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How to Think for Yourself

• sbussard 6y ago
  PG has one target market. I respect him for that. He’s trying to help the unique people experience their full potential instead of giving into conformity. My heart aches for all the ways I’ve allowed conformity to ruin me, but thankful that some of my original efforts have paid off.
• known 6y ago
  "Do not argue with an idiot. He will drag you down to his level and beat you with experience" --Mark Twain (b. 1835) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunning_Kruger https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunning_Kruger
• deleted 6y ago
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• fvdessen 6y ago
  The decrease of independent minded as an organisation grows seems an almost universal phenomenon. It happens to startups yes, but also to forums, bands, fashions, the internet, games, religions, politics, etc. Basically anything new will target independent minded people, and anything successful will target conventional people. It's sad for the independent minded, but is there anything that can be done about this ?
  • vgmartin 6y ago
    Yes, the independently-minded people who created the original organization and the value must refuse to let parasitical people in. pg cannot use this term in his essays, but it boils down to that, at least in the software space. In agriculture etc. of course conventional minded people do excellent work and create tremendous value.
  • inglor_cz 6y ago
    "anything successful will target conventional people" Plenty of successful products are useful for both. E-mail, smartphone, Covid vaccine. PG's idea that outsourcing more conventional activities such as advertisements and PR may preserve the creative core of the company is interesting at least.
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• meheleventyone 6y ago
  It feels like independent mindedness and conventional mindedness is a false dichotomy and that most people are somewhere between each depending on the subject and context. Moreover if you subscribe to the dichotomy you're probably doing a poor job of creating an environment that encourages people to be independent minded. At the organizational level it feels completely normal that it will become more conventional within it's own bubble as it grows. Companies are mostly trying to move in one direction and having lots of independent people off doing their own thing runs counter to that. Other similar structures follow this pattern as well. Part of it is cultural norms developing but part of it is recognizing that a company is very much exerting pressure on the people that work within it. Which is probably why founders find it easier to talk to other founders as they both have the luxury of the freedom to think independently within this context as they are steering the company itself. You see this with attempts at internal startups or R&D teams where independence is encouraged but it's impossible or hard to spin anything out of them because you end up bumping back into the company pressures trying to do so. You're basically asked to "go do something amazing" ... "but not like that!" Personally I love small companies primarily for the autonomy it provides and as a designer really value applying myself to different problems. So I get the joy of independence but I think I'm fairly conventional on other topics.
  • andi999 6y ago
    This reminds me, a long time ago I saw a couple of videos of Steve Jobs at a retreat for Next Computers (in the early phase of the company); now can only find an edited version. I was surprised to see how market analysis his argumentation was driven; while they created something great, he didnt sound independent minded but more like subject to his customers.
    • hinkley 6y ago
      I think if you pick apart Jobs’ vision statements, you can infer that he decided long ago on a type of customer he wanted to sell products to, as did Bill Gates. While it’s news to me that he was numbers driven, I’m not necessarily surprised. Those numbers didn’t make him pander (much), while in other hands numbers often do.
• cblconfederate 6y ago
  Thinking is outsourced these days
• austincheney 6y ago
  Originality is an interesting thing. The word itself is highly favorable and when confronted with the word alone most people have a favorable impression of it. In practice most people absolutely despise originality. It isn't that something original is merely disinterested or disagreeable. It is a thing of emotional revulsion that frequently brings forth hostility. Ray Dalio, as I discovered when I interviewed at BridgeWater in 2014, had figured out how to test for originality as a psychological personality characteristic and comparatively measure people using a standard metric. Strangely enough if you score high enough on such a metric people will be interested in you for interesting reasons such that they might be able to identify or measure the concept and yet not have any idea how to explorer it or exploit it. What I have learned most from originality is rejecting feedback and scoring ideas not in what people say but what they do next or whether they come back. I have also learned that originality appeals highly to a very specific class of people eager to explore new things. These rare people are precious to early stage ideas of any kind. Identify them and go out of your way to appreciate their time even when they disagree with you.
• seek3r 6y ago
  At the end of the day, thinking for ourselves is hard. It takes time and often the stakes aren’t that high. I think that being a bit sceptic and cynic can help. You don’t need to be born with those traits; you can acquire them with some practice. It’s an investment that is valuable especially when dealing with politics, or one’s career. There are always multiple sides to a story. Just try to get a grip of what each side is saying, and what their interests are. Then, gather data if you need to. Analyse it, reason about it, discuss it openly. I do it sometimes. Other times I just trust the source enough to let it go. Don’t put yourself in a silo. If you do, you’re surely thinking for yourself, but you could also be missing on something you didn’t consider. Edit: I guess that there’s also a biological side to it. It’s safer to go along with the mass. If not from an evolutionary perspective, it makes sense from a social one.
• peterlk 6y ago
  Excellent article > When you hear someone say something, stop and ask yourself "Is that true?" This is one of my favorite things to do, though the list of people who will talk to me again after I do it is very short. (Edit: To be extra clear... While this is a bitter pill - I do not like it when others do it to me - I do find it to be very effective for reinforcing good faith in close, trusting relationships. I also do appreciate when others use this question on me; the temporary frustration/discomfort is worth reminding me to center myself.) When someone is feeling outraged about something (often politics) simply ask: "but are they correct?" The answer is almost always: "I'm not sure" (myself included). When doing this to myself, this is often enough for me to shrug off the outrage and realize that I actually do not care. It really doesn't matter to me what political statements a mayor from a town in another state made. > In the most independent-minded people, the desire not to be told what to think is a positive force. This subject implies another that is closely related, and is my biggest complaint about ads. Ads try to tell you what to think, and they are sometimes successful. But more importantly, they tell you what to think _about_, and they are much more successful at this. I like being focused on the problems that I have, and ads try as hard as they can to take that focus away.
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  • base698 6y ago
    He mentions in the next sentence: "I'm not suggesting that you impose on everyone who talks to you the burden of proving what they say" > When you hear someone say something, stop and ask yourself "Is that true?" Don't say it out loud. I'm not suggesting that you impose on everyone who talks to you the burden of proving what they say, but rather that you take upon yourself the burden of evaluating what they say.
    • karlerss 6y ago
      I have found it useful to ask "why do you think this true?" instead. When there's enough time of course.
• _jy3k 6y ago
  1. Start by following someone's else advice, about how to think for yourself. That should work. Because why not? 2. In case it did not work out, for whatever reasons, became an autist, in whatever way you can. Not that it is possible, or that you will really understand anybody after the fact, but hey. 3. Still interested? Learn a different (alternative) language (semantics), based on nothing (emptiness) at all. You may start by giving me money, in return, i will give you nothing and not say much or anything. Then you'll achieve something like no.2. (Warning, you may go mad or broke or both). Afterwards, you'll probably start doing things, that you have not been able to think about before, achieving the ultimate goal. Warning: you'll be someone else by then. 4. What is psychoanalysis? 5. If you are reading this, then you are using words and language invented by someone else. Therefore you are not thinking for yourself. 6. Attend transformational festivals, until you will know why are they called that. You may still not think for yourself afterwards, but you may think in a different way. 7. Become an artist. 8. What is art?
  • glitchc 6y ago
    Bravo!
  • seek3r 6y ago
    2a. Then you not only will start thinking for yourself. You will also start overthinking about why Apple didn’t put macOS on the iPad Pro, or why your friends don’t care about org-mode.
    • _jy3k 6y ago
      Friends? Overthinking - relative to standard set by who?
      • seek3r 6y ago
        Right...
  • deleted 6y ago
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• bobsil1 6y ago
  1. Don’t read advice on how to think for yourself
  • friendlybus 6y ago
    1a. Read advice on how to think and make up your own mind
• neilv 6y ago
  > When you hear someone say something, stop and ask yourself "Is that true?" This is also a good thing to ask when the someone is oneself.
• amadeuspagel 6y ago
  > You don't want to start a startup to do something that everyone agrees is a good idea, or there will already be other companies doing it. Unless it's a schlep: http://www.paulgraham.com/schlep.html http://www.paulgraham.com/schlep.html
  • tonyjstark 6y ago
    > You don't want to start a startup to do something that everyone agrees is a good idea, or there will already be other companies doing it Which would show you that there is a market with customers. Now the question is, can you find a niche in that market and do you have enough to separate yourself from the competitors, also is it possible to attract attention to your product or is the market already saturated. No need to invent something totally new, it's fine to improve enough to make the pain to switch to your product worthwhile.
• varispeed 6y ago
  Thinking for yourself means accepting the consequences of such. For some people it is easier to follow someone else's advice and then blame them if something goes wrong than making decision themselves and then trying to learn from it. It is a tough one, but if you engage critical thinking you may end up somewhere in the middle, which isn't bad.
• samblr 6y ago
  >> You have to do something that sounds to most other people like a bad idea. Any examples of this in B2B/Enterprise-Tech startups ? (likes of SnowFlake, Slack etc)
• interactivecode 6y ago
  While I agree holding your own views and opinions help with doing something novel and different. I do feel like articles like this are mostly used to cover up and excuse hostility, bad work environments and Jobs esque management styles. You can have groundbreaking ideas without "disrupting" every single part of your work life. Assuming large groups of people can't think for themselves is both short sighted and insulting. Not everyone is in the position to push their views on their environment without repercussions. I'm pretty sure a janitor or administrator can think for themselves really well. It's their bosses that limit their subordinates, not the employees limiting themselves.
  • username90 6y ago
    > Assuming large groups of people can't think for themselves is both short sighted and insulting. But it is mostly true, at least in management positions. Independent-minded people by definition question authority so they are mostly relegated to low status positions. If you don't question authority then you aren't independent-minded. And no, questioning some authority figure just because some other authority figure told you to doesn't count.
    • watwut 6y ago
      Why would independed minded person necessary came to conclusion that loudly openly questioning authority is good idea, in situation in which it is predictable that it is going to lead to bad result?
      • username90 6y ago
        Keeping quiet about things only helps so much. People can feel if you question them or not. I mean, there are two workers, A is always excited about everything his manager suggest and do while B mostly keeps his thoughts to himself. Who is more likely to get promoted?
        • watwut 6y ago
          I mean, your example literally assumed that independent minded person will be low status which implies low impact. In any case, the dichotomy between A and B is beyond false dichotomy situation. The range of possible decisions and behaviors warry quite a lot. But yes, having good relationship with manager definitely helps your career. It typically does not require being excited about absolutely everything.
• leto_ii 6y ago
  It seems to me that throughout the essay Paul Graham keeps undermining his own claims. Early on he states: > Independent-mindedness seems to be more a matter of nature than nurture. Subsequently he starts giving advice about how to make yourself more independently-minded: > Can you make yourself more independent-minded? I think so. This quality may be largely inborn, but there seem to be ways to magnify it, or at least not to suppress it. > But if you surround yourself with independent-minded people, you'll have the opposite experience: hearing other people say surprising things will encourage you to, and to think of more. > You can also take more explicit measures to prevent yourself from automatically adopting conventional opinions. The most general is to cultivate an attitude of skepticism. etc. Only to come back to claims about the strength of certain natural tendencies: > I don't think we can significantly increase our resistance to being told what to think. It seems the most innate of the three components of independent-mindedness; people who have this quality as adults usually showed all too visible signs of it as children. > Everyone I know who's independent-minded is deeply curious, and everyone I know who's conventional-minded isn't. Except, curiously, children. All small children are curious. Perhaps the reason is that even the conventional-minded have to be curious in the beginning, in order to learn what the conventions are. I guess the overall takeaway would be that intellectual independence is primarily innate, but can be cultivated with targeted effort. Personally I find this view unconvincing, or at least not well specified. I suspect early care and environment play a much larger role than biology in developing one's intellectual attitudes, as well as personality. To the extent to which there are genuinely biological factors involved, I would have been really curious to see more concrete evidence of what those factors might be. Nevertheless, the article is sprinkled with nuggets of useful advice or insight, such as the following: > If you later find yourself in a situation that makes you think "this is like high school," you know you should get out. > try to meet as many different types of people as you can. It will decrease the influence of your immediate peers if you have several other groups of peers. Plus if you're part of several different worlds, you can often import ideas from one to another. > You can expand the source of influences in time as well as space, by reading history. > When you hear someone say something, stop and ask yourself "Is that true?" > unfashionable ideas are disproportionately likely to lead somewhere interesting. The best place to find undiscovered ideas is where no one else is looking.
  • 6y ago
• bluGill 6y ago
  If you have an idea and nobody else is doing it, odds are not that you had a good idea; instead it is probably a bad idea that many others have had and failed at. When you have a seemingly original idea figure out who else had it and ask why they failed. That will give you insight into what you need to do better. Sometimes you will realize that it was a bad idea, other times you will know what to change to make it work.
  • inglor_cz 6y ago
    There is a big space of ideas of indeterminate value in between the "good" and "bad" poles. Was creating Uber a good idea? The company has grown a lot, but AFAIK is still not profitable; the jury is out on this one. In some cases, the answer is to try.
    • bluGill 6y ago
      Uber is just a taxi company. Maybe better done (as you say, the jury is out) , but just a taxi company in the end. People get this idea that taxi company on the internet is some how unique, but it isn't really.
• lonesword 6y ago
  Did anyone find the article too long? Don't get me wrong - the first few paragraphs were engaging and thought-provoking. The rest of the article looked as if it could be condensed to two paragraphs. This is not a criticism - I'm just curious to know if I was bored because I have a short attention span, or if the amount of novel/useful content in the article plummeted sharply beyond the first few paragraphs.
  • inglor_cz 6y ago
    Yes, I did. While I generally like PG's essays, I wished this one was about half its actual size. As if PG resigned on brevity this time.
  • ojnabieoot 6y ago
    Like many of PG’s essays about psychology or society, the problem is that this essay is basically an aphorism or a self-help book: there’s no logic here, no citations, no connection to facts. It’s just a bunch of feel-good BS for libertarian-minded tech workers. I get the impression that the length is (at least unconsciously) making up for the absence of rigor. A few paragraphs of “stuff that has no real argument but basically sounds right to PG” is a fine short essay as a “maninfesto of independent thought”. But when the essay is full of detailed “analysis” of “facts” such as “it seems that independent thought is a matter of nature rather than nurture,” then PG is just wasting his readers’ time. This essay is a genuine clunker.
    • nickthemagicman 6y ago
      You could argue the same things about Plato or Descartes or Locke philosophy. But a lot of things have been built upon their wisdom and thinking.
      • ojnabieoot 6y ago
        No - Plato, Descartes, and Locke all referenced actual history when formulating their ideas about politics - PG doesn't even mention an example of an "independent-minded" person! - and at least Descartes and Locke heavily cited the past generations of political philosophers that came before them. It is also worth noting that at least Plato/Descartes/Locke were investigating deep questions of political philosophy with little precedent and which is almost impossible to observe empirically. By contrast, PG has an entire century's worth of psychology theory and experiments that he is ignoring out of pure arrogance.
• bambax 6y ago
  It is surely a mere coincidence that every time PG makes up some category of elite people he finds himself right in the middle of it.
  • burade 6y ago
    when people achieve success too early in life they start thinking they're hot stuff
    • qPM9l3XJrF 6y ago
      Looks like he sold Viaweb when he was about 34. Too early for you?
  • loxs 6y ago
    Yeah, and he has the money to prove that he is right.
    • deleted 6y ago
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    • Ma8ee 6y ago
      Was that meant to be sarcasm?
  • qznc 6y ago
    Everyone is the hero in their own story. Don't know where i got it from. I usually use it as a reminder that even evil people like Hitler consider themselves as the good hero. Maybe in difficult circumstances. I don't want to compare PG to Hitler though.
    • offtop5 6y ago
      It's definitely a good thing to remember. Not to be sociopathic, but try to be the hero of your own story as well. Focusing on the things you do right and not remunerating on your mistakes it's a key part of mental wellness.
• forgotmypw17 6y ago
  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.
  • amadeuspagel 6y ago
    This is a funny line, but the majority is clearly right on most questions, such as the color of the sky, the shape of the earth, etc..
    • forgotmypw17 6y ago
      >the majority is clearly right on most questions This is exactly the idea which the statement counteracts. You're trusting the majority opinion because it is the majority. Yet it is not always right, and you can give yourself a huge advantage by questioning it for yourself. ... or you can continue being a follower of majority opinion. The choice is up to you. By the way, the majority opinion has been wrong about the shape of the earth before.
      • lotsofpulp 6y ago
        > Yet it is not always right, and you can give yourself a huge advantage by questioning it for yourself. Assuming you have a reason to. If the majority assumed the shape of the earth was a cube based on the information they had at the time, and you came along and noticed something to refute that, of course that is valuable. But if you are refuting that simply because the majority assumed it, that doesn’t seem useful. People have a limited amount of time on earth, and using the majority’s assumptions is a valuable heuristic for not wasting resources (time) coming to the same conclusion. Can everyone study sufficient biology and astrophysics to “prove” to themselves how vaccines and planetary systems work? Most likely not.
        • MinusGix 6y ago
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• vgmartin 6y ago
  Yet again an excellent essay. It is very sad that these days pg is literally the only one in the programming space who writes essays for free spirits. Ten years ago these opinions would not have been extraordinary, but programmers as a group seem to have been subject to successful $BIGCORP reeducation in the last decade.
