How to Think for Yourself

This essay and other's like it, without evidence or data, implies that some of us know the formula for success. I get it, the things that change convention are unconventional at first. This is the definition of unconventional. I agree with the general vector of his essay but this is just boring to me.

Here is my formula for success (in case anyone cares): Enjoy life, try to make the world better, be a good person, go towards your passions (whether for hobby or career) and cultivate relationships because that seems to be the thing people regret most when they die.

Now, let's move on to to the actual unconventional ideas and observations.

Bryan Caplan in his book The Case Against Education suggests that employers value college degrees partly as a signal of conformism, and that that's the reason college is so hard to replace.

(His theory is the college signals three things: Intelligence, discipline and conformism. It would be easy to signal first two things in some other way, but the very fact that you think you know better how to signal them proves that you're some kind of smartass who's inevitably going to cause trouble.)

It's a matter of budget. When you do things that don't matter too much to you, you are damn happy to think exactly like the next guy, reusing the existing knowledge as is without a second thought.

For instance: how do you boil an egg? For all I care, I leave it in boiled water for 10 minutes. I am more than happy to never challenge this conventional wisdom because I'm spending all my time trying to think out of the box while searching for a new sorting algorithm.

Now put a chef in my place. They could have their own specialized/unconventional boiling technique while saying all sorting can be done with bubble sort.

Always restrict your conclusions within the appropriate context. For every person different things matter, you can't think for yourself for every piece of knowledge. There isn't enough time. If people didn't copy and follow along (while inovating in their special domain) we would still live in the stone age

> When you hear someone say something, stop and ask yourself "Is that true?"

This is one of my favorite things to do, though the list of people who will talk to me again after I do it is very short. (Edit: To be extra clear... While this is a bitter pill - I do not like it when others do it to me - I do find it to be very effective for reinforcing good faith in close, trusting relationships. I also do appreciate when others use this question on me; the temporary frustration/discomfort is worth reminding me to center myself.)

When someone is feeling outraged about something (often politics) simply ask: "but are they correct?" The answer is almost always: "I'm not sure" (myself included). When doing this to myself, this is often enough for me to shrug off the outrage and realize that I actually do not care. It really doesn't matter to me what political statements a mayor from a town in another state made.

> In the most independent-minded people, the desire not to be told what to think is a positive force.

This subject implies another that is closely related, and is my biggest complaint about ads. Ads try to tell you what to think, and they are sometimes successful. But more importantly, they tell you what to think _about_, and they are much more successful at this. I like being focused on the problems that I have, and ads try as hard as they can to take that focus away.

As someone who once made their living as a scientist, I can tell you from firsthand experience that while this is technically correct, the conclusion PG wishes to draw from this:

> One of the most effective techniques is one practiced unintentionally by most nerds: simply to be less aware what conventional beliefs are.

is very wrong, at least in the domain of scientific research (and probably others as well, but scientific research is the area in which I can speak with some authority). In order to make scientific progress, you have to understand the conventional wisdom. The reason for this is that the conventional wisdom in science is the product of about 350 years (and counting) of hard work by an awful lot of smart people. Those people explored a lot of wrong ideas on the way towards discovering the right ones, and if you are unaware of this history and just strike out on your own thinking that you are so much more brilliant than any other human who has ever walked the planet before you, you are much more likely to go down a well-known dead-end than you are to discover something new. I wasted about ten years of my life learning this lesson the hard way.

Being skeptical of the conventional wisdom can be useful, but keeping yourself intentionally ignorant of it is generally a bad plan.

My mother raised me to think for myself, it was a heavy emphasis of my upbringing and important for her.

However I'm now in situations where the world is divided and asking questions (in order to make my own mind up) is considered some kind of admission of guilt for being part of the "other".

For example: Asking someone why they think immigration is good/bad. If it's a belief they hold, I'm interested in knowing the thought process and making my own conclusions based on something I might not have known. But the act of asking the question makes the person, who may not have put too much original thinking in; quite defensive.

There's another drawback here too: which is that you can't experience everything. I can't live with the experiences of an American Black Woman who emigrates to England as a White English Man who lives in Sweden; it's just not possible, thus it requires strenuous effort to empathise.

There will always be a line in which we just have to take things at face value, in computer terms "understanding the contract" between components.

Thinking for yourself is overrated as society is not built for it if you want to fit in.

I'm not sure about this. I think people are aware of what is conventional, and that's why they gravitate towards it. It's a risk-mitigation strategy, or in the case of curiosity, the explore-exploit trade-off at work.

Life presents you with a bewildering array of options. It greatly helps to establish what the conventional choice is. It will generally be the safe option, a path well-trodden. You can try to reverse-engineer why it became the conventional choice, gain an appreciation of its advantages, maybe tweak things to find a slightly more optimal solution for your personal circumstance... but sticking with convention qua convention is generally justified. People don't 'accidentally' make the same choices as most others, they deliberately identify what is conventional and follow that path. Go to university, buy a house with a mortgage, get a car on PCP, marry before having children, etc etc

Likewise for a small child there is no downside to curiosity, only upside. As an adult, there is an awareness that you need to earn your daily bread, before all else. Working with people who seem to just follow flights of fancy, risking their livelihood, can be infuriating.

And then there is the whole meta-question of conventional thoughts versus conventional statements. If you believe something that is widely disbelieved, and you speak up, you're sticking your neck out. When I see people do this I tend to get the impression they have not really calibrated their bet on being right against the reputational risk they are assuming.

