July 2020One of the most revealing ways to classify people is by the degreeand aggressiveness of their conformism. Imagine a Cartesian coordinatesystem whose horizontal axis runs from conventional-minded on theleft to independent-minded on the right, and whose vertical axisruns from passive at the bottom to aggressive at the top. Theresulting four quadrants define four types of people. Starting inthe upper left and going counter-clockwise: aggressivelyconventional-minded, passively conventional-minded, passivelyindependent-minded, and aggressively independent-minded.I think that you'll find all four types in most societies, and thatwhich quadrant people fall into depends more on their own personalitythan the beliefs prevalent in their society.[1]Young children offer some of the best evidence for both points.Anyone who's been to primary school has seen the four types, andthe fact that school rules are so arbitrary is strong evidence thatwhich quadrant people fall into depends more on them than the rules.The kids in the upper left quadrant, the aggressively conventional-mindedones, are the tattletales. They believe not only that rules mustbe obeyed, but that those who disobey them must be punished.The kids in the lower left quadrant, the passively conventional-minded,are the sheep. They're careful to obey the rules, but when otherkids break them, their impulse is to worry that those kids will bepunished, not to ensure that they will.The kids in the lower right quadrant, the passively independent-minded,are the dreamy ones. They don't care much about rules and probablyaren't 100% sure what the rules even are.And the kids in the upper right quadrant, the aggressivelyindependent-minded, are the naughty ones. When they see a rule,their first impulse is to question it. Merely being told what todo makes them inclined to do the opposite.When measuring conformism, of course, you have to say with respectto what, and this changes as kids get older. For younger kids it'sthe rules set by adults. But as kids get older, the source of rulesbecomes their peers. So a pack of teenagers who all flout schoolrules in the same way are not independent-minded; rather the opposite.In adulthood we can recognize the four types by their distinctivecalls, much as you could recognize four species of birds. The callof the aggressively conventional-minded is "Crush <outgroup>!" (It'srather alarming to see an exclamation point after a variable, butthat's the whole problem with the aggressively conventional-minded.)The call of the passively conventional-minded is "What will theneighbors think?" The call of the passively independent-minded is"To each his own." And the call of the aggressively independent-mindedis "Eppur si muove."The four types are not equally common. There are more passive peoplethan aggressive ones, and far more conventional-minded people thanindependent-minded ones. So the passively conventional-minded arethe largest group, and the aggressively independent-minded thesmallest.Since one's quadrant depends more on one's personality than thenature of the rules, most people would occupy the same quadranteven if they'd grown up in a quite different society.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, butthat the ones who are aggressively conventional-minded today wouldhave been aggressively conventional-minded then too. In other words,that they'd not only not have fought against slavery, but thatthey'd have been among its staunchest defenders.I'm biased, I admit, but it seems to me that aggressivelyconventional-minded people are responsible for a disproportionateamount of the trouble in the world, and that a lot of the customswe've evolved since the Enlightenment have been designed to protectthe rest of us from them. In particular, the retirement of theconcept of heresy and its replacement by the principle of freelydebating all sorts of different ideas, even ones that are currentlyconsidered unacceptable, without any punishment for those who trythem out to see if they work.[2]Why do the independent-minded need to be protected, though? Becausethey have all the new ideas. To be a successful scientist, forexample, it's not enough just to be right. You have to be rightwhen everyone else is wrong. Conventional-minded people can't dothat. For similar reasons, all successful startup CEOs are notmerely independent-minded, but aggressively so. So it's no coincidencethat societies prosper only to the extent that they have customsfor keeping the conventional-minded at bay.[3]In the last few years, many of us have noticed that the customsprotecting free inquiry have been weakened. Some say we're overreacting— that they haven't been weakened very much, or that they've beenweakened in the service of a greater good. The latter I'll disposeof immediately. When the conventional-minded get the upper hand,they always say it's in the service of a greater good. It justhappens to be a different, incompatible greater good each time.As for the former worry, that the independent-minded are beingoversensitive, and that free inquiry hasn't been shut down thatmuch, you can't judge that unless you are yourself independent-minded.You can't know how much of the space of ideas is being lopped offunless you have them, and only the independent-minded have the onesat the edges. Precisely because of this, they tend to be verysensitive to changes in how freely one can explore ideas. They'rethe canaries in this coalmine.The conventional-minded say, as they always do, that they don'twant to shut down the discussion of all ideas, just the bad ones.You'd think it would be obvious just from that sentence what