• eznzt 6y ago
  https://s.yimg.com/aah/paulgraham/how-to-think-for-yourself-1.gif https://s.yimg.com/aah/paulgraham/how-to-think-for-yourself-... I wonder who makes these, and how are they made.
• DrNuke 6y ago
  Delusion, ignorance, egotism, purism, curiosity? Is this really such a dark, dystopian world for everybody attempting startups out there?? “Hey, teachers, leave those kids alone!” (cit.)
• adnzzzzZ 6y ago
  The distinction between independent-mindedness and conventional-mindedness is captured more correctly I think by a trait called politeness as defined here https://www.researchgate.net/publication/5863998_Between_Facets_and_Domains_10_Aspects_of_the_Big_Five https://www.researchgate.net/publication/5863998_Between_Fac... Independent-mindness would be similar to low politeness (coupled with high openness, but I'll ignore that for now), and those people would be more likely to be like this than not: * Make enemies. * Oppose authority. * Believe that I am better than others. * Seek danger. * Put people under pressure. * Try to outdo others. * Believe only in myself. * Impose my will on others. * Love a good fight. * Seek conflict. * Think too highly of myself. * Tell tall stories about myself. * Play tricks on others. * Enjoy crude jokes. * [Comment loudly about others.] * [Enjoy being reckless.] * [Do dangerous things.] You get the point. In my opinion, you don't really get to be independent-minded without the negatives that come with it. For instance, most conspiracy theorists are highly independent-minded people. They definitely reject authority, and they're highly curious and contrarian about established narratives. This recent small debate I found on Twitter is a good illustrative example of it. https://twitter.com/ModeledBehavior/status/1328023553824993280 https://twitter.com/ModeledBehavior/status/13280235538249932... The account in question (https://twitter.com/toad_spotted https://twitter.com/toad_spotted) was someone who got the pandemic right earlier than most people, so conventional-minded people followed it because it was a good source of information about the virus overall. But now that another situation has come up where independent-mindedness can also show itself to be useful (and potentially right), conventional-minded people will dislike it, just like they disliked it when the outcome of the virus wasn't yet known. I felt like mentioning this because I feel like there's a lack of appreciation for how exactly the negative aspects of independent-mindedness manifest themselves in real life, and without that appreciation for the negatives of it I think it's easy to misjudge how independent-minded someone actually is and to also misjudge people who are more independent-minded than you because they seem more difficult to get along with.
  • dependsontheq 6y ago
    I think it's quite tragic that you got downvoted in a thread about independent thinking. Seriously people, you might disagree with his point, but it's very independent, has a lot of substance compared to all other comments, provides links. Probably was to independent for some?
• wiredfool 6y ago
  Yes Brian! Tell Us More!
• candu 6y ago
  As far as a practice of mindful examination: yes, this makes sense. Examining your thoughts, and the spoken assertions of others, is valuable if only to train critical thinking. I do think it's possible to prize independence in this regard too much, though. Taken to the extreme, it's a sort of personal not-invented-here syndrome: it can shut you off from valuable sources of ideas and mentorship, and cause you to endlessly re-tread mental ground that's already been covered. Taking the successful scientist as an example: they "stand on the shoulders of giants", and their "independent" thoughts are only possible because they're immersed in, and actively synthesizing, lots and lots and lots of "conventional" thought. The "independent" breakthrough is just one small iteration on heaps of "conventional" thought. The "independent" product is just one small iteration on heaps of "conventional" technology. It's the deep familiarity with the "conventional" part, and thinking through what all that really means and makes possible, that makes the "independent" part possible. So: are you really thinking independently? Or are you just thinking blindly, without that familiarity?
• dijit 6y ago
  So, I might have a controversial opinion here. My mother raised me to think for myself, it was a heavy emphasis of my upbringing and important for her. However I'm now in situations where the world is divided and asking questions (in order to make my own mind up) is considered some kind of admission of guilt for being part of the "other". For example: Asking someone why they think immigration is good/bad. If it's a belief they hold, I'm interested in knowing the thought process and making my own conclusions based on something I might not have known. But the act of asking the question makes the person, who may not have put too much original thinking in; quite defensive. There's another drawback here too: which is that you can't experience everything. I can't live with the experiences of an American Black Woman who emigrates to England as a White English Man who lives in Sweden; it's just not possible, thus it requires strenuous effort to empathise. There will always be a line in which we just have to take things at face value, in computer terms "understanding the contract" between components. Thinking for yourself is overrated as society is not built for it if you want to fit in.
  • randomsearch 6y ago
    Find people you can be honest with and have those conversations. There aren’t many. Then sugarcoat for the narrow minded people. There are many.
  • _blu 6y ago
    there's a degree of social intelligence involved with your examples. It's not really about "thinking for yourself", as everything is about context. uou don't have to completely become the other person in order to empathize. For most people it does not require strenous effort. evolution is all about the ability to fit in. this includes the ability to be your own person with your own opinions. a well adapted person can do that and still being a part of the group/society
  • jackcosgrove 6y ago
    > Thinking for yourself is overrated as society is not built for it if you want to fit in. I agree that if you want to fit in, thinking for yourself is counterproductive. But I also think society has more escape hatches for unconventionally minded people than it ever has, and if you don't care about fitting in the penalties have never been lower.
• koopuluri 6y ago
  > When I wrote "The Four Quadrants of Conformism" I expected a firestorm of rage from the aggressively conventional-minded, but in fact it was quite muted. They sensed that there was something about the essay that they disliked intensely, but they had a hard time finding a specific passage to pin it on. I think this goes both ways: those that found something they liked intensely, but had a hard time finding a specific passage / point to pin it on could also be aggressively conventionally minded. Both reactions stem from letting your subconscious decide your logical conclusion rather than arrive at that conclusion through skeptical, rigorous observation and analysis.
• amadeuspagel 6y ago
  Like many of pg's essays there's an unqualified glorification of being independent. For example the suggestion that hiring conformist people is something that just happens. It seems more likely that companies more or less consciously hire such people, because a company where everyone thinks independently would be one where everyone wants to do something different, and nothing would get done, no one could agree on anything. Bryan Caplan in his book The Case Against Education suggests that employers value college degrees partly as a signal of conformism, and that that's the reason college is so hard to replace. (His theory is the college signals three things: Intelligence, discipline and conformism. It would be easy to signal first two things in some other way, but the very fact that you think you know better how to signal them proves that you're some kind of smartass who's inevitably going to cause trouble.)
  • username90 6y ago
    Being independent is mostly negative. Prison is full of independent thinkers. However the small share of independent thinkers who actually got many things right are way more valuable than any conventional thinker as it is them who push society forward. Glorifying them is absolutely warranted.
    • jononor 6y ago
      The value that an independent thinker is able to create is usually predicated on a large amount of more conventional thinkers. No need to pit the two against eachother, or glorify the one any more than the other.
      • deleted 6y ago
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    • b0rsuk 6y ago
      Are gang members also independent thinkers?
    • tartoran 6y ago
      I think you completely missed the point. Really not sure what independent thinkers have to do with prisons. Some of those may be thinkers who got into prison, but that’s a really small fractions. Prisons are filled with mostly non-thinkers who got there after their impulses led them on a wrong path.
• rzodkiew 6y ago
  I believe that the independent-mindedness actually has some sort of biological underpinning. Original thought requires more energy expenditure (to push against entropy) than simply copying someone else's thinking. So my hypothesis is that if your body is better at providing energy to the brain and not "wasting" it on other energy sinks around your body, you'll be better at independent thinking (and also intelligence, since it also boosts your ability to create models). But that's just my totally unproven and anecdotal hypothesis, although I guess it might be worth checking out scientifically.
• brainperson 6y ago
  Pity the spirit of HN is pretty much against it these days.
• throwaway2245 6y ago
  > To be a successful scientist, for example, it's not enough just to be correct. Your ideas have to be both correct and novel. You can't publish papers saying things other people already know. To be a brilliant scientist - maybe. To be a successful scientist - I think (unfortunately) the opposite. If you rock the boat too hard - by challenging or contradicting other scientists' work, then you'll be gently rebuffed on technical grounds by the peer-review process, which will make it harder and slower to get funding, which means you spend more time stuck in bureaucracy than you do in science. Publishing things that confirm the status quo is a much easier way to be successful as a scientist. Correctness is less important - many published papers are not 'correct'. I doubt that the other examples (investors, startup founders, writers) are different in this respect. It's easier to be successful by taking the obvious and safe path competently, rather than taking the very high risk of a completely novel path.
  • Cthulhu_ 6y ago
    Yeah, I mean a LOT of people - scientists, software developers, etc - already struggle to do things correctly, let alone in a novel way. There's huge value in work that is not groundbreaking. For the sciences for example: Repeat or (re) confirm someone else's theories. Repeatability is one of the most important parts of science, and if all the scientists only pushed to do something new, instead of double-checking others' work, science would become something ego-driven and vague. For software development (my and most people on here's jobs), 99% of it is not building something new. Build something good first. Quality standards, testing, accessibility - how much software do you know that actually does that right? I've worked with so many people during my consultancy stint (myself included I guess?) that would always pursue the latest and greatest - they wanted to innovate, they wanted something fresh and new. So rarely did they spend more than two years at any one customer. The worst offenders would swoop into a company, advise technology X, then fly off again without ever having to live with the consequences. And that does not make you a better developer. It scratches your personal itch maybe, but you've caused potentially millions in lost productivity and the inevitable rewrite by more sane developers further down the line. I'm trying at the moment to do things Right. Build software for the next ten years, instead of the next six months. I'm struggling a bit because the project is big and I'm just a solo developer, but I like to think the mindset is right. I mean I'm not doing anything new, it's just a CRUD application in the end, but it's important that it's done right due to the sheer amount of data (width, not so much amount).
• znpy 6y ago
  > You see this pattern with startup founders too. You don't want to start a startup to do something that everyone agrees is a good idea, or there will already be other companies doing it. You have to do something that sounds to most other people like a bad idea, but that you know isn't I immediately thought of Drew DeVault's initiatives...
• AntiImperialist 6y ago
  I don't think there is a need for "thinking for yourself" for those to whom it doesn't come naturally. I believe that the human population produces certain number of people with contrarian attitudes as a defense against too much conformity, which can trap the population in local maximas or even wipe it out of existence if it fails to adapt to the changes. When the natural environment is changing, there is a bigger need for contrarians because there is a possibility that the changed environment is detrimental to the population or there could be better opportunities because of the changes to the environment. However, in stable times, contrarians are a nuisance or even a threat to the stability of the society. It's much more valuable most of the time for most of the people to do what you know and keep it at that. As a contrarian, I am fortunate enough to be in the current time and place where I'm less likely to be executed for my "wrong" views because some of it is applied in places where it is very useful and I'm a net benefit to the society. If and when things become stable again, our kind will be silenced and curbed. I would want to have a future where it is understood that the human population is bigger than the individual... and these variations exist because it is beneficial to the the population in the long term... and these differences should be celebrated... but maybe the effort required to maintain this understanding in the population is not worth it overall over getting rid of us by silencing or executing us. So, my kind will make do by understanding that this is happening and learn to shut up and stay low until when things change and we're needed again.
• motohagiography 6y ago
  Fan of PG's work. Question from me would be, were these the values he attributes to his business success, or discoveries after enlightenment and actualization? Follow up essays, "how to prevail on others when you've thought for yourself," and "how to leverage other thinkers who just don't fit," would be extra interesting. There is a significant element of "Foxes and Hedgehogs," in this, and what I talk about to business clients as "indoors cats and outdoors cats," as well. I like that this essay brings to mind what it means to "en-courage," or to give courage-to someone. It's not flattery or justification, it is meant to genuinely imbue people with courage.
• jonny383 6y ago
  The very premise of this article is an oxymoron. "How to Think for Yourself" (by reading instructions on how from someone other than yourself)
  • username90 6y ago
    Someone who is already an independent thinker doesn't need this advice though. However someone who is a dependent thinker who see Paul as an authority figure could maybe listen a bit and become a tiny bit more independent than he were before.
  • elric 6y ago
    It's not. We also teach teachers how to teach, for instance. No one is born with all their skills and knowledge. Critical (or independent) thinking is a skill just like any other.
    • jonny383 6y ago
      If you're thinking in a way you've been "taught" (aka told) to think, you're not truly thinking for yourself.
• deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
• jangid 6y ago
  Reaction of Twitter people on point #2 in notes?
• goto11 6y ago
  Fun observation that everybody in this community consider it positive to be "independent minded". But the author seem to fall into the same trap at the end: When I wrote "The Four Quadrants of Conformism" I expected a firestorm of rage from the aggressively conventional-minded, but in fact it was quite muted. They sensed that there was something about the essay that they disliked intensely, but they had a hard time finding a specific passage to pin it on. Isn't it much more likely that the conventional-minded people actually liked the essay because it confirmed their values and world-view? Presumable the essayist can't read minds, so this is just how he hopes they reacted.
  • xzvf 6y ago
    “Everybody is identical in their secret unspoken belief that way deep down they are different from everyone else”.
  • sct202 6y ago
    I don't think this community is unique in the number of people who believe themselves to be independently minded. I can't recall the last time someone has told me they are a conformist compared to the number of times I've heard someone describe themselves as an independent out of the box thinker.
    • 9387367 6y ago
      "Everyone is an independent thinker until they get punched in the prefrontal cortex”
      • TremendousJudge 6y ago
        Everyone likes to be an "independent thinker", nobody likes to be a "weirdo"
    • xen0 6y ago
      "It's one of those irregular verbs isn't it? I have an independent mind. You are an eccentric. He is round the twist."
• austincheney 6y ago
  The article mentions politically extreme politicians being niche conformists, point #7. I find the difference between an extreme politician and moderate one is that the moderates advocate for their constituents, which requires two things: listening to their constituents and compromising on political ideals to attain an interest desirable to their constituents. Extreme politicians instead tell you want your opinion is. That opinion is often a form of populism because otherwise nobody would give it the time of day. Extremes are only relevant when they have a following.
  • Consultant32452 6y ago
    I think you have these two backwards. By definition a populist is promoting the rights and power of the people against privileged elite. It's no surprise the privileged elite consider populist an insult. And it's the moderates, the privileged elite, that have to instruct the proles about what's best for them.
    • austincheney 6y ago
      Then we will disagree. I think your error is subjectivity in that you are narrowly focused upon audience stereotypes than behavior at large.
    • notahacker 6y ago
      By definition a populist claims to be promoting the rights and power of the people against a privileged elite. In many cases this involves instructing proles not to listen to any other views and especially not any criticism of their movement since these are falsehoods promoted to serve the interests of the elite, and sometimes flat out telling them what the popular will is supposed to be...
      • Consultant32452 6y ago
        A moderate wishes to maintain the status quo position of the elite. I don't think it's helpful to try to debate which type of politician is likely to lie more.
• hnracer 6y ago
  He hit the nail on the head but I think the framing of the investor's objective is not complete. The search for alpha is usually not about finding ideas that everyone thinks is bad but are actually good, although that does sometimes happen. Instead it's about finding totally undiscovered perspectives that lead to new insights into the market structure, market data or underlying market mechanisms that nobody considered before. There's large numbers of Easter Eggs that need to be unlocked. It's secret knoweledge, an unknown unknown. The world of start-ups is a little different. It's more rare to have a totally novel idea that nobody has thought of. In that space I think his framing is spot on. Regardless, there's enough similarities that I think it's fair to group them together.
  • superhuzza 6y ago
    Same with his comments about science. It isn't necessary for everyone else to be wrong - you're often just adding more detail to the picture. PG paints it as some kind of zero-sum when it really isn't.
• yawboakye 6y ago
  Being able to divide people into independent-minded and conventionally-minded is itself conventional thinking. It's also sadly narrow. There is no one I know who is independently minded in all disciplines of life or, likewise, conventionally minded. In sports, there's no one as independently-minded as the top stars (read reviews by their coaches and teammates for a sense of this). But in other disciplines, especially religion, they're are amost the most conventionally minded: adopting all sorts of rituals to solicit the help of God during the game. This extends beyond sports. Descartes, arguably the father of modern philosophy, was a devout Catholic, even refusing to publish a paper after Galileo's declaration got him in trouble with the Catholic Church. If the soubriquet "father of modern philosophy" doesn't imply independent thinking, I don't know what else would. And then there's his Meditations on First Philosophy where he's severely blinded by conventional-mindedness to "discover" God as the first principle. I guess what I'm trying to say is that, someone writing about independent- and conventional-mindedness should at least take some pain to explain that in any individual you'll see both. That there are no independent-minded people nor conventional-minded people, but only in ways that we carry out our activities.
• edw519 6y ago
  Another place where the independent- and conventional-minded are thrown together is in successful startups. The founders and early employees are almost always independent-minded; otherwise the startup wouldn't be successful. But conventional-minded people greatly outnumber independent-minded ones, so as the company grows, the original spirit of independent-mindedness is inevitably diluted. This causes all kinds of problems besides the obvious one that the company starts to suck I can think of no better example of this than Hacker News. Years ago, independent-minded people came together for the liveliest "out of the box" discussions on the internet. Eventually those people started to get shouted down until sadly, many of them left. I wish I knew what to do about that. I imagine people way smarter than me have been struggling with this for some time.