But, most professions are not like that. I don't want my surgeon, car mechanic, plumber, or accountant to be the sort who is rarely in agreement with their peers. If they are wrong half the time about things which everyone else knew the right answer to, but also half of the time they are right when everyone else is wrong, I'm still much worse off. Being unconventional is only a good thing if the consequences of being wrong are much less bad, than the benefits of being correct when others are all wrong.

Edit: typo on “synecdoche” (original was “synecdouche,” which could be read as clever/juvenile but was simply unintentional).

Also: my original phrasing (which I’ll leave intact above for context) was vague; I specifically meant to express that the more recent essays resonate less with me than the older ones once did. I haven’t reevaluated the older essays; it’s been ages since I went through them.

2. In case it did not work out, for whatever reasons, became an autist, in whatever way you can. Not that it is possible, or that you will really understand anybody after the fact, but hey.

3. Still interested? Learn a different (alternative) language (semantics), based on nothing (emptiness) at all. You may start by giving me money, in return, i will give you nothing and not say much or anything. Then you'll achieve something like no.2. (Warning, you may go mad or broke or both). Afterwards, you'll probably start doing things, that you have not been able to think about before, achieving the ultimate goal. Warning: you'll be someone else by then.

4. What is psychoanalysis?

5. If you are reading this, then you are using words and language invented by someone else. Therefore you are not thinking for yourself.

6. Attend transformational festivals, until you will know why are they called that. You may still not think for yourself afterwards, but you may think in a different way.

7. Become an artist.

8. What is art?

I do think it's possible to prize independence in this regard too much, though. Taken to the extreme, it's a sort of personal not-invented-here syndrome: it can shut you off from valuable sources of ideas and mentorship, and cause you to endlessly re-tread mental ground that's already been covered. Taking the successful scientist as an example: they "stand on the shoulders of giants", and their "independent" thoughts are only possible because they're immersed in, and actively synthesizing, lots and lots and lots of "conventional" thought.

The "independent" breakthrough is just one small iteration on heaps of "conventional" thought. The "independent" product is just one small iteration on heaps of "conventional" technology. It's the deep familiarity with the "conventional" part, and thinking through what all that really means and makes possible, that makes the "independent" part possible.

So: are you really thinking independently? Or are you just thinking blindly, without that familiarity?

He knows exactly the kind of backlash he will receive and is prompting you for it intentionally. He's not writing for you or to you, and he cares not a whit what you think.

He's writing to and for people like him, trying to help them put words and clear thought to vague understandings and apprehensions they've been wrestling with.

He's not self-aggrandizing but student-aggrandizing, as the headmaster of a school of thought that he values deeply. If you hate the headmaster or his style or the school of thought, that's wonderful, but it's not at all relevant to his aims. I hope this sheds some light on the bigger picture for those unaware.

Moreover if you subscribe to the dichotomy you're probably doing a poor job of creating an environment that encourages people to be independent minded.

At the organizational level it feels completely normal that it will become more conventional within it's own bubble as it grows. Companies are mostly trying to move in one direction and having lots of independent people off doing their own thing runs counter to that. Other similar structures follow this pattern as well. Part of it is cultural norms developing but part of it is recognizing that a company is very much exerting pressure on the people that work within it. Which is probably why founders find it easier to talk to other founders as they both have the luxury of the freedom to think independently within this context as they are steering the company itself.

You see this with attempts at internal startups or R&D teams where independence is encouraged but it's impossible or hard to spin anything out of them because you end up bumping back into the company pressures trying to do so. You're basically asked to "go do something amazing" ... "but not like that!"

Personally I love small companies primarily for the autonomy it provides and as a designer really value applying myself to different problems. So I get the joy of independence but I think I'm fairly conventional on other topics.

I think there's something off about this statement: A lot of people enjoy watching a new marvel movie once or twice a year while the movies themselves are more or less reiterations of the previous ones. People seem to enjoy the repetition.

The same seems to be true for essays: People enjoy finding their own thoughts repeated by anothers voice.

For example, there are a lot of essays analyzing/explaining/stating/claiming the importance of book X, videogame Y or composer Z; Art movement A, theory B or profession C. But do they provide anything new besides the comfort of nostalgia for shared experiences? However stale the enjoyment of these essays seems when viewed through the lens of the cited statement, the enjoyment itself can not be denied.

> Independent-mindedness seems to be more a matter of nature than nurture. Which means if you pick the wrong type of work, you're going to be unhappy. If you're naturally independent-minded, you're going to find it frustrating to be a middle manager. And if you're naturally conventional-minded, you're going to be sailing into a headwind if you try to do original research.

I'm asking this seriously. I'm a fairly unconventional thinker. (I'm not sure that's always or even mostly a good thing.) So I do find it frustrating to be in middle management, as I have been numerous times. It's also usually frustrating to report to middle management. I much prefer to figure out solutions and pursue them independently.

HOWEVER, I've also thus far found nothing but greater frustrations as an organizational leader or solo entrepreneur. (Good thing I'm currently neither.)

What are the options for the independent thinker who doesn't want to follow orders, doesn't care to lead others, but also wants to be a part of a team? Someone who knows they need others with complementary skills? Surely I'm not the only nerd who fits this bill.

Is there a work model for a team of independent thinkers who wish to neither lead nor follow, but simply cooperate? My gut says there is, that it's probably pretty obvious, and I'm just blind to it. Or maybe that they exist, but tend to fail. The only thing that comes to mind is to be a co-founder in the early stages of a startup, but if that succeeds you'll end up in a leadership role pretty quickly. Not everyone gets to be Woz.

