Lonely Dissent

[Eliezer Yudkowsky]

Asch’s conformity experiment showed that the presence of a single dissenter tremendously reduced the incidence of “conforming” wrong answers. Individualism is easy, experiment shows, when you have company in your defiance. Every other subject in the room, except one, says that black is white. You become the second person to say that black is black. And it feels glorious: the two of you, lonely and defiant rebels, against the world!¹

But you can only join the rebellion after someone, somewhere, becomes the first to rebel. Someone has to say that black is black after hearing everyone else, one after the other, say that black is white. And that—experiment shows—is a lot harder.

Lonely dissent doesn’t feel like going to school dressed in black. It feels like going to school wearing a clown suit.

That’s the difference between joining the rebellion and leaving the pack.

If there’s one thing I can’t stand, it’s fakeness—you may have noticed this. Well, lonely dissent has got to be one of the most commonly, most ostentatiously faked characteristics around. Everyone wants to be an iconoclast.

I don’t mean to degrade the act of joining a rebellion. There are rebellions worth joining. It does take courage to brave the disapproval of your peer group, or perhaps even worse, their shrugs. Needless to say, going to a rock concert is not rebellion. But, for example, vegetarianism is. I’m not a vegetarian myself, but I respect people who are, because I expect it takes a noticeable amount of quiet courage to tell people that hamburgers won’t work for dinner.²

Still, if you tell people that you’re a vegetarian, they’ll think they understand your motives (even if they don’t). They may disagree. They may be offended if you manage to announce it proudly enough, or for that matter, they may be offended just because they’re easily offended. But they know how to relate to you.

When someone wears black to school, the teachers and the other children understand the role thereby being assumed in their society. It’s Outside the System—in a very standard way that everyone recognizes and understands. Not, y’know, actually outside the system. It’s a Challenge to Standard Thinking, of a standard sort, so that people indignantly say, “I can’t understand why you—” but don’t have to actually think any thoughts they had not thought before. As the saying goes, “Has any of the ‘subversive literature’ you’ve read caused you to modify any of your political views?”

What takes real courage is braving the outright incomprehension of the people around you, when you do something that isn’t Standard Rebellion #37, something for which they lack a ready-made script. They don’t hate you for a rebel. They just think you’re, like, weird, and turn away. This prospect generates a much deeper fear. It’s the difference between explaining vegetarianism and explaining cryonics. There are other cryonicists in the world, somewhere, but they aren’t there next to you. You have to explain it, alone, to people who just think it’s weird. Not forbidden, but outside bounds that people don’t even think about. You’re going to get your head frozen? You think that’s going to stop you from dying? What do you mean, brain information? Huh? What? Are you crazy?

I’m tempted to essay a post facto explanation in evolutionary psychology: You could get together with a small group of friends and walk away from your hunter-gatherer band, but having to go it alone in the forests was probably a death sentence—at least reproductively. We don’t reason this out explicitly, but that is not the nature of evolutionary psychology. Joining a rebellion that everyone knows about is scary, but nowhere near as scary as doing something really differently—something that in ancestral times might have concluded, not with the band splitting, but with you being driven out alone.

As the case of cryonics testifies, the fear of thinking really different is stronger than the fear of death. Hunter-gatherers had to be ready to face death on a routine basis—hunting large mammals, or just walking around in a world that contained predators. They needed that courage in order to live. Courage to defy the tribe’s standard ways of thinking, to entertain thoughts that seem truly weird—well, that probably didn’t serve its bearers as well. We don’t reason this out explicitly; that’s not how evolutionary psychology works. We human beings are just built in such fashion that many more of us go skydiving than sign up for cryonics.

And that’s not even the highest courage. There’s more than one cryonicist in the world. Only Robert Ettinger had to say it first.

To be a scientific revolutionary, you’ve got to be the first person to contradict what everyone else you know is thinking. This is not the only route to scientific greatness; it is rare even among the great. No one can become a scientific revolutionary by trying to imitate revolutionariness. You can only get there by pursuing the correct answer in all things, whether the correct answer is revolutionary or not. But if, in the due course of time—if, having absorbed all the power and wisdom of the knowledge that has already accumulated—if, after all that and a dose of sheer luck, you find your pursuit of mere correctness taking you into new territory . . . then you have an opportunity for your courage to fail.

This is the true courage of lonely dissent, which every damn rock band out there tries to fake.

Of course, not everything that takes courage is a good idea. It would take courage to walk off a cliff, but then you would just go splat.

The fear of lonely dissent is a hindrance to good ideas, but not every dissenting idea is good.³ Most of the difficulty in having a new true scientific thought is in the “true” part.

It really isn’t necessary to be different for the sake of being different. If you do things differently only when you see an overwhelmingly good reason, you will have more than enough trouble to last you the rest of your life.

