The Four Quadrants of Conformism • Hacker News Board

Re: The Four Quadrants of Conformism

#511

Post by war1025 » Fri, Jul 24, 2020, 5:27 PM UTC

mywittyname wrote: post #438

designium wrote: post #413

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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

This gets left out of so many conversations, and is a very important point.

The essay touches on it a little with the slavery bit, but I feel like the rest of the essay downplays it.

Re: The Four Quadrants of Conformism

#512

Post by User23 » Fri, Jul 24, 2020, 5:28 PM UTC

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 know it's taboo to discuss votes here, so please interpret this generally and not as a cute attempt at recursive self-reference. I think it's actually germane and intellectually interesting in this specific limited context.

Aggressively non-comformist comments are the most reliable way to get downvotes on HN, but sometimes they result in massive upvotes.

Passively conformist comments are the most reliable way to get little to no votes whatsoever on HN.

Aggressively conformist comments are the most reliable way to get moderate upvotes on HN.

Passively non-conformist comments virtually don't exist on HN.

Supposing these observations are accurate, it's interesting to consider why they might be so.

Re: The Four Quadrants of Conformism

#513

Post by soundnote » Fri, Jul 24, 2020, 5:30 PM UTC

himinlomax wrote: post #13

Very interesting take. This reminds me of Bob Altemeyer's work. He summed up his decades of research on authoritarianism in a free ebook at https://www.theauthoritarians.org/ . I invite everyone to read this, this is the single most important work of political science / social psychology I've ever read. Two categories he identifies, "authoritarian" and "social dominant" map to Graham's "passively conventional" and "a…

Altemeyer should be viewed with some suspicion: He thinks left-wing authoritarianism is a "Loch Ness monster", and in talks with David Friedman couldn't comprehend why eg. labor unions could constitute an authority to a person - he viewed union membership purely in transactional terms with little ideological content.

His scale may identify a certain kind of authoritarian, but his work is almost assuredly blind as a bat to others and not a comprehensive take.

Re: The Four Quadrants of Conformism

#514

Post by philwelch » Fri, Jul 24, 2020, 5:31 PM UTC

dencodev wrote: post #492

I'm not sure I find much meaning in this essay because everyone's definition of "conventional" and "independent" depends on their own bias. PG's own definition of independently minded seems to be "they have all the new ideas". If that's the case, then universities are absolutely a place of independently minded people when compared to the baby boomers and older generations. Speaking out against racism, bigotry, and sy…

> Speaking out against racism, bigotry, and systemic issues that overwhelmingly impact POC and the LGBTQ+ community is not what I consider "conventionally minded"

It’s so unconventional that almost every Fortune 500 corporation has done so in unison.

I think there’s a part of pg’s essay that’s doing a lot more work than people realize, because everyone keeps missing it:

“ When measuring conformism, of course, you have to say with respect to what, and this changes as kids get older. For younger kids it's the rules set by adults. But as kids get older, the source of rules becomes their peers. So a pack of teenagers who all flout school rules in the same way are not independent-minded; rather the opposite.”

Re: The Four Quadrants of Conformism

#515

Post by projektfu » Fri, Jul 24, 2020, 5:31 PM UTC

mchusma wrote: post #268

I love PGs essays, but his take on Robert George is the opposite of what Robert George was saying. PG: "He's too polite to say so, but of course they wouldn't." Robert George from the quoted tweet: "Of course, this is nonsense. Only the tiniest fraction of them, or of any of us, would have spoken up against slavery or lifted a finger to free the slaves. Most of them—and us—would have gone along. Many would have suppo…

Quoting:

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."

He's too polite to say so, but of course they wouldn't. And indeed, our default assumption should not merely be that his students would, on average, have behaved the same way people did at the time, but that the ones who are aggressively conventional-minded today would have been aggressively conventional-minded then too. In other words, that they'd not only not have fought against slavery, but that they'd have been among its staunchest defenders.

Re: The Four Quadrants of Conformism

#516

Post by jfarmer » Fri, Jul 24, 2020, 5:32 PM UTC

If you write several essays about "the way society works" and they consistently resolve to a protagonist who happens to be very much like yourself, you're probably writing about your own mind, not society.