Anyone?

One example I like to think about is the following: imagine having two boxes (A and B), one on each side of a football field. Exactly one of the two boxes contains a million dollars: box A contains the prize with 99% probability and box B contains the prize with 1% probability.

Suppose you're standing at the center of the field together with n other people and are told to race to get the million dollars (first person who finds it wins). You have to decide whether to run for box A or box B since they're in opposite directions. If n = 0, it's clearly in your best interest to go for box A, but as n grows, the probability of you getting to box A first drops since you're competing with other people, meaning that at some point you ought to actually go for box B.

This is a toy example of where it's not sufficient to be right, but it's also important to be novel. If each person was awarded its contents (rather than just the first person to get there), there'd be no rush and you ought to go for box A. In other words: in zero-sum situations you need to be both right and novel, but in non-zero sum situations it's sufficient to just be right.

I think the example of academia in the article is not quite right for two reasons. As pointed out elsewhere, the incentives in academia are actually quite twisted which means that there's actually more incentive to just be verbose than to be novel, but additionally I don't think it's really zero-sum. It's true that if you're working in a crowded space, it starts approaching zero-sum and then becomes a game of novelty. However, if you're not in a crowded space (e.g. interdisciplinary stuff) you can actually be quite successful by discovering rather mundane things (you might say that this is just being novel on a different axis, which I think is reasonably accurate, but the point made in the article was that the discoveries have to be surprising).

But the author seem to fall into the same trap at the end:

When I wrote "The Four Quadrants of Conformism" I expected a firestorm of rage from the aggressively conventional-minded, but in fact it was quite muted. They sensed that there was something about the essay that they disliked intensely, but they had a hard time finding a specific passage to pin it on.

Isn't it much more likely that the conventional-minded people actually liked the essay because it confirmed their values and world-view? Presumable the essayist can't read minds, so this is just how he hopes they reacted.

> When I ask myself what in my life is like high school, the answer is Twitter. It's not just full of conventional-minded people, as anything its size will inevitably be, but subject to violent storms of conventional-mindedness that remind me of descriptions of Jupiter.

> The threshold for having opinions about politics is much lower than the one for having opinions about set theory. So while there are some ideas in politics, in practice they tend to be swamped by waves of intellectual fashion.

> The conventional-minded are often fooled by the strength of their opinions into believing that they're independent-minded. But strong convictions are not a sign of independent-mindedness. Rather the opposite.

This is also a good thing to ask when the someone is oneself.

You can have groundbreaking ideas without "disrupting" every single part of your work life. Assuming large groups of people can't think for themselves is both short sighted and insulting. Not everyone is in the position to push their views on their environment without repercussions.

I'm pretty sure a janitor or administrator can think for themselves really well. It's their bosses that limit their subordinates, not the employees limiting themselves.

It's bad that when those students grow up, they believe science is the absolute truth and they're hostile to people who doubt about it. They become the new priests. And probably today's biggest "scientific doctrine" is big data-people unquestionably believe whatever data tells them without caring about nuance or bothering to think what it implies. Interestingly, it seems most of those people don't have a strong background in science while most trained scientists rarely hold the same view that science is superior and we know everything.

More in depth, this is maybe the difference between the do-it-first American approach and the study-it-first English attitude? Special relationship at play, you know, but the world is multipolar today, so you also have the socially regulated Euro approach and the paternally autocratic Chinese approach to reconcile. All these, even without taking rogue approaches into consideration.

Maybe the ultimate dream of PG these days is being acknowledged as the headmaster of outsiders, connecting curiosity with prototyping for the markets, in that by-passing the canonical school curricula by virtue of intuition by necessity and fast implementation?

After seeing this, I thought to myself, Pi is dumb. A diameter is double the radius, so the radius is the fundamental. I tried telling this to a bunch of people, kids or adults who just looked at me funny.

I was so happy to much later learn that there's Tau. And very sad that alien races might hear the beeps of Tau/2 being sent to them by the clueless terrans.

This is wrong. You make money when you invest in public stocks as compensation for the risk you take. You don’t need to be better than others at predicting to make money. You do if you want to make excess money, money above the level that compensates for risk.

To start with, I think it's complete bullshit that most work doesn't require independent mindedness, or creativity. Or that most work is uncreative.

Second, I strongly question the assertion that independent mindedness is innate in any sense. I don't believe there's any strong evidence to support this statement, and believing it leads to some pretty dangerous attitudes to the world and other people.

Thirdly, and somewhat illustrative of my previous point, I am quite repulsed by the suggestion that most people think they're free thinkers but aren't. How the hell do you know and who are you to day?

I'm not interested in that obnoxious arrogance.

Yuck

The level of (apparent) profundity(?) in these essays and the amount of people in SV that revere his words just boggles my mind. Maybe I am a conventional thinker :/.

PG may have some good insights sometimes, but it's rare I see him get something so completely wrong as this.

Reproducing research to demonstrate a result was correct or not is a cornerstone in the foundation of science. A fundamental problem in the research community is that incentives as misaligned to support that initiative, and so there are an endless stream of papers published that are either flawed in themselves or obtained spurious results that wouldn't hold up under additional systematic scrutiny.

