371–380 of 874 posts
Conventional-minded people don't like to think of themselves as conventional-minded. And in any case, it genuinely feels to them as if they make up their own minds about everything. It's just a coincidence that their beliefs are identical to their peers'. I'm not sure about this. I think people are aware of what is conventional, and that's why they gravitate towards it. It's a risk-mitigation strategy, or in the case…
That explains so much.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yeah, stereotypes are a bitch. BUT - if one gets stereotyped enough, after a while s/he’s probably developed some coping mechanism to actually leverage it into an advantage (I know I do). So don’t feel too bad - it might well be that the guy uses that sort of conversation precisely to gauge his audience. (It makes a lot of sense that pro athletes are in gaming, btw: it’s competitive and it’s something that can be don…
With games its been ubiquitous culture for a couple of decades now. It frankly staggers me that stereotype is something people actually still think is a thing.
PG sure has been on a kick about how brilliant of an independent thinker he is in a sea of conformity. It's clear in all of his writing that he's perpetually beating around the bush about some current itch he has, I wish he would just come out and say it with out pretending to be a deep thinker: > Do you want to do the kind of work where you can only win by thinking differently from everyone else? I mean, taken outsi…
For me it is absolutely surprising how conventional-minded he is on politics while giving this spiel.
IMHO 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.
1. Taking a position that is so novel that your peers neither agree nor disagree with it. Example from 15 years ago: believing that people should live on floating cities. Most people probably would disagree with this if they thought about it some (or understood the ideology behind the desire to seasted), but the position was so strange that it wouldn't stimulate immediate disagreement.
2. Taking a courageous position that is already strongly and overwhelmingly unpopular. This would be something like "I believe democracy is vastly overrated". Unlike with (1), almost everyone in the population has already formed an opinion that is pro-democratic, so when you utter the opposite view, you've got 95%+ of the population ready to disagree with you.
These two categories are exhaustive. In fact a false category of contrarian belief is uttering something that is already popularly controversial, and only slightly unpopular statistically. An example would be uttering "I believe DJT should be President" in a state like Colorado, where a sizable minority of the population already agrees with you. I think this is why most people think they are independent minded, when in fact they aren't. They have a few slightly unpopular views, which don't sufficiently qualify as genuinely contrarian.
TLDR: Genuinely contrarian opinions are either so novel that almost everyone is ready to disagree with you, or they are so novel that no one has an opinion yet on the subject.
PG sure has been on a kick about how brilliant of an independent thinker he is in a sea of conformity. It's clear in all of his writing that he's perpetually beating around the bush about some current itch he has, I wish he would just come out and say it with out pretending to be a deep thinker: > Do you want to do the kind of work where you can only win by thinking differently from everyone else? I mean, taken outsi…
PG sure has been on a kick about how brilliant of an independent thinker he is in a sea of conformity. It's clear in all of his writing that he's perpetually beating around the bush about some current itch he has, I wish he would just come out and say it with out pretending to be a deep thinker: > Do you want to do the kind of work where you can only win by thinking differently from everyone else? I mean, taken outsi…
IMO Voltairine de Cleyre[0] phrased this notion much better in this essay about Anarchism[1] in the first few paragraphs. She starts with describing two essential spirits, one being conservative and steady, the other one being progressive and unpredictable. It becomes clear these spirits both inhabit everyone in some way or another and society reflects that as a whole as well. On a personal level, it gets complicated…
https://web.archive.org/web/20201127171502/https://theanarch...
Mark Twain said, whenever you find yourself siding with the majority, it's time to pause and reflect. I have found this saying to serve me well enough to memorize it. I think the reason is that by the time an opinion has propagated to the majority, it is already outdated, and several years (sometimes decades) behind the newest available knowledge.
If you hold a view that very few share, you're more likely to have thought from first principles about why that view should be held. If you hold a view that everyone shares, there's a much higher probability that the view is programmed into you by your social stimuli.
To get negative votes in Hacker News: * Post something that is factual, but the crowd doesn't like * Post something that is logical, but the crowd doesn't like * Post a link to something reasonable, but that the crowd doesn't like Just to say that Hacker News is a highly biased community. There's very little space here to discuss anything that is not "conventional" beyond some bits of technology. When a topic touches…