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The Four Quadrants of Conformism

paulgraham.com

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Re: The Four Quadrants of Conformism

#391

Post by [deleted] »

archagon wrote: post #389
krapp wrote: post #298

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't know. I never thought I'd see the day when Americans seem more concerned about "SJWs" exercising their free speech rights than actual secret police tossing political dissidents into black vans but I guess here we are.

I look on in desperate horror at the blatant, authoritarian corruption happening every single day at the White House, and yet the only righteous anger I see on the “intellectual watering hole” of HN is towards cancel culture. I don’t get it. Don’t people read the news? How do you not have an ulcer from watching this shit every day for four years?

[deleted]

Re: The Four Quadrants of Conformism

#392

Post by notacoward »

Worth noting that the "aggressively non-conformist" quadrant includes not just inventors and leaders but also criminals and trolls. For some reason the essay downplays that.

Also, is it just me, or does it seem like most of pg's recent essays are attempts to "poison the well" against anyone who might try to hold him and his peers accountable for their contributions to the sorry state of our society? He doesn't directly attack them, but he seems to be coming at a general "social pressure is bad" theme from multiple directions lately.

Re: The Four Quadrants of Conformism

#393

Post by aerosmile »

The amount of negativity in the comments is astonishing (and has been with regards to all of his recent essays). Which is perverse on a couple of levels:

1. PG's essay outlines a theory that the majority of the world is conventionally-minded and doesn't like to discuss new ideas. The comments here perfectly resemble that theory. PG wins. (Edit: at the time of writing, the comments were exclusively negative. This has changed since.)

2. If you don't like his writing and his world view (the brave startup founder is the hero), then why come to HN? Why support someone's website and accelerator/fund if you think they are so wrong?

3. While recognizing the limitations of this framework (see below), let's recognize that PG became very wealthy by employing the brave founder thesis. There's got to be a lot of truth there.

If there's anything wrong with PG's writing, it's that he doesn't spell out the truth for you - which is that in 99% of the cases, you're not the target audience. This essay is the perfect example. The quadrant he's romanticizing about is the smallest one, and of course most people are not going to see themselves resembling those characteristics. Many other essays have this quality - it's easy to walk away realizing that you're either not young enough, or not hard-working enough, or not smart enough, or not in a position to take the required risks to be the target audience. And that hurts, because it's true. Just don't shoot the messenger.

For clarification, all you get from being a part of PG's target audience is having a certain set of traits which are good for one thing, but would also disqualify you from being an astronaut and pursuing many other desirable careers.

Re: The Four Quadrants of Conformism

#395

Post by jimbokun »

krapp wrote: post #298
marcus_holmes wrote: post #233

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>> That's how things tend to work when people are so alienated or disenfranchised from the system that change within the system becomes impossible, yes. And the endpoint of that process is revolution. Again, not a good thing. Revolutions are bloody. How can you fix the democratic process so that works as it ought and prevent the disaster you're heading for?

I don't know. I never thought I'd see the day when Americans seem more concerned about "SJWs" exercising their free speech rights than actual secret police tossing political dissidents into black vans but I guess here we are.

This is a non-sequitur.

Getting low level employees fired for some kind of political faux pas does absolutely nothing to combat Trump's gross abuses of power.

Re: The Four Quadrants of Conformism

#396

Post by BenoitEssiambre »

PaulHoule wrote: post #288
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…

"Four quadrants" are frequently a bad smell. They often are structurally wrong, such as https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flynn%27s_taxonomy which has three real entities in it (a triangle) and one non-entity. The Nolan chart gets into trouble in a different way: https://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Nolan_chart That demonstrates a libertarian position that some people like to talk about but does not get traction when you try to…

I tend to be a big fan of pg's posts even his more controversial ones, but I must admit the use of four quadrant categorization turned me off here. It's not a problem with the idea he's trying to convey. It is valid, at least in some contexts. The issue here is more about lazy communication, sloppy emphasis, too coarse thinking.

Shoehorning concepts into quadrants is information theoretically very suboptimal, and usually has bad Bayesian fit from concept to reality. It's a visual trick often used in superficial business presentations that to be frank, is a bit of an insult to readers. It assumes they haven't already thought of the two simplest dimensions of the problem. It's probably a fine tool for early intros on simple subjects to newbies, but it's a bit condescending when used on more complex concepts with more sophisticated audiences. It ignores millennia of knowledge of the subtlety of language, taxonomies and ontologies that go way back at least to Aristotle's Categories.