  • fallingfrog 6y ago
    Okay, but how do you have a lively discussion but also have nobody’s ideas getting shouted down? Would a lively discussion involve everyone agreeing with one another? Edit: people are apparently not getting my central point here: it might be that, if you’re a conformist, you see a whole bunch of people nodding and saying roughly the same things and think, “this is a lively discussion!” But then see people disagreeing with you and think, “what happened to this once lively community?” But, it could also be that we’re talking about something else. But the parent post is too vague for me to tell. I sense a more concrete suggestion coming on? Maybe related to the power of downvotes to silence dissent?
    • edw519 6y ago
      shoutedDown != disagreed
      • fallingfrog 6y ago
        Explain. In what way? Edit: I tried to just post that I think I understand where you’re coming from: people disagreeing but without giving actual reasons. Which is toxic. And guess what: I got “you’re posting too fast”. Thanks for enabling real discussions by nonconformists, hacker news!
• danielmarkbruce 6y ago
  Should paragraph 27 start with "The conventional-minded" instead of "The independent-minded" ? Or am I missing something?
• gregwebs 6y ago
  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 can create conformists unless they emphasize independent thinking. Personally I try to avoid telling children what exactly to do and try to listen to them, essentially treating them like adults: this is explained in the book "How to Talk so Kids Will Listen". "Resistance to being told what to think" is given in this essay as working with curiosity, but I think it can also have a negative feedback. The independent thinker can be less curious about ideas they are told by someone else. However, the same phenomenon may help explain the mentioned individualization of curiosity: the ideas the critical thinker thinks of as coming from themselves naturally generate curiosity in those areas.
  • qPM9l3XJrF 6y ago
    Another idea for instilling independent thinking in kids is to troll them: https://imgur.com/a/GLDrD 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.
    • gregwebs 6y ago
      I agree, it is one of the great joys of parenting :) I think it helps a lot with imagination, curiosity, and "fastidiousness about truth" since they need to keep evaluating whether what you tell them is true. A deeper variant of this that I do is focus more on giving them incorrect justifications for things. This helps with evaluating the reasons given for why something is true rather than the idea itself.
    • __jf__ 6y ago
      Maybe I’m overdoing it but like true Bayesians mine just don’t believe me anymore. Instead they will just believe troll stories from others.
• eternalban 6y ago
  A holistic approach to the question of collective thought and formation of conventional ideas raises the question of "what is the positive functional purpose of conventional thinkers in society and civilization?" That "conventional thought serves as societal and civilizational balast" seems a satisfactory (and possibly obvious) answer. Independent thought exerts a displacing force on the collective mind. If this force exceeds the capacity of the collective to adjust ("far out"), the thought (and the thinker) is rejected. Successful independent thought moves but does not destablize the collective mind.
• Garlef 6y ago
  > An essay that told people things they already knew would be boring. You have to tell them something new. I think there's something off about this statement: A lot of people enjoy watching a new marvel movie once or twice a year while the movies themselves are more or less reiterations of the previous ones. People seem to enjoy the repetition. The same seems to be true for essays: People enjoy finding their own thoughts repeated by anothers voice. For example, there are a lot of essays analyzing/explaining/stating/claiming the importance of book X, videogame Y or composer Z; Art movement A, theory B or profession C. But do they provide anything new besides the comfort of nostalgia for shared experiences? However stale the enjoyment of these essays seems when viewed through the lens of the cited statement, the enjoyment itself can not be denied.
  • jimbokun 6y ago
    > A lot of people enjoy watching a new marvel movie once or twice a year while the movies themselves are more or less reiterations of the previous ones. People seem to enjoy the repetition. The success of the Marvel movies is obvious in retrospect, but nothing like them had ever been done before. Thor, Iron Man and Captain America were not considered among the popular Marvel Characters. Spider Man, X-Men and Fantastic Four had already been licensed by other companies, but no one cared to do the same with what became the foundation characters of the Marvel Cinematic Universe. Having a cinematic universe where major characters had their own movies, plus movies where they banded together, was common in comics, but never on the big screen. Keeping the characterizations largely true to the comics, when many directors had wanted to make them more "sophisticated" or "adult", also displays independent minded thinking. Would anyone have predicted a sci-fi romp with a talking squirrel and walking tree the general public had no familiarity with would be a massive success? Making Thanos the protagonist of the "Hero's Journey" in the climax of the whole series I think was a bold decision. There are many other ways these movies were bold and creative and, yes, independent minded, leading to success that would have been impossible with conventional thinking.
  • MinusGix 6y ago
    > A lot of people enjoy watching a new marvel movie once or twice a year while the movies themselves are more or less reiterations of the previous ones. People seem to enjoy the repetition. Honestly, I would argue against this. While they tend to do simplistic plotlines that are similar to the previous, they're very visibly different and so do not trigger any of the usual "I already watched this." that I get from watching sitcoms. Though, I do agree that people at times read essays because they reiterate your thoughts back to you, but as you say I'd agree that its more comfort/shared-experiences than the content that they've already seen (ex: reaction videos). At times, I've done this because I know an article will be able to provide an alternative view on the topic to further fuel my own reasoning, or simply helping to ground my reasoning more into words. But, I do think an essay that is obviously what I already know would be boring. If I had to read an article about basic programming techniques, I'd be likely bored, due to having seen it all before.
• goalieca 6y ago
  I see the title. I only read the comments. /s
• weeboid 6y ago
  How to Think for Yourself "Read this article" :D
• postingpals 6y ago
  In many ways this is just an extension of his 4 quadrants of conformism essay, so I'll argue with it using ideas from that essay. I would argue that people vastly over estimate their degree of independent mindedness because although it's easy to be independent minded in one field, especially if it's one you have been studying for a while, it's incredibly easy to fall victim to common sheep-like mentalities about any other topic you're not an expert in. Just ask non-economists what they think of the economy, all of their answers, if not outright incorrect, will be canned answers stolen directly from whatever media outlet they use. This is important to note because literally everyone does it. I don't actually know of a single person that has not done this, and I personally have done it so many times I question my degree of independence and free will all the time. So what can we say about this? Is no one independent minded then?
  • tingol 6y ago
    Not very popular nowadays, but saying "I don't know" or "I am not informed enough" is always an option. You make it out as if you have to have a perfectly individual and informed opinion on everything there is which is pretty much impossible.
• methyl 6y ago
  > You don't want to start a startup to do something that everyone agrees is a good idea, or there will already be other companies doing it. I must say I quite disagree with that statement. You definitely can run a successful startup without being novel. Other companies doing the same thing as you do is not necessarily something that will prevent you to be successful.
• DodgyEggplant 6y ago
  Somebody that tells you how to think for yourself?
• baron_harkonnen 6y ago
  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 outside of this being a PG essay I would assume this means stay away from SV, but I suspect that's not really the point. > One of the most effective techniques is one practiced unintentionally by most nerds: simply to be less aware what conventional beliefs are. This essay is an object lesson in how this leads to profoundly conventional thinking. This entire thing reads like it was torn from the journal of a clever middle-schooler who thinks he's so much more clever then the world. Right now Silicon Valley VC thinking is the dominant ideology, putting blinders on to what is considered convention isn't cultivating an independent mind, it's an assertion of the status quo. > An essay that told people things they already knew would be boring. I agree, but given how beloved rehashed versions of "aren't we the clever independent thinkers!" essays are here I think there is some empirical evidence to the contrary.
  • auggierose 6y ago
    Well, PG very probably is an independent thinker. I enjoy his examinations what makes people like him different from other people, and while this essay may sound like a rehash of his other essays, it isn't. It was genuinely surprising to me (and also obvious in hindsight) that people separate into independently-minded and conventionally-minded and that this determines what work they should be looking for. I mean, this is advice that is about as actionable as advice will ever get. Beware that there are strong forces that will tempt you to act against this advice, and make you doubt yourself.
  • Agreed99 6y ago
    Agreed. He obfuscates his point behind emotionally pompous British semantics. His orthodox of privilege was obviously a public lovers quarrel with Thiel (who was, around the same time, also ranting like a god-headed buffoon in essays to the tune of “the rubes need masters! villainous cackle” on blogs around the web). They have little information advantage, except in the form of ephemeral financial capital. Human tradition states “rich person = extra special” so we rubberneck at them. Beneath the pretentious veneer it’s contemporary businessmen. Let’s see them resolve longstanding issues in society and science. Wagging business success in the face of people who weren’t born yet isn’t terribly novel and their real output isn’t that useful to the future.
• 11thEarlOfMar 6y ago
  Is it helpful to differentiate Discovery vs. Invention? When a scientist discovers a physical behavior, or a oceanographer a new species, it's a discovery that others could make. The phenomena exists, they happened to find it first. When a composer invents, they are likely creating music that no other human would have created. If they hadn't composed it, it would never have existed. Both of these activities seem to require an independent mind to be successful. Are they related? Or fundamentally different in some way?
  • glitchc 6y ago
    Is rearranging existing chords into a new sequence "Invention" or "Discovery"?
    • psysharp 6y ago
      If you reference it to the world and its inherent chaos it is an invention. If you reference it to a structure with labels and a finite number of alterations it is a discovery of a part of that structure
      • glitchc 6y ago
        Evolution is inherently chaotic, yet new species are "discovered," not "invented." Coming back to songs, most chart hits are cobbled together from samples and prior works. It's unclear whether we can all these new creations that occurred in isolation.
        • psysharp 6y ago
          You are right, species are discovered when in reference to our defined concept of what it means to be a spiece, that is a structure with all other spiecies. However it's name is an invention, as all definitions are invented. Yes the song example can be put on a scale, but even the most plagerised of works can call it an invention to an extent when referencing a newly created title. On a side note, since we all share the most primitive source of information, all behaviours are indirectly stolen on one level or another. But that idea doesn't contribute alot of practicality
• anonunivgrad 6y ago
  PG will never go on the record expressing any actually transgressive thoughts.
• meagher 6y ago
  I created a CSS proxy for reading PG’s essays. Formatting is a bit nicer https://pg-essays.now.sh/think.html https://pg-essays.now.sh/think.html
  • aeoleonn 6y ago
    Thanks! This is much much better. By comparison PG's blog looks like it's out of the mid 90's. It needs a serious revamp.
  • jyriand 6y ago
    Thank you. I guess PG doesn't want to conform to make his essays more readable :)
• laichzeit0 6y ago
  I’m completely fine with being conventional minded. It’s saved me from using MongoDB, nodejs, and countless other fads.
  • aeoleonn 6y ago
    hilarious and true-- hype trains are drains. I'm with ya on mongodb. nodejs is awesome though :) that sweet sweet async event loop. sure, the language has some imperfections-- it's not perfect for all use cases (nor is any other)-- but overall I enjoy working with it. the community is fantastic as well.
• troelsSteegin 6y ago
  So, to be independent-minded is to be actively evidence-seeking, as opposed to being conventionally reflexively consensus-accepting. Positive traits are skepticism, honesty, and curiousity. As a complement, it always helps to be smart. Start ups attract and benefit from independent-minded doers. It's nice to think about "independent-mindedness" as a superpower. There's one thing missing. Being useful. If you frame a start up experience as an opportunistic search for a sustainable market, plus rigorous service to customer experience in that market, it helps a lot to have strong drive to be relevant, to serve. A ideal organization will help independently minded people to be mission-effective. That suggests an organization that is flattish, decoupled, and with explicit goals and values. But won't an organization, pragmatically, also need incorporate conventionally-minded people - who can also be smart and useful? A ideal organization for the "conventionally minded" suggests hierarchy and normative culture and policies. What's the right structure for a mix of "independent" and "conventional" contributors?
• psysharp 6y ago
  > More generally your goal should be not to let anything into your head unexamined. I can accept this way of reasoning if 'unexamined' is not directly linked to attention. The brain consistently tries to automate thoughts/behaviours and with confidence comes relaxation in the attention muscle, as to say well defined areas will need less 'examination'. On another note, there's a reason why conventions exist and it is not always the right path to opt for independence. Being able to relate to people is a huge blessing and should not be completely overruled if the object is piece of mind. All in all an intresting article
• young_unixer 6y ago
  Schopenhauer on thinking for oneself: https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/On_Thinking_for_Oneself https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/On_Thinking_for_Oneself
• DrNuke 6y ago
  Folks, do not shoot the messenger (aka PG) here: he actually created something novel fifteen years ago, while coalescing brilliant minds around something people needed. He even went on making an institution of that! With the miracle turned institution and now organization, it is human to look back and preach to the good savages of today. More in depth, this is maybe the difference between the do-it-first American approach and the study-it-first English attitude? Special relationship at play, you know, but the world is multipolar today, so you also have the socially regulated Euro approach and the paternally autocratic Chinese approach to reconcile. All these, even without taking rogue approaches into consideration. Maybe the ultimate dream of PG these days is being acknowledged as the headmaster of outsiders, connecting curiosity with prototyping for the markets, in that by-passing the canonical school curricula by virtue of intuition by necessity and fast implementation?
  • meheleventyone 6y ago
    A headmaster for outsiders or a thought leader for independent thinkers if you will?
• cushychicken 6y ago
  I think PG is trying too hard to generalize with a lot of his latest essays. Many of those essays seem like he's trying to take his experiences and take them up a level of abstraction, and apply them across a whole swath of human experience. That's hard, and it falls a little flat on the receiving end when it doesn't land. He's still got it on some topics. I loved his essay on having kids.
• nickelcitymario 6y ago
  Are there only a few paths for independent thinkers? > Independent-mindedness seems to be more a matter of nature than nurture. Which means if you pick the wrong type of work, you're going to be unhappy. If you're naturally independent-minded, you're going to find it frustrating to be a middle manager. And if you're naturally conventional-minded, you're going to be sailing into a headwind if you try to do original research. I'm asking this seriously. I'm a fairly unconventional thinker. (I'm not sure that's always or even mostly a good thing.) So I do find it frustrating to be in middle management, as I have been numerous times. It's also usually frustrating to report to middle management. I much prefer to figure out solutions and pursue them independently. HOWEVER, I've also thus far found nothing but greater frustrations as an organizational leader or solo entrepreneur. (Good thing I'm currently neither.) What are the options for the independent thinker who doesn't want to follow orders, doesn't care to lead others, but also wants to be a part of a team? Someone who knows they need others with complementary skills? Surely I'm not the only nerd who fits this bill. Is there a work model for a team of independent thinkers who wish to neither lead nor follow, but simply cooperate? My gut says there is, that it's probably pretty obvious, and I'm just blind to it. Or maybe that they exist, but tend to fail. The only thing that comes to mind is to be a co-founder in the early stages of a startup, but if that succeeds you'll end up in a leadership role pretty quickly. Not everyone gets to be Woz. Anyone?
  • psysharp 6y ago
    Well be can begin with defining leader. Can't you say that a leader is one element of the group who is more intuned to regulate the stress levels of the group, and by having one the group can operate more efficiently? Isn't it infact burden but limitied to a designated element? Not everyone needs to be a leader, isn't that the point of having one? It might just be a completely seperate characteristics from independence
  • erikpukinskis 6y ago
    You can have a small independent business. Buy a backhoe and become and excavator. Learn how to build custom cabinets. You will need to hire people from time to time, but you won’t have to work in concert with anyone 40 hours a week. In software, the best examples I see of that are in video games. Lots of solo developers. Hard to succeed but if you want it enough, the path is clear. There are solo web developers too. But you need to be able to do sales and support. You’re right startups are out because they grow and you’ll find yourself surrounded soon enough. I guess my advice is treat your jobs like daily networking events, try to find people, especially with complementary skill sets, who you like and who like you. Have a side project, a game or a web dev company or whatever, and wait for a large enough revenue opportunity that you can incorporate and hire one of those people you got along with. Problem is, the networking at work thing is nearly impossible if you’re as independent as you are. I’d recommend counseling. A therapist and/or career coach. Ideally both.
• root_axis 6y ago
  I can't help but note the irony of a highly influential technologist disseminating an essay titled "how to think for yourself"
• fallingfrog 6y ago
  One of the consequences of thinking for yourself is that you’re often going to find that the majority of other people disagree with you. So you’re always going to be having disagreements where it’s an unfair fight; you’re outnumbered and easy to ignore. It’s exhausting, and people generally cope in two ways: keep their thoughts private, which looks like conformity from the outside, or find like minded people, which puts them back in the majority, arguably making them a conformist again. Either way something feels off about claiming oneself to be a consistent nonconformist. Edit: the other aspect of this to consider is the power relationships involved. If you’re the boss you probably feel free to express your opinions to anyone of equal or lower status: employees and other founders. But if you’re the employee, doing so to the boss might involve personal risk. So for pg to paint his employees as conformists leaves a bad taste in the mouth.
• vortegne 6y ago
  What a narcissist, holy shit
• TigeriusKirk 6y ago
  Got a lot of upvotes here? Yeah, that's an unambiguous sign you've dunning-krugered your independent thinking ability.