Worse, these flawed pieces of research feed into the sound-byte media cycle and over time have eroded public trust & confidence in the scientific process. To some extent that's unavoidable when preliminary research, even well performed, us taken out of context. But every study performed with a handful of subjects that producing a weak result with controversial implications will be shouted from the roof tops nonetheless.

So, to PG saying a successful scientist must pursue novel research: stop navel gazing on the superiority of SV values and looking to shove them into every area of human endeavor. You're wrong, and sometimes dangerously so.

This is not a criticism - I'm just curious to know if I was bored because I have a short attention span, or if the amount of novel/useful content in the article plummeted sharply beyond the first few paragraphs.

I have found this saying to serve me well enough to memorize it.

I think the reason is that by the time an opinion has propagated to the majority, it is already outdated, and several years (sometimes decades) behind the newest available knowledge.

Working for a Japanese corporation taught me to really respect the "three P's." They didn't have the kind of creativity to invent the next iPhone, but they had what it takes to make it better than everyone else, and in a fairly short time.

Great things are accomplished by great teams, and teams need a lot of variety to work properly. A team composed only of independent thinkers would be a never-ending gladiatorial contest, with the product being the main victim.

What does gall me, is the fairly naked disrespect that many brilliant folks have for the types of implementors that they need in order to realize their dreams. These engineers (and managers) are often treated as "dime a dozen," which is far from the truth.

Many of those essays seem like he's trying to take his experiences and take them up a level of abstraction, and apply them across a whole swath of human experience. That's hard, and it falls a little flat on the receiving end when it doesn't land.

He's still got it on some topics. I loved his essay on having kids.

I can think of no better example of this than Hacker News.

Years ago, independent-minded people came together for the liveliest "out of the box" discussions on the internet.

Eventually those people started to get shouted down until sadly, many of them left.

I wish I knew what to do about that. I imagine people way smarter than me have been struggling with this for some time.

At least the advice to find out which one you are and commit to that is useful.

Lots of value in being conventional: all my friends who went and worked at AMZN and GOOG are far wealthier than the rest of us today.

pg hasn't changed. He can't; he's too weird (nonconformist, if you prefer). Traits at that level just are.

What's changed is his status. Becoming rich and famous changes how people perceive you. What sounds scrappy and original coming from an underdog sounds inflated and self-congratulatory coming from a fatcat. It's because he hasn't changed—in particular, to accommodate the expectations people have once they classify you as a fatcat—that people complain that he changed.

Even more ironically, this 'change' is the invariant: pg never accommodated the expectations people had. His essays pissed people off 10 years ago, 15 years ago, coming up on 20 years ago. While the surface reasons have changed, the feelings are so similar that the deep structure of the off-pissage is surely the same.

They post pseudo-intellectual babble about going against the grain justified by single sentence "observations" about some anecdotal evidence they then stretch and generalize into a larger point and continue beating up until the horse is dead.

The main reason for this is that I see a big divide between what he says about success people and what I have observed. Success has no set pattern. It can come from a huge variety of reasons.

I really hope this is not koolaid because a lot of young people are drinking it. It would suck if it was all just to suck them into applying for YC.

When a scientist discovers a physical behavior, or a oceanographer a new species, it's a discovery that others could make. The phenomena exists, they happened to find it first.

When a composer invents, they are likely creating music that no other human would have created. If they hadn't composed it, it would never have existed.

Both of these activities seem to require an independent mind to be successful. Are they related? Or fundamentally different in some way?

There's one thing missing. Being useful. If you frame a start up experience as an opportunistic search for a sustainable market, plus rigorous service to customer experience in that market, it helps a lot to have strong drive to be relevant, to serve. A ideal organization will help independently minded people to be mission-effective. That suggests an organization that is flattish, decoupled, and with explicit goals and values. But won't an organization, pragmatically, also need incorporate conventionally-minded people - who can also be smart and useful? A ideal organization for the "conventionally minded" suggests hierarchy and normative culture and policies. What's the right structure for a mix of "independent" and "conventional" contributors?

Does no one else find that a “how to think for yourself” article is something of a paradox?

I mean, if you do follow through whatever directions are pointed out, you already failed.

I suspect conformity has just as strong of a relationship with childhood environment as genetics. Ironically heavy-handed parents trying to create conformity can create rebels. Loving and understanding parents can create conformists unless they emphasize independent thinking. Personally I try to avoid telling children what exactly to do and try to listen to them, essentially treating them like adults: this is explained in the book "How to Talk so Kids Will Listen".

"Resistance to being told what to think" is given in this essay as working with curiosity, but I think it can also have a negative feedback. The independent thinker can be less curious about ideas they are told by someone else. However, the same phenomenon may help explain the mentioned individualization of curiosity: the ideas the critical thinker thinks of as coming from themselves naturally generate curiosity in those areas.

To be a brilliant scientist - maybe.

To be a successful scientist - I think (unfortunately) the opposite.

If you rock the boat too hard - by challenging or contradicting other scientists' work, then you'll be gently rebuffed on technical grounds by the peer-review process, which will make it harder and slower to get funding, which means you spend more time stuck in bureaucracy than you do in science.

Publishing things that confirm the status quo is a much easier way to be successful as a scientist. Correctness is less important - many published papers are not 'correct'.

I doubt that the other examples (investors, startup founders, writers) are different in this respect.

It's easier to be successful by taking the obvious and safe path competently, rather than taking the very high risk of a completely novel path.

