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The Four Quadrants of Conformism

paulgraham.com

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Re: The Four Quadrants of Conformism

#241

Post by oldsklgdfth »

naveen99 wrote: post #216
oldsklgdfth wrote: post #141

The part of the essay that made me the most introspective was: " Princeton professor Robert George recently wrote: I sometimes ask students what their position on slavery would have been had they been white and living in the South before abolition. Guess what? They all would have been abolitionists! They all would have bravely spoken out against slavery, and worked tirelessly against it. " I had to stop and ask mysel…

It’s a weakly specified / trick question. Do you get to keep your knowledge of the world as it is today ? if not how are you different than people 200 years ago ? So you can just ask what your ancestor’s position would have been. Which we already know the answer to.

The question forced to me ask myself if my values and convictions remain strong in the absence of knowledge. Do I know that slavery is terrible or do I believe in equality of humans? In the first case it's memorization, which is very specific to context. If I believe in the equality of humans, I can apply that belief across contexts and still reach unconventional conclusions.

Personally, I know I would not have been much different because I'm not much different today.

Re: The Four Quadrants of Conformism

#242

Post by kaymanb »

sideshowb wrote: post #20

> On the other hand, perhaps the decline in the spirit of free inquiry within universities is as much the symptom of the departure of the independent-minded as the cause. People who would have become professors 50 years ago have other options now. Now they can become quants or start startups. You have to be independent-minded to succeed at either of those. In defence of my chosen place in a university: being a quant…

I would also argue that the intersection of people who become quants / found successful startups and did so despite having a real shot at becoming a professor is pretty small.

My only real data points are my own graduate school experience, but I haven't heard of anyone who was on a path to success in academia who didn't continue on down that path, or at least give it their absolute best shot before moving in. By success I mean maybe a post-doc or two followed by a reasonable shot at a tenure-track position at a decent school. This restriction is made in the same way that (I am assuming) pg is only referring to quants at decent firms, and startup founders who at least have an idea they can get off the ground. I seriously doubt that any kind of conformism at say, an ivy league institution, is because people who would have become profs there chose not to.

Re: The Four Quadrants of Conformism

#243

Post by hnal943 »

oisdk wrote: post #209
rclayton wrote: post #184

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree. I would like for someone to enumerate all the people who have been “cancelled” and then compare it to those that have been violently attacked.

I mean I think there's an argument to be made that discourse has become more rigid (although I do think it's overblown), but like I don't understand how you can write this: > Also from an ex soviet state. Also feel alarm bells going off. I'm legitimately scared. I've seen this before, I know where it goes. And not be talking about a massive police crackdown on protest and the army being brought in to police civilians…

You don't understand, and that's the problem.

Re: The Four Quadrants of Conformism

#244

Post by kerkeslager »

Funes- wrote: post #202
bambax wrote: post #109

I have come to intensely dislike most of PG's essays, for many reasons, but the two main ones are that 1/ he plays fast and loose with the facts, reduces the whole history of (the various peoples of) humanity to a single arrow, and confuses demonstration with affirmation and, more importantly 2/ he has an unhealthy obsession with "classifying" people, by which he actually means ranking them, from top to bottom. The p…

>he plays fast and loose with the facts I don't expect essays to be scientific papers. The term comes from the French verb essayer 'to attempt, to try'. It's a genre widely known for being exactly that: a (mostly) brief rundown of ideas, without an exhaustive empirical demonstration being necessary nor expected. On top of that, it's a ~1500-word blog post on his own website . Get real.

Who cares? If your argument is that essays aren't concerned with facts, then that's a great argument for ignoring the entire genre of essays. Ideas without basis in reality aren't worth anything.

Luckily, some essayists are concerned with facts, so we don't have to throw out the whole genre. But we should absolutely ignore the essays that don't concern themselves with facts.

Re: The Four Quadrants of Conformism

#245

Post by erikerikson »

Funes- wrote: post #202
bambax wrote: post #109

I have come to intensely dislike most of PG's essays, for many reasons, but the two main ones are that 1/ he plays fast and loose with the facts, reduces the whole history of (the various peoples of) humanity to a single arrow, and confuses demonstration with affirmation and, more importantly 2/ he has an unhealthy obsession with "classifying" people, by which he actually means ranking them, from top to bottom. The p…

>he plays fast and loose with the facts I don't expect essays to be scientific papers. The term comes from the French verb essayer 'to attempt, to try'. It's a genre widely known for being exactly that: a (mostly) brief rundown of ideas, without an exhaustive empirical demonstration being necessary nor expected. On top of that, it's a ~1500-word blog post on his own website . Get real.

Is there not a spectrum of levels of accuracy/voracity in essays? Is it not valid to have a preference for authors alignments to parts of that spectrum?

