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The Four Quadrants of Conformism

paulgraham.com

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Re: The Four Quadrants of Conformism

#641

Post by BoiledCabbage »

luckylion wrote: post #365
jacobush wrote: post #337

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But the reform way hasn't worked very well, if at all, either. Not saying that means one should revolt or anything, just that America seems like it's stuck between a rock and hard place, currently.

>But the reform way hasn't worked very well, if at all, either. You don't see a difference between USA, 1960 and USA, 2020?

And you know what was the cause of the largest changes between 1960 and 2020? The civil rights protests.

And those protesters were disapproved of / hated by the majority of the population at the time. For upsetting the status quo - and "pushing for change to quickly". There are surveys that list this - that mirror the exact same responses that a number of people give today about BLM.

Re: The Four Quadrants of Conformism

#642

Post by dang »

peisistratos wrote: post #373
stopachka wrote: post #31

Loved this essay. The phrase “aggressively conventional minded” is genius, and may contribute a lot towards the solution. As someone coming from an ex-soviet state, I’ve felt personal alarm bells ring more and more, as I experience the kind of intolerance and double speak America is heading into. Both the left and the right my opinion are missing the key points on freedom (the left suppressing and labeling, the right…

[flagged]

We've banned this account for using primarily HN for ideological battle and ignoring our requests to stop.

Re: The Four Quadrants of Conformism

#643

Post by solmans »

GavinB wrote: post #577
frasermince wrote: post #503

While I think there might be a grain of truth here I really disagree with how he states it. He seems to be really placing higher value on the isolated genius who does great things despite society being against him. This seems to be based on a lot of pretension and dismisses people who do not think like him. With how he defines conformity and nonconformity one could argue that the flatearther surrounded by non flatear…

Yes, flat-earthers would probably count as non-conformist. I think the point is that in order to have Galileo, you have to tolerate flat-earthers as well. I do agree that calling most people "sheep" is uncharitable, and would add that calling aggressive conformists "stupid" is also not accurate or productive. They might be making stupid decisions, but they're not stupid people.

To view the majority of human beings as livestock, metaphorically or not, really shows the kind of person he is. Everyone is for the most part unique and will have bouts of aggressive independent mindedness. No one is constantly questioning the system or breaking rules, Paul would like to think that's what he does but in reality he is more of a conformist than he thinks and if he saw himself this way he would probably not use the term 'sheep' to describe it.

Re: The Four Quadrants of Conformism

#644

Post by dang »

baron_harkonnen wrote: post #583
coldcode wrote: post #21

If you want to learn about the various types of people and how they relate to the world around them, study the French Revolution (in depth, not just a snippet). You will find every kind of person (in much more complex combinations than presented here), and how they participate/change/destroy/terrorize/etc. People today are no different we just have more technology.

It's pretty clear from PG's writing that he doesn't do a lot of reading.

You could not be more wrong. pg reads more, and more widely, than almost anyone I've met. And I've met a lot of well-read people.

It eternally boggles my mind how people jump to completely false conclusions like this.

Re: The Four Quadrants of Conformism

#645

Post by chillacy »

avs733 wrote: post #615
smhost wrote: post #587

This is so meandering and incoherent that it's hard to comment on, but the idea that silicon valley and finance types are "independent-minded" is downright laughable. It's pretty clear that those types are in lock-step with each other ideologically, maybe broadly split between east-coast and west-coast aesthetically. This categorization is such nonsense. People in the hard sciences don't neatly fall into a type, and…

Excessive dimension reduction is a scourge in social science, and in societal commentary by just about everyone. So, yes - I agree with your point entirely, and I think it can be made much more concrete honestly by adding another dimension: The why of independence Notably, that is the harder one to create a surface level observation of. But take his favored quadrant: "And the kids in the upper right quadrant, the agg…

> I think that you'll find all four types in most societies, and that which quadrant people fall into depends more on their own personality than the beliefs prevalent in their society.

Personality is a real topic of psychology research, the current model is a five-factor model https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Big_Five_personality_traits

But the distributions are not bi-modal, so in reality most people are near the center of this quadrant with (I assume normally distributed) outliers.

Re: The Four Quadrants of Conformism

#646

Post by nitrogen »

joshuamorton wrote: post #636
nitrogen wrote: post #546

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is no way you are informed... Who do you think you are helping by doing that? This kind of turning on people who agree with you in principle but might have some of the details wrong is exactly the kind of fractally magnifying divisiveness that some of these subthreads are talking about. We are all largely on the same side w.r.t. wanting positive outcomes for everyone. We will get there through deescalation and…

When you say "Everything the protestors are doing has probably set us back a decade." it really doesn't sound like you agree with the protestors. So maybe if you do agree with them, don't say things that undermine them, or they'll respond in kind. Saying "Everything the protestors are doing has probably set us back a decade." isn't deescalating or cooperating, and insisting that the protestors need to deescalate and…

IMO the more charitable reading of that is "everything [I've heard about the] protestors doing", in which case the blame lies on biased information sources, not directly on our fellow commenter.

So, again IMO, a productive reply might be, "Data shows that most of the protestors are peaceful, but I do acknowledge there are some bad actors that are getting the bulk of the attention. Maybe we can brainstorm solutions to this attention bias at the same time we try to solve these other problems."

Re: The Four Quadrants of Conformism

#647

Post by solmans »

erichocean wrote: post #588
baron_harkonnen wrote: post #583

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's pretty clear from PG's writing that he doesn't do a lot of reading.

It's literally a meme where announces on Twitter their excited discovery of .

Funny how most people in this thread consider themselves aggressively independent minded, but when the silicon valley prophet releases his monthly creative writing piece disguised as a scientific discovery they defend and praise it tooth and nail.

Re: The Four Quadrants of Conformism

#648

Post by chillacy »

AlanYx wrote: post #330
ekianjo wrote: post #292

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The first best instance of this was during the French Revolution. People were guillotined in droves for being not merely enthusiastic enough.

I think there are some important qualitative differences with the French Revolution, at least in its relationship with the academy (although I'm not an expert). During the French Revolution, most of the aristocratic cadre of scientists did lose their positions, but less than a year into the Terror, the Institut de France was established with more-or-less conventional takes on merit and the scientific method. In the c…

There was a section on this in the sci-fi novel Three Body Problem. The students force a professor of physics to recant his claim that relativity is a legitimate theory, and he refuses, then gets beaten by students.

I remember thinking at the time it was such a bizarre piece of fiction, then I later found out this kind of stuff really happened.

Re: The Four Quadrants of Conformism

#649

Post by BurningFrog »

tome wrote: post #200
jmeister wrote: post #116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It’s too far in the game to still make this claim. Go through this list and tell us there is no “real” speech suppression: https://twitter.com/SoOppressed/status/1282404647160942598?s...

In fact it's mostly worse than that, because it's barely even "speech", it's people getting picked on for making trivial "mistakes".

You can think of it as "The Twitter mob needs to destroy N people every day".

If they find genuinely bad people to destroy, they go first. But if not, pretty much anyone will do.

Re: The Four Quadrants of Conformism

#650

Post by CoolGuySteve »

dang wrote: post #644
baron_harkonnen wrote: post #583

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's pretty clear from PG's writing that he doesn't do a lot of reading.

You could not be more wrong. pg reads more, and more widely, than almost anyone I've met. And I've met a lot of well-read people. It eternally boggles my mind how people jump to completely false conclusions like this.

He reads everything except hacker news comment sections, I'm guessing.
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