Re: The Four Quadrants of Conformism

#517

Post by projektfu » Fri, Jul 24, 2020, 5:33 PM UTC

projektfu wrote: post #515

mchusma wrote: post #268

I love PGs essays, but his take on Robert George is the opposite of what Robert George was saying. PG: "He's too polite to say so, but of course they wouldn't." Robert George from the quoted tweet: "Of course, this is nonsense. Only the tiniest fraction of them, or of any of us, would have spoken up against slavery or lifted a finger to free the slaves. Most of them—and us—would have gone along. Many would have suppo…

Quoting: 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." He's too polite to say so, but of course they wouldn't. And indeed, our default ass…

They're saying the same thing, but PG added the "He's too polite..." bit as though he didn't read past /1 in the thread.

Re: The Four Quadrants of Conformism

#518

Post by ThatGeoGuy » Fri, Jul 24, 2020, 5:35 PM UTC

skellington wrote: post #498

oisdk wrote: post #385

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 someone despicable. So the only actual example I was able to google here was the last one: and I have to say, is that it? A guy wasn’t asked back as a dorm a…

Rioters aren't protesters and there is nothing even close to "brutal" happening to the rioters. If anything, the state is showing remarkable restraint. Imagine if this shit was happening in China or Russia. If you/they get what you want out of all of this, a neo-marxist-anarcho-commune-socialist-green-whatever, no-rules, but lots of rules enforced randomly by the mob, THEN you'll see real brutal-ism like you saw in C…

We're not yet living in George Orwell's 1984 either, but just because we don't live in the worst possible timeline with a Ministry of Love doesn't mean we can't criticize or ask for improvement of conditions or policies in society today.

To brush off the actions of the police in the US as "not even close to brutal" and "showing remarkable restraint" is beyond callous and demonstrates some pretty bad faith and a lack of empathy on your part. I will remind you that this started over the murder of a man accused of using a fake $20 bill, and __human lives are more important than property__.

Re: The Four Quadrants of Conformism

#519

Post by defen » Fri, Jul 24, 2020, 5:35 PM UTC

war1025 wrote: post #511

mywittyname wrote: post #438

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> Being an enforcer or a rule breaker is very much dependent upon what the rules are. This gets left out of so many conversations, and is a very important point. The essay touches on it a little with the slavery bit, but I feel like the rest of the essay downplays it.

That seemed like the whole point of the essay to me and not a side note. His claim is that rule-orientation and assertiveness are present already in childhood (which I think is true), and that those are what determine people's behavior toward rules, not the specifics of the rules themselves.

Re: The Four Quadrants of Conformism

#520

Post by oisdk » Fri, Jul 24, 2020, 5:37 PM UTC

Sacho wrote: post #477

oisdk wrote: post #437

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 th…

I think the "secret police" part is a red herring. My opinion is that the federal police were justified defending the courthouse, but were not justified hunting around for suspects in vans, unmarked or not(this is the state police's job!), but I don't think too many would agree that the federal vs state divide is what's important, which is why I didn't bring it up initially. I feel the anger against the federal agent…

> Hopefully we can agree that it's well within police prerogative to prevent rioting, serious property damage(like trying set fire to buildings), possible violence.

No, as it happens.

I mean I get I'm probably outside the Overton window for hacker news, but I think we could probably find common ground on the principle that whatever else, the police should not use deadly force to prevent vandalism. This should include rubber bullets and batons, and I believe that tear gas also is not justified to prevent vandalism.

I mean you have to understand that there are countries which don't experience the horrific brutality the US is going through right now. The police in these place isn't better because the government paid out millions to consultancy firms run by former cops, but because the role of the police is dramatically different, and almost always much smaller.

> I am definitely willing to concede that Trump is a tactless brute, and sending the federal agents in like this was far from the best strategy.

I don't like talking about Trump much in this context: the problem is far larger than him, and I think people talking about him alone are missing the point.

The problem is overly-powerful police departments and unions which have massive political power in the cities they operate. Violence is used to increase this power, which in turn increases their funding and capacity for violence.

We see this all the time with (for instance) the NYPD: their union directly threatened de Blasio's daughter, for instance. They also stopped patrolling in protest of the prosecution of their officers (famously crime dropped during this time).

The only way to stop the cycle is to cut the power.