• forest_dweller 6y ago
  > The second component of independent-mindedness, resistance to being told what to think, is the most visible of the three. But even this is often misunderstood. The big mistake people make about it is to think of it as a merely negative quality. The language we use reinforces that idea. You're unconventional. You don't care what other people think. But it's not just a kind of immunity. In the most independent-minded people, the desire not to be told what to think is a positive force. It's not mere skepticism, but an active delight in ideas that subvert the conventional wisdom, the more counterintuitive the better. I've found quite a lot in my career that often people mistake understanding someone elses line of thought as acceptance of such a thought. This invariantly upsets someone that to be quite frankly isn't mentally equipped (and no I not using that a euphemism for stupid, I mean they literally cannot have conversations about ideas and that maybe due to a number of reasons that have nothing to do with their intelligence) will become upset and then you end up in an argument and the conversation is derailed. Also simply examining pre-conceptions of why a problem exists also seems to upset some. Normally because you are undermining their authority in one manner or another or they have accepted the initial pre-conception cannot be incorrect because it is normally considered to be inevitable.
• Gravityloss 6y ago
  A lot of attempts being independent-minded end up just being contrarian. It is after all much less of an investment. It gets really tiring to talk to such people after a while.
  • jl2718 6y ago
    But still a thoroughly contrarian personality may be defined as disagreement on maybe 10 separate issues, which is maybe one in a million possibilities. And if those are popular contentious issues, then it may be for good reason, given so much effort taken to convince everybody that one opinion is dominant. And of course there are different types: the theorist, and the skeptic. Skeptics generally have an extremely good hit rate on the truth. There are many beliefs held by the vast majority of educated people, that require fantastic improbabilities and incongruences with normal experience, whereas the extremely uncommon disbelief requires only storytellers. I can see how this would be quite boring company. Theorists are the opposite. They tell great stories with attempt to explain, or influence, or gain social acceptance by conforming their story to the emotional needs of the group. You wouldn’t think them tiresome at all if the story was catering to your emotional needs. Or perhaps not, because you may be a tiresome skeptic yourself.
• apples_oranges 6y ago
  I find nonconformist thinking rather isolating and open-mindedness rather helpful, but it does sometimes invite naiveté. Therefore I like his advice to secretly think through if a statement is correct. But I suspect there is more than one kind of "thinking for yourself", because it's not always useful. Perhaps one has to think for himself BUT at the same time be very tuned in to what the others believe in order to have ideas that have potential?
• johnnujler 6y ago
  Why would you want to talk about how each individual is multi-faceted, complex, and full of contradictory beliefs when you can conveniently categorize them into conventional and independent? Ah, I know the answer: because hackers come in only one flavor: independent; and everyone else who doesn't fit the description is a conventional thinker. The level of (apparent) profundity(?) in these essays and the amount of people in SV that revere his words just boggles my mind. Maybe I am a conventional thinker :/.
  • ceilingcorner 6y ago
    > categorize them into conventional and independent? Replace conventional and independent with another word pairing and have you have 95% of most modern writing.
  • mewpmewp2 6y ago
    He specifically said it is a spectrum, not a category and of course you can be more of an independent thinker in certain categories and more conventional in others.
  • zug_zug 6y ago
    I think if he weren't famous, PG's essays wouldn't get much reverence. But as an icon for he's a great figure. He uses his social status points to offer messages of optimism, self-improvement, hope for rebels that is socially important and feels good. The fact that we tear him down so much is testament to the regard we hold him in. I'm sure all of us who poke at his logic could just as easily shred the Pope, the Dalai Lama, the president...
    • nickpp 6y ago
      Actually PG's essays made him famous. YC came afterwards. He did Viaweb before, but I doubt he was known for it.
    • johnnujler 6y ago
      Isn’t that all the more reason why he should buckle down and write in a more responsible manner than just categorise people in absolute terms. I do not have much idea about religious leaders, but he definitely has some impact on how the SV scene operates, and with the amount of idolatry circle-jerk that happens among the YC founders, it is only justified that he be more cautious in how he treats people whether in his essays or in in real life.
• graycat 6y ago
  PG had lots of terms, e.g., independent minded, and lots of proposed connections among them. Okay, for some approaches to science, the next step is to define numerical measures of the terms and then to state the proposed connections mathematically. Then gather a lot of data and test the connections. E.g., not from PG, but as people rise in organizations, do they become more conservative, e.g., in PG's terminology, more conventional minded? Pursuing just that one question scientifically was my wife's Ph.D. dissertation. Point: Addressing scientifically all of PG's proposed connections would be a lot of work! And my guess is that many of the connections, including ones seemingly nearly obviously true -- would be very tough to settle scientifically.
• typon 6y ago
  I find reading this article a very uncomfortable experience. It's just assertion after assertion without evidence to back them up. Do people believe this guy because he's rich?
  • ceilingcorner 6y ago
    Do people believe this guy because he's rich? Just wait until you find out who's president.
    • deleted 6y ago
      [deleted]
  • crumbshot 6y ago
    Definitely part of it, along with the cult following he's managed to gather here. Quite ironic to see the high priest of HN commanding his devotees on how to think for themselves.
    • chenpengcheng 6y ago
      well said.
  • mcguire 6y ago
    Because he's rich, and this is his forum.
  • cma 6y ago
    He has done original thinking that helped the world big in non-business ways: http://www.paulgraham.com/spam.html http://www.paulgraham.com/spam.html That said, the way the article dehumanizes a group of people feels like listening to the radio in Rwanda in 1994.
  • heracles 6y ago
    How do you know people believe him? I can tell you why I love his essays: because of the way he argues. It is very transparent. I seldomly agree with his conclusion(s), but since he is so honest (he is not trying to deceive) in listing his arguments it is just a matter for me to find where he is wrong... or where I am wrong. I find this style so uncommon and stimulating that I hardly can stand the regular "opinion" held by most people. At least it is hard to be intrigued by arguments that doesn't even try to be precise. When PG writes something I pay attention to the words, because I know they were chosen with some care. If I can force open a crack in his arguments I get wiser, and if I don't... the same thing happens. I wish more people wrote like him, but preferably less about startups. They don't interest me as much as attempts at honest discourse.
• paulpauper 6y ago
  I want to think for myself but I also want to have opinions that others will like . Thinking for yourself in a vacuum sucks.
• furyofantares 6y ago
  I'd like the opposite essay, how to be more conventional-minded. It's exhausting feeling continually unable to accept conventional wisdom and go with the flow. Questioning everything is absolutely not all upside; there isn't time or energy available to do it, so you've gotta either tune a huge chunk of the world out, or cynically reject it, both of which are alienating and unpleasant.
• mattmaroon 6y ago
  "You don't want to start a startup to do something that everyone agrees is a good idea, or there will already be other companies doing it. You have to do something that sounds to most other people like a bad idea, but that you know isn't — like writing software for a tiny computer used by a few thousand hobbyists, or starting a site to let people rent airbeds on strangers' floors." Probably true more often than not, but Google and Facebook both started off doing something that everyone already thought was a good idea, they just did it much better.
• paulpauper 6y ago
  >The same is true for investors. It's not enough for a public market investor to predict correctly how a company will do. If a lot of other people make the same prediction, the stock price will already reflect it, and there's no room to make money. The only valuable insights are the ones most other investors don't share. That really depends. Tesla and Amazon stock are widely followed and have optimistic projections yet continue to deliver massive shareholder returns.
• cryptica 6y ago
  Over the past decade, our economic system has been rewarding zero-sum capital concentration at the expense of productive innovation and this has rewarded conventional thinkers at the expense of independent thinkers. Conventional thinkers are better at concentrating capital because they want what everyone else wants - This allows certain things to become and remain highly overvalued or undervalued. Conventional thinkers have a sense of value which is grounded mostly in social approval/reinforcement; their sense of value is mostly detached from any underlying utility. Independent thinkers are better at innovating since they don't value social approval/reinforcement and so they are more capable at identifying real utility value. The problem today is that there are many conventional thinkers and they have been reinforcing each other's arbitrary decisions (not rooted in utility). This arbitrariness which is only rooted in social convention has been terrible for independent thinkers. Independent thinkers have been competing with large groups of conventional thinkers; on a ratio of maybe 1 to 100 or worse. A lone genius is no match for hundreds of fools. History has demonstrated this time and time again. Socrates, Galileo... Successfully persecuted for being independent thinkers. It doesn't matter that they were right. Our society just seems to be breeding conventional thinkers by the millions.
• RickHull 6y ago
  For those railing against this essay, who feel that PG is fluffing himself up and patting himself on the back like a nerdy middleschooler -- you've missed the big point, badly. PG writes unapologetically, directly, and simply, and this may pattern match to a naive middleschooler, but you are letting your base instincts cover up the fact that PG is wise, has earned his stripes, and is sharing his wisdom, unapologetically, directly, and simply. He knows exactly the kind of backlash he will receive and is prompting you for it intentionally. He's not writing for you or to you, and he cares not a whit what you think. He's writing to and for people like him, trying to help them put words and clear thought to vague understandings and apprehensions they've been wrestling with. He's not self-aggrandizing but student-aggrandizing, as the headmaster of a school of thought that he values deeply. If you hate the headmaster or his style or the school of thought, that's wonderful, but it's not at all relevant to his aims. I hope this sheds some light on the bigger picture for those unaware.
  • judofyr 6y ago
    > He's writing to and for people like him, trying to help them put words and clear thought to vague understandings and apprehensions they've been wrestling with. Ah, yes, he's writing an article about how to think for yourself to the people who already think like him. So if we don't think like him, but rather in an independent way, then it makes sense that we wouldn't agree with this article. Got it!
    • RickHull 6y ago
      Ha, you jest, but you bring up a subtle point. There are degrees and dimensions of similarity. For example, two people who uphold a principle of freedom of speech may nonetheless completely disagree on any particular issue. But they are very similar in an important way. Do you value independent thinking? If so, what part of the article did you most disagree with?
      • epsilonclose 6y ago
        Do independent thinkers read essays that tell them how to think independently? The irony may have been intentional on the author's part, but I still won't read the essay. Bad juju.
• zug_zug 6y ago
  I would say independent thought is a limited resource, and you should allocate it wisely. There are many things you can "think for yourself" about that wouldn't return much for the investment. For example, if I rejected english and made my own language that would probably be a long-shot. For a while, I wasn't interested in using math formulas until I could prove them, in hindsight maybe I'd say spend that energy getting better at people skills. I think you'll find 90% of things are done the right way, and if you deviate you're probably doing worse for it. So it's worst being deliberate about. I don't think independent thought is an ends in itself.
• losvedir 6y ago
  > You have to do something that sounds to most other people like a bad idea, but that you know isn't — like writing software for a tiny computer used by a few thousand hobbyists, or starting a site to let people rent airbeds on strangers' floors. He's talking about airbnb here, but what's the other company?
  • gms 6y ago
    Microsoft.
  • rm445 6y ago
    Microsoft maybe?
  • soneca 6y ago
    I believe Microsoft, it started when personal computers were just a niche hobby.
• ceilingcorner 6y ago
  Can someone explain the constant reference to nerds in PG's essays? I feel like it's a concept straight out of a 1970s-90s low-budget movie and hasn't been accurate or relevant since...
  • SpicyLemonZest 6y ago
    The concept was prevalent in 1970s-90s movies because it's a core part of how people who grew up in those decades (like PG) perceive the world. I suspect that he struggles to see the world without that lens applied, the same way political partisans struggle to look at things without a red vs. blue filter; it's too foundational to who he is and what he believes. (I don't mean that as an insult, to be clear. I have filters like that too, and I'm sure we all do.)
    • Ar-Curunir 6y ago
      It's also quite a common factor in Scott Aaronson's writings, and equally, his blog posts would be much better if he could discard that filter at least once in a while
    • lovelyviking 6y ago
      >The concept was prevalent in 1970s-90s movies because it's a core part of how people who grew up in those decades (like PG) perceive the world. What movies for instance you have in mind that you think influnced core part? >political partisans Who for instance?
      • SpicyLemonZest 6y ago
        It's my understanding that the causality went the other direction; that "nerds" were a clear youth subculture in the 60s and 70s, and this subculture inspired all of the 70s-90s movies about them even as the term "nerd" broadened far beyond any concrete set of characteristics. If you had to pick one movie that contributed the most to fossilizing the image, Revenge of the Nerds has to be it.
• cryptica 6y ago
  I think the biggest problem we have today is that people have become so out of touch with themselves and their own intrinsic needs that they ended up resorting to simply wanting what other people want. We can blame advertising. Successful advertising is all about inducing as many people as possible to conform to the same imagery.
• mempko 6y ago
  > Independent-mindedness seems to be more a matter of nature than nurture. Pretty bold claim My Graham. What evidence is there for this?
• ineedasername 6y ago
  To be a successful scientist... you can't publish papers saying things other people already know PG may have some good insights sometimes, but it's rare I see him get something so completely wrong as this. Reproducing research to demonstrate a result was correct or not is a cornerstone in the foundation of science. A fundamental problem in the research community is that incentives as misaligned to support that initiative, and so there are an endless stream of papers published that are either flawed in themselves or obtained spurious results that wouldn't hold up under additional systematic scrutiny. Worse, these flawed pieces of research feed into the sound-byte media cycle and over time have eroded public trust & confidence in the scientific process. To some extent that's unavoidable when preliminary research, even well performed, us taken out of context. But every study performed with a handful of subjects that producing a weak result with controversial implications will be shouted from the roof tops nonetheless. So, to PG saying a successful scientist must pursue novel research: stop navel gazing on the superiority of SV values and looking to shove them into every area of human endeavor. You're wrong, and sometimes dangerously so.
  • Karunamon 6y ago
    The word used was "successful", not "good". Reproduction papers and meta-analyses seldom generate notoriety.
    • ozim 6y ago
      Watch out for the words. Being notorious :), or lets just call it being well known is not a measure of success. Problem with defining successful scientist is I suppose more complex than scientist becoming a celebrity. I believe one can be very successful by reproducing papers and for example pointing out bad ones that claim something that was supposed to be "groundbreaking".
  • wildermuthn 6y ago
    But reproducing research results does produce new knowledge: enhanced validity of the original research. Or on the contrary, decreased validity. Both outcomes result in the creation of new (deeper) knowledge.
• lisper 6y ago
  > There are some kinds of work that you can't do well without thinking differently from your peers. To be a successful scientist, for example, it's not enough just to be correct. Your ideas have to be both correct and novel. As someone who once made their living as a scientist, I can tell you from firsthand experience that while this is technically correct, the conclusion PG wishes to draw from this: > One of the most effective techniques is one practiced unintentionally by most nerds: simply to be less aware what conventional beliefs are. is very wrong, at least in the domain of scientific research (and probably others as well, but scientific research is the area in which I can speak with some authority). In order to make scientific progress, you have to understand the conventional wisdom. The reason for this is that the conventional wisdom in science is the product of about 350 years (and counting) of hard work by an awful lot of smart people. Those people explored a lot of wrong ideas on the way towards discovering the right ones, and if you are unaware of this history and just strike out on your own thinking that you are so much more brilliant than any other human who has ever walked the planet before you, you are much more likely to go down a well-known dead-end than you are to discover something new. I wasted about ten years of my life learning this lesson the hard way. Being skeptical of the conventional wisdom can be useful, but keeping yourself intentionally ignorant of it is generally a bad plan.
  • ChrisMarshallNY 6y ago
    > Being skeptical of the conventional wisdom can be useful, but keeping yourself intentionally ignorant of it is generally a bad plan. I can vouch for that. I write software, but my original training was as an EE. My software development methodology was almost entirely self-taught. This has been both good and bad. I will sometimes come up with some really interesting orthogonal approaches, but I will also sometimes "reinvent the wheel," with a naive approach. Experience has taught me to seek out prior art, and established patterns. My creative way may still be the best way, but I've learned that is not always the case.
    • enos_feedler 6y ago
      I think ordering of exposure makes a difference. Being submersed in prior art and then trying to come up with something novel is much harder or less likely than having conviction around a novel idea/experience and then digging into prior art to strengthen your offering.
• moralsupply 6y ago
  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 life in general it becomes a place for political narratives associated with the establishment (meaning: left leaning), which is probably explainable due to the fact most people here work in big tech companies that have strong government ties.
  • nickpp 6y ago
    Not only negative votes, but flagging as well. The flagging mechanism is commonly used on HN to completely disappear dissenting opinions.
    • piva00 6y ago
      No, the flagging works well for unsupported opinions (usually with quite bad discourse included) being pushed, if you feel you were flagged wrongly you can always go check with the mod team and explain why you believe your behaviour shouldn't have been flagged. I believe that HN is one of the most open forums for dissenting opinions when those opinions are well-presented and substantiated.
  • porpoise 6y ago
    I think it's still possible to go against conventional narrative on HN and get upvoted, but one needs to word one's comments with an extraordinary amount of extra care, completely stripped of sarcasm or confrontational tone, remaining objective even when under personal attack - in short, one is held to a much higher standard (in terms of quality and substance of comments) than those posting conventional opinion.
    • moralsupply 6y ago
      I agree with that. It generally applies to most online forums as well. We don't tend to have a "thick skin" for ideas that make us uncomfortable.
• mempko 6y ago
  > Independent-mindedness seems to be more a matter of nature than nurture. Paul Graham seems dead wrong on this. Here is a twin study showing the opposite. https://www.google.com/url?sa=t&rct=j&q=&esrc=s&source=web&cd=&ved=2ahUKEwiLy_3mj6PtAhVkNn0KHYGUCU0QFjAEegQIBxAC&url=https%3A%2F%2Flink.springer.com%2Fcontent%2Fpdf%2F10.1007%2Fs11434-013-5701-x.pdf&usg=AOvVaw3SG4H_efLc0jpwYokj9dMR https://www.google.com/url?sa=t&rct=j&q=&esrc=s&source=web&c... Also the Asch conformity experiments suggest the opposite. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Asch_conformity_experiments https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Asch_conformity_experiments Scientific thinking is something that can be taught. Think for yourself, don't listen to Paul Graham.