adangerous game they're playing. But I'll spell it out. There aretwo reasons why we need to be able to discuss even "bad" ideas.The first is that any process for deciding which ideas to ban isbound to make mistakes. All the more so because no one intelligentwants to undertake that kind of work, so it ends up being done bythe stupid. And when a process makes a lot of mistakes, you needto leave a margin for error. Which in this case means you need toban fewer ideas than you'd like to. But that's hard for theaggressively conventional-minded to do, partly because they enjoyseeing people punished, as they have since they were children, andpartly because they compete with one another. Enforcers of orthodoxycan't allow a borderline idea to exist, because that gives otherenforcers an opportunity to one-up them in the moral purity department,and perhaps even to turn enforcer upon them. So instead of gettingthe margin for error we need, we get the opposite: a race to thebottom in which any idea that seems at all bannable ends up beingbanned. [4]The second reason it's dangerous to ban the discussion of ideas isthat ideas are more closely related than they look. Which means ifyou restrict the discussion of some topics, it doesn't only affectthose topics. The restrictions propagate back into any topic thatyields implications in the forbidden ones. And that is not an edgecase. The best ideas do exactly that: they have consequencesin fields far removed from their origins. Having ideas in a worldwhere some ideas are banned is like playing soccer on a pitch thathas a minefield in one corner. You don't just play the same gameyou would have, but on a different shaped pitch. You play a muchmore subdued game even on the ground that's safe.In the past, the way the independent-minded protected themselveswas to congregate in a handful of places — first in courts, andlater in universities — where they could to some extent make theirown rules. Places where people work with ideas tend to have customsprotecting free inquiry, for the same reason wafer fabs have powerfulair filters, or recording studios good sound insulation. For thelast couple centuries at least, when the aggressively conventional-mindedwere on the rampage for whatever reason, universities were thesafest places to be.That may not work this time though, due to the unfortunate factthat the latest wave of intolerance began in universities. It beganin the mid 1980s, and by 2000 seemed to have died down, but it hasrecently flared up again with the arrival of social media. Thisseems, unfortunately, to have been an own goal by Silicon Valley.Though the people who run Silicon Valley are almost all independent-minded,they've handed the aggressively conventional-minded a tool such asthey could only have dreamed of.On the other hand, perhaps the decline in the spirit of free inquirywithin universities is as much the symptom of the departure of theindependent-minded as the cause. People who would have becomeprofessors 50 years ago have other options now. Now they can becomequants or start startups. You have to be independent-minded tosucceed at either of those. If these people had been professors,they'd have put up a stiffer resistance on behalf of academicfreedom. So perhaps the picture of the independent-minded fleeingdeclining universities is too gloomy. Perhaps the universities aredeclining because so many have already left.[5]Though I've spent a lot of time thinking about this situation, Ican't predict how it plays out. Could some universities reverse thecurrent trend and remain places where the independent-minded wantto congregate? Or will the independent-minded gradually abandonthem? I worry a lot about what we might lose if that happened.But I'm hopeful long term. The independent-minded are good atprotecting themselves. If existing institutions are compromised,they'll create new ones. That may require some imagination. Butimagination is, after all, their specialty.Notes[1]I realize of course that if people's personalities vary in anytwo ways, you can use them as axes and call the resulting fourquadrants personality types. So what I'm really claiming is thatthe axes are orthogonal and that there's significant variation inboth.[2]The aggressively conventional-minded aren't responsible for allthe trouble in the world. Another big source of trouble is the sortof charismatic leader who gains power by appealing to them. Theybecome much more dangerous when such leaders emerge.[3]I never worried about writing things that offended theconventional-minded when I was running Y Combinator. If YC were acookie company, I'd have faced a difficult moral choice.Conventional-minded people eat cookies too. But they don't startsuccessful startups. So if I deterred them from applying to YC, theonly effect was to save us work reading applications.[4]There has been progress in one area: the punishments for talkingabout banned ideas are less severe than in the past. There's littledanger of being killed, at least in richer countries. The aggressivelyconventional-minded are mostly satisfied with getting people fired.[5]Many professors are independent-minded — especially in math,the hard sciences, and engineering, where you have to be to succeed.But students are more representative of the general population, andthus mostly conventional-minded. So when professors and studentsare in conflict, it's not just a conflict between generations butalso between different types of people.Thanks to Sam Altman, Trevor Blackwell, Nicholas Christakis, PatrickCollison, Sam Gichuru, Jessica Livingston, Patrick McKenzie, GeoffRalston, and Harj Taggar for reading drafts of this.