Edit: the other aspect of this to consider is the power relationships involved. If you’re the boss you probably feel free to express your opinions to anyone of equal or lower status: employees and other founders. But if you’re the employee, doing so to the boss might involve personal risk. So for pg to paint his employees as conformists leaves a bad taste in the mouth.

Some investment firms already seem to be able to grow revenues without growing the number of employees.

Growing revenue without growing employees is probably a good thing for many reasons if it's possible. However w/r/t the investment firms, imo many investment firms can grow revenue without hiring only when the bottleneck constraint on their revenue is just their reputation.

As their reputation grows, investment firms are often able to do the same thing but with a larger quantity of investor money. Perhaps their reputation also helps on the other end; maybe some can make the same quantity of deals per unit time but as their reputation grows perhaps they become better connected so maybe the deals get bigger and/or more profitable.

In other industries you have to produce a higher quantity of goods or services in order to get more revenue, so this may not generalize.

Unless it's a schlep: http://www.paulgraham.com/schlep.html

independent-mindedness ...has three components: fastidiousness about truth, resistance to being told what to think, and curiosity.

Truth Skepticsm Curiosity

There are many things you can "think for yourself" about that wouldn't return much for the investment. For example, if I rejected english and made my own language that would probably be a long-shot. For a while, I wasn't interested in using math formulas until I could prove them, in hindsight maybe I'd say spend that energy getting better at people skills.

I think you'll find 90% of things are done the right way, and if you deviate you're probably doing worse for it. So it's worst being deliberate about. I don't think independent thought is an ends in itself.

I think this goes both ways: those that found something they liked intensely, but had a hard time finding a specific passage / point to pin it on could also be aggressively conventionally minded.

Both reactions stem from letting your subconscious decide your logical conclusion rather than arrive at that conclusion through skeptical, rigorous observation and analysis.

This extends beyond sports. Descartes, arguably the father of modern philosophy, was a devout Catholic, even refusing to publish a paper after Galileo's declaration got him in trouble with the Catholic Church. If the soubriquet "father of modern philosophy" doesn't imply independent thinking, I don't know what else would. And then there's his Meditations on First Philosophy where he's severely blinded by conventional-mindedness to "discover" God as the first principle.

I guess what I'm trying to say is that, someone writing about independent- and conventional-mindedness should at least take some pain to explain that in any individual you'll see both. That there are no independent-minded people nor conventional-minded people, but only in ways that we carry out our activities.

This is important to note because literally everyone does it. I don't actually know of a single person that has not done this, and I personally have done it so many times I question my degree of independence and free will all the time. So what can we say about this? Is no one independent minded then?

I’ll have to think a lot about this, because it’s something important to me, and what he’s written here is very different from my experience and understanding, but I trust his history of accuracy, so I can’t just dismiss it.

Yet some comments make me feel like they expect, with the threat of harsh criticism, uber-deep and profoundly insightful content from PG on a highly consistent basis. Maybe it's the phenomenon where wider audiences give rise to (or amplify) polarizing views.

I've confirmed this in a number of conversations with founders and other professionals, so it is possible the formal research surfaces more. Here are a few of stories from people I know:

1. A left handed, night owl, bathroom builder with horrible memory, who loves his work and can easily find a way to improvise to achieve the right results on projects, even if volunteering in a different country with different materials and house structures (wood vs brick) where he doesn't speak the language.

2. A doctor with amazing memory (can recite most movie lines ever heard and medical books ever read) who becomes timid and conservative about any new approach unless the best possible route is taken.

3. A founder who has benchmarked their brain on different tasks with different amounts of sleep deprivation. They have noticed in some states (nap, and high protein no-carb meal after sleep deprived state) the brain kicks into gear and comes up with amazing solutions to previously un-crackable problems while in other states repeat tasks flow much faster without over-think.

Conventional thinkers are better at concentrating capital because they want what everyone else wants - This allows certain things to become and remain highly overvalued or undervalued. Conventional thinkers have a sense of value which is grounded mostly in social approval/reinforcement; their sense of value is mostly detached from any underlying utility.

Independent thinkers are better at innovating since they don't value social approval/reinforcement and so they are more capable at identifying real utility value.

The problem today is that there are many conventional thinkers and they have been reinforcing each other's arbitrary decisions (not rooted in utility). This arbitrariness which is only rooted in social convention has been terrible for independent thinkers. Independent thinkers have been competing with large groups of conventional thinkers; on a ratio of maybe 1 to 100 or worse.

A lone genius is no match for hundreds of fools. History has demonstrated this time and time again. Socrates, Galileo... Successfully persecuted for being independent thinkers. It doesn't matter that they were right.

Our society just seems to be breeding conventional thinkers by the millions.

1. Taking a position that is so novel that your peers neither agree nor disagree with it. Example from 15 years ago: believing that people should live on floating cities. Most people probably would disagree with this if they thought about it some (or understood the ideology behind the desire to seasted), but the position was so strange that it wouldn't stimulate immediate disagreement.

2. Taking a courageous position that is already strongly and overwhelmingly unpopular. This would be something like "I believe democracy is vastly overrated". Unlike with (1), almost everyone in the population has already formed an opinion that is pro-democratic, so when you utter the opposite view, you've got 95%+ of the population ready to disagree with you.

These two categories are exhaustive. In fact a false category of contrarian belief is uttering something that is already popularly controversial, and only slightly unpopular statistically. An example would be uttering "I believe DJT should be President" in a state like Colorado, where a sizable minority of the population already agrees with you. I think this is why most people think they are independent minded, when in fact they aren't. They have a few slightly unpopular views, which don't sufficiently qualify as genuinely contrarian.

