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“Corn-Pone Opinions” by Mark Twain (1901)
- kcorbitt 11y agoI agree with this sentiment in general, especially that our own feeling of self-worth can be determined to a fair degree by the opinions of people we surround ourselves with, and that this drives conformity. However, I'd add an important corollary, and one that is perhaps a bit less cynical :). Even if it's mostly true that you can only feel fulfilled when your actions and opinions are approved by your peers, you still get to chose who your peers are, and whose opinion you value. That's true today more than ever, with the world's interconnectedness and the huge diversity of on- and offline communities. Near the end of the article, Mark Twain says "Men think they think upon great political questions, and they do; but they think with their party, not independently." If you take the time to choose the parties/communities you align yourself with carefully, you can live a very principled and self-determined life even accepting the inevitability of some degree of group conformity.
- jccc 11y agoyou still get to chose who your peers are, and whose opinion you value Is that any less influenced by self-approval, and the approval of others?
- mr_luc 11y agoI agree that it's more possible now to switch/choose alignment than it ever was. And being 'more possible' means that it must be happening more. But "why people choose the communities they align with" doesn't seem much different than "why people have their opinions." Are we carefully choosing who we align ourselves with, any more than we're choosing our opinions? I don't think there's any test for this, or any cure, other than making time to ruminate, meditate, and ponder. Alone. Free from distractions and other voices. And if that's the case, isn't it at least possible that today it's both easier to switch communities, and less likely to be for any principled reason?
- plusquamperfekt 11y agoGood point - one might choose one's peers based on the desired feedback - the end result wouldn't be more healthy than adapting oneself to the feedback of a static peer group.
- TeMPOraL 11y ago> you still get to chose who your peers are, and whose opinion you value. It sounds like an easy way out, but I found it hard in practice. Not only it may be dangerous (filter bubble), but it also seems to be very similar to self-mind-hacking - which I found not to work at all. As long as I know I'm trying to trick my mind into believing something, it will refuse to do so. If it works at all, it must be on such a long timescale that you forget that it was all fake.
- Bulkington 11y agoAllow me to inject a cynical slant to your hopeful suggestion that people 'today more than ever' can chose their peers. People with a certain education supported by an infrastructure (personal and technological) that allows for choice have this flexibility, but those without see only the threat of 'the other,' not an opportunity to rethink fundamental principles. Worse, political leaders continue to exploit ignorance, but with sophisticated mass communication tools and technologies Twain could never have imagined. Prominent examples: 1. Lower-middle class Southern whites in the U.S. (with whom Twain was intimately familiar) embrace right-wing rhetoric (devout opposition to a godless, liberal govt that rewards a free-loading underclass) while the Republican Party caves to the self-interest of the mega-corp oligarchy. These folks who would benefit from social reforms reject all such liberal notions because, well, they still believe anyone who's not white and Christian is out to take away what little they have. But regressive conservative tax policy is actually doing them harm. (tl;dr: see the success of Fox News, with its overwhelmingly white/old audience. http://www.forbes.com/sites/greatspeculations/2015/04/02/ratings-growth-and-cable-news-dominance-will-boost-fox-news-subscription-revenues/ http://www.forbes.com/sites/greatspeculations/2015/04/02/rat...) 2. Given the above in the U.S., is it any wonder radical Islam succeeds in less affluent, less educated areas of the world--where there's very little exposure to outside ideas. And there's certainly very little opportunity for social/intellectual/economic mobility.
- rdancer 11y agoProtestant conservatives support Republican corporatist policy for the same reason urban hipsters support Democrat corporatist policy: because the vote tallying rules strongly favour a two-party system, and the parties they respectively support at least pretend to care about them, while the majority of the Nation sees them as a laughing stock. It speaks to their moral fibre that they are willing to put up with economic disadvantages to prop up policies that they care about. Suggesting people are somehow foolish because they put ideas before take-home is a weak argument. I'm sure you have a point, but maybe you could come up with better examples.
