The decrease of independent minded as an organisation grows seems an almost universal phenomenon. It happens to startups yes, but also to forums, bands, fashions, the internet, games, religions, politics, etc.
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 ?
"anything successful will target conventional people"
Plenty of successful products are useful for both. E-mail, smartphone, Covid vaccine.
PG's idea that outsourcing more conventional activities such as advertisements and PR may preserve the creative core of the company is interesting at least.
It feels like independent mindedness and conventional mindedness is a false dichotomy and that most people are somewhere between each depending on the subject and context.
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.
This reminds me, a long time ago I saw a couple of videos of Steve Jobs at a retreat for Next Computers (in the early phase of the company); now can only find an edited version. I was surprised to see how market analysis his argumentation was driven; while they created something great, he didnt sound independent minded but more like subject to his customers.
I think if you pick apart Jobs’ vision statements, you can infer that he decided long ago on a type of customer he wanted to sell products to, as did Bill Gates.
While it’s news to me that he was numbers driven, I’m not necessarily surprised. Those numbers didn’t make him pander (much), while in other hands numbers often do.
It's a spectrum and I'm not sure that Paul would dispute that, he might define the bottom 60 percent of the spectrum as "conventional-minded" and the top five percent as "independent-minded", especially if we think this trait increases superlinearly as we move up the quantile distribution. This dichotomization lowers the resolution but can work practically
Right but it's not even a single spectrum. It varies by topic and context. You can be an independent thinker in some regards but highly conventional in others. As others have pointed out this essay is actually highly conventional for a certain point of view. So whether you're viewed as a conventional or independent minded person is also a subjective factor of the community around you.
Originality is an interesting thing. The word itself is highly favorable and when confronted with the word alone most people have a favorable impression of it.
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.
At the end of the day, thinking for ourselves is hard. It takes time and often the stakes aren’t that high. I think that being a bit sceptic and cynic can help. You don’t need to be born with those traits; you can acquire them with some practice.
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.
> 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.
He mentions in the next sentence: "I'm not suggesting that you impose on everyone who talks to you the burden of proving what they say"
> When you hear someone say something, stop and ask yourself "Is that true?" Don't say it out loud. I'm not suggesting that you impose on everyone who talks to you the burden of proving what they say, but rather that you take upon yourself the burden of evaluating what they say.
Absolutely a clear signal that their belief is emotional. If you step on that toe just make it clear that you aren't questioning them at all, in fact, "you agree with them... you just wanted to know some sources to point to when those other nosey people who question our beliefs do so"... and diffuse the situation.
You really just want to make the other person feel "heard" and respected for their opinion, if that's the level at which they communicate.
Most people just want to feel some control over their lives, so telling them they're wrong and trying to reframe their reality might not ultimately be a positive, as long as their beliefs allow them to remain predictable and act within reason in their society.
What's their motivation? If it is to knowingly start and propagate lies, then you're obviously not going to get them to change. If it's to parrot falsities to feel control or look smart (what I believe PG is referring to as "conventional-minded"), figure out ways to subtly shift that without making it clear you're undermining them, if that's your motivation. It doesn't have to be all or nothing unless you're a cult leader or protecting a loved one from a con.
But then, hey, why is your reality the correct version of reality?
There's a side-effect here. If you're interacting in a place where straight-up calling bullshit on someone is socially unacceptable (HN, Wikipedia talk pages, many professional settings), then your first suggestion will simply take the place of calling bullshit and have the same effect.
Definitely agree. It's difficult to convey that level of charm / diplomacy via text, for me at least. Body language and other props being available also play a big role in making someone switch focus, and at least feel positively about the overall interaction, even if I ultimately agree to disagree (and state that, or not).
If I feel as though the online recipient of my messaging isn't receptive, there's really no need to contend in the first place. I don't have to change everyone's mind, nor is it really my place to do so ...
> straight-up calling bullshit on someone is socially unacceptable
I think it's not about social acceptance. It is unacceptable because if you call them bullshit without giving good reasons why you think so it is not advancing the discussion in any good way. You are not contributing anything except your personal opinion.
If you do have good reasons to explain why you think they are wrong you don't need to call them names because you can just provide the correct reasoning instead.
Exactly. It's definitely cognitively dissonant to say to someone, "You're wrong, let me see your facts... but I don't have facts about why you're wrong."
I think something to reiterate is that it never goes well when you tell the other person that you disagree with them. A person is not just one idea, they're made from thousands... You're merely disagreeing with one idea, and that should be made clear when you're speaking with them. Regarding the parent comment's terminology of "calling bs", that's a bit of a harsh way to put it, or approach it, if you're trying to reconcile a difference of opinion over a single idea, and not fundamentally pointing at another person and saying, "You are your one bad idea and I don't like either."
> hey, why is your reality the correct version of reality?
Exactly, it is about the question "why?". Why are your reasons for believing something more plausible. But that is not the mindset of an emotionally charged person.
Was the election rigged? A Trump supporter would say "Of course it was". But a judge in Pennsylvania had a good response to Giuliani (who was trying to argue it was): "... Calling an election unfair does not make it so. Charges require specific allegations and then proof. We have neither here".
> Why are your reasons for believing something more plausible. But that is not the mindset of an emotionally charged person.
Unfortunately, that is so. But usually, that person's motivation is to feel understood, valued, respected, and safe within the reality / status quo they've come to understand is their best guess. When you realize their specific fears, it makes it easier to empathize and work with them on seeing from other perspectives, and that those perspectives don't threaten them, even though they are not innately familiar or intuitive initially... But that can be quite challenging.
I'm not sure what Giuliani's motivations are, but if they aren't emotional on a personal level, they aren't his own fears, which doesn't work the same way...
Good point. People are afraid of being wrong not only because they don't want to lose an argument, but because if they are wrong about one thing, it might turn out they are wrong about many things. Thinking that you understand the world gives you comfort.
Its enough to demonstrate nonsocial results, IMHO. Especially when dealing with mailed paper ballots, and computerized tabulators.
No way Biden outperformed Obama with Black voters in key swing states and underperformed him everywhere else!
The results in some of these ridings has the hallmarks of election fraud. This is why its still not getting certified by so many states. And I predict will go to legislature to pick electors in those states
While this activity can be useful, I think it is simultaneously at the root of many of our social problems today.
You cannot ask this question about literally everything. Well, you can, but you'll end up questioning things that are universally accepted (Which way is North? Is gasoline flammable?). So naturally you dial it back, and you ask questions only about things that seem wrong, or that you particularly care about.
The corollary is that you are going to decide subjectively (and somewhat arbitrarily) that some things are not worth questioning. And just like that, everybody has made their own independent assumptions about the truth, and we can no longer have discussions about a common set of facts.
The cure is not just questioning facts "more". The cure is actually aligning as a society about what we accept as true so that we can converse about the other things. But, that means less independent thinking, paradoxically.
> that means less independent thinking, paradoxically.
