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 o

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.