- marktangotango 11y agoThis characterization is often put forth to explain how the poor can support the Republicans: >> These folks who would benefit from social reforms reject all such liberal notions because, well, they still believe anyone who's not white and Christian is out to take away what little they have. In my experience, coming from fly over country, the real thought process could not be further removed. Where I came from, self reliance and self determination were prized. We might be poor as hell, heating our home with wood we cut, and eating food we grew and shot, but so was everyone else in our area, and there was nothing wrong with that. We weren't taking hand outs and getting along just fine (embellishing and paraphrasing try to make the point here). The idea being, everyone could do this, but were too lazy. We were poor, but not impoverished. The gp's characterization is actually quite offensive to these people.
- narag 11y agoIt doesn't seem that Twain thinks it's impossible to see through your interests. He also says to have "studied" some question, that suggest he believes it could be considered rationally. Both the preacher and Twain's philosophy are very independent thinking themselves. So it's a matter of numbers. A huge proportion of society is easily manipulated by showing them a "manufactured consensus." (Chomsky dixit)
- aaronem 11y ago> A huge proportion of society is easily manipulated by showing them a "manufactured consensus." And for the rest, you just need to pander to their belief that they're immune to that sort of thing.
- TheOtherHobbes 11y agoI think Twain is indulging himself. He's conflating trivial social conventions about dinner arrangements and clothes, with deeply-felt political positions, with social and financial farming of political influence. There's evidence that far from being social conventions, political biases are partly neurological. Whether the biases are due to nature or nurture, brain function can't usefully be reduced to superficial observations about creative thinking or self interest. Twain should at least have noticed that voters reliably support people who take away their bread/corn instead of supplying it. In fact humans are quite incredibly bad at calculating genuine self interest. We seem to be programmed to equate effective leadership with a certain kind of strutting acquisitive self-indulgence and macho mammal posturing. Being a follower of same can often be a terrible way to meet your bread needs - but a very good way to be treated as a disposable resource.
- allenbrunson 11y agoHere's what I have to say about that: That's pretty rich, coming from you, Paul Graham. You have All The Money, and All The Respect amongst your large and powerful peer group. Given your considerable wealth, there's nothing anybody can do to negatively impact your life in any meaningful way. Yet you continue to bang the same drum you've been banging for a decade now, at least. Time to tell us something we don't already know.
- skybrian 11y agoPaul Graham didn't write it.
- buckpassing 11y agoyeah. twain wrote literature. paul graham writes like someone convinced that he has found the most efficient means of communication.
- icebraining 11y agoThis was posted a decade ago. Someone just decided to submit it to HN now.
- dasil003 11y agoIt's generally a bad idea to assume that people whom you envy have no problems; it's just another form of dehumanization of the other.
- dpweb 11y agoI like how Emerson felt about conformity, not to mention - to be exceptional, one must be a non-conformist. Many would rather be accepted than exceptional At some point in your life, you may have to make that choice. The problem with public opinion in our times is this idea that the crowd is always right. Something is true because the crowd says it is. The crowd saying it is, makes it true. Sane is not the same as true. Sane just means many people believe it. The person who believes something no one else does is considered insane. When the lone "insane" person is vindicated, great wealth and success seem to follow.
- fnordfnordfnord 11y ago>When the lone "insane" person is vindicated, great wealth and success seem to follow. I must not have been paying attention. When did that ever happen?
- relkor 11y agoWhen someone sees a market inefficiency that everyone else was ignoring, and then solves it, they are in position to collect economic rents until others catch up. The problem that was solved was not imaginary, it was real, and people are suddenly able to pay to remove this problem. This is clear throughout history as first movers have successfully implemented local monopolies with varying degrees of scale.