This is indeed the paradox of our times. An accelerated technology shift (the global computer network) has generated large amounts of people who are rationally self-reliant to a fault, since they are either the only ones in their social circles who understand the new tech or the only ones who can spend a lot of time reading stuff from the internet. This cult of "independent thinking" leads them down dark alleys for which they simply don't have the necessary preparation (conspiracies, flat earth, etc), but from which they cannot get out (because admitting your own reasoning is wrong is extremely difficult).
How do you get out of flat-earth on your own, without re-living centuries of astronomic research? How do you get out of moonlanding negationism, without personally examining all the retrieved moon rocks? How do you get out of antivaxxing, without personally living through pestilence? (well, at least Covid19 should help with that...)
I guess it's a balance. Society simply would not hold if we all were radical independent thinkers, since we'd be constantly questioning everything that we cannot individually and immediately determine as true. A degree of conformism is actually necessary for progress of any sort.
> How do you get out of flat-earth on your own, without re-living centuries of astronomic research? How do you get out of moonlanding negationism, without personally examining all the retrieved moon rocks? How do you get out of antivaxxing, without personally living through pestilence? (well, at least Covid19 should help with that...)
Find a way to get rationalists out of believing that these examples are an accurate representation of the beliefs of the conspiracy world in general, and you may be well on your way to a universal solution. But watch out for that first step, it's a doozy.
This essay provides a lot of the necessary advice to accomplish such a thing, but I suspect one must actually possess sufficient unconventionality to exercise it, not just perceive oneself to possess it.
I think you misunderstand the purpose of these examples. They're not meant to be typical representations; they're meant to be non-controversial representations, allowing us to discuss the thought processes involved without having the conversation derailed by people who honestly believe the example.
Perhaps. If, for the sake of argument, we accept that as true...might it be also true that they are other things, simultaneously?
Who knows what ideas (and communications of ideas) really are, how they really work, what influence they exert on the very fabric of the environment (this infinitely complex, magical soup that we refer to as reality) in which they (and we) are contained, and what the infinite, recursive downstream consequences are of this influence.
At the end of the day, they "are what they are" and "do what they do", and the same applies to their (unseen, unrealized, misunderstood) systemic consequences. We can culturally deny such things (just as conspiracy theory culture collectively denies many things) all we want, but this does not stop it from being actually true. Mother Nature does not require our agreement when organizing the structure and affairs of the universe, but we may mind a great deal when the system she has designed (that we rarely try to truly understand) serves up the consequences of any wilful ignorance that we may be guilty of (see: Planet Earth, 2020).
An extremely large number of people confidently (and sincerely) make claims that seem to suggest they have a deep, accurate understanding of all this complexity. My intuition suggests that these people may not actually be as correct as they perceive themselves to be.
>> Find a way to get rationalists out of believing that these examples are an accurate representation of the beliefs of the conspiracy world in general, and you may be well on your way to a universal solution.
This is but one instance of a much larger problem. But solve this one, and you may have unknowingly solved many others.
FTA:
You can also take more explicit measures to prevent yourself from automatically adopting conventional opinions. The most general is to cultivate an attitude of skepticism. When you hear someone say something, stop and ask yourself "Is that true?" Don't say it out loud. I'm not suggesting that you impose on everyone who talks to you the burden of proving what they say, but rather that you take upon yourself the burden of evaluating what they say.
"Saying things out loud" certainly has consequences (which come in many forms....loss of friends, ostracization, downvotes, etc). I wonder...might there also be some downstream systemic consequences to not "saying things out loud"...like for example when some of the things that are not said out loud are ~unpopular/unpleasant to ponder, but also true and extremely important.
Shared culture and norms are necessary for social harmony, and reduce the costs of law enforcement. Social harmony generally makes people happier as long as they are included in the mainstream, while internalized law enforcement frees up money for other uses. I see those as the main advantages of conformity.
I think however that it's generally true that conformity diminishes progress and positive change. Whether that's worth the loss of a shared culture depends. I think the current state in the US where there are two cultures which divide the population into two modes is harmful, since it makes society fractious and hostile. We could do for more conformity, now.
However if that were to shift back to a mass culture with various countercultures chafing against it, I think then more independent thinking would be good. I think mass cultures are the rule rather than the exception now, and most other places could do for more independent thinkers.
What’s happening in our culture seems more like a case of several competing conventions, split on tribal lines, rather than individuals thinking their way to unique positions.
Do you think this is only uniquely happening now? I can’t think of a time on earth that hasn’t happened, implicitly or explicitly. (Depending on your definition of “tribe”...tribe of one?). The exceptions don’t last long: Nazi Germany, Mao’s China (Xi’s?), Stalin’s Soviet Union...
Never has it been easier to see this clearly, though, than in the current era of instant access and sharing of information and opinion.
But in the US, individuals thinking on their own is almost a core cultural value. Although more honor'd in the breach than in the observance in some circles.
Not just because the founding of the US was based upon a break with convention of colonization and an hereditary royalist system. Most immigrants (at least before the age of air travel) made a radical permanent individual decision to leave the Old World and come to the Americas, when most around them were staying. So it is in the DNA, so to speak.
Still a core value to most in the US, I would venture to say. We honor self-reliance and unconventionality when we read Emerson, Thoreau and Whitman for example. Might be a more significant core value for the heartland of the US than the coastals. Farming will do that to a person.
You folks are still reading Emerson and the like, right?
When it's appropriate to do so, and it's information that can be verified you can say, "Where did you get your information/Where did you learn that?" which may be slightly less confrontational.
If it's just an opinion, well, you might ask "how did you arrive at that conclusion?" or you might smile and say, "Oh,
yeah?"
I love (and identify with) the sentiment of your last paragraph. One of my favorite cities is Sao Paulo. All outdoor advertisements were banned in 2006.
1. Start by following someone's else advice, about how to think for yourself. That should work. Because why not?
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.
2a. Then you not only will start thinking for yourself. You will also start overthinking about why Apple didn’t put macOS on the iPad Pro, or why your friends don’t care about org-mode.
> You don't want to start a startup to do something that everyone agrees is a good idea, or there will already be other companies doing it
Which would show you that there is a market with customers. Now the question is, can you find a niche in that market and do you have enough to separate yourself from the competitors, also is it possible to attract attention to your product or is the market already saturated. No need to invent something totally new, it's fine to improve enough to make the pain to switch to your product worthwhile.
Thinking for yourself means accepting the consequences of such. For some people it is easier to follow someone else's advice and then blame them if something goes wrong than making decision themselves and then trying to learn from it.
It is a tough one, but if you engage critical thinking you may end up somewhere in the middle, which isn't bad.
While I agree holding your own views and opinions help with doing something novel and different. I do feel like articles like this are mostly used to cover up and excuse hostility, bad work environments and Jobs esque management styles.
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.
> Assuming large groups of people can't think for themselves is both short sighted and insulting.