There are a few genuine packs of iconoclasts around. The Church of the SubGenius, for example, seems to genuinely aim at confusing the mundanes, not merely offending them. And there are islands of genuine tolerance in the world, such as science fiction conventions. There are certain people who have no fear of departing the pack. Many fewer such people really exist, than imagine themselves rebels; but they do exist. And yet scientific revolutionaries are tremendously rarer. Ponder that.

Now me, you know, I really am an iconoclast. Everyone thinks they are, but with me it’s true, you see. I would totally have worn a clown suit to school. My serious conversations were with books, not with other children.

But if you think you would totally wear that clown suit, then don’t be too proud of that either! It just means that you need to make an effort in the opposite direction to avoid dissenting too easily. That’s what I have to do, to correct for my own nature. Other people do have reasons for thinking what they do, and ignoring that completely is as bad as being afraid to contradict them. You wouldn’t want to end up as a free thinker. It’s not a virtue, you see—just a bias either way.

¹Followup interviews showed that subjects in the one-dissenter condition expressed strong feelings of camaraderie with the dissenter—though, of course, they didn’t think the presence of the dissenter had influenced their own nonconformity.

²Albeit that in the Bay Area, people ask as a matter of routine.

³See Robin Hanson, “Against Free Thinkers,” Overcoming Bias (blog), 2007, http://​​www.overcoming-bias.com/​​2007/​​06/​​against_free_th.html.

[RobinHanson]

In addition to suffering social disapproval when they first make their contrary claims, the lonely dissenter should realize that even if they are eventually proven right, they will likely still lose socially compared to if they had not so dissented.

[wedrifid]

So shut up and bet.

[Doug_S.]

Yes, I would totally wear that clown suit to high school. My classmates would have loved it! (My, shall we say, eccentricities… won me a strange sort of popularity.)

Also, having had the experience of repeatedly being able to come up with correct answers that almost all the other students could not has made me perhaps a little more confident in myself than I should be.

My freshman chemistry class in college had multiple choice exams; when taking the final, I noticed that, on one problem, my solution didn’t match any of the answers, but after going over it several times, I couldn’t find any mistake in my work. I eventually decided that the error was not mine, and spoke up. As it turns out, the question did contain a mistake that affected the answer, and I was the only one confident enough to question the question!

[handoflixue]

I once had a math teacher who put an impossible question on the final exam, as his quiet way of reinforcing that you have to actually think sometimes. He was a bit shocked when I pointed out that there were actually two, due to a typo in another question :)

[James_D._Miller]

“What takes real courage is braving the outright incomprehension of the people around you,”

I suspect that autistics are far more willing than neurotypicals to be true iconoclast because many neurotypicals find autistics incomprehensible regardless of what the autistics believe. So the price of being an intellectual iconoclast is lower for autistics than for most other people.

[dmh_phoenix]

Yes—I was going to reply to “There are certain people who have no fear of departing the pack” with “there are some people who can’t stay with the pack!”.

These (not just the autistics, but also other neurodiverse folks) are the true “natural outsiders”. As demonstrated by the OP’s comments, their presence in a group (or contrariwise their exclusion) has nontrivial effects on how a group acts, and especially how it deals with challenges.

[TobyBartels]

Thanks goodness for the neurodiverse, then!

[Unknown]

There’s a distinction between contradicting everyone else (lonely dissent) and proposing something new. Dissent takes courage, not necessarily proposing something new, because one might suppose that people will find the new thing acceptable. For example, I’m not sure that Ettinger needed more courage than modern cryonicists—he gives the impression that he expected his idea to be accepted as an obviously great idea, once it was proposed. It seems he was rather surprised by the world’s reaction.

[James_Bach]

Eliezer, never mind black, the true iconoclasts don’t go to school. I quit in 10th grade and became an emancipated minor. In the three years prior, I refused to do homework, citing the 13th Amendment. My motivation echoes yours: I could not abide fakers, and public school abounds with them. Fake lessons. Fake arguments. Fake sentiments. Public school is a thinly disguised day care center.

Fortunately, education is not the same as schooling, and there are plenty of ways to become better educated in private life. Then I discovered as an adult that being unconventionally educated could be a competitive advantage.

[Juno_Watt]

Ask yourself: “would I self-study this material anyway if I had the next three-five years paid for? Would this occupy a large part of my time regardless of what I’m doing?” If so, it’s worth it.

As opposed to what? The business world is relentlessly honest?

[tlhonmey]

I wouldn’t say the business world is relentlessly honest in all things, but when the rubber meets the road, business either provides what the consumers want, or gets shouldered aside in favor of someone who does. This keeps them marginally more honest than in the educational system where the consumer who pays for it is generally not the student and they’re generally left free to pursue whatever absurd fantasies they please in the name of demonstrating how “intellectual” they are.