- JadeNB 11y ago> When someone sees a market inefficiency that everyone else was ignoring, and then solves it, they are in position to collect economic rents until others catch up. PG, for example: http://www.paulgraham.com/avg.html http://www.paulgraham.com/avg.html . :-)
- JadeNB 11y ago> Many would rather be accepted than exceptional. At some point in your life, you may have to make that choice. I think that there are two problems with this. (EDIT: 'Problems' is a bad word. I don't mean two things that make it wrong, but rather two things that require a careful reading to appreciate fully. I should have said 'subtleties'.) First, and most importantly, I think that people think that being exceptional is a choice. Thus, someone says "ah, I shall be exceptional!", and sits back and waits to become so. Being exceptional is not a choice; becoming exceptional is, though it is a slow process, subject to setbacks, and not guaranteed of even eventual success (unless—as is perhaps uniquely appropriate here—one is willing to move the goalposts when necessary, and find success where one is). Second, I take your explicit point to be the decision between being accepted and being exceptional, but I'll respond as if it were between being conformist and being exceptional (which I took to be the subtext). After the problem is surmounted of deciding just to be exceptional, and realising that one must become so, I think that sometimes people confuse blind non-conformity with reasoned non-conformity. That is, a decision not to conform just in order not to be part of the crowd is just as silly as a decision to conform to be part of the crowd. Rather, make your decisions as you will, regardless of the pressure of the crowds, with the idea that you will sometimes agree with and (probably) more often disagree with them, and become exceptional in that way.
- edderly 11y agohttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hP8IxKizzWc https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hP8IxKizzWc
- skybrian 11y agoTrue as far as it goes, but there are a lot of other factors influencing why some ideas spread widely and others don't. These days we can even track how it happens.
- wrecktangle 11y agoAnd it readily brings the famous Nazareth's evangelist to mind- Jesus Christ. Considering the 6 stages of his blasphemy trials between Religious and Roman courtrooms (especially, the burdened denial of right and wrong between Herod and Pilate). And contrasting that unfortunate crisis of conscience greeted by the reported mob justice with how many billion people today follow a religion borne of Christ's personality, it just reinforces one thing Mark Twain endeavored to deliver as important message in that essay: "Think for yourself."
- rdancer 11y agoI like how on an article about crowd conformity and how certain thoughts may come to be frowned upon, your comment gets downvoted because it's Christian.
- wrecktangle 11y agoTry your very best. Read that comment until understanding gives way. You should realize that the comment whiffs of a lack of religion. Unless of course you delight in dissension for the sake of its inanity.
- rdancer 11y agoYour comment talks about the Good News, and does that with respect to the reader. It has hope that people may read it and consider it. And you call him "Christ" Love-hope-faith + evangelizing + acceptance of Jesus for what he claims he is => your comment couldn't be more Christian. What am I missing?
- rdancer 11y agoWhy is GP being flagged?
- wrecktangle 11y agoGood News? What does that mean? You are better off with discernment if you read a remark or a book from start to finish before you make a call for judgment. Again, here's the single news I undertook to broadcast with respect to the reader: "...it just reinforces one thing Mark Twain endeavored to deliver as important message in that essay: "Think for yourself"....."
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- dang 11y agoNo, it's been up since before HN existed: https://web.archive.org/web/*/http://www.paulgraham.com/cornpone.html https://web.archive.org/web/*/http://www.paulgraham.com/corn....
- jjoe 11y agoThanks, I over-analyzed again and I'm way off w.r.t PG!
- aristus 11y agoWhen pg published "What You Can't Say" (paulgraham.com/say.html) in the early 2000s, I wrote him to say that it was similar to this piece by Twain.
- robotresearcher 11y ago"Corn-Pone Opinions" by Mark Twain, written in 1901, first published in 1923. Twain died in 1910.
- dang 11y agoThanks, we put that year in the title.