But it is mostly true, at least in management positions. Independent-minded people by definition question authority so they are mostly relegated to low status positions. If you don't question authority then you aren't independent-minded. And no, questioning some authority figure just because some other authority figure told you to doesn't count.
Why would independed minded person necessary came to conclusion that loudly openly questioning authority is good idea, in situation in which it is predictable that it is going to lead to bad result?
Keeping quiet about things only helps so much. People can feel if you question them or not. I mean, there are two workers, A is always excited about everything his manager suggest and do while B mostly keeps his thoughts to himself. Who is more likely to get promoted?
Everyone starts out as low status, so that scenario is the most important to analyze.
> But yes, having good relationship with manager definitely helps your career. It typically does not require being excited about absolutely everything.
Do you think that questioning your manager doesn't make it harder to have a good relationship with him? As I said keeping quiet about it doesn't work, most people know when you aren't agreeing with them even without telling them.
My point about excitement is that a person will lose a lot of energy and excitement when they do things they feel are wrong. Others can feel that.
It's possible to be independent minded and not question management. You know internally that it's all BS (because of your independent mindedness) but don't vocalize it because you're employing a political strategy to which that would be harmful.
Lets say that your drive to be liked by your manager makes you express X more support for his ideas, or express X less arguments against them. Then the person with a more supportive base line will still appear more supportive even after this motivation adjustment.
You can work around this by just being better than your peers at manipulating feelings, but it is still a handicap.
> I do feel like articles like this are mostly used to cover up and excuse hostility, bad work environments and Jobs esque management styles.
I don't think so but I definitely dislike the mentioned points as well and probably this should be more unambiguous. At the same time, hostile and toxic work environments tend to encourage aggression towards regular employees with different opinions. Therefore I find the article quite encouraging.
It seems to me that throughout the essay Paul Graham keeps undermining his own claims. Early on he states:
> Independent-mindedness seems to be more a matter of nature than nurture.
Subsequently he starts giving advice about how to make yourself more independently-minded:
> Can you make yourself more independent-minded? I think so. This quality may be largely inborn, but there seem to be ways to magnify it, or at least not to suppress it.
> But if you surround yourself with independent-minded people, you'll have the opposite experience: hearing other people say surprising things will encourage you to, and to think of more.
> You can also take more explicit measures to prevent yourself from automatically adopting conventional opinions. The most general is to cultivate an attitude of skepticism.
etc.
Only to come back to claims about the strength of certain natural tendencies:
> I don't think we can significantly increase our resistance to being told what to think. It seems the most innate of the three components of independent-mindedness; people who have this quality as adults usually showed all too visible signs of it as children.
> Everyone I know who's independent-minded is deeply curious, and everyone I know who's conventional-minded isn't. Except, curiously, children. All small children are curious. Perhaps the reason is that even the conventional-minded have to be curious in the beginning, in order to learn what the conventions are.
I guess the overall takeaway would be that intellectual independence is primarily innate, but can be cultivated with targeted effort.
Personally I find this view unconvincing, or at least not well specified. I suspect early care and environment play a much larger role than biology in developing one's intellectual attitudes, as well as personality.
To the extent to which there are genuinely biological factors involved, I would have been really curious to see more concrete evidence of what those factors might be.
Nevertheless, the article is sprinkled with nuggets of useful advice or insight, such as the following:
> If you later find yourself in a situation that makes you think "this is like high school," you know you should get out.
> try to meet as many different types of people as you can. It will decrease the influence of your immediate peers if you have several other groups of peers. Plus if you're part of several different worlds, you can often import ideas from one to another.
> You can expand the source of influences in time as well as space, by reading history.
> When you hear someone say something, stop and ask yourself "Is that true?"
> unfashionable ideas are disproportionately likely to lead somewhere interesting. The best place to find undiscovered ideas is where no one else is looking.
Yes, he just paraphrased the agreeableness trait of the OCEAN/Big Five personality model here. His nature/nurture musing are off the mark, though: Of the five traits agreeableness has the lowest heritability with about 42%.
The curiosity part he mixed in would be opennes to experience, with about 57% heritability.
If you have an idea and nobody else is doing it, odds are not that you had a good idea; instead it is probably a bad idea that many others have had and failed at.
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.
Uber is just a taxi company. Maybe better done (as you say, the jury is out) , but just a taxi company in the end. People get this idea that taxi company on the internet is some how unique, but it isn't really.
Did anyone find the article too long? Don't get me wrong - the first few paragraphs were engaging and thought-provoking. The rest of the article looked as if it could be condensed to two paragraphs.
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.
Like many of PG’s essays about psychology or society, the problem is that this essay is basically an aphorism or a self-help book: there’s no logic here, no citations, no connection to facts. It’s just a bunch of feel-good BS for libertarian-minded tech workers. I get the impression that the length is (at least unconsciously) making up for the absence of rigor.
A few paragraphs of “stuff that has no real argument but basically sounds right to PG” is a fine short essay as a “maninfesto of independent thought”.
But when the essay is full of detailed “analysis” of “facts” such as “it seems that independent thought is a matter of nature rather than nurture,” then PG is just wasting his readers’ time. This essay is a genuine clunker.
No - Plato, Descartes, and Locke all referenced actual history when formulating their ideas about politics - PG doesn't even mention an example of an "independent-minded" person! - and at least Descartes and Locke heavily cited the past generations of political philosophers that came before them.
It is also worth noting that at least Plato/Descartes/Locke were investigating deep questions of political philosophy with little precedent and which is almost impossible to observe empirically. By contrast, PG has an entire century's worth of psychology theory and experiments that he is ignoring out of pure arrogance.
Dollars to donuts PG could sit down and write down an in-depth philosophical article with all kinds of references and probably get it into periodicals.
I think you're mistaking the type of writing this is.
This is for a blog not a book or an academic journal.
These are his semi fleshed out informal ideas and you can take them or leave them.
I don't even think he's claiming theyre objective reality.
They're interesting neat ideas based on a smart man's experience that help you look at the world in a certain way and I can appreciate that and I'm glad he writes them.
I’ve been pretty critical of PG’s essays recently but I thought this one hit the spot. Go into twitter right more and search for “great reset” for a perfect mirror of this paragraph for example:
> Without this fastidiousness about truth, you can't be truly independent-minded. It's not enough just to have resistance to being told what to think. Those kind of people reject conventional ideas only to replace them with the most random conspiracy theories. And since these conspiracy theories have often been manufactured to capture them, they end up being less independent-minded than ordinary people, because they're subject to a much more exacting master than mere convention.
To truly appreciate the beauty of such mirrors, one should take care to examine both sides...observe thousands of the conversations of not just the "excessively" open-minded who obsess over topics like The Great Reset and similar, but also of those who are the ideological opponents of these types. Observe how they talk about their opponents. See if any patterns (in talking, and thinking) emerge, and whether some of the patterns are the same in both communities.