TLDR: Genuinely contrarian opinions are either so novel that almost everyone is ready to disagree with you, or they are so novel that no one has an opinion yet on the subject.

> Fortunately you don't have to spend all your time with independent-minded people ...

Maybe it's the absurdity to divide people (and here obviously ALL people) simply into two groups and just by structuring them gain some meaning or knowledge. It's really easy and unprofessional: really you could divide society up by uncountable distinctions. But distinctions do not make dialectics or aren't anything but misleading if you're just asserting them.

Also the distinctions between conventional and independent are just blurry ones here, only derived by example; not by definition. There is no intellectual sharpness to the argument, right from the start of the "essay" – in that, that it appeals only to the intuition, not to the mind. There are no studies about "independent-minded" or "conventional-minded" people; not in hte sense he is using the term here. Quite the opposite: he is using the terms to appeal to a feeling. In no earnest science, or literature, someone talks so dull and undifferentiated about human beings.

Also I wouldn't ever think about a friend of mine, or someone close to me with such cold efficiency that derives from that really simplistic way of handling people and amateur psychology.

Also missing from the articulation is that independence from the group can be at odds with your loyalty and respect for the cause of the group, and our sense of civil duty towards it.

90% of 'independent thinking' is akin to conspiracy theory, or people arbitrarily rejecting authority, even if that authority is legitimate.

9% of 'independent thinking' is raw creativity, art, or people just expressing themselves one way or another in a variety of ways.

Only 1% of independant thinking is of the type he is describing, which is conscientious.

The problem is that it's very hard to have the self awareness to know which type you are.

There is logic in conformity, even imperfect systems, it's much better that we have a standard than otherwise.

The most enlightened people I find are those that seem actually fairly conformist not so much because they have been 'told' to do a certain thing, but because they understand why - and - have a sense of duty or obligation towards the outcome - and then conscientiously chose to take that path. It's not conformist to do what everyone else is doing if there's reason in it.

>Perhaps the reason is that even the conventional-minded have to be curious in the beginning, in order to learn what the conventions are. Whereas the independent-minded are the gluttons of curiosity, who keep eating even after they're full.

The author doesn't try to answer where the greed for innovation comes from.

If those traits come from parents, how can this be reproduced? Isn't 'How to Think for Yourself' more like 'You are all individuals'? It can make people behave in certain ways, but it cannot create individualism.

Coincidently, the author offers a service for founders to help them to be founders, to tell them, how to be founders. He most likely is looking for conforming non-conformists, because those are the people who need his services the most.

Then on the other hand, maybe he has realized that he cannot give them what they need the most? It's a bit like reddit. He gave the founders lisp and a non-conformist, but they ended up with a platform for submissions.

People think for themselves when the answers they get are not enough. Who wants to give people the gift of endless dissatisfaction?

there is always a flavor of lecturing in his words. sometimes, it makes me wonder if i am just too stupid to understand his answers to all matters.

these days i could not finish reading his writings. his twitter feels like a talkative kid who hasn't learned self control. i have unfollowed him long ago.

he may want to be different. but how is he different? really.

Basically anything new will target independent minded people, and anything successful will target conventional people. It's sad for the independent minded, but is there anything that can be done about this ?

I must say I quite disagree with that statement. You definitely can run a successful startup without being novel. Other companies doing the same thing as you do is not necessarily something that will prevent you to be successful.

It’s an investment that is valuable especially when dealing with politics, or one’s career.

There are always multiple sides to a story. Just try to get a grip of what each side is saying, and what their interests are. Then, gather data if you need to. Analyse it, reason about it, discuss it openly. I do it sometimes. Other times I just trust the source enough to let it go.

Don’t put yourself in a silo. If you do, you’re surely thinking for yourself, but you could also be missing on something you didn’t consider.

Edit: I guess that there’s also a biological side to it. It’s safer to go along with the mass. If not from an evolutionary perspective, it makes sense from a social one.

Paul Graham seems dead wrong on this. Here is a twin study showing the opposite.

https://www.google.com/url?sa=t&rct=j&q=&esrc=s&source=web&c...

Also the Asch conformity experiments suggest the opposite.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Asch_conformity_experiments

Scientific thinking is something that can be taught. Think for yourself, don't listen to Paul Graham.

Company values really are just words on a wall in pretty much every company. I don't think you will find a single company where the values aren't silently broken by leadership and management. The best companies have ways of hiding this through shallow apologetic acts (e.g. self-washing on social media).

I've seen this happen to plenty of people who found out something they shouldn't have, at companies who would otherwise appear like great places to work.

His 'Letters to a Young Contrarian'(2001), though filled with himself[0], remains a heartfelt read for anyone going about the world in their own way. If you can get a used copy, preferably filled with marginalia, treasure it, add your own thoughts, and pass it along. The always unique comments railing against Hitch will be worth the effort. More so when all agree.

Paul may wish to pick up a copy, though I suspect he just needs to re-read the one on his shelf.

https://www.amazon.com/Letters-Young-Contrarian-Mentoring-Pa...

[0] therefore with frustration, liquor, cigarette ash, fragility, and sheer brilliance

Okay, for some approaches to science, the next step is to define numerical measures of the terms and then to state the proposed connections mathematically. Then gather a lot of data and test the connections.

E.g., not from PG, but as people rise in organizations, do they become more conservative, e.g., in PG's terminology, more conventional minded? Pursuing just that one question scientifically was my wife's Ph.D. dissertation.