• ghufran_syed 6y ago
  It's really hard to read this kind of discussion of paul graham's work, because I feel there is a lot of reaction to who he is rather than just the ideas being presented. I'd love to see him do a [Richard Bachman](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_Bachman https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_Bachman) i.e. start writing essays with no obvious connection to his actual identity and see what response it gets.
  • cuspycode 6y ago
    I agree, it's very irritating that so many people respond to who the messenger is, rather than to what the message is. You don't really have to anonymize the author's identity in order to focus on the message rather than the messenger. You just have to let go of identity politics and any similar goofiness.
    • pell 6y ago
      There is no identity politics - which in itself isn't bad or "goofiness" by the way - when the author is read as part of the writing. Most critical comments mentioned Graham's biography for specific reasons that correspond to the writing.
• stfp 6y ago
  Yes, tell me how to think for myself
• TameAntelope 6y ago
  PG has a high degree of believability to me when it comes to the topic of innovation, which makes it all the harder to square his assertion that a successful way to innovate is to be unaware of convention with my experience that you simply can’t even begin to innovate until you know the state of the art in a field. I’ll have to think a lot about this, because it’s something important to me, and what he’s written here is very different from my experience and understanding, but I trust his history of accuracy, so I can’t just dismiss it.
• momirlan 6y ago
  I think people get hung up on the term "conventional". This is a good essay on how to think right and avoid biases. Just my conventional opinion.
• einpoklum 6y ago
  "If you follow what this HackerNews story says, you are sure to reach the state of thinking all by yourself!"
• blitztime 6y ago
  This reminded me of a different article by Scott Alexander which also addresses the topic of certain ventures like the stock market and job interviewing being “anti-inductive” aka resistant to formulas that worked in the past. You could say that successful independent thinking is also a highly anti-inductive activity. https://slatestarcodex.com/2015/01/11/the-phatic-and-the-anti-inductive/ https://slatestarcodex.com/2015/01/11/the-phatic-and-the-ant...
• ChrisMarshallNY 6y ago
  I dunno. Like everything, we need balance. Brilliance needs to be balanced with patience, persistence and practicality. Working for a Japanese corporation taught me to really respect the "three P's." They didn't have the kind of creativity to invent the next iPhone, but they had what it takes to make it better than everyone else, and in a fairly short time. Great things are accomplished by great teams, and teams need a lot of variety to work properly. A team composed only of independent thinkers would be a never-ending gladiatorial contest, with the product being the main victim. What does gall me, is the fairly naked disrespect that many brilliant folks have for the types of implementors that they need in order to realize their dreams. These engineers (and managers) are often treated as "dime a dozen," which is far from the truth.
  • randcraw 6y ago
    I agree that pg's model for thinking serves disruptive-based enterprises like small startups much better than consensus-based endeavors like a large corporation, a military, or a football team. Groupthink is an essential skill when cooperation is more important to success than innovation. Propaganda and the delusions that ensue from it are how you build teams.
    • ChrisMarshallNY 6y ago
      Hmm... not sure I'd put it that way. We can't have teams that are composed of both independent thinkers and implementation experts? I think of companies like Apple, that had a couple of rather...mercurial types at the head, and a large team of highly skilled implementors to realize their view. I guess what I was talking about, is that we get all caught up in brilliant "visionaries," and forget that someone needs to actually do the work in the trenches to get the "vision" up and going. I encounter outright disdain for skilled implementors, even though they are just as rare as "visionaries." Sure, there are lots of people with the correct job titles, a firm grasp of jargon, and a willingness to take money, but it is just as difficult to find good implementation experts, as it is to find good visionaries. It isn't as "sexy" to be an implementation expert, but it is very, very important.
• alecbz 6y ago
  I don't relish the idea of doing work where I can only succeed when I disagree with others (it feels both risky and lonely) but that's different than if, in practice, I tend to conform to what others think (I don't think I do, on average).
• chenpengcheng 6y ago
  he is not the best. i am very impressed by how little his thinking and writing have improved over the years. there is always a flavor of lecturing in his words. sometimes, it makes me wonder if i am just too stupid to understand his answers to all matters. these days i could not finish reading his writings. his twitter feels like a talkative kid who hasn't learned self control. i have unfollowed him long ago. he may want to be different. but how is he different? really.
• raintrees 6y ago
  Seven things came up for me, reading this: Permaculture has a concept that it is the boundaries where interesting things happen - Where desirable life can be found. Between the forest and the meadow is where lies the life that may be desirable, whether fauna or flora. I had labeled the two distinctions as destroyer/creators versus maintainers. I tear things down to create better replacements, whereas my partner is an excellent maintainer - As long as my new system is not too onerous, she is usually willing to keep it going, as I move on to the next process. And it seems that the transition from a small company to a larger one is also the transition from the independent to the more conventional minded, even though it contains its own traps (like having independents forced out - even from their own companies, or being strangled into oblivion by bean-counters, as it were). Those who don't/did not do well in school may be in the independent group, more often than not. But then that misses other underlying reasons, like a few of my friends who had undiagnosed dyslexia. I found a helpful guide to develop those analytical/independent thinking processes in Harry Browne's book How I Found Freedom In An Unfree World. https://www.nateliason.com/notes/freedom-unfree-world-harry-browne https://www.nateliason.com/notes/freedom-unfree-world-harry-... Although I have usually been attracted to conspiracy theory just to be at odds with the rest of mainstream thought, I recognize I do not practice enough critical thinking if said theory already conforms to an existing bias I may have - Another place for me to practice my mental strength! Another item in HN's feed this morning is Connections - That series has been an invaluable cross-discipline introduction to so much thought and design of other creative independent types. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25218056 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25218056 Last, I agree with the concept of reading good autobiographies of interesting thinkers allows me to think some of the same thoughts they did...
• LockAndLol 6y ago
  Why is the SSL cert from *.store.yahoo.com ?
• notoriousarun 6y ago
  > Not even a single mention in the essay. > Silence > Deep Work important components for thinking?
• Tycho 6y ago
  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 of curiosity, the explore-exploit trade-off at work. Life presents you with a bewildering array of options. It greatly helps to establish what the conventional choice is. It will generally be the safe option, a path well-trodden. You can try to reverse-engineer why it became the conventional choice, gain an appreciation of its advantages, maybe tweak things to find a slightly more optimal solution for your personal circumstance... but sticking with convention qua convention is generally justified. People don't 'accidentally' make the same choices as most others, they deliberately identify what is conventional and follow that path. Go to university, buy a house with a mortgage, get a car on PCP, marry before having children, etc etc Likewise for a small child there is no downside to curiosity, only upside. As an adult, there is an awareness that you need to earn your daily bread, before all else. Working with people who seem to just follow flights of fancy, risking their livelihood, can be infuriating. And then there is the whole meta-question of conventional thoughts versus conventional statements. If you believe something that is widely disbelieved, and you speak up, you're sticking your neck out. When I see people do this I tend to get the impression they have not really calibrated their bet on being right against the reputational risk they are assuming.
  • musicale 6y ago
    > get a car on PCP That explains so much.
• schnulller 6y ago
  Somehow I got to feel a lot of unease when I read sentences like > Fortunately you don't have to spend all your time with independent-minded people ... Maybe it's the absurdity to divide people (and here obviously ALL people) simply into two groups and just by structuring them gain some meaning or knowledge. It's really easy and unprofessional: really you could divide society up by uncountable distinctions. But distinctions do not make dialectics or aren't anything but misleading if you're just asserting them. Also the distinctions between conventional and independent are just blurry ones here, only derived by example; not by definition. There is no intellectual sharpness to the argument, right from the start of the "essay" – in that, that it appeals only to the intuition, not to the mind. There are no studies about "independent-minded" or "conventional-minded" people; not in hte sense he is using the term here. Quite the opposite: he is using the terms to appeal to a feeling. In no earnest science, or literature, someone talks so dull and undifferentiated about human beings. Also I wouldn't ever think about a friend of mine, or someone close to me with such cold efficiency that derives from that really simplistic way of handling people and amateur psychology.
• zw123456 6y ago
  As an inventor holding over 70 patents, I often get asked "can you teach me to be innovative?" My answer is that you already are but you have been taught not to be. It is not that you need to learn to be innovative you have to unlearn to be compliant. School, military, most big companies all have many rules and expectations which essentially train the innovativeness out of people. I agree it is in human nature to be innovative and creative, you just have to find ways to unleash your inner inventor.
  • jstummbillig 6y ago
    > As an inventor holding over 70 patents Can/Did you elaborate on this? Sounds exciting, I would love to hear more about how you got started and what kind of work you do.
    • zw123456 6y ago
      I started at Bell Labs in 1978, I am a research fellow for a large telcom presently.
• karmakaze 6y ago
  Late in life I wondered if/when I had a truly original idea. Not one that I was the first to think of, but one which I came up with all on my own not based upon anything similar I'd already learned. It was hard but I satisfyingly recalled an early instance. I was in grade 7 back in the late 70s being taught that cutting a circle in half and unrolling each half to make the semi-circumference straight thus making a series of triangles (in the limit). Meshing the triangles together makes a parallelogram/rectangle in the limit. This was a demonstration of the formula for the area of a circle. After seeing this, I thought to myself, Pi is dumb. A diameter is double the radius, so the radius is the fundamental. I tried telling this to a bunch of people, kids or adults who just looked at me funny. I was so happy to much later learn that there's Tau. And very sad that alien races might hear the beeps of Tau/2 being sent to them by the clueless terrans.
• georgewsinger 6y ago
  There are only two types of contrarian views. 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.
  • dragonwriter 6y ago
    I was going to suggest a third but I realize it's a hybrid: having a view that in summary fits the latter category but for which the detailed argument is in the former category.
  • hindsightbias 6y ago
    An issue with #2 might be that 5% is still millions of people , many of who are available to find with a google search. So it becomes harder to figure out who is a courageous contrarian and who is a crank. Pre-web, individual conspirasists used to be mute. They were either smart enough to keep quiet or afraid to speak up because they thought their views were unique. Now, everyone can let their freak flag fly without much consequence. There just isn’t enough danger or personal risk anymore to separate the wheat from the chaff.
• deleted 6y ago
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• maxx1011 6y ago
  Independent thinking is just part of being more creative. Unfortunately as people keep following the tale, this is perhaps an illusion of being unique
• deleted 6y ago
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• x87678r 6y ago
  Some of my biggest regrets are doing what I thought was best when I should have done what everyone else was doing. This ranges from from not buying an overpriced house 20 years ago, to not partying at college, to following some interesting but unpopular technology. Its not all bad doing things your own way but you have to be careful about straying too much.
  • ryan-duve 6y ago
    When I catch myself with thoughts like these I remind myself of the lesson from https://xkcd.com/584/ https://xkcd.com/584/ One thing that helps is keeping in touch with friends that made such decisions and hearing their regrets today.
  • whateveracct 6y ago
    > I wish in the past I had tried more things 'cause now I know that being in trouble is a fake idea http://achewood.com/?date=01272005 http://achewood.com/?date=01272005
  • Kranar 6y ago
    Fair enough but I did all the things you regret and I am very very happy I did them. Bought a house in 2009 when everyone said it was stupid because of the great recession, avoided partying, drinking or doing any kind of drugs, or "having fun" all throughout high school and university, and instead of using all the newest and greatest popular technologies I made my own libraries. That house is now worth 3 times more today than when I bought it, almost all popular technologies from 10 years ago are dead and unmaintained today whereas the technology I made for myself forms the basis of my software company, and frankly I don't know many people in their 30s who still continue to maintain the same kind of friendship with their party buddies. All this to say that it's irrelevant whether you do things everyone else does or do things no one else does. It's just a very poor way of reasoning about anything in life.
    • VoodooJuJu 6y ago
      I think that's exactly what they're saying - that they regret not partying and not buying that nice house.
• pontus 6y ago
  I really appreciate the message in this article. I think another way to partition the world is into zero-sum and non-zero sum situations. In non-zero sum situations it's more important to be correct than novel, but in zero-sum situations it's important to be both correct and novel. One example I like to think about is the following: imagine having two boxes (A and B), one on each side of a football field. Exactly one of the two boxes contains a million dollars: box A contains the prize with 99% probability and box B contains the prize with 1% probability. Suppose you're standing at the center of the field together with n other people and are told to race to get the million dollars (first person who finds it wins). You have to decide whether to run for box A or box B since they're in opposite directions. If n = 0, it's clearly in your best interest to go for box A, but as n grows, the probability of you getting to box A first drops since you're competing with other people, meaning that at some point you ought to actually go for box B. This is a toy example of where it's not sufficient to be right, but it's also important to be novel. If each person was awarded its contents (rather than just the first person to get there), there'd be no rush and you ought to go for box A. In other words: in zero-sum situations you need to be both right and novel, but in non-zero sum situations it's sufficient to just be right. I think the example of academia in the article is not quite right for two reasons. As pointed out elsewhere, the incentives in academia are actually quite twisted which means that there's actually more incentive to just be verbose than to be novel, but additionally I don't think it's really zero-sum. It's true that if you're working in a crowded space, it starts approaching zero-sum and then becomes a game of novelty. However, if you're not in a crowded space (e.g. interdisciplinary stuff) you can actually be quite successful by discovering rather mundane things (you might say that this is just being novel on a different axis, which I think is reasonably accurate, but the point made in the article was that the discoveries have to be surprising).
  • mcguire 6y ago
    You regard innovation as a zero sum game? (Paul specifically says that to be successful, a founder has to be right and everyone else wrong.)
    • pontus 6y ago
      Yes and no. If I wanted to start a social network today, it would not be sufficient to just clone Facebook because the space is already so saturated (it's zero-sum). I would have to have something very novel. If, however, I wanted to start a social network back in the early 2000s, I think it would have been sufficient to clone Facebook because the space was not yet saturated. This is not to say that it would have worked out, of course. Most likely I would have been crushed by Zuckerberg. When a new technology emerges, there will be a lot of "obvious" ideas that are ready to be "plucked", but as that technology matures, these obvious ideas become saturated, effectively turning the space into a zero-sum game. For example, in the early days of the app store / mobile revolution, I think there were a lot of reasonably straight-forward ideas out there ready to be executed on, e.g. Uber. I'm not saying that Uber was necessarily obvious to everyone, but I don't think that the idea of summoning a taxi from your phone would have been met with comments like "that's crazy, nobody would ever want that." However, if you wanted to come up with a startup around mobile today, you'd be better be very novel because pretty much everything obvious is already taken. Looking at trends today like autonomous cars, I think there are plenty of reasonably obvious ideas that we all sort of expect will be part of the first generation of applications (shipping, robo-taxies, last-mile delivery). That's not to say that they're easy to implement or by any means are guaranteed to succeed, but I don't think that they'll necessarily be super controversial.
• psyc 6y ago
  > I'm not suggesting that you impose on everyone who talks to you the burden of proving what they say, but rather that you take upon yourself the burden of evaluating what they say. Oh how I wish this were in the site guidelines.
• mcguire 6y ago
  "Ditto for essayists. An essay that told people things they already knew would be boring. You have to tell them something new." How come I know exactly where this essay is going? It is yet another "start-up founders are genetically, intellectually, and emotionally superior; the rest of the muggles are so envious." Does Paul think everyone except startup founders works on an assembly line? "You see this especially among political extremists. They think themselves nonconformists, but actually they're niche conformists. Their opinions may be different from the average person's, but they are often more influenced by their peers' opinions than the average person's are." Oooh. So close. Anyway, don't pop your shoulder out while you're patting yourself on the back.
  • MetalGuru 6y ago
    Nowhere in the essay does he argue that the three qualities of independent thinkers are exclusive to startup founders. You clearly feel some type of way about Paul Graham.
    • hn_throwaway_99 6y ago
      While I may not necessarily be as harsh as the commenter you are responding do, I will say that I am starting to feel a certain way about pg, and it's much less positive than it was 5-10 years ago. I feel like a common thread in his most recent essays has been separating people into, for lack of a better term, "desirables" vs. "undesirables". True, he doesn't use those terms, and he often couches the language he uses about the undesirables in sort of a "they can't really help it, they're just born that way" phrasing, but the distain is barely hidden. And I find all of this somewhat ironic, given that as high as pg values curiosity, I don't really see a lot of self-introspection (at least as communicated in his essays) about why he seems to be much more interested in recent years in writing about how one group of people is intrinsically special and the other basically just exists to be led. I will specifically contrast this with Sam Harris. While they talk about different subjects, I find Sam Harris to be much more interested in thinking about "why do I think the way I do." More importantly, after listening to a Harris podcast I often find myself thinking about things in a very different way, where lately with pg's essays I find myself thinking "not this shit again."
• lanevorockz 6y ago
  Sad state of affairs that people need to be thought how to think for themselves. It's unnatural and only a product of the current educational systems. Greek philosophers were able to do a lot of great work over 2 thousand years ago.
