Lonely Dissent

Non-conformity is only relative to the social and intellectual norms in your life. A sci-fi convention is essentially a huge collection of socially tone-deaf individuals, so of course they're going to be tolerant; there's no coherent metric for conformity in the first place. This is probably why intellectual movements form: they create a context in which new and unconventional ideas lack the stigma they would have elsewhere.

This means that you can't measure the level of a person's non-conformity by some objective metric of how "strange" they are. A person who is well integrated into their social or intellectual milieu can do something less eye-catching than wearing a clown suit and still be much greater non-conformist. It depends entirely on your environment, your audience, and how well you understand both.

I think that the point about risking the incomprehension of those around you points to something deeper. I always marvel at Goddard's courage, for example, when he was launching liquid rockets out of a cabbage patch. Here's a guy who moved back in with his mom and faced the ridicule of local and national newspapermen who fundamentally misunderstood the physics of what he was doing.

The incomprehension of the tribe nearly always leads to the most crushing kind of social defeat. And when you factor in the inevitable failures of any novel challenge, I'll bet you'll find that the life of an intellectual hero isn't just lonely, it's leadenly depressing. (I'm thinking right now of a comment made by one of the Wright brothers on the train home after a failed flight attempt: "Man will not fly for a thousand years.") It's no fun to be a depressed hero, I'm sure. For every Goddard and Wright brother, there must be thousands of failure stories, each of them detailing a life you'd never want to live.

The cost associated with real innovation is generally very high. We are, after all, paleolithic creatures living in a technical world. Conformity means a successful hunt. We're monkeys with mp3 players. Thus, this innovator's penalty is an atavism, but it's not one we're going to overcome anytime soon.

Did anyone not already know this? Anyone over the age of about 21 knows how much easier it is to add to momentum than to create it. It's the difference between a stand-up comic and a funny guy at a party. Or a founder and an employee. One is creating something, the other is redirecting it.

Not a bad article, but most of the examples given of "lonely dissent" seem to me to fall much more into the "vegetarian" category than the "clown suit" category.

For me at least, the feeling upon encountering somebody who tells me that he wants to have his body frozen after he dies isn't "Oh wow, what a crazy idea I've never heard before", it's "Oh, another one of those". Cryonicists (if that's a word) are too numerous and too well connected to each other to really count as lonely dissenters.

Oh, and I could have done without the "PS. I am awesome" bit at the end.