[Eliezer Yudkowsky]

Eliezer, never mind black, the true iconoclasts don’t go to school. I quit in 10th grade

You must have a higher tolerance for frustration.

[Caledonian2]

You want really frustrating and generally fruitless iconoclasm?

Try explaining to a bunch of cryonicists that even though they may be right about the odds of preserving brain data, there’s likely no data in their brains worth going through the trouble of saving.

They usually resort to the script of presuming a personal insult.

[soreff]

(replying to this so long after the comment was made because of seeing other recent comments on this thread) I don’t see it as a personal insult, but I don’t see it as novel either. I see it as part of the “why would people in the future bother reviving anyone from the 21st century?”. Its a standard objection, and the standard answer is that it isn’t very different from asking why people in the future would bother to give medical care to unknown people arriving at a hospital in an ambulance. If the society is rich enough, and humane enough, it will probably do both. If the society is either too poor or too inhumane, it will probably do neither. (I’m folding the technological capability of reviving a cryonicist in with measuring the wealth of the society) This isn’t fruitless iconoclasm, it is rehashing of decades-old discussions.

[Cyan2]

“They usually resort to the script of presuming a personal insult” instead of rightly apprehending the point you’re making, which is...?

This is the difficulty I have with your comments, Caledonian. You always leave the interesting part out. (This is not a personal insult, by the way—just a straightforward observation.)

[danlowlite]

I would imagine (and, I see poke below has mentioned this off-hand) that people are...not that interesting.

Oh, I am sure you are. Like, personally. But, really, would you want to resurrect a random 1850s person? Aside from kitsch or perhaps historical interests (if they were an interesting or influential personality), there are certainly better ways to spend your time.

It’s not going to be like Encino Man, I am pretty sure.

Edit: I don’t think I agree...but I’m not sure yet.

[Ender]

Actually, I think that historians would love to wake up random people from way back when, whether or not they were famous at the time.

[Alicorn]

You have posted this several times; please delete the excess.

[Ender]

Sorry, I didn’t mean to do that, and I don’t know how it happened.

[[deleted]]

Three years later reply: People who chose cryonics are very likely to be unusual people, as evidenced by their choosing cryonics.

I also dispute your premise, on the grounds that people aren’t complete jerks.

[Ender]

Actually, I think that historians would love to wake up random people from way back when, whether or not they were famous or influential at the time.

[danlowlite]

OK. I’ll follow up. They might want to, but what events would that trigger? The benefits might be clear, but for what costs?

Firstly, you would add another person to the population pool. That addition, in and of itself, is probably a negligible effect. Humans do this with some regularity. It is unlikely that the addition of one specific historical figure would push us over some theoretical tipping point.

What would be a greater cost would be one of rights: does the resurrected “owe” anything for being plucked from history, financially or metaphorically? What psychological toll might be exacted on an 200′s era Roman slave when he shows up in Chicago in 2023? Assuming he could even grasp what had happened and learn a modern language, how is he to provide for himself? If he cannot, who? The historian, perhaps. What a decidedly high-risk research proposal: what if your resurrection is a boring fool?

Sure, I think it’d be neat to interview Hannibal or Twain or any number of folks from the past, I just think it might be a bad idea.

Probably reading into the idea a bit much at this point...

[Fergus_Mackinnon]

Presumably the capital investment everyone frozen gives to the Cryonics Institute would pay for their revival, or perhaps just for the revival and re-education of some of the more interesting people, who would then, hopefully feeling some empathy for the remaining popsicles, pay to have them reanimated later.

I’ll just try to be interesting, and somewhat self-sacrificing so someone who reads any of my work might feel guilty enough to have me reanimated.

Or we might just be reanimated to serve as soldiers in a future war as our coping mechanisms leave us just the right type of crazy to stay mostly sane in harsh environments. Who knows?

[Ender]

Now cryonics are starting to sound like a religion; if you are an interesting person, and have a good enough reputation, then someone will bother to reanimate you and you will live forever. I like it.

[Ender]

Actually, I think that historians would love to wake up random people from way back when, whether or not they were famous or influential at the time

[Ender]

Actually, I think that historians would love to wake up random people from way back when, whether or not they were famous or influential at the time

[Ender]

Actually, I think that historians would love to wake up random people from way back when, whether or not they were famous or influential at the time.

[Ender]

Actually, I think that historians would love to wake up random people from way back when, whether or not they were famous or influential at the time.

[michael_vassar3]

Hard to see how that’s a rebuttal Caledonian. Probably won’t work AND probably no data worth saving still adds up to better odds than definitely worm-food. I guess it’s possible that some cryonicists might find their values better served by offering their brains for scientific research, but that basically goes under the category “dying for a cause” even if the dying part was very likely anyway.