  • pjscott 6y ago
    Greek philosophers whose works are still being read today are probably not a representative sample. It's tempting to look back at a few exceptional people from past societies, compare them with typical people from ours, and find our society lacking -- but this isn't a fair comparison.
• cammil 6y ago
  This article seems so conventional to me. How ironic.
• Arubis 6y ago
  Over the years, I've found PG's essays much less compelling. As some sibling comments here have noted, there's a level of self-assuredness that feels increasingly disconnected from reality, like PG's become a synecdoche of SF VC-fuelled startup culture as a whole. Whether that's him changing, or me, or the world, I'm not certain--but I still look forward to them simply because the ensuing discussions here on HN tend to have some gold in them. Edit: typo on “synecdoche” (original was “synecdouche,” which could be read as clever/juvenile but was simply unintentional). Also: my original phrasing (which I’ll leave intact above for context) was vague; I specifically meant to express that the more recent essays resonate less with me than the older ones once did. I haven’t reevaluated the older essays; it’s been ages since I went through them.
  • texasbigdata 6y ago
    I mean if you’re a human and you’re trying to generate weekly content or similar, there should be some kind of s-curve in your production function. No one is novel enough to come up with new ideas ad infinitum (sp?). Dudes been writing for how many years?
    • walleeee 6y ago
      That's the thing. Why is he trying to generate content constantly if he has little to say? I have my own theories (elaborated elsewhere in this thread), but it's a question that needs asking.
  • B1FF_PSUVM 6y ago
    .
    • Arubis 6y ago
      Ha! This was unintentional, but I’ll leave it for context of your comment. Edit: alas, with your comment removed, this is nonsensical; I’ve fixed the typo in parent.
      • deleted 6y ago
• Animats 6y ago
  The physical separation of Lockheed's Skunk Works may have had this as a side benefit. That mindset produced the big corporate labs of the 1950s to 1970s - Bell Labs, Xerox PARC, IBM Research, Sarnoff Labs, the Department of Energy labs, the NASA centers, etc. They got impressive results. But in time, they stagnated, working hard on the wrong problems. You have to have a well defined goal to make that work. Of course, at the other extreme, we have the brogrammers making webcrap. "Agile" is not likely to lead to independent thinking. It's a system for keeping nose to grindstone. We're seeing a very strong push towards political conformity, but it's bipolar. On one side, we have groups where saying there are only two genders can get you fired. On the other side, we have groups which think whatever Trump said today is gospel. This is not getting us anywhere useful.
  • xgk 6y ago
    On one side ... On the other side ... Only one of those sides has children in substantial numbers, so this polarity will sort itself out over longer time scales. As somebody living next to a primary school in a very progressive city I already see this in a big way!
    • Animats 6y ago
      Only one of those sides has children in substantial numbers Which one?
• mindfulplay 6y ago
  I can perhaps grasp the independent thinking when applied to the initial thinking for startups such as AirBnB and Stripe. But what I find insulting is that beyond this simple nugget of an idea, most of what these startups do is very conventional. AirBnB to me reeks of the same VC funded attitude to expand their moat and eviscerate all competition with less than reputable thinking: they rarely care about customers and very much focused on competition. This isn't any spectacular independent thinking beyond that simple idea at the beginning. Similar to Twitter's beginning from an idea bored down on a napkin. I think these companies are filled with very conventional people with very conventional thinking. But the VC folks can claim superiority in thinking they are solving the world's problems with independent thinking within some circlejerk.
• chiefalchemist 6y ago
  Well stated, as expected. That said, it's heavy on features and light on benefits (which include often undesirable side effects). For example, in PG's world unbound-thinking has value. It is generally seen as a good thing. Do the same within a religion and you're a heretic. Worse, you could end up dead. Perhaps he'll do a follow up? To explore the benefits (and friction) for individuals, as well as teams and organizations. Maybe even go so far as to address diversity beyond the conventional paradigm (i.e., race, gender, etc.) That would be great.
• bshanks 6y ago
  The most radical solution would be to grow revenues without growing the company Some investment firms already seem to be able to grow revenues without growing the number of employees. Growing revenue without growing employees is probably a good thing for many reasons if it's possible. However w/r/t the investment firms, imo many investment firms can grow revenue without hiring only when the bottleneck constraint on their revenue is just their reputation. As their reputation grows, investment firms are often able to do the same thing but with a larger quantity of investor money. Perhaps their reputation also helps on the other end; maybe some can make the same quantity of deals per unit time but as their reputation grows perhaps they become better connected so maybe the deals get bigger and/or more profitable. In other industries you have to produce a higher quantity of goods or services in order to get more revenue, so this may not generalize.
• B1FF_PSUVM 6y ago
  "You don't want to start a startup to do something that everyone agrees is a good idea, or there will already be other companies doing it." (1994) "Yo, Jeff, what's this about selling books online? The books.com guys in Ohio have been doing that for years!"
• strofcon 6y ago
  "To be a successful scientist, for example, it's not enough just to be correct. Your ideas have to be both correct and novel. You can't publish papers saying things other people already know. You need to say things no one else has realized yet." Oof, first paragraph and he's entirely wrong. That's rough. One of the most worrisome aspects of the world's take on science lately is that reproduction of published results is considered the work of dullards and thus unworthy of funding. By definition, reproduction of results is not novel, and yet it is (or at least really should be) one of the single most crucial aspects of a shared scientific method. This is profoundly bad thinking by Paul.
  • fractionalhare 6y ago
    In fairness, PG's statement there is correct if you consider it descriptively rather than prescriptively, for exactly the reason you outlined in your comment. As a positive statement of fact about the current ethos of science it's correct. Less so if you interpret it as a normative imperative.
    • deleted 6y ago
      [deleted]
  • coolgod 6y ago
    Depends on what your definition and metric of success. If all academia cares about is citation count then PG makes a good argument.
    • klipt 6y ago
      Both are true: Gaming metrics is good for your career. Having bad metrics is bad for society.
  • oh_sigh 6y ago
    Reproduction of a result is novel if it hasn't been reproduced yet.
  • Yajirobe 6y ago
• renewiltord 6y ago
  Funny. The article cannot live up to the title if some of the premises are true: if independent thinking is nature bound, then you can't learn to do it. At least the advice to find out which one you are and commit to that is useful. Lots of value in being conventional: all my friends who went and worked at AMZN and GOOG are far wealthier than the rest of us today.
• WhompingWindows 6y ago
  PG has a lovely and eloquent writing style that makes truisms so snappy to read.
• yaoxx151 6y ago
  It's amazing to see how little is focused on training young kids to think independently in early education. In my own experience, even science is taught in a doctrinal way, i.e. we were told to believe what scientists thought and discovered. It seems to me that it's no different from religion--just replace God with Newton. Most students worship scientists but don't study them in details. It's bad that when those students grow up, they believe science is the absolute truth and they're hostile to people who doubt about it. They become the new priests. And probably today's biggest "scientific doctrine" is big data-people unquestionably believe whatever data tells them without caring about nuance or bothering to think what it implies. Interestingly, it seems most of those people don't have a strong background in science while most trained scientists rarely hold the same view that science is superior and we know everything.
• gist 6y ago
  What would be interesting (PG if you are reading) is a preamble that indicated what in particular inspired you to write a particular essay.
• abstractbill 6y ago
  "It matters a lot who you surround yourself with. If you're surrounded by conventional-minded people, it will constrain which ideas you can express, and that in turn will constrain which ideas you have. But if you surround yourself with independent-minded people, you'll have the opposite experience: hearing other people say surprising things will encourage you to, and to think of more." This is the exact opposite of my experience. My independent-mindedness happens the most as a reaction to being surrounded by too much groupthink. On the other hand, when I'm surrounded by people who are already having plenty of crazy ideas, they begin to feel a bit tiresome to me, and I don't feel the need to have any of my own.
• zaptheimpaler 6y ago
  I wish for the world to relearn the principle of charity.
• jariel 6y ago
  The 'Elephant in the Room' he failed to mention is that the vast, vast majority of 'independent thought' has nothing to do with 'Truth', it's just more or less egosim. Also missing from the articulation is that independence from the group can be at odds with your loyalty and respect for the cause of the group, and our sense of civil duty towards it. 90% of 'independent thinking' is akin to conspiracy theory, or people arbitrarily rejecting authority, even if that authority is legitimate. 9% of 'independent thinking' is raw creativity, art, or people just expressing themselves one way or another in a variety of ways. Only 1% of independant thinking is of the type he is describing, which is conscientious. The problem is that it's very hard to have the self awareness to know which type you are. There is logic in conformity, even imperfect systems, it's much better that we have a standard than otherwise. The most enlightened people I find are those that seem actually fairly conformist not so much because they have been 'told' to do a certain thing, but because they understand why - and - have a sense of duty or obligation towards the outcome - and then conscientiously chose to take that path. It's not conformist to do what everyone else is doing if there's reason in it.
• contingencies 6y ago
  Had dinner with some randoms tonight in a lesser known corner of China. Although we were in a small place and the bill for 6 people was perhaps $150, it turned out one of them was a (foreign) billionaire. He took an interest in our venture and we made dinner plans tomorrow. One of the topics of conversation: resistance of crowd mentality and thinking for yourself. YMMV.
• randomsearch 6y ago
  Seems almost every PG essay is controversial now. I got downvoted for pointing out someone was insulting him rather than criticising the essay. Which leads me to say - I don't think HN is particularly fanboish towards PG. His recent essays have been mixed in quality, and certainly not up to Hackers and Painters (which I just reread for the third time) and I do feel that HN has thoroughly called that out. There are nuggets of wisdom but also signs of how difficult it can be to write generally when your life paths constricts you somewhat. I really don't see a groupthink towards hero worship. Ironically, it seems the entrepreneur and nerdish need to be contrarian is at work here - looking to push back against PG, and somewhat justifiably so. And I'm sure he'd be the first to appreciate the need for that.
• gorbachev 6y ago
  I find Ray Dalio's thoughts on this and other related subjects much more compelling than Paul's. Mr. Dalio has recently, within the past year or two, started sharing his thoughts publicly in an organized way at https://www.principles.com/ https://www.principles.com/ and on social media.
  • GeorgeTirebiter 6y ago
    Why do you find Dalio's musings 'more compelling' ? To me, Ray is just another Capitalist who extols Capitalism. Is there more to it?
    • gorbachev 6y ago
      https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/why-how-capitalism-needs-reformed-parts-1-2-ray-dalio https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/why-how-capitalism-needs-refo... That's to answer your "just another capitalist" comment. To answer your first question. Because he thinks about and explains things more rigorously than Paul Graham does. That does sometimes make it a little longwinded and he has a tendency to go on a lot of tangents on his live speeches. Also has absolutely no ego in the game whatsoever. It's almost clinical the way he describes how he's thinking about things.
• anonytrary 6y ago
  Thinking for yourself in Silicon Valley is nigh impossible these days without becoming a disliked outcast. If you even question the legitimacy or viability of a potentially flawed mission or irony in company values, experienced startups will manage you out silently and tactfully. In some of the worst places, you'll also get treated poorly and excluded so that you leave. Company values really are just words on a wall in pretty much every company. I don't think you will find a single company where the values aren't silently broken by leadership and management. The best companies have ways of hiding this through shallow apologetic acts (e.g. self-washing on social media). I've seen this happen to plenty of people who found out something they shouldn't have, at companies who would otherwise appear like great places to work.
  • Razengan 6y ago
    > Thinking for yourself in Silicon Valley is nigh impossible these days without becoming a disliked outcast. Yes. The irony of Paul Graham’s fluff (apparently he was one of the founders of HN or something?) about thinking for yourself etc. versus the tendency of HN to downvote any comment that goes against the grain, like the one above. Hah
• lifeisstillgood 6y ago
  Empirical testing is the only way to think about anything. Epidemiology is the way to pluck randomised trials from peoples lived lifestyles As such all the decisions we make in life have been made by billions of others before us - more than enough to tease out the "best" outcomes. This is Inthink truly the golden egg of the age of surveillance - you can think for yourself, but back test against a million exactly the same decisions made by a million others - and decide if their outcomes are what we want
• gorbachev 6y ago
  One of the things I've started actively disliking more and more are the "independent thinkers" in the tech oligarchy who seem to do it simply because they enjoy being contrarians. They post pseudo-intellectual babble about going against the grain justified by single sentence "observations" about some anecdotal evidence they then stretch and generalize into a larger point and continue beating up until the horse is dead.
  • thegjp210 6y ago
    there are loads of these folks in VC. Anyone who went to an ivy/stanford/MIT, worked in banking for 2 years, and now is at a VC by definition isn't a contrarian. Contrarianism bears out in life decisions - not a faux intellectual attitude
    • Balgair 6y ago
      “The noble title of "dissident" must be earned rather than claimed; it connotes sacrifice and risk rather than mere disagreement.” ― Christopher Hitchens, Letters to a Young Contrarian
• sbilstein 6y ago
  But schools generally ignore independent-mindedness, except to the extent they try to suppress it. Why do so many folks buy this bullshit about American schooling? Sure, we've got SATs and standardized tests but schools also have jazz bands, rock ensembles, student written plays and musicals. Hell my failing public high school had plenty of room for self-expression, it wasn't the sort of conformist prison PG thinks to seem schools are, it just wasn't a very good school. No one was going to punish you for writing an essay or starting a club or anything else. My university, one likely to be accused of 'credentialism' also had the gamut of clubs: campus crusade for christ down to groups for divesting from Israel to Zionist groups, to LGBT groups, etc, etc, etc. Its just bullshit.
• n00bdude 6y ago
  well i liked it :P & think it'd be great if more thoughtful-oriented writes on the internet generated such HN discussion
• nazgulnarsil 6y ago
  I think this is an appealing sounding false dichotomy. Bryan Caplan consistently wins bets by betting trends. Robin Hanson has noted that merely taking all the basic facts of a domain as actually true will often get you to contrarian status.
• dukeofdoom 6y ago
  I had two of those thoughts today, that would probably get me ostracized from society if I expressed them freely. Earlier today I overheard a teen girl with a giant behind, talking with her friend how she wants to go home and do nothing, to her obese friend, on a Friday. Sorry but this is not how teenagers acted in the past. And its not normal that so many young people are morbidly obese, stay at home do nothings. People are stumbling along and nobody notices how fat everyone is around here, as if its all fine, but maybe they notice but too afraid to speak up. But really its not fine, its actually pretty horrible. And is probably an indication of some sort of toxicity. Maybe like lead poisoning from lead pipes. I also draw a line, I don't think we should be wearing space suits to live on this planet. Sorry if that means people will die from exposure to disease. But thats not the path I want humanity to take. Independent thinkers can often come off as lacking empathy. Expressing empathy is very important in communication, especially If you want to be liked by other people. But as society, I think its crutch too. Its not that I don't think we have too much empathy. I think we use empathy to cover up problems, which can be solved. A little temporary pain, can reduce suffering in the long run.
  • deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
  • dukeofdoom 6y ago
    These are pretty conventional counter sentiments online, I don't claim I independently thought of them. But you can't freely express them. Try talking about fat people at work, and report how well that goes over. After you lose your job, you might feel a little "ostracized" from society. My point which I did not state adequately in my comment, is that obesity is huge problem, that people use empathy to cover up for. I'll use cigarettes as an example, it wasn't until packages started showing graphic pictures of cancer, damaged lungs, and huge graphic labels and warnings. That the public/social pressure to quit, had substantial effect. I think its misguided to put all our effort in protecting at risk individuals, when the responsibility lies with most of these people to lose weight, and strengthen their immune system. You have to be a blind person to ignore the real authentic evidence of obesity in this country. I won't even bother to look for links to studies. Here's an article stating its 40% and higher. https://www.usnews.com/news/healthiest-communities/articles/2020-02-27/us-obesity-rate-passes-40-percent#:~:text=According%20to%20data%20released%20Thursday,40%25%20for%20the%20first%20time https://www.usnews.com/news/healthiest-communities/articles/.... Its also directly linked to this pandemic in the USA. Its a direct predictor of mortality from COVID. Study. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7346803/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7346803/ I don't oppose wearing masks, as a short term strategy to reduce infection. The evidence that they work is marginal. I have no problem wearing them, other than it may give a false sense security to at risk individuals. But how long should we wear masks? A year, two years, a decade... ? Its very conceivable that technological innovation will take over, and cloth masks will become full-on ventilators. Which at that point really will resemble "space suits". So will wearing mandated "space suits" be a path that we want humanity to go down on? Or will nature select out the weak, like it has done for millions of years in our evolution. Also, "my body my choice" has to be respected at some point. If we want to save the most lives, we would really want to isolate the most at risk elderly and mandate some nation wide weight loss program. Mandating that everyone do an hour walk, lose weight if you are obese, and put a treadmill in every classroom, would save more a lot more lives than just masks.
• thedudeabides5 6y ago
  I mean say what you will about a article telling people how to think for themselves, but I think this framework from paul is pretty good: independent-mindedness ...has three components: fastidiousness about truth, resistance to being told what to think, and curiosity. Truth Skepticsm Curiosity
• eruci 6y ago
  It's always going to be a tiny number of people that'll be the principal cause of progress, along with the rest of us being reasonable enough and simply go along with it. Independent thinking is hard, that's why the majority of people will opt instead to adopt the common thinking of the group of their choice - a choice that comes principally from feelings. One can be perfectly happy however, regardless on which category they belong, as long as they are comfortable with their choice.
