Why don't we engage with the argument a bit more. How are people who are aggressively conformist valuable in ways that Paul Graham is ignoring? One answer is,

Why don't we engage with the argument a bit more. How are people who are aggressively conformist valuable in ways that Paul Graham is ignoring? One answer is, they're valuable in war, where you have large numbers of people who are in a position to weaken the war effort and you want to make sure none of them do or even think about it. The Trump campaign signalling early on that it was at war with certain large chunks of the U.S. population helped kick a lot of people into this war mentality, I think, which might be in their interest or all of our interests in some ways, and that seems to be one of the trends that provoked this essay. Passively independent-minded people are really valuable too, because they gum up the works of conformism by refusing to go along with it, without giving the aggressive conformists targets for outrage. I've also seen a separate axis of how into change and new ideas people are. Some people are into new ideas in an aggressive conformist way. Some people are really resistant to new ideas in the same way.