[handoflixue]

You’re ignoring the, currently, $200,000 expense that goes in to being preserved via Alcor. I dare say $200K is a vastly unreasonable bet to place if you’re assuming “probably no data worth saving”.

GiveWell currently rates the price of a single life at around $1,000. That’s 200 lives saved for the price of your cryonic preservation. Even assuming they’re off by an order of magnitude, that still leaves a 20:1 ratio.

[Dojan]

I am not signed up for cryonics because I can’t afford it. So; point taken. But I would like to point out that:

1 It doesn’t have to be that expensive. $30′000 is quite expensive enough. (Presumably at lower odds of revival though)

2 You could use that same argument about everything: “What?? You bought a house for $200K? That’s 200 lives according to GiveWell!!” Yet people by houses anyway, and I don’t blame them.

[handoflixue]

There is a difference between “probably no data worth saving” and “a house.” Most people have fairly high confidence that the house will actually work...

[Dojan]

Well, yes, but that’s a personal decision one has to make. My point is that it’s weird to point to anything I spends money on that you don’t and say “You could have spent it all on charity!”. Of course I could have. But I didn’t. I also spent a lot of money, most of it actually, on other stuff that I could have been without, like a car and a computer and a TV-set etc. If you spend a lot of money on charity and think others should too, then I salute you, but if so, then tell us that and what we should give to and why, but don’t tell us what we should not spend our own money on. Reminds me of this XKCD strip.

/​rant

I’m sorry if I’m reacting to strongly, it’s just that I get that argument a lot on a lot of different subjects, and it’s like a fully general counterargument; it doesn’t help us decide what to spend money on except charity, and let’s be realistic: Only a very small portion of people spend non-negligible amounts on charity. If you bring out that argument on this topic, you should spread the blame equally over everything else ever bought that have comparable or smaller humanitarian value.

[Goplat]

Gee, how could anybody ever assume hostility from an innocent statement like that. “Please don’t take this the wrong way, but you’re completely worthless and we’d all be better off if you just died. No offense intended.”

[poke]

I’m not sure what Caledonian is getting at but sometimes I see arguments from immortalists about the number of lives lost (needlessly) every day (I think I’ve seen such from Eliezer) and they have the exact opposite of the intended effect on me. Momentarily I find myself a committed “pro-mortalist.” Perhaps the hardest thing to accept is that human life has no such inherent value.

[steven]

Of course, if you dissent in more than one way, you’ll probably hurt both causes by linking them together in people’s perception, so you’re probably better off toeing the line in all ways until you find something you’re reasonably sure is the most important thing you could possibly dissent on.

[Ben_Jones]

Token message of attention-grabbing dissent for your collective pleasures:

There is no point saying ‘the world needs that first dissenter’. Tell people to be rational, tell people to avoid biases, great, but ‘dissenters can be useful’ can never be a heuristic. Who does it? When should they do it? To what degree? Pluralism is great, but we can’t say ‘let’s be pluralistic, who wants to disagree with our idea?’ Shooting yourself in the head is almost universally considered to be A Bad Thing, but that doesn’t mean we need someone to come out and advocate it so we can see the error of our ways. Stupidest person, light outside, sun shining etc. The only useful lesson I can draw from the above is ‘if your idea is universally lauded, find a devil’s advocate.’ This doesn’t happen in the real world.

Dissent can be a good thing; it keeps us honest, even when it’s wrong. But it can only ever be an emergent phenomenon, never part of the design. Everyone above—are you proud of your anecdotes of brave individuality? If so, you haven’t understood. I’d much rather reach my last breath and be able to say ‘I was true to myself,’ not ‘that clown suit really f*cked with their heads.’

Eliezer—surely getting weird looks when trying to explain your immortality scheme to the pagan types gives you get a warm fuzzy rational glow rather than a feeling of being outcast?

Oh, and either ‘camaraderie’ or ‘comradeship’ please! ;)

[dmh_phoenix]

Certainly, dissent, or “difference” in general is “an emergent phenomenon”—but what counts, and what can be “part of the design”, is how the group chooses to treat people who are different! For example, keeping the “special ed” kids in regular school not only means the educational system stays aware of them and their issues, but it means that the “normal” kids get regular exposure to neurodiverse kids, and at least occasionally have to communicate with them.

[Q]

“”“But if you think you would totally wear that clown suit, then don’t be too proud of that either! It just means that you need to make an effort in the opposite direction to avoid dissenting too easily. That’s what I have to do, to correct for my own nature.”””

I know exactly what you mean. I often see myself dissenting with the majority. Unfortunately, it is difficult to tell if I do so because I am Right, or because I want to be Different.