  • Geminidog 6y ago
    >Independent thinking is hard, Not only is it hard it's frowned upon and attacked. You can't help but mock flat earthers but you gotta admit they're independent thinkers.
• birdsbirdsbirds 6y ago
  >And if it's like other forms of fastidiousness, it should also be possible to encourage in children. I certainly got a strong dose of it from my father. >Perhaps the reason is that even the conventional-minded have to be curious in the beginning, in order to learn what the conventions are. Whereas the independent-minded are the gluttons of curiosity, who keep eating even after they're full. The author doesn't try to answer where the greed for innovation comes from. If those traits come from parents, how can this be reproduced? Isn't 'How to Think for Yourself' more like 'You are all individuals'? It can make people behave in certain ways, but it cannot create individualism. Coincidently, the author offers a service for founders to help them to be founders, to tell them, how to be founders. He most likely is looking for conforming non-conformists, because those are the people who need his services the most. Then on the other hand, maybe he has realized that he cannot give them what they need the most? It's a bit like reddit. He gave the founders lisp and a non-conformist, but they ended up with a platform for submissions. People think for themselves when the answers they get are not enough. Who wants to give people the gift of endless dissatisfaction?
• dzink 6y ago
  To add on top of PG's arguments: A podcast with Barry Diller made me realize that small active memory in a person may have a lot to do with them becoming perceptive, intuitive, and thus innovative. Diller underlined many times how he struggles to remember, but has as a result learned to perceive ground truth through experience instead. I've confirmed this in a number of conversations with founders and other professionals, so it is possible the formal research surfaces more. Here are a few of stories from people I know: 1. A left handed, night owl, bathroom builder with horrible memory, who loves his work and can easily find a way to improvise to achieve the right results on projects, even if volunteering in a different country with different materials and house structures (wood vs brick) where he doesn't speak the language. 2. A doctor with amazing memory (can recite most movie lines ever heard and medical books ever read) who becomes timid and conservative about any new approach unless the best possible route is taken. 3. A founder who has benchmarked their brain on different tasks with different amounts of sleep deprivation. They have noticed in some states (nap, and high protein no-carb meal after sleep deprived state) the brain kicks into gear and comes up with amazing solutions to previously un-crackable problems while in other states repeat tasks flow much faster without over-think.
• tacon 6y ago
  In this article, I am struck by how closely PG is echoing the developmental theory of Harvard psychologist Robert Keegan, which I first learned of from this sequence of blog posts on how to be an adult[0]. The good news: with some work we can move from the great majority of adults and have a separate identity, making our own rules (35% of the population). The bad news: only 1% of us reach the final stage of adult development, where we hold many identities and embrace paradox. "We grow by moving more and more of what is unseen and unexamined in the way we understand the world (those things that are SUBJECT) to a place where they can be examined, questioned and changed (where they become OBJECT)." According to Keegan, these are the most important ways to move toward stage 5 development: * Understanding our self: Constant awareness and humility * Sharing our self: Honest, real conversations with people we trust * Transcending our self: Experiment with self-transcendent experiences [0] https://medium.com/@NataliMorad/part-3-how-to-be-an-adult-kegans-theory-of-adult-development-3ed9f2340f9f https://medium.com/@NataliMorad/part-3-how-to-be-an-adult-ke... [1] diagram of stages 3 through 5: https://miro.medium.com/max/875/1*QKt0kDlG-S65Oz-LBiGNQg.png https://miro.medium.com/max/875/1*QKt0kDlG-S65Oz-LBiGNQg.png
• jv22222 6y ago
  > You don't want to start a startup to do something that everyone agrees is a good idea, or there will already be other companies doing it. Great advice for unicorn hunters, for indie hackers, not so much.
• henrypaper48 6y ago
  Sometimes I think Paul Graham mentions high school he writes like he lives in Mean Girls
• justupvoting 6y ago
  Another not-insignificant intellect wasted on the contents of its own bellybutton
• ZguideZ 6y ago
  Somehow being told how to think for myself seems like it misses the point.
• npunt 6y ago
  This essay would have been stronger had pg explored where people choose to be conventional vs independent, rather than make it an identity-based dichotomy between independent / conventional. As it stands, this essay will cause people to insert themselves in the piece along the way rather than consider from a distance what is being discussed. This is especially true since one of the options is framed as the 'good' one, which triggers our innate confirmation bias - of the aspects we recognize in ourselves, we see the 'good' ones loud and clear, while we downplay or ignore the 'bad'. The takeaway of the piece for most is 'I'm an independent thinker' with perhaps some brief acknowledgement of 'but I've had to do conventional things'. Just evoking Dunning-Kruger doesn't innoculate against this conclusion. One of my favorite quotes is "Be regular and orderly in your life, so that you may be violent and original in your work" by Gustave Flaubert. This is, in effect, and similar but distinct thesis from pg's - that people choose to spend time & energy being 'independent thinkers' in certain domains of life, while hewing to convention elsewhere. Of course, different people do this to different degrees, but that's really where this exploration is most interesting - where, when, and how should I be an independent thinker?. One of my favorite activities when getting to know someone is to find the part of their being that is the independent thinker - what hidden rebellions they posses, where those came from, etc. Almost every reasonably smart person I've met has had some independent or unconventional aspect to them if you look close enough, even if they're outwardly very conventional. It's finding these gems and learning from them that makes getting to know someone so much fun. To his credit pg does mention something similar when discussing learning from people. The other reason I like Gustave's quote is that it suggests much more of a choice and strategy in the matter of independence, while leaving open what set of circumstances that led to the 'violent and original' aspect of independent thought. This rings more true to me, because independent thinking has a personal cost when dealing with others, and we must engage with others in life. Reasoning from first principles or holding unpopular beliefs cost us energy (for different people this energy is more or less felt), and Gustave's point is to focus those limited energies on our creative work where they are more productively employed. Having studied psych, bio, and education I'm sensitive to arguments that pontificate about whether something is 'more nature than nurture', especially from those with very technical and deterministic mindsets. To me, this is lazy thinking and convenient shorthand for 'I don't really know how people come to know things'. It's even contradicted by his own admission that his father gave him a strong dose of one of the three parts of being an independent thinker. Because we have such an overwhelming amount of evidence about how different environments shape people's beliefs and actions, when presented with nature/nurture arguments about loose concepts like 'independent thinking' my take is the burden of proof is on those claiming nature. [1] Nonetheless, I did enjoy the essay and its analysis. Many parts rung true or rhymed with my own experiences as a founder and early employee. For instance, the increasing conventionality of later employees you hire. But again pg gets close but misses an important nuance - the environment of a startup at founding or early on inspires more independent thinking because it's a blank sheet where people have a great deal of agency, while the environment of a startup after product market fit is a more conventional environment with constraints that drive conventional action. Thus, most people thrust into an early stage environment are going to become more 'independent thinking' by virtue of the environment and visa-versa in late stage environments. Anyway, it was an enjoyable read regardless, and clearly inspired some quality discussion. [1] A great example of this is the rise of violent crime in the 70s and 80s. A person then may come to the conclusion that man's nature is much more violent, when in fact the root cause is an excess of lead in the environment disrupting neurological development. This is an extreme 'near nature' argument but worth considering how little we understand our environments effect on us. https://www.motherjones.com/kevin-drum/2018/02/an-updated-lead-crime-roundup-for-2018/ https://www.motherjones.com/kevin-drum/2018/02/an-updated-le...
• Nas808 6y ago
  Why doesn't this site use HTTPS?
• lvs 6y ago
  The sheer irony of the upvotes on this charlatan is too much to bear.
• Balgair 6y ago
  The late Christopher Hitchens was a drink sodden ex-Trotskyist popinjay, of course. But one we needed. His 'Letters to a Young Contrarian'(2001), though filled with himself[0], remains a heartfelt read for anyone going about the world in their own way. If you can get a used copy, preferably filled with marginalia, treasure it, add your own thoughts, and pass it along. The always unique comments railing against Hitch will be worth the effort. More so when all agree. Paul may wish to pick up a copy, though I suspect he just needs to re-read the one on his shelf. https://www.amazon.com/Letters-Young-Contrarian-Mentoring-Paperback/dp/0465030335 https://www.amazon.com/Letters-Young-Contrarian-Mentoring-Pa... [0] therefore with frustration, liquor, cigarette ash, fragility, and sheer brilliance
  • Thorentis 6y ago
    A fantastic debate between Christopher and his brother Peter in which Christopher defended the Iraq war showed me just how much of an "independent thinker" Christopher really was (i.e. Not as much as you'd think). Being a militant atheist is hardly enough to be considered independent or contrarian in today's world.
    • Balgair 6y ago
      Hear Hear! He was a two fisted drunken chain smoker, for sure. But what rare good ideas he had were worth it all. I'll cheer again his Letters to Young Contrarian as terrible sauced drivel. But damned if I ever wrote more in the margins of that thin little tome arguing against his bastard ideas. To be clear, I disagree with nearly everything Hitch said. But his poppycock made me think deeper than any second-rate Augustine. To have everyone hate you is a rare thing. To have that for decades is unique. If he ever wrote only that one pamphlet, he'd be forgotten. But that he wrote so much more and that cigarette of a book, well, makes the matchbox so much more reprehensible. It wasn't satire, rather, a hose of drool. But it is truly honest. Again, read it, argue with him, treasure it, and pass it along. I can't recommend anything better on how to live that kind of life.
• vasilipupkin 6y ago
  “if a lot of other people make the same prediction, the stock price will already reflect it, and there's no room to make money“ This is wrong. You make money when you invest in public stocks as compensation for the risk you take. You don’t need to be better than others at predicting to make money. You do if you want to make excess money, money above the level that compensates for risk.
  • cactus2093 6y ago
    I think this is implied because he's talking about people that trade stocks for a living. Leaving money in a an index that tracks the overall market doesn't really count as a full-time trader job.
    • vasilipupkin 6y ago
      I don’t think it’s implied because it’s not even true for professional public market investors. They can make money by giving customers ways to take risk, not necessarily through superior predictions.
  • deleted 6y ago
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• lodi 6y ago
  Well I for one liked this essay. Be sure to read the footnotes at the end for some great lines: > When I ask myself what in my life is like high school, the answer is Twitter. It's not just full of conventional-minded people, as anything its size will inevitably be, but subject to violent storms of conventional-mindedness that remind me of descriptions of Jupiter. > The threshold for having opinions about politics is much lower than the one for having opinions about set theory. So while there are some ideas in politics, in practice they tend to be swamped by waves of intellectual fashion. > The conventional-minded are often fooled by the strength of their opinions into believing that they're independent-minded. But strong convictions are not a sign of independent-mindedness. Rather the opposite.
• ryeguy_24 6y ago
  Am I the only one is getting pretty bored of "formula for success" content? This essay and other's like it, without evidence or data, implies that some of us know the formula for success. I get it, the things that change convention are unconventional at first. This is the definition of unconventional. I agree with the general vector of his essay but this is just boring to me. Here is my formula for success (in case anyone cares): Enjoy life, try to make the world better, be a good person, go towards your passions (whether for hobby or career) and cultivate relationships because that seems to be the thing people regret most when they die. Now, let's move on to to the actual unconventional ideas and observations.
  • m4eta 6y ago
    Humans are excellent at finding patterns where there are none. I don't think that changes when a bunch of 0s end up in your bank account.
    • qPM9l3XJrF 6y ago
      A successful investor is almost by definition someone who's good at finding and exploiting patterns in the market.
  • deleted 6y ago
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  • ardit33 6y ago
    I don't know, but I rather hear sporting/fitness advice from someone that won NBA finals, or the soccer World Cup, then just some random loser. The winner at least can tell you how they did succeed personally, even if they have no comprehensive studies with data. On the other hand, you are just a random guy from the internet, and offering advice with no data at all. You might be broke and posting from your mom's basement, or from the top of a penthouse that you bought from building successful companies/startups. We don't know, so your advice will be treated like: just another opinion, from a internet rando/keyboard warrior, and everyone has opinions. I listen to PG as he has been more right then wrong, also he was very successful, multiple times, and is single handedly a major contributer to many products I use.
• a11yguy 6y ago
  If you want to fit in and get along with most people, it's best not to think for yourself.
  • Aqua 6y ago
    that's what conventional-thinking people do. independent-thinking people don't want to fit in, they instead gather followers (other conventional-thining) to follow them
• PIKAL 6y ago
  I knew from as far back as I can remember that I was totally different from most people. I always thought that most people were the same. I grew up stricken with independent mindedness. If you are smart enough to blend in despite having a completely different way of thinking then it would be ok but I am the kind of person who cannot hide what’s inside. It ruined my life. Most people live a life of luxury simply by the virtue of their brain. Even poor people have the ability to enjoy human connection with other people. That is luxury to me. Most people don’t even understand that something so fundamental can be absent, they don’t even know it exists as it’s own thing. Most people completely miss all the details. This essay really speaks to me. In 2010 when I would try to explain what was going on with Tesla and who Elon musk was, literally nobody believed me, took me seriously or demonstrated any ability at all to think for themselves and come to the correct conclusion through the special combination of single minded intuition and logical deduction that is described in the essay. I noticed that people always reacted the same way, no matter where they came from, mentioning something about golf carts. There was an emotional component where when I would get close to making a breakthrough, an emotional wall would go up. This emotional wall was the same in everyone and it was a very strong pattern. Having an emotional disconnection with yourself is important to being able to believe things that are upsetting or having your world view tossed. It’s not a choice to be disconnected and for me it’s a medical thing. Because of my insights about Tesla and other things related to my special way of thinking, I am retired. And I still say it isn’t worth it and I would give it all up to enjoy the amazing luxury of being a normal person.
  • kerpilo 6y ago
    I identify with both your sentiment and what PG wrote. Going through life with this feeling of disconnection is very consuming, and can have severe consequences personally and professionally. Time is especially unkind for independent thinkers who do not achieve what others consider success, fast enough. Being unconventional and 'creative' while young is something passable and understandable... maybe even fashionable depending on where you live. But being of the same mindset and past your thirties is not generally acceptable, unless you have show a measure of financial/professional success. I would love to see PG write about this, if he has experience observing or living through these sentiments.
• ukj 6y ago
  The hardest problem (still) is decidability. Trying to decide whether you fit in the “conventional” or “non-conventional” category; then trying to decide whether you committed a Type I or a Type II error on the previous task.
• rnikander 6y ago
  Meditate. When I started I was surprised to discover "slower" thoughts that took time to arise, but were of higher quality. The noisy, fast, surface thoughts are often more conventional - echos of what I've been told. Silence is part of creativity.
• Aqua 6y ago
  Loved this read. Looks like most hate towards the message of the article comes from the conventional-minded ;-)
• scandox 6y ago
  You are all individuals
• dang 6y ago
  Every time a new pg essay comes out, comments appear saying how much he and his essays have changed (for the worse, of course). I think this perception has the nicely ironic property that it exists because it's false. pg hasn't changed. He can't; he's too weird (nonconformist, if you prefer). Traits at that level just are. What's changed is his status. Becoming rich and famous changes how people perceive you. What sounds scrappy and original coming from an underdog sounds inflated and self-congratulatory coming from a fatcat. It's because he hasn't changed—in particular, to accommodate the expectations people have once they classify you as a fatcat—that people complain that he changed. Even more ironically, this 'change' is the invariant: pg never accommodated the expectations people had. His essays pissed people off 10 years ago, 15 years ago, coming up on 20 years ago. While the surface reasons have changed, the feelings are so similar that the deep structure of the off-pissage is surely the same.
  • deleted 6y ago
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  • gridspy 6y ago
    I imagine the qualities of his essays which "piss others off" are exactly those qualities that I most value. For instance, I enjoy how each essay seems to take an abstract and detached look at something widely taken for granted. It then extracts some valuable insights that are often too hard to see without this lofty view. I personally love this.
  • nwienert 6y ago
    What’s a strong disagree you have with him? For if he is so non-conformist certainly you disagree with him on a few things. What makes him weird in his thinking compared to your typical Bay Area tech person? They all seem to value non-conformity, thinking from first principles, growth, etc. What view would you’d say is truly contrarian? One that most here would disagree with? Most of the critique here isn’t about him saying something people just disagree with. He’s not being radical in any way whatsoever. The critiques here all have to do with the fact that he’s saying aggressively conventional things that are framed as the opposite. Banal, backwards and self-congratulatory. It’s not that he’s said anything disagreeable in content. You’re fighting against different people with each point you make. It’s like you made a field of straw men and then shot each down. You do the same thing with critiques of HN itself: “people always have said this”, where the “this” is vague and has often been different at different times. If what they say is different then maybe some are right, maybe the “this” was right at the time, and now it’s a different this, and it’s right now. Just because a choir sounds bad doesn’t mean a few voices aren’t correct. Paul is an aggressively conventional guy. He’s your super stereotypical “slightly nerd techie”. He excels at second order thinking (“everyone says X, but have you thought of Y”) but then he just stops there. He never contends with his own second order contrarian idea, he just builds reinforcements around it. This essay is kindergarten chalkboard aphorism “Think Outside the Box!” framed as real contrarianism, which is why he gets flak.
• bra-ket 6y ago
  A stronger essay should have been titled "How to Think."