From TFA:
> You can also take more explicit measures to prevent yourself from automatically adopting conventional opinions. The most general is to cultivate an attitude of skepticism. When you hear someone say something, stop and ask yourself "Is that true?" Don't say it out loud.
Or, sometimes, do say it out loud, and watch hilarity (to the unconventional, at least) ensue.
> Treat it as a puzzle. You know that some accepted ideas will later turn out to be wrong. See if you can guess which. The end goal is not to find flaws in the things you're told, but to find the new ideas that had been concealed by the broken ones. So this game should be an exciting quest for novelty, not a boring protocol for intellectual hygiene. And you'll be surprised, when you start asking "Is this true?", how often the answer is not an immediate yes. If you have any imagination, you're more likely to have too many leads to follow than too few.
> More generally your goal should be not to let anything into your head unexamined, and things don't always enter your head in the form of statements. Some of the most powerful influences are implicit. How do you even notice these? By standing back and watching how other people get their ideas.
> When you stand back at a sufficient distance, you can see ideas spreading through groups of people like waves. The most obvious are in fashion: you notice a few people wearing a certain kind of shirt, and then more and more, until half the people around you are wearing the same shirt. You may not care much what you wear, but there are intellectual fashions too, and you definitely don't want to participate in those. Not just because you want sovereignty over your own thoughts, but because unfashionable ideas are disproportionately likely to lead somewhere interesting. The best place to find undiscovered ideas is where no one else is looking.
He does seem to be pandering to his target audience - specifically those who will be just independent enough to consider failing at a startup, but not so independent that they'll question the more questionable elements of startup culture.
Startup culture really isn't the most natural home for independent and original minds. It's a good match for those who are just different enough to play the game on its own terms, but not so different they'll ask themselves why the game exists. Or whether better games are possible.
And IMO independence correlates far more closely with creativity. I find it more useful to wonder "What is this belief/tradition/culture going to look like five hundred years from now, and/or from the perspective of a disinterested alien visitor?" than to wonder if I'm being independent enough to get investor funding.
Don't know where i got it from. I usually use it as a reminder that even evil people like Hitler consider themselves as the good hero. Maybe in difficult circumstances. I don't want to compare PG to Hitler though.
Not to be sociopathic, but try to be the hero of your own story as well. Focusing on the things you do right and not remunerating on your mistakes it's a key part of mental wellness.
"When you write something telling people to be good, you seem to be claiming to be good yourself. So I want to say explicitly that I am not a particularly good person. When I was a kid I was firmly in the camp of bad."
Having read and forgotten most of his essays over years, I could recall this in a minute. So probably there's more.
Mark Twain said, whenever you find yourself siding with the majority, it's time to pause and reflect.
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.
> Yet it is not always right, and you can give yourself a huge advantage by questioning it for yourself.
Assuming you have a reason to. If the majority assumed the shape of the earth was a cube based on the information they had at the time, and you came along and noticed something to refute that, of course that is valuable.
But if you are refuting that simply because the majority assumed it, that doesn’t seem useful.
People have a limited amount of time on earth, and using the majority’s assumptions is a valuable heuristic for not wasting resources (time) coming to the same conclusion.
Can everyone study sufficient biology and astrophysics to “prove” to themselves how vaccines and planetary systems work? Most likely not.
They aren't arguing that you should simply not trust the majority at all, but that you should be willing to evaluate the majority's beliefs. There are obviously limits on this, and I think you are trying for a far too absolute interpretation of what they were saying.
"In 1884, meridian time personnel met
in Washington to change Earth time.
First words said was that only 1 day
could be used on Earth to not change the 1 day marshmallow."
Here's another aphorism for you: "If a respected, grey-haired scientist tells you something is possible, he's probably right. If he tells you something is impossible, he may well be wrong. But if a thousand respected, grey-haired scientists tell you something, that's probably where you want to put your money."
The opinion of the majority is inevitably whatever their chosen source of media assigns them[1]. This is easily seen in the disparity between subjects where a persuasion campaign is in effect vs the ones where one isn’t. In the latter case persons will have a naturally broad distribution of opinions while in the former you will see near unanimity within their persuasion bubble.
Naturally this makes discussing the assigned opinions extremely boring, because it’s entirely predictable and worse yet at a 6th grade level at best.
[1] In the USA this means the distribution of opinions among the general population is bimodal.
This is complicated by situations where the majority opinion is clearly imprudent so few people actually follow it, but they will loudly insist they agree with it to avoid the social cost of nonconformity. Sadly, in US society it’s an important life skill to be able to recognize this sort of dishonesty and act accordingly.
If you hold a view that very few share, you're more likely to have thought from first principles about why that view should be held. If you hold a view that everyone shares, there's a much higher probability that the view is programmed into you by your social stimuli.
Yet again an excellent essay. It is very sad that these days pg is literally the only one in the programming space who writes essays for free spirits.
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.
The distinction between independent-mindedness and conventional-mindedness is captured more correctly I think by a trait called politeness as defined here https://www.researchgate.net/publication/5863998_Between_Fac... Independent-mindness would be similar to low politeness (coupled with high openness, but I'll ignore that for now), and those people would be more likely to be like this than not:
* 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.
I think it's quite tragic that you got downvoted in a thread about independent thinking. Seriously people, you might disagree with his point, but it's very independent, has a lot of substance compared to all other comments, provides links.
The twitter example seems more like those Nobel prize winners that later reconvert to crackpots.
I definitely agree that conspiracy theorists reject authority and are contrarian, but most don't strike me as curious except for a superficial level.
That said, I would agree with the general idea that independent minded people can be less approachable, mainly due to the fact that they do not "need" anyone and people like to feel useful.
As for the list of things those people may or may not enjoy, the sheer amount of things polled and the small sample size give me doubts.
>The twitter example seems more like those Nobel prize winners that later reconvert to crackpots.
That's the point. They were always "crackpots". You need to be a crackpot to generate ideas that people aren't generating, otherwise everyone would generate them. This means you'll generate wrong ideas, but it also means you'll generate right ideas that people think are wrong.
>I definitely agree that conspiracy theorists reject authority and are contrarian, but most don't strike me as curious except for a superficial level.
They are definitely more curious than most people, as evidenced by the fact that they were attracted to the conspiracy theory in the first place. It's also not uncommon for an intelligent conspiracy theorist to be able to outargue a conventional person on a subject they care about, i.e. the Earth being flat or not.
>As for the list of things those people may or may not enjoy, the sheer amount of things polled and the small sample size give me doubts.
I think this field is pretty well established and this paper in particular is well cited, so among peers it doesn't seem to be contentious.
> For instance, most conspiracy theorists are highly independent-minded people.
I agree with Graham's take that conspiracy minded people are not independent minded at all. They just have a different group whose authority they accept without question.
Very few conspiracy minded people come up with the conspiracies they believe in entirely on their own, or deeply investigate to find out if the conspiracy is true. They just latch on to a conspiracy someone else articulated and accept it unquestioningly.