Sure, I can use logic. But, how do I know I am being a Rationalist, rather than just Rationalizing? It’s easy to make up arguments (even coherently logical ones) to support incorrect conclusions. Look at economists.

[Eliezer Yudkowsky]

Ben Jones, thanks, fixed.

[Paul Crowley]

Lonely dissent doesn’t feel like going to school dressed in black. It feels like going to school wearing a clown suit.

Debating cryonics with my friends, I have been feeling this an awful lot.

[diegocaleiro]

A social suggestion for dissent. This happened to me by chance, but if you are the kind, like me, that would enjoy wearing pijamas in a steak house, or medidate in front of a public monument, you may read it as advice.
To lead others into dissent is usually much easier than to do it alone. So convincing a tiny group can sometimes be the best way to allow yourself to feel confortable with something. I’ve done some social outcast stuff, and usually I just talk people into it, once they have the information that you will do it, they will do it as well.
I was the first transhumanist in Brazil (circa 2003), I first dissented online, finding “gurus” Bostrom, Yudkowsky, Cordero etc… Soon I decided for cryonics. But only now, after seven years I have actually subscribed, and decided to work towards a better posthuman world. This is because it took some seven years to convince a sufficient amount of my friends (let’s say, 9) that I’m not fuc*#ng crazy. I’m too social, so 9 was my natural threshold, but probably most people would dissent happily with one or two.

[taryneast]

ooh—neat. So the joining mechanism doesn’t necessarily have to go one way… that’s a useful life-hack to know. Talk yourself into it by talking somebody else into it.

I can also see how this mechanism can be abused. Think of all those religions that require their members to evangelise. I’m sure it helps them to believe more strongly in the rightness of their cause.

[TheOtherDave]

(nods) I’ve seen, though I cannot currently cite, studies to this effect about Mormon missionaries… that is, that missionaries don’t convert many outsiders, but that the experience of being a missionary increases many people’s commitment to the faith.

More generally, acting on an idea makes it easier to believe that idea.

[JohnH]

missionaries don’t convert many outsiders,

More converts are obtained then are born into the church. Since missionaries are in pairs then last year there were an average of 10 converts per missionary pair. Does this count as many or few?

[TheOtherDave]

That surprises me. But if that’s a typical result (as opposed to an artifact of averaging conversions from other sources over number of missionaries) over a relatively short time-interval, then yeah, I simply stand corrected. Can you cite?

[Peterdjones]

That counts as a huge geometrical explosion.

30% of mormons go on a mission. 10 converts per pair, 5 converts each, would be an increase of 0.3*5=150% per year. However, that is indexed by baptisms rather than long term membership. Presumably there is quite a lot of backsliding, or the whole world would have been converted.

[diegocaleiro]

Investing in X increases X’s stakes......

Also, as Dennett would point out, you are more likely to defend something for which views are polarized, than something for which they are almost all the same. We do not spend much time discussing shoes wearing, but abortion......

[taryneast]

Investing in X increases X’s stake

Viktor Frankl’s “Man’s Search for Meaning” discusses this notion. His conclusion being that if you want to value something, start investing time in it. ie—you can bootstrap your own life-interests… which is kinda cool if you’re the kind of person searching for “meaning” in life. It means you can do something about it by simply picking something and running with it.

We do not spend much time discussing shoes wearing

well, I’d argue that some people spend an awful lot of time discussing such things ;) but I agree. Mostly we talk about things that we disagree on.

I guess that for certain topics, we don’t have anything left to discuss—so it’s considered a done-deal. We only get heated up where there’s something left to hammer out.

[Alicorn]

In the Asch experiment, there are three lines. What happens if A is really the longest, all but one confederate says B is longest, and one confederate dissenter says C is longest?

[red75]

We were able to conclude that dissent per se increased independence and moderated the errors that occurred, and that the direction of dissent exerted consistent effects.

Asch experiment. PDF. Page 5, column 2, paragraph 1.

[JohnH]

Forget the clown suit. Try defending theism in a place where atheism reigns. Try being chaste before marriage and happily married after. Try to stand up for what you know to be right even if no one else around you is.

It is fashionable and respectable to be a dissenter in pre-approved areas of dissent, try instead to stand up for the norms which one knows to be right, and see what happens.

This is the true lonely dissent and the true rebellion for which the “tolerant” are not able to tolerate regardless of whether it is right or true.

[Arandur]

For that matter, try being born into the Church, not going on a mission at the prescribed age, but then still belonging to the Mormon church. Two degrees of dissent there.

Or try being a non-Republican Mormon, cohabitating with crazy right-wingers who think it’s a Good Idea to shut down Planned Parenthood.

For that matter, try being a bisexual in the Mormon church. (Or a furry!) You can’t talk about your sense of identity without your Mormon friends judging you, but you can’t talk about your religion with your non-Mormon friends because they’ll consider you a hypocrite.

