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The Four Quadrants of Conformism

paulgraham.com

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Re: The Four Quadrants of Conformism

#41

Post by raverbashing »

At the notes, there is something that caught my attention:

> Many professors are independent-minded — especially in math, the hard sciences, and engineering, where you have to be to succeed.

And I disagree with it. You don't have to be independent-minded (from the group) to be "average" successful. Quite the opposite.

Follow the lead, follow the procedures, always take the skeptical side and you'll just coast through it. A lot of people succeed doing exactly that.

Research? Take the latest papers in an area, try a similar research (nothing too out of the consensus) and write a grant request for it.

The hard nonconformists, those will have a hard time. And the sad part is that most of them won't be nonconformists "for good reasons" but rather they will be most likely quacks. And I say the percentage is high exactly because academia does not favor anything out of the beaten path and independent thought is shunned.

Re: The Four Quadrants of Conformism

#42

Post by dougabug »

notsureaboutpg wrote: post #28
leereeves wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't see a contradiction in your example. I think such individuals are consistently being aggressively conformist with their group , but for the hyper-political, their group isn't the nation, but the party. That seems to fit with PG's claim that "The call of the aggressively conventional-minded is 'Crush !'". Naturally that would extend to disobeying the rules of the outgroup, perhaps solely because the outgroup p…

Isnt PG claiming that the "rules" are to value free expression and not turn people into heretics and that those who "break" this rule are bad and unworthy and never able to have new, original ideas and thus should never be listened to? Sounds like he is trying to say "Crush !" to me...

Of course he is. Crush the tattletales!

Children think in terms like “tattletales” and “naughty.”

Re: The Four Quadrants of Conformism

#43

Post by newacct583 »

lincolnq wrote: post #17
thom wrote: post #10

Good grief man, if you can only detect new ideas when they erupt from the mouths of startup CEOs, and you can't credit things like social justice and equality as anything but conformist (despite having been denied millions if not billions of people), then you're not 'independent', you're just incredibly narrow minded.

Could you unpack this? The only social justice-related example in the piece was a positive one (antebellum abolitionism). It seems like you might be reading into the piece more than was intended.

I can only read the discussion of "aggressive conformism" at the end as a giant subtweet of cancel culture. There's a real, and sudden, movement in the political center against this idea (c.f. the Harpers letter), and pg is clearly picking a side.

Which is fine, I guess. I personally didn't think the letter was so awful. It's hardly the worst problem in a world where we have federal paramilitary units being deployed to pick fights with hippies, but there are excesses (David Shor for sure shouldn't have been fired).

The problem is there's a baby vs. bathwater issue with the reasoning. The same people who spit bile about Shor are the ones who just pushed BLM from a fringe idea that couldn't get purchase into something approaching social consensus. Did anyone see the ballgame last night? What's your position on Kaepernick now?

Re: The Four Quadrants of Conformism

#45

Post by mkloop »

Excellent essay. I've been asking similar questions myself in the past couple of months, but in terms of European history.

If I see a conformist activist, the first thing I ask myself: In a real crisis, would this person be the next Oskar Schindler?

The answer is almost always "no".

If I see an aggressive activist, the question is: Would this person still be aggressive during an actual crisis.

In some cases, the answer is "yes". But in the majority of cases I doubt it and think they would just switch sides.

Re: The Four Quadrants of Conformism

#46

Post by [deleted] »

notsureaboutpg wrote: post #33
chippy wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The ideas of social justice and equality spring from the independent quadrant. These ideas have become the rules that conventional quadrant follow and expose. This doesn't seem to contradict itself.

Well what about if the rules of the conventional quadrant become "Anyone who says or implies 'Crush !' is bad and should never be listened to"?

[deleted]

Re: The Four Quadrants of Conformism

#47

Post by newacct583 »

stopachka wrote: post #31

Loved this essay. The phrase “aggressively conventional minded” is genius, and may contribute a lot towards the solution. As someone coming from an ex-soviet state, I’ve felt personal alarm bells ring more and more, as I experience the kind of intolerance and double speak America is heading into. Both the left and the right my opinion are missing the key points on freedom (the left suppressing and labeling, the right…

> the fundamental ideas that America is built on is focused so heavily on freedom that I trust the aggressively independent to protect, and the passively independent minded to innovate.

If you saw that essay as a defense of existing social structures, how are you so sure you're not just one of the convention minded too?

Re: The Four Quadrants of Conformism

#48

Post by PaulHoule »

luckylion wrote: post #35
PaulHoule wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Graham is in the bay area and he knows he'd get the smackdown from LGBT activists if he said what he meant, so he is using coded speech. The breathless tone that there is something wrong on college campuses these days (without being specific) is a dead giveaway.

> so he is using coded speech Please give us the decoder, because "it's code for whatever I feel like it is" is really not helpful.

Those Girard books that Peter Thiel wants you to buy because (1) Thiel got a commission and (2) Thiel doesn't know anything academic that didn't happen at Stanford.

Girard seemed to think that the great cultural problem of the world was "The Court of Versailles" where nobles who have no real problems just compete to be the same as each other. It's a compelling problem if you're a vendor who makes fancy stuff for the palace (e.g. one of those mirror makers who got assassinated to protect the secret of making mirrors) but for the 99% of people who grow rice, wheat, corn whatever it is that supports the life of most people and the vendors who serve the palace, it is just designed to erase your perception of your own life and make it a pale shadow of someone else's narcissism.

Re: The Four Quadrants of Conformism

#50

Post by newacct583 »

mkloop wrote: post #45

Excellent essay. I've been asking similar questions myself in the past couple of months, but in terms of European history. If I see a conformist activist, the first thing I ask myself: In a real crisis, would this person be the next Oskar Schindler? The answer is almost always "no". If I see an aggressive activist, the question is: Would this person still be aggressive during an actual crisis. In some cases, the answ…

Have you been watching what's happening in Portland? Where on the spectrum do you put those folks?
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