We just disagree then. In my view, most conspiracy theorists actually deeply investigate if the conspiracy is true, they just don't have the tools, knowledge or intelligence necessary to rebuke the arguments themselves so they believe the conspiracy is true. This is more work than most people do when faced with any kind of claim from an authoritative source.
The main reason some conspiracies get more "believers" than others, in my opinion, is because they're contrarian signals, so they'll attract contrarian people, and like with anything, most people will only explore the surface level stuff because that's enough for their contrarian itches.
As far as a practice of mindful examination: yes, this makes sense. Examining your thoughts, and the spoken assertions of others, is valuable if only to train critical thinking.
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?
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.
there's a degree of social intelligence involved with your examples. It's not really about "thinking for yourself", as everything is about context. uou don't have to completely become the other person in order to empathize. For most people it does not require strenous effort.
evolution is all about the ability to fit in. this includes the ability to be your own person with your own opinions. a well adapted person can do that and still being a part of the group/society
> Thinking for yourself is overrated as society is not built for it if you want to fit in.
I agree that if you want to fit in, thinking for yourself is counterproductive. But I also think society has more escape hatches for unconventionally minded people than it ever has, and if you don't care about fitting in the penalties have never been lower.
But does it? The strenuous effort part? Empathy doesn’t require strenuous effort, it can’t be that hard to relate to the core struggles of anyone you don’t know yet, surely you’d have to be some sort of magician to empathise at the granular level even with someone that looks like you (not sure how relevant that is but seems to be important to you), comes from the same school and now lives on the same block of flat as you do, as they could have gone through life having the complete adverse experience from yous, but at the core level, as long as you’re not some sort of social anosognostic, it’s not that hard to relate to what complete strangers from obscure environments feel/want/think like.
This is easily tested by simply taking a trip to some remote place you don’t speak the language and you’ll see how quickly empathy kicks in and how soon ‘conversations’ are happening where you totally relate to what they are going through perhaps not as much as they can relate to what you’re going through you lunatic explorer of the subconscious. Then with time as you learn their language, well, fuck it, as long as you are wearing some shade of grey you will fit right in where you are right now and wear your mask.
> it can’t be that hard to relate to the core struggles of anyone you don’t know yet,
The issue is more in the relating to struggle that you never went through and never observed. In order to relate, the other person would need to be unusually great at expression what it is like, what constrains they have and you would also have to be very good listener.
> 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".
I think this is partly because the rules or conventions that allowed rational discussion in good faith have been hacked by those acting in bad faith. The sad truth is that good faith discussion has been utterly rhetorically hijacked by things like "just asking questions" so when someone is genuinely asking questions you are assumed to be acting in bad faith. I have no idea what the answer to that is other than to find people you can trust to have these conversations with. And the danger is a lot of the people you think you can trust are just more people acting in bad faith.
> 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.
It may be a matter of knowing when to stop. My personal experience is that most people will try to answer even sensitive questions when you approach them with genuine interest and make some effort to formulate questions in a way that doesn't imply some sort of value judgement. If this is difficult, just be explicit and explicitly say you're not trying to judge or offend them.
Sure enough, you'll hear people make an argument that you find unconvincing, or they may not answer the exact question that you asked, and some people will even admit they don't know why they believe something. When that happens, you'll have to accept that as their answer (and draw your own conclusions in silence).
People do get hostile when you keep "nagging" - asking more and more questions - when it's clear that they aren't interested in the subject or haven't thought about it much. To the other person it feels like you're either trying to make them feel stupid or change their mind. And you're getting none the wiser anyway because those who do not get offended will just make up their "reasons" on the spot.
Obviously avoid the mistake to ask someone for their opinion, and then immediately returning the "favor" by giving your opinion on the matter.
I think questioning someone's ideology or beliefs to their face has never and will never win them as a friend. These things generally aren't rationally founded anyway. If you ask about some political issue, you're going to get regurgitated talking points and tribalism, not a thesis. I think it's quite rare to meet someone willing to suspend belief for a bit and engage in unbiased debate, or at least I haven't met too many. This line of thinking can be helpful in a technical context though.
"Questioning someone's beliefs" doesn't have to mean "tell the idiot why I'm right and they're wrong in the form of a series of questions".
If you ask with sincere interest and an open mind, and avoid passing judgment on the answers you get (including with nonverbal cues), the person you're questioning will generally feel flattered, not attacked. This is how good journalists get people to open up to them.
If they aren’t “fastidious about truth” probably. If they are, and they know you are being “curious”, you will likely have a cool, engaging conversation on your hands.
> But the act of asking the question makes the person, who may not have put too much original thinking in; quite defensive.
Honestly, this is a good thing. Don't talk to these people. Over time I've found friends that I can discuss rationally with about many of their disparate experiences, them being from various races, genders, nationalities, and other such factors.
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[ 3.1 ms ] story [ 392 ms ] threadBasically 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 ?
pg cannot use this term in his essays, but it boils down to that, at least in the software space.
In agriculture etc. of course conventional minded people do excellent work and create tremendous value.
Plenty of successful products are useful for both. E-mail, smartphone, Covid vaccine.
PG's idea that outsourcing more conventional activities such as advertisements and PR may preserve the creative core of the company is interesting at least.
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.
While it’s news to me that he was numbers driven, I’m not necessarily surprised. Those numbers didn’t make him pander (much), while in other hands numbers often do.
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.
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.
> 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.
> When you hear someone say something, stop and ask yourself "Is that true?" Don't say it out loud. I'm not suggesting that you impose on everyone who talks to you the burden of proving what they say, but rather that you take upon yourself the burden of evaluating what they say.
You really just want to make the other person feel "heard" and respected for their opinion, if that's the level at which they communicate.
Most people just want to feel some control over their lives, so telling them they're wrong and trying to reframe their reality might not ultimately be a positive, as long as their beliefs allow them to remain predictable and act within reason in their society.
What's their motivation? If it is to knowingly start and propagate lies, then you're obviously not going to get them to change. If it's to parrot falsities to feel control or look smart (what I believe PG is referring to as "conventional-minded"), figure out ways to subtly shift that without making it clear you're undermining them, if that's your motivation. It doesn't have to be all or nothing unless you're a cult leader or protecting a loved one from a con.
But then, hey, why is your reality the correct version of reality?
If I feel as though the online recipient of my messaging isn't receptive, there's really no need to contend in the first place. I don't have to change everyone's mind, nor is it really my place to do so ...
I think it's not about social acceptance. It is unacceptable because if you call them bullshit without giving good reasons why you think so it is not advancing the discussion in any good way. You are not contributing anything except your personal opinion.
If you do have good reasons to explain why you think they are wrong you don't need to call them names because you can just provide the correct reasoning instead.