But you know what’s interesting? In each of the above situations, all of which apply (or have applied in the past) to me, I can think of someone else I know who’s in the same situation.

With seven billion people on this planet, is it really possible to dissent in a “unique” way?

This is not meant to detract from Yudkowsky’s post; he himself said “there are [others] in the world, somewhere, but they aren’t there next to you. You have to explain it, alone, to people who just think it’s weird”. But it’s an interesting thought. Reminds me of the saying: “In China, if you’re one-in-a-million, there are a thousand of you”.

[MatthewBaker]

That’s what the internet has given us more than anything. The ability to find others willing to dissent on the same level and its why its probably the greatest technological advancement our species has made so far (barring moon landing and possibly cryonics).

[Nornagest]

I’m somewhat ambivalent about this. The Internet makes it much easier to find like opinions, but that capability can be used just as easily to reinforce existing biases as to dissolve them, a privilege previously available only to the cultural mainstream in a given region. That does make forming or belonging to a subculture a lot easier—and the Internet seems to be pushing out mass culture in its ~1945 to ~1995 form, as a result—but it’s not as easy to conclude that it makes people’s opinions on average any more adaptive.

I suppose we can expect a polyculture to be more resistant to infection, at least. That’s a plus.

[Arandur]

That’s an interesting point… so if we define thusly:

• “Toni” is the set of all beliefs, values, and predilections held by a given person, named with the generic name “Toni”;

• “Normal” is the set of all beliefs, values, and predilections held by the “cultural mainstream” dominating the geographical region wherein Toni lives;

• “Abnormal” is the relative complement) of “Normal” with respect to “Toni”;

then we can conclude that the internet, and indeed the advent of mass long-distance communication in general, serves to augment the strength of “Abnormal”… regardless of “Abnormal”’s moral value with respect to the “cultural mainstream”?

[Nornagest]

Well, the same process is happening for everyone (at different rates depending on how much weight they give to user-directed long-distance communication relative to face-to-face or mass media), not just to Toni. It’s less that that communication style makes everyone more perverse relative to the cultural mainstream and more that it weakens the concept of a cultural mainstream by making other viewpoints more accessible.

The main point I was trying to make, though, is that this isn’t necessarily adaptive even if you make the assumption that cultural conformity isn’t. By making the loci of culture self-organizing rather than depending largely on extrinsic factors like geographical chance, you make it easier for any given person to find a culture that suits their needs, but also remove many of the barriers to cult attractors.

[Arandur]

Well, yes, that’s true. So what’s the net result? Maximum entropy? Everyone ends up evenly spread out across value-space? If that’s the case, then what basis do we have for a sense of morality in the first place? Or does the force of Affective Death Spirals cause valuepoints to gravitate toward each other, forming factionalization? That’s difficult to imagine, though, because someone can belong to two different, even generically (though not in fact) opposing, factions: Gay and Republican, Mormon and Rationalist.

Predict the future. Go. :P

EDIT: How do you feel about the hypothesis that the distance between a valuepoint and the “mainstream” valuepoint correlates positively with the susceptibility of that valuepoint to an Affective Death Spiral? I.e., people are more adamant about holding beliefs that are more “weird”.

[Nornagest]

I’d keep morality out of this discussion entirely, to be honest. It tends to obscure more than it illuminates when talking about cultural dynamics.

[Arandur]

Okay, so forget morality. What does the shape of valuespace end up looking like? Maximum entropy? Factionalization? Or one new cultural mainstream, in a different place in valuespace than the previous one?

[Nornagest]

I think we can safely rule out a single cultural mainstream—our cultural architecture post-Internet would make one unstable, since it makes any opposition visible and self-reinforcing. About the only way for one to exist would be if human preference space turns out to be narrow enough to accommodate only one when sufficiently analyzed, which given what we know about minds I very much doubt is the case. Maximum entropy doesn’t seem much more likely, since it also seems unstable in view of human alliance-seeking behavior.

That leaves factionalism—but that’s a pretty broad spectrum, and there are too many unknowns for me to make solid predictions about where points in value-space will end up clustering, if they ever stabilize at all. I don’t think the conflicting value systems you describe are much of a barrier, though; people might have an impressive capacity for cognitive dissonance, but they don’t have an infinite one.

[Arandur]

Oh yes, well, I wouldn’t expect any actual predictions at this point. :3 That would be rather difficult. But I agree that factionalism is the Most Likely Scenario; vocal dissent will work against minimum entropy, and alliance-seeking will work against maximum entropy.

The analogy of the formation of stars and planets keeps coming to mind, but I think that might be just noise.

The problem with factionalism is that group psychology tends to lead to inter-faction wars… do you think this is likely to be a legitimate, real-world problem in the future?