• gtsop 6y ago
  Accept the duality of your human nature. You think as a collective and as an individual at the same time. It's a matter of budget. When you do things that don't matter too much to you, you are damn happy to think exactly like the next guy, reusing the existing knowledge as is without a second thought. For instance: how do you boil an egg? For all I care, I leave it in boiled water for 10 minutes. I am more than happy to never challenge this conventional wisdom because I'm spending all my time trying to think out of the box while searching for a new sorting algorithm. Now put a chef in my place. They could have their own specialized/unconventional boiling technique while saying all sorting can be done with bubble sort. Always restrict your conclusions within the appropriate context. For every person different things matter, you can't think for yourself for every piece of knowledge. There isn't enough time. If people didn't copy and follow along (while inovating in their special domain) we would still live in the stone age
  • thomastjeffery 6y ago
    I like this point. Instead of "question everything", "question that which you are interested in". After all, asking - let alone answering - every question would simply take too much time.
    • ausbah 6y ago
      isn't this just something people unconsciously do all the time?
  • anonymouse008 6y ago
    It takes extreme discipline to know what you should question vs. what you shouldn’t. There’s a line from some famous SVite that agrees with your sentiment - something about picking the right horses and more about focusing on the right things. A lot of this ‘how to boil a perfect egg’ competition comes not from the love of the pursuit (personally I have a much better day with a soft yolk), but because of the ‘prestige games’ we play with each other to prove we are not inadequate. It’s a joy to learn from someone who truly wants to share, not position. To them they’ve discovered this wonderful way to do X that maybe you’ll love too — but to hear advice from folks that wish you worship them in return for their advice, is almost a negative sum game. These articles walk a fine line, and many times it takes a live discussion for the intent to be measured.
• deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
• axiom92 6y ago
  >If a lot of other people make the same prediction, the stock price will already reflect it, and there's no room to make money. TSLA disagrees.
• darkerside 6y ago
  I find it interesting that conventional thinkers are described as "sheep" in this article. In my experience, most people who I thought were shallow or "conventional" thinkers were not. Rather, they cared about different things than I did. They were independent thinkers, questioning assumptions, in the field where they were expert or passionate, and conventional thinkers everywhere else because they want to save their mental energy for the areas they care about the most.
  • eloff 6y ago
    In my experience most people are sheep. I rarely encounter people who think independently about very much at all. And I'm sure they all would think the above didn't apply to them. Especially with politics I notice most people just pick a red or blue team or equivalent in their country, and inherit all their positions - which blows my mind. I also think it doesn't apply to me, but I worry about how really independent my thinking is.
    • darkerside 6y ago
      My advice is not to worry about it. Figure out what you want to think most about and seek truth. If other people find a different truth, try to learn from it. It's that simple.
      • eloff 6y ago
        If other people find a different truth, one of us is wrong. If it's the majority with a different truth I'm honest enough with myself most of the time to realize it's probably me who's wrong. But sometimes I will stand my ground anyway, not usually out of stubbornness, but because I'm confident that my analysisis correct. I don't think my odds are actually great in these cases, but just occasionally I might have found the truth before the rest of the world, and that can be valuable.
        • darkerside 6y ago
          > If other people find a different truth, one of us is wrong. 2+2=4. But it also equals 8/2, 4.00000, and 25% of 16. What I've found in my experience is that when people disagree, they can both be right, and most often, the heart of the disagreement is not what is true, but what is _important_. Another thing I've found to be true is that if you don't understand what someone is saying, they probably know something that you don't. These two findings don't seem related at first, but they are.
• avodonosov 6y ago
  Solutions are dictated by problem itself to a large extent, so when someone is right when others are wrong he may be just understanding the nature of the problem better. So he is conventionaly minded, but sees deeper into the chain (web) of implications, because has more powerful brain or spent more attention on the topic out of interest, etc. Same conventional thinking, only carried further.
• deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
• permo-w 6y ago
  Apologies for getting a little Reddity, but let’s all take a minute to appreciate the irony of being told how to think for yourself
• tambourine_man 6y ago
  I glanced over this entire day thread but didn’t find this questioning so here it goes: Does no one else find that a “how to think for yourself” article is something of a paradox? I mean, if you do follow through whatever directions are pointed out, you already failed.
  • tclancy 6y ago
    You make a compelling point. Tell me more.
    • tambourine_man 6y ago
      If you really think for yourself you won’t follow whatever the article's advice is. However well intentioned the original proposal is, it’s not yours and not to be followed if the intention is to be original. The article’s proposal is an impossible task, akin to the barber paradox https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barber_paradox https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barber_paradox
      • tclancy 6y ago
        https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/thats-the-joke https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/thats-the-joke
• ATsch 6y ago
  Absolutely insufferable, I can't even hate-read this article.
• Geminidog 6y ago
  The unconventional independent minded people on HN are the people who are banned and voted down. While this group of people includes individual with new ideas, it also includes flat earthers. The same emotional confidence that allows you to have revolutionary ideas is the same one that allows you to be a flat earther. If you posted your idea on HN and you find that the idea is voted up by a lot? It means a lot of people agree with you, the thought is therefore not independent or unconventional. Does your post get voted down? Well it's pretty much by definition a very independent idea. In general, unconventional independent minded people fight an uphill battle.
• pure_vida 6y ago
  This is basically a verbose version of the countless sayings that state something along the lines of...if you think the same as others, you’ll get the same results. Albeit he’s speaking about the initial temperament / mindset of the individual, which is something I guess. What is quite ironic is that this is written by Pg, who’s institution has become one of the most conformist. To generalize and draw out the point clearly - Yc invests in tech companies (most conformist type of business nowadays) that are incredibly de-risked since those that make the yc. Arches usually have ‘traction’/ revenue etc. (Ie, odds are that today, yc wouldn’t invest in 2 designers looking to disrupt hospitals)
• rossdavidh 6y ago
  While I agree that there are professions where thinking unconventional thoughts is especially important, there's a flipside to this which is missed in this essay: they're professions where being wrong is not catastrophic. VC's can invest in many startups, and a few successes can make up for a lot of failures. It's ok to be wrong a lot, if a few big successes (i.e you were right when everyone else was wrong) can make up for that. But, most professions are not like that. I don't want my surgeon, car mechanic, plumber, or accountant to be the sort who is rarely in agreement with their peers. If they are wrong half the time about things which everyone else knew the right answer to, but also half of the time they are right when everyone else is wrong, I'm still much worse off. Being unconventional is only a good thing if the consequences of being wrong are much less bad, than the benefits of being correct when others are all wrong.
  • imgabe 6y ago
    You are missing the part about being fastidious about the truth. Nobody cares about people who are "unconventional" in a way that is at odds with reality. Conventions are merely cognitive shortcuts we use to apply previously determined knowledge. Sometimes that knowledge grows out of sync with the world, or there is a newer, better understanding of the world that represents an improvement, and we need to replace or update the convention. This is where we need unconventional thinkers to question assumptions and test new ways of doing things. Yes, even in fields like surgery and plumbing. Do you think the current state of knowledge in surgery is perfect and cannot be improved? If not, you are depending on people to question the current conventions. I promise you the first plumber who proposed the waterless urinal was met with a lot of resistance from other plumbers "That's not how we do things", "That will never work" etc. etc. It doesn't mean he's also going to design your house so that shit has to flow uphill. Nobody is proposing that you just throw out conventions at random for the sake of calling yourself unconventional.
• zaphodq42 6y ago
  When I read PG’s essays I find they are subconsciously trying to pitch YC. How everyone PG knows including him are very special and deserving. This clouds my experience of reading his essays. I am unable to derive any value from them because of this. The main reason for this is that I see a big divide between what he says about success people and what I have observed. Success has no set pattern. It can come from a huge variety of reasons. I really hope this is not koolaid because a lot of young people are drinking it. It would suck if it was all just to suck them into applying for YC.
• bravura 6y ago
  I loved this essay, but... for me, one of the interesting failures is in assuming that there is only one dimension for being unconventional. Even though one might like to think of themselves on an axis from "conventional" to "unconventional", my experience has shown that your normality can vary wildly depending upon whether we are talking about matters of love, finance, career, etc. As well as nuances therein. What I think would be quite probing would be an exploration of the ways in which you might be unconventional in some aspects of your career, whereas conventional in others. It's these fine-differences that the articles suggests we could adjust to achieve parity overall in a particular domain, but does not actually explore...
• 3131s 6y ago
  [flagged] Paul Graham's response to AOC's statement on billionaires (twitter.com/paulg) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24099192 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24099192
• pksebben 6y ago
  There is some really, really good advice in here for those folks who might be struggling with identity and self-valuation in today's excessively connected culture. There are a couple of indelicate points, however, that I think bear addressing. "Independent-mindedness" is a very, very leaky abstraction. It is certainly not a scalar quantity (as Paul seems to suggest), nor is it something one is born with. At best, it is a measurement of distance from the cultural mean, and culture is n-dimensional. Culture is also contextual. Paul trades a little paint with this concept but fails to impact it fully. If you're trying to expand your understanding of the world (and consequently your ability to reason about it, which will help you think for yourself), one of the best things you can do is to travel / move / change jobs / insert contextual mix-up here. He touches on some qualities adjacent to these concepts with stunningly good advice. Think for yourself. Be curious. Ask what's missing. Step back and see how people think. However, he notably avoids giving a name to one of the most important components of curiosity; that of humility. He talks around it quite a bit - but somehow misses calling it out explicitly. This feels like the kind of thing that someone of his considerable success might take a little for granted. Not that he doesn't have it himself, I cannot make an assessment as to that one way or the other. This leads me to one of the things I found most dissonant about this piece; Paul absolutely nails it when he talks about having sovereignty over your thoughts. In the context of an article that's about "how to make it". Pressure to succeed financially or to gain social recognition is one of the most deleterious forces to a diverse culture of thought. Forgive me for getting a little political here, but IMHO it's the core reason that capitalism has an upper bound. Fiscal incentives are by their nature (and design) reductive. From there, I have a couple of other, relatively minor, gripes. I'm as uncomfortable as many of the rest of you with how specific the prescriptions for "thinking for yourself" get. Furthermore, the idea that you have to insulate yourself against those who are different from you (even if you perceive that difference to be I'm weird and they're not) is fundamentally antithetical to expanding your worldview. That being said, if you're struggling with feeling like the world is trying to put you in a box, the things Paul suggests here are helpful: Indulge your curiosity. Don't hang out with people who get down on you for being you. Humor and ingenuity are sibling concepts. Don't participate in intellectual fashion. Most importantly, don't let people tell you how to think.
• viswanathk 6y ago
  So many high school analogies with pg. One wonders if he is trying to say something to his high school self..
• ghego1 6y ago
  Isn't it paradoxical to be told how to think for oneself?
• nevertoolate 6y ago
  Is this article about defining a term independent-minded which is strongly related to curious and a lot more talk about some aspects of the life and ideas of an independent-minded nerd?
• thisistheend123 6y ago
  In comments here, lo and behold, the cult of PG. The fraternity that gets nothing but an inflated sense of pride from someone who has made a lot of money for himself and a few select others. They sing kumbaya together on HN when the great leader comes up with another one of his scriptures.
• arnath 6y ago
  I'm sure the best way to learn how to think for yourself is to read an essay telling you how to think for yourself
• bot41 6y ago
  Isn't the idea for AirBnB paid couch surfing? The idea was already popular.
• geomark 6y ago
  He says "...good universities are still an excellent way to meet independent-minded people." Is that even true anymore? So many of the ones I considered "good" have gone over to the whole SJW/microaggressions/safe spaces mentality. Any independent thinkers will have a hard time finding each other at those places. Are there any universities left where you would have your ideas really challenged? That's what I would expect at university.
  • __float 6y ago
    Perhaps “safe spaces” are a lofty goal to allow students to focus on intellectual exploration rather than devoting a lot of mental energy to the slow drip of “microaggressions”. It sounds like you might be in one of the “niche conformists” pg describes.
    • geomark 6y ago
      Haha. I'm asking for suggestions of unis where I can still be challenged and even offended, and someone comes along with some psycho babble about me being a conformist of some sort. If I put on my psycho babble hat I might think they spent too much time in one of those safe spaces.
      • __float 6y ago
        If you think the concept of a safe space is at odds with being challenged then you are severely mistaken. When is the last time you were at a university? Your vaguely inflammatory comments suggest it’s been a while...
• nottrobin 6y ago
  I basically completely disagree with everything in this article. And the article provides scant evidence to support its (to me) extremely controversial framing of the world. To start with, I think it's complete bullshit that most work doesn't require independent mindedness, or creativity. Or that most work is uncreative. Second, I strongly question the assertion that independent mindedness is innate in any sense. I don't believe there's any strong evidence to support this statement, and believing it leads to some pretty dangerous attitudes to the world and other people. Thirdly, and somewhat illustrative of my previous point, I am quite repulsed by the suggestion that most people think they're free thinkers but aren't. How the hell do you know and who are you to day? I'm not interested in that obnoxious arrogance. Yuck
• sxzxs 6y ago
  The comments I've read have been really strongly worded either for or against the motif of this article. All in all I thought this essay was a nice albeit not too deep train of thought through kinds of thinking - not anything worth getting into fisticuffs over. Yet some comments make me feel like they expect, with the threat of harsh criticism, uber-deep and profoundly insightful content from PG on a highly consistent basis. Maybe it's the phenomenon where wider audiences give rise to (or amplify) polarizing views.
• commentrix 6y ago
  What's interesting is all the sheep coming to say, "Hey, actually I'm an individual!" even tho 1000-ands of times they've shat on individuals and celebrated the collective, even the collective lynching of individuals that were too "divergent" for their fickle and arbitrary collective tastes. Now, when an "authority" a "leader of a pack" shows up and says "Individual think good", the sheep bleat ever louder, "me good", "no cull". So ridiculous. You're all (mostly) sheep. Sheep in your condemnation of this celebration of individuality, sheep in the illogic of it, given that you've merrily discarded and excluded individuality for the thrill of "collective righteousness", now, in collective unison you've come to proclaim, either or any of: - I am individual, I peace - I am sheep-dividual hybrid but that smart, I peace - PG is wrong on principle, therefore sheep good, I peace You are all (commenters against, here) the first morons to leap at passing criticism on anything divergent from your groupthink, embracing this culture of "criticism" as a sacred ritual, but when passed against you, it is the end of the world. This must evoke the deep unresolved insecurity at the sheep: they know they surrendered that tiny individual voice inside, and they know, on some level, that's wrong, but they need to cover that up with everything they've got, to justify and feed their sense of safety in the comfort of the herd. Good luck to you, sheep all! Keep telling yourself, inside, individual good, bad me give it up, and outside, individual bad, good me sheep member. I think you all should accept your duality and just get on with it, and not feel threatened by seeing the realization in other individuals of a mirror (to you) of your own unrealized individuality. Or just accept your whole sheepness, if that's what you are. Accept this paradox and just fully give up your baggage about not being individual "enough", and embrace the collective. Then you will not be so threatened and insecure when someone talks of individuality, you will know, the superiority, of the hoard! "Your individuality shall be merged into our own." I don't care that y'all sheep. I want you to be sheep. Get out of my way. Stay outta my way. Get away from me. You're disgusting with your crazy illogical groupthink. You'll never understand the free thinkers, so don't try to impose just stay away. I want you to be secure in your collectivism. Because then you won't be so prone to attack the individuals that cross your paths. Be secure. Be confident. I don't care that it seems wrong or illogical to me. There's value in the collective. IF YOU ARE SHEEP, FUCKING EMBRACE IT. Yes, sheep are cowards, but there's literally gathousands of you, so just fucking EMBRACE IT. Surrender to your sheepness, and find, please, your own version of transcendent bliss, so we can all of us get back to being ourselves without interfering in others through triggered projected insecurities sparked from difference. Just be your fucking sheepself, and enjoy it. You see me outside the herd? Just ignore. Go back to eating grass, and get full belly and feel good. OK?
• tacocataco 6y ago
  This article reads like a startup founder trying to convince people to jump in a meat grinder.
• aborsy 6y ago
  Conventional wisdom is often just fine, as physicist M. Gell-Mann said!
• wiz21c 6y ago
  FTA, > Can you make yourself more independent-minded? Very bad question. The good ones were : do you need to ? do you want to ? would it help others ?
• archibaldJ 6y ago
  For this article to be "useful" it should be treated like some kind of scripture in 420AD. What's great about this article is not its content but that it exists and is written by someone with a considerable amount of influences in this world. I would argue that if you have been so-called independent minded for long enough most PG's articles would feel cliché. Nonetheless, if you deeply values independent mindfulness and happen to enjoy PG's writings, you will find the article to be extremely powerful because these words can computationally touch something deep inside you. And that is nice. This is pratically a piece you can meditate with.
• kelvin0 6y ago
  We all have the capacity to think for ourselves, once we start trusting our 'instinct/little voice/intuition' and not doubting ourselves into oblivion. We need to unlearn our bad habits, not necessarily search for some sacred pearl of wisdom in Nirvana somewhere...
• 7357 6y ago
  tl;dr ;-)
• dTal 6y ago
  I feel a certain sense of irony from the title. It's rather reminiscent of the scene from Life of Brian - "You're all individuals!" "We're all individuals!"
• brw12 6y ago
  Wow, I've never felt so seen by an essay.