I think something to reiterate is that it never goes well when you tell the other person that you disagree with them. A person is not just one idea, they're made from thousands... You're merely disagreeing with one idea, and that should be made clear when you're speaking with them. Regarding the parent comment's terminology of "calling bs", that's a bit of a harsh way to put it, or approach it, if you're trying to reconcile a difference of opinion over a single idea, and not fundamentally pointing at another person and saying, "You are your one bad idea and I don't like either."
Exactly, it is about the question "why?". Why are your reasons for believing something more plausible. But that is not the mindset of an emotionally charged person.
Was the election rigged? A Trump supporter would say "Of course it was". But a judge in Pennsylvania had a good response to Giuliani (who was trying to argue it was): "... Calling an election unfair does not make it so. Charges require specific allegations and then proof. We have neither here".
https://apnews.com/article/election-2020-donald-trump-pennsy...
Unfortunately, that is so. But usually, that person's motivation is to feel understood, valued, respected, and safe within the reality / status quo they've come to understand is their best guess. When you realize their specific fears, it makes it easier to empathize and work with them on seeing from other perspectives, and that those perspectives don't threaten them, even though they are not innately familiar or intuitive initially... But that can be quite challenging.
I'm not sure what Giuliani's motivations are, but if they aren't emotional on a personal level, they aren't his own fears, which doesn't work the same way...
No way Biden outperformed Obama with Black voters in key swing states and underperformed him everywhere else!
The results in some of these ridings has the hallmarks of election fraud. This is why its still not getting certified by so many states. And I predict will go to legislature to pick electors in those states
You cannot ask this question about literally everything. Well, you can, but you'll end up questioning things that are universally accepted (Which way is North? Is gasoline flammable?). So naturally you dial it back, and you ask questions only about things that seem wrong, or that you particularly care about.
The corollary is that you are going to decide subjectively (and somewhat arbitrarily) that some things are not worth questioning. And just like that, everybody has made their own independent assumptions about the truth, and we can no longer have discussions about a common set of facts.
The cure is not just questioning facts "more". The cure is actually aligning as a society about what we accept as true so that we can converse about the other things. But, that means less independent thinking, paradoxically.
This is indeed the paradox of our times. An accelerated technology shift (the global computer network) has generated large amounts of people who are rationally self-reliant to a fault, since they are either the only ones in their social circles who understand the new tech or the only ones who can spend a lot of time reading stuff from the internet. This cult of "independent thinking" leads them down dark alleys for which they simply don't have the necessary preparation (conspiracies, flat earth, etc), but from which they cannot get out (because admitting your own reasoning is wrong is extremely difficult).
How do you get out of flat-earth on your own, without re-living centuries of astronomic research? How do you get out of moonlanding negationism, without personally examining all the retrieved moon rocks? How do you get out of antivaxxing, without personally living through pestilence? (well, at least Covid19 should help with that...)
I guess it's a balance. Society simply would not hold if we all were radical independent thinkers, since we'd be constantly questioning everything that we cannot individually and immediately determine as true. A degree of conformism is actually necessary for progress of any sort.
Find a way to get rationalists out of believing that these examples are an accurate representation of the beliefs of the conspiracy world in general, and you may be well on your way to a universal solution. But watch out for that first step, it's a doozy.
This essay provides a lot of the necessary advice to accomplish such a thing, but I suspect one must actually possess sufficient unconventionality to exercise it, not just perceive oneself to possess it.
Who knows what ideas (and communications of ideas) really are, how they really work, what influence they exert on the very fabric of the environment (this infinitely complex, magical soup that we refer to as reality) in which they (and we) are contained, and what the infinite, recursive downstream consequences are of this influence.
At the end of the day, they "are what they are" and "do what they do", and the same applies to their (unseen, unrealized, misunderstood) systemic consequences. We can culturally deny such things (just as conspiracy theory culture collectively denies many things) all we want, but this does not stop it from being actually true. Mother Nature does not require our agreement when organizing the structure and affairs of the universe, but we may mind a great deal when the system she has designed (that we rarely try to truly understand) serves up the consequences of any wilful ignorance that we may be guilty of (see: Planet Earth, 2020).
An extremely large number of people confidently (and sincerely) make claims that seem to suggest they have a deep, accurate understanding of all this complexity. My intuition suggests that these people may not actually be as correct as they perceive themselves to be.
>> Find a way to get rationalists out of believing that these examples are an accurate representation of the beliefs of the conspiracy world in general, and you may be well on your way to a universal solution.
This is but one instance of a much larger problem. But solve this one, and you may have unknowingly solved many others.
FTA:
You can also take more explicit measures to prevent yourself from automatically adopting conventional opinions. The most general is to cultivate an attitude of skepticism. When you hear someone say something, stop and ask yourself "Is that true?" Don't say it out loud. I'm not suggesting that you impose on everyone who talks to you the burden of proving what they say, but rather that you take upon yourself the burden of evaluating what they say.
"Saying things out loud" certainly has consequences (which come in many forms....loss of friends, ostracization, downvotes, etc). I wonder...might there also be some downstream systemic consequences to not "saying things out loud"...like for example when some of the things that are not said out loud are ~unpopular/unpleasant to ponder, but also true and extremely important.
I think however that it's generally true that conformity diminishes progress and positive change. Whether that's worth the loss of a shared culture depends. I think the current state in the US where there are two cultures which divide the population into two modes is harmful, since it makes society fractious and hostile. We could do for more conformity, now.
However if that were to shift back to a mass culture with various countercultures chafing against it, I think then more independent thinking would be good. I think mass cultures are the rule rather than the exception now, and most other places could do for more independent thinkers.
Never has it been easier to see this clearly, though, than in the current era of instant access and sharing of information and opinion.
But in the US, individuals thinking on their own is almost a core cultural value. Although more honor'd in the breach than in the observance in some circles.
Not just because the founding of the US was based upon a break with convention of colonization and an hereditary royalist system. Most immigrants (at least before the age of air travel) made a radical permanent individual decision to leave the Old World and come to the Americas, when most around them were staying. So it is in the DNA, so to speak.
Still a core value to most in the US, I would venture to say. We honor self-reliance and unconventionality when we read Emerson, Thoreau and Whitman for example. Might be a more significant core value for the heartland of the US than the coastals. Farming will do that to a person.
You folks are still reading Emerson and the like, right?
If it's just an opinion, well, you might ask "how did you arrive at that conclusion?" or you might smile and say, "Oh, yeah?"
https://99percentinvisible.org/article/clean-city-law-secret...
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?
This is also a good thing to ask when the someone is oneself.
Unless it's a schlep: http://www.paulgraham.com/schlep.html
Which would show you that there is a market with customers. Now the question is, can you find a niche in that market and do you have enough to separate yourself from the competitors, also is it possible to attract attention to your product or is the market already saturated. No need to invent something totally new, it's fine to improve enough to make the pain to switch to your product worthwhile.
Any examples of this in B2B/Enterprise-Tech startups ? (likes of SnowFlake, Slack etc)
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.
