Should paragraph 27 start with "The conventional-minded" instead of "The independent-minded" ? Or am I missing something?
How to Think for Yourself
101–110 of 874 posts
Re: How to Think for Yourself
#102IMHO PG's best essay since thinking for yourself is a complex topic that underlies many of his previous essays yet is explained so well here. A few things stuck out to me that could have deeper explanations:
I suspect conformity has just as strong of a relationship with childhood environment as genetics. Ironically heavy-handed parents trying to create conformity can create rebels. Loving and understanding parents can create conformists unless they emphasize independent thinking. Personally I try to avoid telling children what exactly to do and try to listen to them, essentially treating them like adults: this is explained in the book "How to Talk so Kids Will Listen".
"Resistance to being told what to think" is given in this essay as working with curiosity, but I think it can also have a negative feedback. The independent thinker can be less curious about ideas they are told by someone else. However, the same phenomenon may help explain the mentioned individualization of curiosity: the ideas the critical thinker thinks of as coming from themselves naturally generate curiosity in those areas.
Re: How to Think for Yourself
#103It feels like independent mindedness and conventional mindedness is a false dichotomy and that most people are somewhere between each depending on the subject and context. Moreover if you subscribe to the dichotomy you're probably doing a poor job of creating an environment that encourages people to be independent minded. At the organizational level it feels completely normal that it will become more conventional wit…
It's a spectrum and I'm not sure that Paul would dispute that, he might define the bottom 60 percent of the spectrum as "conventional-minded" and the top five percent as "independent-minded", especially if we think this trait increases superlinearly as we move up the quantile distribution. This dichotomization lowers the resolution but can work practically
Re: How to Think for Yourself
#104The article mentions politically extreme politicians being niche conformists, point #7. I find the difference between an extreme politician and moderate one is that the moderates advocate for their constituents, which requires two things: listening to their constituents and compromising on political ideals to attain an interest desirable to their constituents. Extreme politicians instead tell you want your opinion is…
I think you have these two backwards. By definition a populist is promoting the rights and power of the people against privileged elite. It's no surprise the privileged elite consider populist an insult. And it's the moderates, the privileged elite, that have to instruct the proles about what's best for them.
Then we will disagree. I think your error is subjectivity in that you are narrowly focused upon audience stereotypes than behavior at large.
Re: How to Think for Yourself
#105Excellent article > When you hear someone say something, stop and ask yourself "Is that true?" This is one of my favorite things to do, though the list of people who will talk to me again after I do it is very short. (Edit: To be extra clear... While this is a bitter pill - I do not like it when others do it to me - I do find it to be very effective for reinforcing good faith in close, trusting relationships. I also…
He mentions in the next sentence: "I'm not suggesting that you impose on everyone who talks to you the burden of proving what they say" > When you hear someone say something, stop and ask yourself "Is that true?" Don't say it out loud. I'm not suggesting that you impose on everyone who talks to you the burden of proving what they say, but rather that you take upon yourself the burden of evaluating what they say.
Although it could act as a good filter, if they lash out it's a valuable red flag
Re: How to Think for Yourself
#106A holistic approach to the question of collective thought and formation of conventional ideas raises the question of "what is the positive functional purpose of conventional thinkers in society and civilization?" That "conventional thought serves as societal and civilizational balast" seems a satisfactory (and possibly obvious) answer.
Independent thought exerts a displacing force on the collective mind. If this force exceeds the capacity of the collective to adjust ("far out"), the thought (and the thinker) is rejected.
Successful independent thought moves but does not destablize the collective mind.
Re: How to Think for Yourself
#107He hit the nail on the head but I think the framing of the investor's objective is not complete. The search for alpha is usually not about finding ideas that everyone thinks is bad but are actually good, although that does sometimes happen. Instead it's about finding totally undiscovered perspectives that lead to new insights into the market structure, market data or underlying market mechanisms that nobody considere…
Same with his comments about science. It isn't necessary for everyone else to be wrong - you're often just adding more detail to the picture. PG paints it as some kind of zero-sum when it really isn't.
Re: How to Think for Yourself
#108While I agree holding your own views and opinions help with doing something novel and different. I do feel like articles like this are mostly used to cover up and excuse hostility, bad work environments and Jobs esque management styles. You can have groundbreaking ideas without "disrupting" every single part of your work life. Assuming large groups of people can't think for themselves is both short sighted and insult…
> Assuming large groups of people can't think for themselves is both short sighted and insulting. But it is mostly true, at least in management positions. Independent-minded people by definition question authority so they are mostly relegated to low status positions. If you don't question authority then you aren't independent-minded. And no, questioning some authority figure just because some other authority figure t…
It's possible to be independent minded and not question management. You know internally that it's all BS (because of your independent mindedness) but don't vocalize it because you're employing a political strategy to which that would be harmful.
Re: How to Think for Yourself
#109IMHO PG's best essay since thinking for yourself is a complex topic that underlies many of his previous essays yet is explained so well here. A few things stuck out to me that could have deeper explanations: I suspect conformity has just as strong of a relationship with childhood environment as genetics. Ironically heavy-handed parents trying to create conformity can create rebels. Loving and understanding parents ca…
Another idea for instilling independent thinking in kids is to troll them: https://imgur.com/a/GLDrD In the comics Calvin doesn't catch on, but in my experience if you keep making the tale taller and taller, kids will start to figure out what's going on and be more alert in the future.
Re: How to Think for Yourself
#110> An essay that told people things they already knew would be boring. You have to tell them something new.
I think there's something off about this statement: A lot of people enjoy watching a new marvel movie once or twice a year while the movies themselves are more or less reiterations of the previous ones. People seem to enjoy the repetition.
The same seems to be true for essays: People enjoy finding their own thoughts repeated by anothers voice.
For example, there are a lot of essays analyzing/explaining/stating/claiming the importance of book X, videogame Y or composer Z; Art movement A, theory B or profession C. But do they provide anything new besides the comfort of nostalgia for shared experiences? However stale the enjoyment of these essays seems when viewed through the lens of the cited statement, the enjoyment itself can not be denied.