Point: Addressing scientifically all of PG's proposed connections would be a lot of work! And my guess is that many of the connections, including ones seemingly nearly obviously true -- would be very tough to settle scientifically.

for me, one of the interesting failures is in assuming that there is only one dimension for being unconventional.

Even though one might like to think of themselves on an axis from "conventional" to "unconventional", my experience has shown that your normality can vary wildly depending upon whether we are talking about matters of love, finance, career, etc. As well as nuances therein.

What I think would be quite probing would be an exploration of the ways in which you might be unconventional in some aspects of your career, whereas conventional in others. It's these fine-differences that the articles suggests we could adjust to achieve parity overall in a particular domain, but does not actually explore...

What is quite ironic is that this is written by Pg, who’s institution has become one of the most conformist. To generalize and draw out the point clearly - Yc invests in tech companies (most conformist type of business nowadays) that are incredibly de-risked since those that make the yc. Arches usually have ‘traction’/ revenue etc. (Ie, odds are that today, yc wouldn’t invest in 2 designers looking to disrupt hospitals)

The fraternity that gets nothing but an inflated sense of pride from someone who has made a lot of money for himself and a few select others.

They sing kumbaya together on HN when the great leader comes up with another one of his scriptures.

Follow up essays, "how to prevail on others when you've thought for yourself," and "how to leverage other thinkers who just don't fit," would be extra interesting.

There is a significant element of "Foxes and Hedgehogs," in this, and what I talk about to business clients as "indoors cats and outdoors cats," as well.

I like that this essay brings to mind what it means to "en-courage," or to give courage-to someone. It's not flattery or justification, it is meant to genuinely imbue people with courage.

In practice most people absolutely despise originality. It isn't that something original is merely disinterested or disagreeable. It is a thing of emotional revulsion that frequently brings forth hostility.

Ray Dalio, as I discovered when I interviewed at BridgeWater in 2014, had figured out how to test for originality as a psychological personality characteristic and comparatively measure people using a standard metric. Strangely enough if you score high enough on such a metric people will be interested in you for interesting reasons such that they might be able to identify or measure the concept and yet not have any idea how to explorer it or exploit it.

What I have learned most from originality is rejecting feedback and scoring ideas not in what people say but what they do next or whether they come back. I have also learned that originality appeals highly to a very specific class of people eager to explore new things. These rare people are precious to early stage ideas of any kind. Identify them and go out of your way to appreciate their time even when they disagree with you.

What's great about this article is not its content but that it exists and is written by someone with a considerable amount of influences in this world. I would argue that if you have been so-called independent minded for long enough most PG's articles would feel cliché.

Nonetheless, if you deeply values independent mindfulness and happen to enjoy PG's writings, you will find the article to be extremely powerful because these words can computationally touch something deep inside you. And that is nice.

This is pratically a piece you can meditate with.

Permaculture has a concept that it is the boundaries where interesting things happen - Where desirable life can be found. Between the forest and the meadow is where lies the life that may be desirable, whether fauna or flora.

I had labeled the two distinctions as destroyer/creators versus maintainers. I tear things down to create better replacements, whereas my partner is an excellent maintainer - As long as my new system is not too onerous, she is usually willing to keep it going, as I move on to the next process. And it seems that the transition from a small company to a larger one is also the transition from the independent to the more conventional minded, even though it contains its own traps (like having independents forced out - even from their own companies, or being strangled into oblivion by bean-counters, as it were).

Those who don't/did not do well in school may be in the independent group, more often than not. But then that misses other underlying reasons, like a few of my friends who had undiagnosed dyslexia.

I found a helpful guide to develop those analytical/independent thinking processes in Harry Browne's book How I Found Freedom In An Unfree World. https://www.nateliason.com/notes/freedom-unfree-world-harry-...

Although I have usually been attracted to conspiracy theory just to be at odds with the rest of mainstream thought, I recognize I do not practice enough critical thinking if said theory already conforms to an existing bias I may have - Another place for me to practice my mental strength!

Another item in HN's feed this morning is Connections - That series has been an invaluable cross-discipline introduction to so much thought and design of other creative independent types. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25218056

Last, I agree with the concept of reading good autobiographies of interesting thinkers allows me to think some of the same thoughts they did...

Independent thought exerts a displacing force on the collective mind. If this force exceeds the capacity of the collective to adjust ("far out"), the thought (and the thinker) is rejected.

Successful independent thought moves but does not destablize the collective mind.

I can accept this way of reasoning if 'unexamined' is not directly linked to attention. The brain consistently tries to automate thoughts/behaviours and with confidence comes relaxation in the attention muscle, as to say well defined areas will need less 'examination'.

On another note, there's a reason why conventions exist and it is not always the right path to opt for independence. Being able to relate to people is a huge blessing and should not be completely overruled if the object is piece of mind.

All in all an intresting article

So my hypothesis is that if your body is better at providing energy to the brain and not "wasting" it on other energy sinks around your body, you'll be better at independent thinking (and also intelligence, since it also boosts your ability to create models).

But that's just my totally unproven and anecdotal hypothesis, although I guess it might be worth checking out scientifically.

Probably true more often than not, but Google and Facebook both started off doing something that everyone already thought was a good idea, they just did it much better.

Extreme politicians instead tell you want your opinion is. That opinion is often a form of populism because otherwise nobody would give it the time of day. Extremes are only relevant when they have a following.