But it is mostly true, at least in management positions. Independent-minded people by definition question authority so they are mostly relegated to low status positions. If you don't question authority then you aren't independent-minded. And no, questioning some authority figure just because some other authority figure told you to doesn't count.
In any case, the dichotomy between A and B is beyond false dichotomy situation. The range of possible decisions and behaviors warry quite a lot.
But yes, having good relationship with manager definitely helps your career. It typically does not require being excited about absolutely everything.
> But yes, having good relationship with manager definitely helps your career. It typically does not require being excited about absolutely everything.
Do you think that questioning your manager doesn't make it harder to have a good relationship with him? As I said keeping quiet about it doesn't work, most people know when you aren't agreeing with them even without telling them.
My point about excitement is that a person will lose a lot of energy and excitement when they do things they feel are wrong. Others can feel that.
You can work around this by just being better than your peers at manipulating feelings, but it is still a handicap.
I don't think so but I definitely dislike the mentioned points as well and probably this should be more unambiguous. At the same time, hostile and toxic work environments tend to encourage aggression towards regular employees with different opinions. Therefore I find the article quite encouraging.
> Independent-mindedness seems to be more a matter of nature than nurture.
Subsequently he starts giving advice about how to make yourself more independently-minded:
> Can you make yourself more independent-minded? I think so. This quality may be largely inborn, but there seem to be ways to magnify it, or at least not to suppress it.
> But if you surround yourself with independent-minded people, you'll have the opposite experience: hearing other people say surprising things will encourage you to, and to think of more.
> You can also take more explicit measures to prevent yourself from automatically adopting conventional opinions. The most general is to cultivate an attitude of skepticism.
etc.
Only to come back to claims about the strength of certain natural tendencies:
> I don't think we can significantly increase our resistance to being told what to think. It seems the most innate of the three components of independent-mindedness; people who have this quality as adults usually showed all too visible signs of it as children.
> Everyone I know who's independent-minded is deeply curious, and everyone I know who's conventional-minded isn't. Except, curiously, children. All small children are curious. Perhaps the reason is that even the conventional-minded have to be curious in the beginning, in order to learn what the conventions are.
I guess the overall takeaway would be that intellectual independence is primarily innate, but can be cultivated with targeted effort.
Personally I find this view unconvincing, or at least not well specified. I suspect early care and environment play a much larger role than biology in developing one's intellectual attitudes, as well as personality.
To the extent to which there are genuinely biological factors involved, I would have been really curious to see more concrete evidence of what those factors might be.
Nevertheless, the article is sprinkled with nuggets of useful advice or insight, such as the following:
> If you later find yourself in a situation that makes you think "this is like high school," you know you should get out.
> try to meet as many different types of people as you can. It will decrease the influence of your immediate peers if you have several other groups of peers. Plus if you're part of several different worlds, you can often import ideas from one to another.
> You can expand the source of influences in time as well as space, by reading history.
> When you hear someone say something, stop and ask yourself "Is that true?"
> unfashionable ideas are disproportionately likely to lead somewhere interesting. The best place to find undiscovered ideas is where no one else is looking.
The curiosity part he mixed in would be opennes to experience, with about 57% heritability.
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.
Was creating Uber a good idea? The company has grown a lot, but AFAIK is still not profitable; the jury is out on this one.
In some cases, the answer is to try.
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.
While I generally like PG's essays, I wished this one was about half its actual size. As if PG resigned on brevity this time.
A few paragraphs of “stuff that has no real argument but basically sounds right to PG” is a fine short essay as a “maninfesto of independent thought”.
But when the essay is full of detailed “analysis” of “facts” such as “it seems that independent thought is a matter of nature rather than nurture,” then PG is just wasting his readers’ time. This essay is a genuine clunker.
But a lot of things have been built upon their wisdom and thinking.
It is also worth noting that at least Plato/Descartes/Locke were investigating deep questions of political philosophy with little precedent and which is almost impossible to observe empirically. By contrast, PG has an entire century's worth of psychology theory and experiments that he is ignoring out of pure arrogance.
I think you're mistaking the type of writing this is.
This is for a blog not a book or an academic journal.
These are his semi fleshed out informal ideas and you can take them or leave them.
I don't even think he's claiming theyre objective reality.
They're interesting neat ideas based on a smart man's experience that help you look at the world in a certain way and I can appreciate that and I'm glad he writes them.
> Without this fastidiousness about truth, you can't be truly independent-minded. It's not enough just to have resistance to being told what to think. Those kind of people reject conventional ideas only to replace them with the most random conspiracy theories. And since these conspiracy theories have often been manufactured to capture them, they end up being less independent-minded than ordinary people, because they're subject to a much more exacting master than mere convention.
From TFA:
> You can also take more explicit measures to prevent yourself from automatically adopting conventional opinions. The most general is to cultivate an attitude of skepticism. When you hear someone say something, stop and ask yourself "Is that true?" Don't say it out loud.
Or, sometimes, do say it out loud, and watch hilarity (to the unconventional, at least) ensue.
> Treat it as a puzzle. You know that some accepted ideas will later turn out to be wrong. See if you can guess which. The end goal is not to find flaws in the things you're told, but to find the new ideas that had been concealed by the broken ones. So this game should be an exciting quest for novelty, not a boring protocol for intellectual hygiene. And you'll be surprised, when you start asking "Is this true?", how often the answer is not an immediate yes. If you have any imagination, you're more likely to have too many leads to follow than too few.
> More generally your goal should be not to let anything into your head unexamined, and things don't always enter your head in the form of statements. Some of the most powerful influences are implicit. How do you even notice these? By standing back and watching how other people get their ideas.
> When you stand back at a sufficient distance, you can see ideas spreading through groups of people like waves. The most obvious are in fashion: you notice a few people wearing a certain kind of shirt, and then more and more, until half the people around you are wearing the same shirt. You may not care much what you wear, but there are intellectual fashions too, and you definitely don't want to participate in those. Not just because you want sovereignty over your own thoughts, but because unfashionable ideas are disproportionately likely to lead somewhere interesting. The best place to find undiscovered ideas is where no one else is looking.
Startup culture really isn't the most natural home for independent and original minds. It's a good match for those who are just different enough to play the game on its own terms, but not so different they'll ask themselves why the game exists. Or whether better games are possible.
And IMO independence correlates far more closely with creativity. I find it more useful to wonder "What is this belief/tradition/culture going to look like five hundred years from now, and/or from the perspective of a disinterested alien visitor?" than to wonder if I'm being independent enough to get investor funding.
Don't know where i got it from. I usually use it as a reminder that even evil people like Hitler consider themselves as the good hero. Maybe in difficult circumstances. I don't want to compare PG to Hitler though.
Not to be sociopathic, but try to be the hero of your own story as well. Focusing on the things you do right and not remunerating on your mistakes it's a key part of mental wellness.
