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Comment by TomOfTTB | Hacker News Reader

I think you latched on to the real lesson here. Most people will be conformist, it's in their nature. So "don't be a conformist" isn't really a lesson that's practical from a societal level.

The lesson I think is that society needs to tolerate non-conformists because they may very well be it's salvation some day. Even if society feels those people are completely undesirable there are ways to separate them without throwing away their accomplishments (Galileo was put on house arrest in 1600 but still allowed to continue his work)

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Conformity isn't about nature. It's largely a matter of background, development, social elements, etc.

I don't know where this idea of "either you're a conformist or you're not" came from, but it's wrong. Like anything, there's depth to the idea of conforming. Some people who nonconform do it in ways that happen to match what other people have done because it's a logical progression. Some people nonconform by acting as randomly as possible. Of the people that quote unquote conform, I doubt many think of it as conformity. In fact, I'd go further and suggest that if many of those people were convinced of its being conforming, they would take certain steps to change.

When someone wants to just "fit in," they are consciously trying to conform. So I would argue that most people do this, so most people consciously conform. Most people don't want to be different or weird, which is often what innovation looks like.

Of course the problem is that 99% of non-conformists are wrong, but all of them believe that they are right, some of them are really dangerous, and some of them are work very hard to be persuasive. Society is a balancing act of incorporating as much diversity as possible without losing structural integrity. Most people disagree with each other about whether we need more diversity or more conformity, to what extent we are unbalanced, and pretty much everything else at any given point in time.

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