Conformists may kill civilizations • Hacker News Board

Re: Conformists may kill civilizations

#11

Post by toadpipe » Sat, Oct 03, 2009, 7:55 PM UTC

eggoa wrote: post #2

The paper is available at: http://www.des.ucdavis.edu/faculty/Richerson/RedNoise.pdf This quote just about summarizes every post-apocalyptic movie I've ever seen. "After this fixation of pure horizontal learning, occurring very approximately 12,000 time units from the start, the population completely loses most of its ability to track the environment, and, when the environment changes, mean fitness declines and the p…

It's quite interesting to think about how much I've learned about nature socially, vs. directly. It seems clear that I learn almost everything socially, and everything I learn directly is probably available socially, probably at a lower cost. In other words, nothing I learn directly is really new, and what is new could very easily be predicted from models - it's hardly even information in the Shannon sense. I'm a university student, but it's not clear to me that I've ever even met anyone who learned anything new themselves either (about the environment). Almost the entire information processing capacity of the species seems to be devoted to internal processing of information and the modeling of internal behavior. It seems like there's no other way it could be, given the sheer number of people, but it does make you wonder how far that can go.

Listening to people like Gwynne Dyer talk about global warming makes it sound like the problem is not so much that we don't have enough people tracking the environment, or even that we don't propagate the information fast enough, but that the sheer inertia of the system makes it so that changes can't be made fast enough to avoid major shakeups.

Re: Conformists may kill civilizations

#12

Post by unalone » Sat, Oct 03, 2009, 9:35 PM UTC

TomOfTTB wrote: post #5

jonmc12 wrote: post #4

Interesting to think that if you are a non-conformist your role in our civilization's survival is to evangelize your new behaviors while trying not to get yourself killed, imprisoned or banned.

I think you latched on to the real lesson here. Most people will be conformist, it's in their nature. So "don't be a conformist" isn't really a lesson that's practical from a societal level. The lesson I think is that society needs to tolerate non-conformists because they may very well be it's salvation some day. Even if society feels those people are completely undesirable there are ways to separate them without thr…

Conformity isn't about nature. It's largely a matter of background, development, social elements, etc.

I don't know where this idea of "either you're a conformist or you're not" came from, but it's wrong. Like anything, there's depth to the idea of conforming. Some people who nonconform do it in ways that happen to match what other people have done because it's a logical progression. Some people nonconform by acting as randomly as possible. Of the people that quote unquote conform, I doubt many think of it as conformity. In fact, I'd go further and suggest that if many of those people were convinced of its being conforming, they would take certain steps to change.

Re: Conformists may kill civilizations

#13

Post by zimbu668 » Sun, Oct 04, 2009, 1:06 AM UTC

Has to be said http://despair.com/connot.html

Re: Conformists may kill civilizations

#14

Post by chrischen » Sun, Oct 04, 2009, 6:10 AM UTC

unalone wrote: post #12

TomOfTTB wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think you latched on to the real lesson here. Most people will be conformist, it's in their nature. So "don't be a conformist" isn't really a lesson that's practical from a societal level. The lesson I think is that society needs to tolerate non-conformists because they may very well be it's salvation some day. Even if society feels those people are completely undesirable there are ways to separate them without thr…

Conformity isn't about nature. It's largely a matter of background, development, social elements, etc. I don't know where this idea of "either you're a conformist or you're not" came from, but it's wrong. Like anything, there's depth to the idea of conforming. Some people who nonconform do it in ways that happen to match what other people have done because it's a logical progression. Some people nonconform by acting…

When someone wants to just "fit in," they are consciously trying to conform. So I would argue that most people do this, so most people consciously conform. Most people don't want to be different or weird, which is often what innovation looks like.

Re: Conformists may kill civilizations

#15

Post by fauigerzigerk » Sun, Oct 04, 2009, 1:03 PM UTC

"Societies should promote individual learning and innovation over cultural conformity, and the models for social learning should be individuals who have demonstrated that they understand how to live with the current environmental trends," says Whitehead.

The difficulty is to find out who is successful because he or she understands environmental trends and who is successful because of conformity. I doubt that prestige is a good filter.

Re: Conformists may kill civilizations

#16

Post by known » Sun, Oct 04, 2009, 2:06 PM UTC

"The reasonable man adapts himself to the world; the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore all progress depends on the unreasonable man" --George Bernard Shaw