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The Four Quadrants of Conformism

paulgraham.com

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Re: The Four Quadrants of Conformism

#431

Post by rclayton »

BurningFrog wrote: post #383
rclayton wrote: post #322

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Have we started killing cancelled people? Who has been “cancelled” anyways? What punishments have they endured? A lost job at a very public position? As someone wisely pointed out, the only person possibly going to be jailed in the #MeToo movement will be Harvey Weinstein. Many comedians and politicians have recovered. Look at Al Franken - polls show he’s electable in his state (by the group that ostracized him no le…

It's rare to see someone so purely miss the point.

Please explain how I missed it. Or do we just disagree?

Re: The Four Quadrants of Conformism

#432

Post by classified »

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…

> If you come up with clever ways of escaping the law for your own benefit...

... then PG will call you "smart".

Re: The Four Quadrants of Conformism

#433

Post by snowwrestler »

missosoup wrote: post #159
wdwecewc wrote: post #143

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As someone who claims to be educated on history, it is important then to remind yourself of why this actually occurs. You can't make essays dismissing some angry mob as if they are a homogenous hivemind. They won't listen to you because they literally can't listen to you, they act independently and uncoordinated. You have to tackle issues which cause them to be aggressive towards racists to begin with. Police brutali…

You probably don't know this word, but you're literally advocating for ochlocracy, which is the very thing I was talking about in the upstream comments. The mob has an infinite well of issues, the mob will never be satisfied. That's exactly how it transitions into totalitarianism. Pandering to the mob just adds more fuel to the fire. Police brutality etc. are issues that should certainly be addressed, and there's cou…

I think you need to spend some more time familiarizing yourself with American history. This is not the first time U.S. citizens have decided to protest for change.

You're acting like this is the first time people have ever complained about things or marched in the streets, and therefore we're on the precipice of communism. We're not.

> The mob has an infinite well of issues, the mob will never be satisfied.

We don't have a mob in the U.S., we have sovereign citizens. The right to march and complain about each other is firmly protected by the U.S. Constitution. The goal of improving the nation is shared by all of us, and we take it seriously, even if some feelings get hurt along the way.

Re: The Four Quadrants of Conformism

#434

Post by jfarmer »

aerosmile wrote: post #393

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…

> 3. It's futile to fight a war of words over who is right or wrong - let's instead use the economic success as a proxy for truth. With few exceptions, you're definitionally going to be less economically successful than PG. Do you think he would have pulled it off if the brave startup founder thesis was fundamentally wrong?

This is so...weird.

All this says is his model draws no conclusions which (1) he acts on and (2) make it impossible for him to generate sufficient economic returns.

What does his model have to say about becoming an expert chess player? A world-class author? An amazing athlete? A successful therapist? If there are people who are successful along those dimensions whose models contradict pg's, then what?

Your statement is almost a tautology.

Re: The Four Quadrants of Conformism

#435

Post by free_rms »

rclayton wrote: post #429
free_rms wrote: post #378

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's actually a great summary of the beef with cancel culture -- it only punches down. They can't touch Trump, or Ben Shapiro, or any of the other people that they really hate. Those people's actual jobs are to say things progressives hate. Who can the cancelers get? Moderate liberals, working in liberal enclaves, who said the wrong thing. Get'em! That'll make me feel better.

That’s actually my point. Overestimating the reach of cancel culture because you live in a liberal enclave.

Maybe we're very precisely estimating the reach and are appropriately terrified?

If you can't get the people you want, but you really want to get somebody...

Re: The Four Quadrants of Conformism

#436

Post by AlexandrB »

enoch_r wrote: post #382
rclayton wrote: post #312

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As oisdk points out, I would consider the very real threat of violence different than a celebrity getting their contract cancelled. But that’s an important point to also make. There’s a vast difference between a celebrity being cancelled and an average person. Cultivating popularity is a part of being a celebrity — so isn’t avoiding being cancelled a natural extension of that profession? As for regular people getting…

Kindness Yoga shut down after their pro-BLM posts online were criticized as "performative activism" by employees: https://coloradosun.com/2020/06/29/kindness-yoga-closure-dur... A woman in Kentucky was fired after 20 years from her job as a Hearing Instrument Specialist after she said she didn't support BLM in a facebook video: https://reclaimthenet.org/tabitha-morris-cancel-culture/ (Her GoFundMe was also shut down.…

Whenever I see lists like this, what's interesting to me is what's omitted. In this particular case I don't see mention of workers getting fired for trying to organize or advocate for unions[1]. I don't see the abuse that gets piled on cops who report the misdeeds of their colleagues[2]. And I don't see the NFL effectively blacklisting Colin Kaepernick for his views on police brutality.