For example, in PG's world unbound-thinking has value. It is generally seen as a good thing. Do the same within a religion and you're a heretic. Worse, you could end up dead.

Perhaps he'll do a follow up? To explore the benefits (and friction) for individuals, as well as teams and organizations. Maybe even go so far as to address diversity beyond the conventional paradigm (i.e., race, gender, etc.) That would be great.

That really depends. Tesla and Amazon stock are widely followed and have optimistic projections yet continue to deliver massive shareholder returns.

Independent thinking is hard, that's why the majority of people will opt instead to adopt the common thinking of the group of their choice - a choice that comes principally from feelings.

One can be perfectly happy however, regardless on which category they belong, as long as they are comfortable with their choice.

When you have a seemingly original idea figure out who else had it and ask why they failed. That will give you insight into what you need to do better. Sometimes you will realize that it was a bad idea, other times you will know what to change to make it work.

Questioning everything is absolutely not all upside; there isn't time or energy available to do it, so you've gotta either tune a huge chunk of the world out, or cynically reject it, both of which are alienating and unpleasant.

Same conventional thinking, only carried further.

TSLA disagrees.

How come I know exactly where this essay is going? It is yet another "start-up founders are genetically, intellectually, and emotionally superior; the rest of the muggles are so envious."

Does Paul think everyone except startup founders works on an assembly line?

"You see this especially among political extremists. They think themselves nonconformists, but actually they're niche conformists. Their opinions may be different from the average person's, but they are often more influenced by their peers' opinions than the average person's are."

Oooh. So close.

Anyway, don't pop your shoulder out while you're patting yourself on the back.

Mr. Dalio has recently, within the past year or two, started sharing his thoughts publicly in an organized way at https://www.principles.com/ and on social media.

We can blame advertising. Successful advertising is all about inducing as many people as possible to conform to the same imagery.

He's talking about airbnb here, but what's the other company?

Ten years ago these opinions would not have been extraordinary, but programmers as a group seem to have been subject to successful $BIGCORP reeducation in the last decade.

My heart aches for all the ways I’ve allowed conformity to ruin me, but thankful that some of my original efforts have paid off.

(1994)

"Yo, Jeff, what's this about selling books online? The books.com guys in Ohio have been doing that for years!"

Oh how I wish this were in the site guidelines.

Trying to decide whether you fit in the “conventional” or “non-conventional” category; then trying to decide whether you committed a Type I or a Type II error on the previous task.

Why do so many folks buy this bullshit about American schooling? Sure, we've got SATs and standardized tests but schools also have jazz bands, rock ensembles, student written plays and musicals.

Hell my failing public high school had plenty of room for self-expression, it wasn't the sort of conformist prison PG thinks to seem schools are, it just wasn't a very good school. No one was going to punish you for writing an essay or starting a club or anything else.

My university, one likely to be accused of 'credentialism' also had the gamut of clubs: campus crusade for christ down to groups for divesting from Israel to Zionist groups, to LGBT groups, etc, etc, etc.

Its just bullshit.

It's clear in all of his writing that he's perpetually beating around the bush about some current itch he has, I wish he would just come out and say it with out pretending to be a deep thinker:

> Do you want to do the kind of work where you can only win by thinking differently from everyone else?

I mean, taken outside of this being a PG essay I would assume this means stay away from SV, but I suspect that's not really the point.

> One of the most effective techniques is one practiced unintentionally by most nerds: simply to be less aware what conventional beliefs are.

This essay is an object lesson in how this leads to profoundly conventional thinking. This entire thing reads like it was torn from the journal of a clever middle-schooler who thinks he's so much more clever then the world.

Right now Silicon Valley VC thinking is the dominant ideology, putting blinders on to what is considered convention isn't cultivating an independent mind, it's an assertion of the status quo.

> An essay that told people things they already knew would be boring.

I agree, but given how beloved rehashed versions of "aren't we the clever independent thinkers!" essays are here I think there is some empirical evidence to the contrary.

Great advice for unicorn hunters, for indie hackers, not so much.

* Make enemies.

* Oppose authority.

* Believe that I am better than others.

* Seek danger.

* Put people under pressure.

* Try to outdo others.

* Believe only in myself.

* Impose my will on others.

* Love a good fight.

* Seek conflict.

* Think too highly of myself.

* Tell tall stories about myself.

* Play tricks on others.

* Enjoy crude jokes.

* [Comment loudly about others.]

* [Enjoy being reckless.]

* [Do dangerous things.]

You get the point. In my opinion, you don't really get to be independent-minded without the negatives that come with it. For instance, most conspiracy theorists are highly independent-minded people. They definitely reject authority, and they're highly curious and contrarian about established narratives.

This recent small debate I found on Twitter is a good illustrative example of it. https://twitter.com/ModeledBehavior/status/13280235538249932... The account in question (https://twitter.com/toad_spotted) was someone who got the pandemic right earlier than most people, so conventional-minded people followed it because it was a good source of information about the virus overall. But now that another situation has come up where independent-mindedness can also show itself to be useful (and potentially right), conventional-minded people will dislike it, just like they disliked it when the outcome of the virus wasn't yet known.

I felt like mentioning this because I feel like there's a lack of appreciation for how exactly the negative aspects of independent-mindedness manifest themselves in real life, and without that appreciation for the negatives of it I think it's easy to misjudge how independent-minded someone actually is and to also misjudge people who are more independent-minded than you because they seem more difficult to get along with.