Description of the world seems necessarily a compression of facts. I read this critique as stating more or less, "I find that PG tends to bias the data selected for the compression to support the conclusions he is inclined to promote".

I agree that essays have a wider allowable not-grounded-in-demonstrable-reality-ness compared to scientific papers but if an author seems to one to cherry pick, it seems reasonable for the one to declare that as a criticism of the author.

This is an important thing to know, especially since those compression statements are usually the premises the theses of the essays depend.

Re: The Four Quadrants of Conformism

#246

Post by da39a3ee »

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.

> and you can't credit things like social justice and equality as anything but conformist

As I'm sure you know, people like PG, and me, and the many, many other people who share many common beliefs with the progressive left, do not criticize social justice and equality. What we are finding extraordinarily problematic currently is the people on the progressive left who are the most vocal champions of social justice and equality, in particular their intolerance, deplatforming, certainty that their's is the only true view, etc.

Re: The Four Quadrants of Conformism

#247

Post by rjknight »

oldsklgdfth wrote: post #158
rjknight wrote: post #138

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We can distinguish between pure and applied innovation, though. Coming up with a new algorithm which can be applied to facial recognition is a pure innovation, deploying that algorithm to monitor political dissidents is applied innovation. I would not agree that the latter example "isn't anything in moral terms", even though the former is.

I would argue that you cannot parse out the "good" technology from the "bad" technology as that would require full knowledge of downstream consequences. Embedded in every technology there is a powerful idea, sometimes two or three powerful ideas. Every technology has a philosophy which is given expression in how the technology makes people use their minds, in what it makes us do with our bodies, in how it codifies th…

This feels like having it both ways. "Innovation is morally neutral" and "harmful uses are the inevitable consequences of innovation" can't both be true.

I would prefer to say that the act of creating a possibility is different from the act of exercising that possibility in a particular way. But you seem to be saying that merely creating the possibility makes the use inevitable, and so the person who invents the tiny cameras or the image-recognition software is inescapably responsible for the use of that technology to target political dissidents.

I agree that once the invention has been made, it becomes harder to stop someone from using the invention in bad ways. But the moral responsibility is clearly with the person who makes bad use of technology, not with the person who invented it (assuming that the technology was not invented specifically for that purpose).

Re: The Four Quadrants of Conformism

#248

Post by oisdk »

motorcycleman9 wrote: post #218
oisdk wrote: post #162

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> different people conform to the norm, regardless of the virtue (or lack thereof) of the norm itself. But this is exactly what I'm disagreeing with: there was widespread and popular opposition to slavery from its invention. To act like "everyone was doing it, everyone thought it was ok" is absolutely just not true. The people in favour of slavery were largely the wealthy, powerful minority who benefited from slavery…

To clarify my point on the slavery example- Slavery was present for hundreds or thousands of years. It was also obviously morally wrong for the entirety of it's existence. It's decline in the western world was relatively quick compared to the duration of it's existence. This decline came about as the western world became rich enough that eliminating the suffering of slaves was worth the inconvenience of replacing the…

> This decline came about as the western world became rich enough that eliminating the suffering of slaves was worth the inconvenience of replacing their labor.

This is just not true, and certainly not the view of most historians. This is an important claim, and you have not backed it up with evidence.

> It is not obvious that the Stanford prison experiment is a complete fraud.

I'm sorry, but this is quite a strange statement to me. Let me put it this way: if I cited the Stanford prison experiment in a university paper, the paper would be failed. The experiment is widely criticised, outright fraud has been found in a number of cases, and its results have not been replicated.

> The only ground I can stand on is that people such as Stephen Pinker getting cancelled is obviously ridiculous.

Again, Stephen Pinker is an extremely powerful individual. He's a multi-millionaire, a Harvard professor, I don't think I could come up with a better example of someone with a large platform. If he's been "cancelled" then he's an example of how insignificant and ineffectual "cancel culture" really is.

(of course people looking into his association with Jeffrey Epstein is quite another thing, I certainly don't think that's a "cancelling")

Re: The Four Quadrants of Conformism

#250

Post by oldsklgdfth »

rclayton wrote: post #178
bambax wrote: post #109

I have come to intensely dislike most of PG's essays, for many reasons, but the two main ones are that 1/ he plays fast and loose with the facts, reduces the whole history of (the various peoples of) humanity to a single arrow, and confuses demonstration with affirmation and, more importantly 2/ he has an unhealthy obsession with "classifying" people, by which he actually means ranking them, from top to bottom. The p…

He had a habit of always making the hero of his narrative the “brave startup founder”.

It would be interesting to come up with the "tech" archetypes.

The coder with a thousand faces, a modern day adaptation of Joseph Campbell[0]

[0]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Hero_with_a_Thousand_Faces

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