It seems like it's only "cancel culture" when it happens to people we identify with.

[1] https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2020/may/05/amazon-pr...

[2] https://www.kcaw.org/2019/12/12/sitka-settles-police-whistle...

Re: The Four Quadrants of Conformism

#437

Post by oisdk »

Sacho wrote: post #321
oisdk wrote: post #258

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I assume you're aware of police obscuring their badge numbers, and refusing to identify themselves? That phenomenon is at least as common as the actual police violence. While I have many problems with the following snopes article, I think the facts it presents are pretty incontrovertible: https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/feds-unmarked-vans-portlan...

> I assume you're aware of police obscuring their badge numbers, and refusing to identify themselves? Er, is this what you would call secret police? The article's facts may be incontrovertible, but they don't agree with your description: "What's Undetermined While one person said he was detained without officers identifying themselves — and another viral video was interpreted by viewers as a case of the same thing —…

So what's undetermined in the snopes article is whether specifically those police that detained people in portland identified themselves or not.

When I spoke about officers not identifying themselves I was talking generally, about the other cases from outside of portland, of officers obscuring their badges and not identifying themselves.

But no, that's not really what I would count as secret police. I mean I think the distinction is a little arbitrary and before long you basically get to arguing definitions which is almost always a waste of time, but I think the actions of the police in the snopes article constitute an overstep that I think qualifies as authoritarian. Especially when those agencies were sent in specifically by the executive.

Also, I should point out that the line you quoted is the one I have a problem with:

> we have no verifiable evidence to prove or disprove whether agents in those cases explained for what federal agency they worked during the arrests.

That's a very strange sentence to me: like how could you even prove such a thing? Have a video of the entirety of the person's interaction with the police?

I think if we're being reasonable here that it's overwhelmingly likely the police didn't identify themselves in this case. But of course it's not feasible to have "evidence" for that kind of thing, so I suppose I can't go ahead and say I'm sure on the point.

Re: The Four Quadrants of Conformism

#438

Post by mywittyname »

designium wrote: post #413
notacoward wrote: post #392

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 direct…

I think you can apply his quadrant to usage of mask during Covid and the result speaks for themselves: Let's play this out for mask wearing: Top Left: Top doctors asking people to wear masks Bottom Left: People who are wearing masks Bottom Right: People who occasionally use masks, or alternatives, bandanas, etc. Top Right: People who don't want to use masks because of freedom.

Go into a conservative areas the the top quadrants flip. Where the Top Left are the People who don't wear masks accost others for doing so and the top right are those wearing the mask in spite of the harassment.

Being an enforcer or a rule breaker is very much dependent upon what the rules are.

Re: The Four Quadrants of Conformism

#439

Post by BurningFrog »

free_rms wrote: post #400
BurningFrog wrote: post #381

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 Beijin…

Yeah, the anti Mao sentiment is very clear.

This is not just a factual historical account. It also takes a lot of opportunities to point out how awful a person Mao was, and makes claims about his motives, which don't always seem knowable.

Of course, when writing about one of the worst rulers in human history, being a bit judgemental is understandable. But it does make me want to check other sources.

On the fact level, there seems to be an enormous amount of work behind the book.

Re: The Four Quadrants of Conformism

#440

Post by __alexs »

jimbokun wrote: post #418
__alexs wrote: post #317

I honestly don't understand this perspective which seems central to a lot of pgs writing lately: "the customs protecting free inquiry have been weakened" Can anyone explain it? We are, right now, posting on the most expansive and weakly moderated communications platform humanity has ever had. You can find almost anyone opinion imaginable out there with a brief Google search and forums on which to argue every side of…

> You can find almost anyone opinion imaginable out there with a brief Google search and forums on which to argue every side of it with. And you can quickly get someone fired or their business boycotted or doxxed or swatted if they express an opinion you don't like.

Yes the world is scary, people speaking up have always put themselves at risk but we have better tools to protect ourselves and find like minded people now.

This isn't new and at worst doesn't seem that much different to how people have always acted. The argument is that things have got worse, but they just seem to be the same.

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