[Nornagest]

We can definitely expect to see conflict—we see it already at a small scale. I’m not really comfortable wearing the futurist hat when it comes to predicting what future factional conflicts will look like, though.

[Arandur]

I’m sorry; I did not mean to interrogate you. I meant my questions as a hypothetical conversation-starter; I may have been too aggressive.

[MatthewBaker]

If your interested in fiction about possible futures, i advise you look at some of the below universes :) <---- EDIT for clarification.

Shadowrun seems like one possibility that would be cool but not very realistic in the future, that’s one of the only fictional universes i would assume has any substantial probability given the predicate that magic returns to the world.

Another one would be the Ardneh sequence by Fred Saberhagen which requires no such prior just a lot of awesome AI development that doesn’t end in a completely positive singularity.

[Arandur]

Caution! Caution!

[MatthewBaker]

I dont refer to them for actual predictions xD i just thought if you were interested in possible futures consistent with evidence then you should read those series. I’m quite aware of that fallacy, but I’m sorry if i was unclear.

[Arandur]

Well, then. :3 I’d be happy to take a look! Thank you for your entirely non-fallacious contribution.

[MatthewBaker]

I was more focused on its influence on myself :) however seeing the tragedy of the Gifford’s shooting and other home grown terrorists i guess i should take the value with a grain of salt.

[Alicorn]

JohnH, you have not historically been especially trollish. You’re getting there now. Calm down and come back later, maybe.

[JohnH]

maybe.

[Nornagest]

I probably don’t need to tell you this, but I’m pretty sure that was meant to be “maybe I’ve described the correct course of action”, not “maybe you should come back [implication: and maybe not]”.

That being said, though, Alicorn’s right. Unbiased reception of theism is perhaps a collective sore spot for LW, but willfully poking something in the sore spots is not generally considered polite—and you’re not likely to get much applause by associating the site with the “intolerant tolerance” meme, either.

[mat33]

“I would totally have worn a clown suit to school. My serious conversations were with books, not with other children.”

The same goes for me. But then, our teachers told us not to be afraid to ask “silly” questions and express weird ideas. If you aren’t the best and you aren’t nearly the worst student, a lot of others would be thinking along same lines at the moment. Our teachers pointed that our… and it helped, actually. Well, it wasn’t your average school.

“But if you think you would totally wear that clown suit, then don’t be too proud of that either! It just means that you need to make an effort in the opposite direction to avoid dissenting too easily.”

The age takes care of that. It fills you with “cached ideas” and an overhealming need for security. Maturity (it isn’t nearly as positive a thing, as it may sound) makes you a conservator.

[-ind]

What about those who merely play “devils advocate,” by presenting the dissenting opinion in situations where there’s a general consensus, whether or not the presenter agrees with the dissenting opinion? I just hate it when people all agree on one topic without even considering other veiwpoints. Would that just be playing the iconoclast role, or would it just be giving people more options in their choices?

[scribbler]

It’s a universal phenomena. Every social animal despite its social behaviour will have certain outliers. This is true not just among animals but also other elements of the universe including galaxies of stars and planets.

There would exist among the homogeneous mass, a few outliers. That’s the Universe’s way to provide for evolution. Without dissent and difference, life would not be sustainable.

[MugaSofer]

In my experience, most people react to learning that I’m vegetarian by trying to argue me out of my crazy non-meat-eating ways. Usually just praising the taste of various meat products, but dire warnings of malnutrition are also popular. Some people can get quite angry at you, presumably based on the fact that choosing vegetarianism on ethical grounds tactitly labels meat-eaters as unethical.

[Alfador]

I wouldn’t have worn a clown suit in high school, per se… but in college I made campus newspapers (plural; I transferred from one university to another and one major to another mid-undergraduate… and thus ended up taking five years for my bachelor’s) by wearing fake fox ears and tails, and later a bright blue cloak. Not because I wanted to make a statement. Not because I was TRYING to make everybody’s day a bit more surreal, though that was definitely a bonus. Just because I wanted to, and wasn’t about to let conformity get in the way.

One of my professors had a problem with this. One. And it’s telling that rather than say “I have a problem with you wearing that sort of thing in class”, he instead insisted that it was disruptive to other students. Now, I could have argued my position, taken a poll of my classmates, or complained to higher authorities in the department. Instead… I took off my ears whenever I was in that professor’s class, because I was paying to learn that course, and I wasn’t about to let a problem that may have been wholly the professor’s, or legitimately the other students’, get in the way of that just because I wanted to wear a ridiculous outfit to class.

I do admit that I probably would not have been so respectful and mature had I been eleven years old learning Potions. I do recall being respectful to my Chemistry instructor at twelve years… but then, I wasn’t wearing an unusual outfit, there. ;)

[Galap]

Yeah, I’ve definitely had to learn the hard way to tone it down with respect to having ideas and interests that run completely orthogonal to familiarity with peers/​society.