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- irq-1 11y agoTwain was wrong on his main point. He claims self-approval as the motivator for following fashions (of all sorts), but most conformity comes from trying to navigate life: we do what works for our neighbors. IBMs dress code wasn't adopted because coworkers liked the fashion, but because if you wanted to work at IBM you needed to wear the uniform. Time and interest are limited, and copying is easy. > Do you believe that a tenth part of the people, on either side, had any rational excuse for having an opinion about the matter at all? I studied that mighty question to the bottom -- came out empty. ... We all do no end of feeling, and we mistake it for thinking. And out of it we get an aggregation which we consider a boon. This mistakes the value of expressing an opinion or having a vote. First, there's the personal benefit of investigating and thinking something through (even if you "came out empty"). Second, there's a public benefit to encouraging people to investigate and thinking something through on their own. Third, the 'wisdom of the crowd' might be right, show us new ideas, or offer insight and wisdom. -- This essay seems related to Paul Grahams "How to Do What You Love". He wrote that when deciding what to do, we should consider what's respected by our peers. > What you should not do, I think, is worry about the opinion of anyone beyond your friends. You shouldn't worry about prestige. Prestige is the opinion of the rest of the world. When you can ask the opinions of people whose judgement you respect, what does it add to consider the opinions of people you don't even know? [4] > This is easy advice to give. It's hard to follow, especially when you're young. [5] Prestige is like a powerful magnet that warps even your beliefs about what you enjoy. It causes you to work not on what you like, but what you'd like to like. http://www.paulgraham.com/love.html http://www.paulgraham.com/love.html
- sheensleeves 11y agoHe started his essay w/ the example of a gay person. If you want to be outside of the herd in thought, it would aid you to be something alien to the majority. edit: you're right.
- dharbin 11y agoI'm pretty sure, in 1901, gay meant: keenly alive and exuberant : having or inducing high spirits <a bird's gay spring song>
- bherms 11y agoIn that time, gay did not mean homosexual, but happy. Twain was saying he was happy and impudent and satirical and delightful, characteristics you wouldn't necessarily expect a slave to have.
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- staunch 11y agoMark Twain had no trouble thinking for himself. Paul Graham does the same kind of thing in his essays. Every great standup comedian in the world does it. It's a skill that few practice, but thinking for yourself is not actually difficult. Most people have the basic reasoning skills required, they just never care enough to "rock the boat". And that's the real cause of conformity: apathy.
- TeMPOraL 11y agoI don't think it's apathy. I feel it's culture and economic considerations. Society generally doesn't reward you for thinking outside the box, or outside the "outside the box" box. It rewards you for following the same rules, norms and patterns as everyone else does. Meanwhile, you have your spouse and kids to feed, house to keep warm, lots of work to do for little pay and an abusive boss that keeps you on your toes. Most people don't have time to think for themselves, even if it was rewarded, and it isn't.
- johngalt 11y agoNow we all assume that this perfectly explains the people we disagree with. They are victims of conformity and group think. Thankfully we have reasoned opinions based in fact.
- rdancer 11y agoIt is a cloistered mind that cannot make that leap.
- TeMPOraL 11y agoCloistered by the filter bubbles. Though Twain's essay suggests it's not a new phenomenon. People tend to group together with those who believe similar things, each confirming preconceptions of the others. From inside of such a group it always looks like everyone else are sheeple that need to wake up.
- rdancer 11y agoYour are sheeple. But that doesn't mean that I am not. People are very painfully reminded of their imperfection on a daily basis. They don't always care to keep it in mind, or take it into account, but surely they are aware. Are you saying that people are not aware that their opinions may not be as ironclad as they sometimes seem?
- TeMPOraL 11y ago> Are you saying that people are not aware that their opinions may not be as ironclad as they sometimes seem? That's the impression I'm getting when talking with many of them. Or when browsing the more mainstream parts of the Internet.
- rdancer 11y agoHere's to us being the lucky few who can see that we're fallible, while the sheeple wallow in their ignorance ;-)
- rsp1984 11y agothat it is born of the human being's natural yearning to stand well with his fellows and have their inspiring approval and praise -- a yearning which is commonly so strong and so insistent that it cannot be effectually resisted, and must have its way. Actually I think it's the other way round. The force to conform doesn't come from seeking "approval and praise" but from avoiding the negative consequences of possibly being isolated and ostracised. This is because where there's isolation there is disrespect and even violence from the peer group around the corner, apart from the negative effects it has on one's value on the "partnership market".
- elchief 11y agoIf, like me, you didn't know what corn-pone is, it's a type of corn bread.
- mankandee 11y agoMonkey see, monkey do.