Yet people jump to it really quickly. I had smart people pitch to me on two separate occasions, startup ideas that were specialized domain search engines where "get this, we would have two sliders that would allow people to get more results from one of these four quadrants". They thought they had found the best dimensions to categorize their domain's data and could beat much more flexible and expressive combinations of natural language keywords to zone in on things relevant to users' inquiries. It's a weird reflex.

Re: The Four Quadrants of Conformism

#397

Post by AlexandrB »

vorpalhex wrote: post #308
oisdk wrote: post #177

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I find it bizarre that comments like these seem to think the main battle ground for free speech is young people like myself "cancelling" people on twitter, when at the same time protestors are being arrested by secret police in the US. Like there is an authoritarian government right there for you to criticise, but you choose only to talk endlessly about tweets like "can white people make rice, or is it cultural appro…

You're engaging in a straw man of both sides and it makes me want to disregard your argument entirely. > you choose only to talk endlessly about tweets like... Do you really think that's what people are complaining about here? Not the professors being fired, the well known economists being forced to resign? There was a professor who lost his status running a residence hall because he was on the legal defense team for…

> We have a legal and social framework for affecting longterm change and it works much better than arson.

This is a non-sequitur. Police violence has (probably) been increasing for years[1]. Over the last 20 years the police have become more militarized and killings by police have increased even as crime rates have decreased sharply. Clearly the legal and social frameworks are not working.

[1] https://fee.org/articles/how-many-people-are-killed-by-polic...

Re: The Four Quadrants of Conformism

#398

Post by jimbokun »

wdwecewc wrote: post #122
stopachka wrote: post #111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How confident are you that this is true? What kind of information would you have to see to feel alarm?

I would have to see the left gaining real political or financial power. Right now I am far more concerned about right wing fascism since that is gaining popularity in multiple countries.

The left controls academia, the arts, media, and corporate HR departments. That's a significant amount of power that can be wielded against people who don't conform.

Re: The Four Quadrants of Conformism

#399

Post by AlanYx »

BurningFrog wrote: post #381
AlanYx wrote: post #347

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>one big difference is that the Red Guards were created by Mao as a way to purge the party of his enemies... No -- that's not the case, and that's precisely why I think the parallel to what is happening now is so strong. The Red Guards started in 1966 as a student movement. They later developed a manifesto, which Mao thought he could leverage to his own advantage, so he endorsed its broadcast. This fanned the flames…

I guess we've read different books about it. This is my source: https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0679746323/ What Mao did in secret may not be possible to know fully. But are you really telling me that China in 1966 was a free enough society that students could just start an independent political movement that took over the country?

I haven't read that book, but the Wikipedia article gives a reasonable account based on what I've read: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Red_Guards#Origins

>But are you really telling me that China in 1966 was a free enough society that students could just start an independent political movement that took over the country?

It wasn't a free society by any stretch, but the students' radicalism was in line with the prevailing zeitgeist... they denounced university officials as intellectual elites, corrupted by bourgeois notions that threatened the success of the revolution. Meanwhile, Mao faced ongoing struggles to maintain and consolidate power, so he found endorsing their ideas useful. But the movement itself rapidly spun beyond his direct control.

Re: The Four Quadrants of Conformism

#400

Post by free_rms »

BurningFrog wrote: post #381
AlanYx wrote: post #347

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>one big difference is that the Red Guards were created by Mao as a way to purge the party of his enemies... No -- that's not the case, and that's precisely why I think the parallel to what is happening now is so strong. The Red Guards started in 1966 as a student movement. They later developed a manifesto, which Mao thought he could leverage to his own advantage, so he endorsed its broadcast. This fanned the flames…

I guess we've read different books about it. This is my source: https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0679746323/ What Mao did in secret may not be possible to know fully. But are you really telling me that China in 1966 was a free enough society that students could just start an independent political movement that took over the country?

Mao leveraged the movement to try and get himself back in the driver's seat, after he had been sidelined following the Great Leap Forward. He amplified them greatly for his own selfish reasons, which is also happening in our current moment, in different ways. They wound up being, surprise, unpredictable and destructive.

(A note, I read that book too, it's good but needs discounting for bias. Anybody who writes Beijing as 'Peking', or Zhou Enlai as "Chou En-lai" in the 21st century has clearly got a KMT-flavored axe to grind. But it also has some great original research.)

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