Perhaps what annoys me even more is when I like something that coincidentally has associated with it one of those Outside The Box groups, when I don’t want to be associated with that group, or more accurately, don’t want to have to hear the canned response for it, whatever it may be.

For example, I like heavy metal and anime, but have no desire to be a part of those counter-cultural groups. Unfortunately, it’s pretty hard for me to talk about either of those things without people—both inside and outside those ciricles—from assigning me to that bin. It’s not harmless categorization either: being considered to fit in those bins has pretty strong social baggage attached to it.

[themusicgod1]

This strikes me as an unfortunately place and time-sensitive OvercomingBias/​LessWrong post. As the moral character and fashions change with the change of generations, it’s going to lose its edge. While the reader is going to vaguely understand the general idea...they may not really ‘get’ why or that cryonics was that far outside the overton window to begin with. It might warrant relooking at or retelling this particular set of stories in a more recent context later on. I wonder if the retelling of the Sequences later on end up doing just this.

[lawrence-hg257]

But the question is, is the expected utility and the probability of success of dissenting high enough to outweigh the risks? A true dissenter would face the risk of being ostracised and potentially losing their grounds to be paid attention to—in which case only the dissenter would experience any change: that of the quality of their life experience drastically dropping. Furthermore, what if dissenting actually causes a decrease in expected utility? (e.g. It would be better to conform now and dissent later when one has gained a high enough status to be listened to.)

When does the benefit outweigh the cost? When is it better to outright dissent rather than to introduce a shift in thinking from inside the pack?

[dragonfiremalus]

All throughout highschool I wanted to learn to play the guitar. But at that point in time almost everyone I knew was learning to play the guitar, and I sure wasn’t going to do what everybody else did. Now, six years later, I’m finally learning. It’s a real shame let my disgust of conformity drive me away from putting off something I now love.

[Good_Burning_Plastic]

Actually not doing stuff there’s already a glut of is not a terribly bad heuristic: for example, if in your area there are 1000 guitarist and 100 drummers it’s much easier for you to get into a band if you play the drums than if you play the guitar.

[jwoodward48]

Ah, but that’s assuming that their goal is “get into a band,” rather than “attain a new and interesting hobby.”

[happy dark lord]

If only people were saner.

We should create a process to rate the degree of dissent of every action, story, idea. That way after a small inventory, we could all have our ‘dissent score’. And by this way know if we have to correct our biais towards more social efficiency or towards more edgy thoughts.

What say?

[happy dark lord]

Something like an Erdos number where 0 is the most common and politically correct man in the universe, and every departure of thought gives you 1. Your score gets higher and higher as you depart further and further from that man.

[Strawperson]

The overcoming bias link in footnote 3 is broken, here’s a working version:

https://​​www.overcomingbias.com/​​2007/​​06/​​against_free_th.html

[Takia]

Funnily enough, while I did not wear a clown suit to school, I did wear a bright green cape. Not for any particular reason either. Perhaps it would be wise of me to make that effort to avoid being biased towards nonconformity. I wouldn’t consider myself an iconoclast though, although now that I think about it, my goal of combatting aging with the idea of living forever has earned me many criticisms.
I suppose I just haven’t thought to measure how lonely my beliefs are.
That said, there are also the beliefs I keep to myself in the name of conformity, so I’ve come to the conclusion that humans are complicated.

[DirectedEvolution]

Many are interested in longevity medicine and it has received significant research funding in the past year. I can direct you to resources to learn more based on your biology background. It’s an unconventional but increasingly popular topic among researchers, so you’re not alone.

[ROM]

Asch’s conformity experiment showed that the presence of a single dissenter tremendously reduced the incidence of “conforming” wrong answers. Individualism is easy, experiment shows, when you have company in your defiance. Every other subject in the room, except one, says that black is white. You become the second person to say that black is black. And it feels glorious: the two of you, lonely and defiant rebels, against the world!

It’s probably worth noting that most people are actually pretty okay with being lone dissenters—at least if we’re going by Asch’s conformity experiments. The original studies have been a bit overblown in psych textbooks, which tend to portray conformity as more rampant than it really is (see here and here). In reality, individualism shows up more often than you’d think. In the original study, about 35.7% conformed, and in a recent replication, it’s around 33%. None of this really contradicts what Yud said here, though, just adds a little nuance. Most people aren’t conformist sheep.

[Robert Cousineau]

http://​​www.overcoming-bias.com/​​2007/​​06/​​against_free_th.html.

This link should be: https://​​www.overcomingbias.com/​​p/​​against_free_thhtml (removing the hyphen will allow a successful redirect).