Better that than trying to write about something he knows nothing about..
p.s. I'm not defending him here, I'm generally not a fan of pg, but I think there's a less narcissistic possibility here. ;)
His lack of self awareness is incredibly impressive. I'm almost envious.
http://paulgraham.com/good.html
"When you write something telling people to be good, you seem to be claiming to be good yourself. So I want to say explicitly that I am not a particularly good person. When I was a kid I was firmly in the camp of bad."
Having read and forgotten most of his essays over years, I could recall this in a minute. So probably there's more.
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.
This is exactly the idea which the statement counteracts.
You're trusting the majority opinion because it is the majority.
Yet it is not always right, and you can give yourself a huge advantage by questioning it for yourself.
... or you can continue being a follower of majority opinion.
The choice is up to you.
By the way, the majority opinion has been wrong about the shape of the earth before.
Assuming you have a reason to. If the majority assumed the shape of the earth was a cube based on the information they had at the time, and you came along and noticed something to refute that, of course that is valuable.
But if you are refuting that simply because the majority assumed it, that doesn’t seem useful.
People have a limited amount of time on earth, and using the majority’s assumptions is a valuable heuristic for not wasting resources (time) coming to the same conclusion.
Can everyone study sufficient biology and astrophysics to “prove” to themselves how vaccines and planetary systems work? Most likely not.
Here's another aphorism for you: "If a respected, grey-haired scientist tells you something is possible, he's probably right. If he tells you something is impossible, he may well be wrong. But if a thousand respected, grey-haired scientists tell you something, that's probably where you want to put your money."
Naturally this makes discussing the assigned opinions extremely boring, because it’s entirely predictable and worse yet at a 6th grade level at best.
[1] In the USA this means the distribution of opinions among the general population is bimodal.
I'm not necessarily promoting arguing against majority opinion, only thinking for yourself and deciding what you think, and acting accordingly.
Arguing against majority opinion is usually a futile and unprofitable endeavor.
Knowing that it is wrong can literally save your life at times.
If you hold a view that very few share, you're more likely to have thought from first principles about why that view should be held. If you hold a view that everyone shares, there's a much higher probability that the view is programmed into you by your social stimuli.
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.
* 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.
Probably was to independent for some?
I definitely agree that conspiracy theorists reject authority and are contrarian, but most don't strike me as curious except for a superficial level.
That said, I would agree with the general idea that independent minded people can be less approachable, mainly due to the fact that they do not "need" anyone and people like to feel useful.
As for the list of things those people may or may not enjoy, the sheer amount of things polled and the small sample size give me doubts.
That's the point. They were always "crackpots". You need to be a crackpot to generate ideas that people aren't generating, otherwise everyone would generate them. This means you'll generate wrong ideas, but it also means you'll generate right ideas that people think are wrong.
>I definitely agree that conspiracy theorists reject authority and are contrarian, but most don't strike me as curious except for a superficial level.
They are definitely more curious than most people, as evidenced by the fact that they were attracted to the conspiracy theory in the first place. It's also not uncommon for an intelligent conspiracy theorist to be able to outargue a conventional person on a subject they care about, i.e. the Earth being flat or not.
>As for the list of things those people may or may not enjoy, the sheer amount of things polled and the small sample size give me doubts.
I think this field is pretty well established and this paper in particular is well cited, so among peers it doesn't seem to be contentious.
I agree with Graham's take that conspiracy minded people are not independent minded at all. They just have a different group whose authority they accept without question.
Very few conspiracy minded people come up with the conspiracies they believe in entirely on their own, or deeply investigate to find out if the conspiracy is true. They just latch on to a conspiracy someone else articulated and accept it unquestioningly.
The main reason some conspiracies get more "believers" than others, in my opinion, is because they're contrarian signals, so they'll attract contrarian people, and like with anything, most people will only explore the surface level stuff because that's enough for their contrarian itches.
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?
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.
evolution is all about the ability to fit in. this includes the ability to be your own person with your own opinions. a well adapted person can do that and still being a part of the group/society
I agree that if you want to fit in, thinking for yourself is counterproductive. But I also think society has more escape hatches for unconventionally minded people than it ever has, and if you don't care about fitting in the penalties have never been lower.
But does it? The strenuous effort part? Empathy doesn’t require strenuous effort, it can’t be that hard to relate to the core struggles of anyone you don’t know yet, surely you’d have to be some sort of magician to empathise at the granular level even with someone that looks like you (not sure how relevant that is but seems to be important to you), comes from the same school and now lives on the same block of flat as you do, as they could have gone through life having the complete adverse experience from yous, but at the core level, as long as you’re not some sort of social anosognostic, it’s not that hard to relate to what complete strangers from obscure environments feel/want/think like.
This is easily tested by simply taking a trip to some remote place you don’t speak the language and you’ll see how quickly empathy kicks in and how soon ‘conversations’ are happening where you totally relate to what they are going through perhaps not as much as they can relate to what you’re going through you lunatic explorer of the subconscious. Then with time as you learn their language, well, fuck it, as long as you are wearing some shade of grey you will fit right in where you are right now and wear your mask.
The issue is more in the relating to struggle that you never went through and never observed. In order to relate, the other person would need to be unusually great at expression what it is like, what constrains they have and you would also have to be very good listener.
That is unlikely combination typically.
I think this is partly because the rules or conventions that allowed rational discussion in good faith have been hacked by those acting in bad faith. The sad truth is that good faith discussion has been utterly rhetorically hijacked by things like "just asking questions" so when someone is genuinely asking questions you are assumed to be acting in bad faith. I have no idea what the answer to that is other than to find people you can trust to have these conversations with. And the danger is a lot of the people you think you can trust are just more people acting in bad faith.
It may be a matter of knowing when to stop. My personal experience is that most people will try to answer even sensitive questions when you approach them with genuine interest and make some effort to formulate questions in a way that doesn't imply some sort of value judgement. If this is difficult, just be explicit and explicitly say you're not trying to judge or offend them.
Sure enough, you'll hear people make an argument that you find unconvincing, or they may not answer the exact question that you asked, and some people will even admit they don't know why they believe something. When that happens, you'll have to accept that as their answer (and draw your own conclusions in silence).
People do get hostile when you keep "nagging" - asking more and more questions - when it's clear that they aren't interested in the subject or haven't thought about it much. To the other person it feels like you're either trying to make them feel stupid or change their mind. And you're getting none the wiser anyway because those who do not get offended will just make up their "reasons" on the spot.
Obviously avoid the mistake to ask someone for their opinion, and then immediately returning the "favor" by giving your opinion on the matter.
If you ask with sincere interest and an open mind, and avoid passing judgment on the answers you get (including with nonverbal cues), the person you're questioning will generally feel flattered, not attacked. This is how good journalists get people to open up to them.
Honestly, this is a good thing. Don't talk to these people. Over time I've found friends that I can discuss rationally with about many of their disparate experiences, them being from various races, genders, nationalities, and other such factors.