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Viliam comments on Open thread, Apr. 18 - Apr. 24, 2016 - Less Wrong
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One should learn to walk before they try to run. Conformity is a signal of average social skills. Non-conformity usually means low social skills; and sometimes is a costly signal of high social skills. Unless you really know what you are doing, it's the former.
Generally, if your social skills are really bad (and they could be worse than you imagine), imitating average people is an improvement, and is probably a better idea than any smart idea you invented yourself (assuming that your current bad situation already is a result of years of following your own ideas about how to behave).
If you want to be a socially successful person, aim to be a diplomat, not a clown, because it's better to be a mediocre diplomat than a mediocre clown.
Of course, everything is a potential trade-off. Sometimes you have a good reason to do something differently than most people, maybe even differently than everyone else. But choose your battles wisely. Be weird strategically, not habitually.
It is probably wise to see your non-conformity impulses as a part of your self-sabotaging mechanism.
Er, no, I don't think so.
Conformity is a function that requires a rather important argument: conformity to what? When you see non-conformity, the usual case is that you see someone from a different tribe and that tells you nothing about this person's social skills.
Occasionally there is a different situation: someone is trying to conform and failing. Now that is actually a sign of low social skills. But that isn't quite non-conformity, that's failing at conformity.
Well, us nerds are famous for lacking social skills. We may imagine ourselves to be a parallel (superior) tribe to the rest of the society, but the fact is that we are usually unable to cooperate even with each other. So let's continue making fun of the sour grapes of conformity.
That's a popular meme. I'm not sure how well does it match reality.
Sure, socially incompetent nerds exist. But socially incompetent yobs and rednecks exist, too, and might well outnumber the nerds. The meme is sticky for a couple of reasons: (1) it cuts nerds down to size ("He might be much smarter than me, but he couldn't pick up a girl if his life depended on it"); and (2) it has a nice reversion of skills ("Brainiac, but clueless").
Besides, there is an important distinction between people who want to but can't and people who just don't want to -- a distinction that's not made here.
I am not sure what does that show or prove. Cooperation is not the holy grail of human social behaviour.
Mutant and proud :-P
Don't believe stereotypes you see in media, and don't use a static model of "social skills". Being nerdy went mainstream 30 years ago, and there's probably a similar social success rate among nerds as among other groups.
"just another tribe" is pretty accurate IMO.
I don't care about media. My model is based on interaction with nerds in fandom and in Mensa, and the simplified generalization is: too busy engaging in signalling competitions, which undermines their ability to cooperate and win anything other than mostly imaginary debate points.
The few cases I have seen nerds achieving something impressive, it was usually because some half-nerdy/half-mainstream person organized the project (using the skills they gained elsewhere) and did not participate in the pissing contests.
The cooperation mostly fails because everyone is too busy to prove they are better than everyone else in the group. Trying to explain why that might be a mistake runs into exactly the same problem, only one level higher (i.e. it becomes a competition of writing the best snarky comment on why people who cooperate are idiots).
That's not terribly representative (MENSA, in particular, is known to be quite dysfunctional). Here is a field report describing successful nerds:
OK, how did we get here...
And now you post this:
I feel like it actually supports my opinion. The field report describes successful nerds who are good at the social game. And what I say is, essentially, "let's do it (or at least let's not have a norm of going in the opposite direction)".
I'm confused.
This is a descriptive statement about reality. I happened to disagree with it.
This is prescriptive statement about... I'm actually not sure what. Let's be successful? Sure, let's. But it has nothing to do with non-conformity.
Note that in esr's example the nerds are successful and good at social games. But they are not successful because they're good at social games.
Let's be successful through cooperation, which conformity is an ingredient of.
For people to cooperate, they have to agree on the project they cooperate on, and also agree on the general strategy to accomplish this project. With perfect Bayesian reasoners, the agreement would be achieved by Aumann's Theorem. With humans, certain doze of conformity is required to overcome the remaining differences in opinion remaining after people have already updated on each other's opinions.
If you can't do this last step, you get Mensa. Nothing ever gets done, because everyone has a different opinion, and everyone feels it would be low-status to accept someone else's solution when it is obviously imperfect (therefore it wouldn't be accepted on basis of pure logic).
As an example, a few years ago, when I had much more free time, I was active in two societies: Mensa, and a local Esperanto group.
In the Esperanto group, as a team of five or ten people we succeeded to publish a new textbook, a multi-media CD (containing books, songs, and computer programs in E-o) and later a larger DVD edition (with added E-o courses, and an offline version of E-o Wikipedia), and created a website containing a wiki and a forum; all this within two years. (Later I decided that E-o isn't my high priority anymore, so I quit the team. As far as I know, the remaining members now use their skills for some commercial projects related to learning languages other than E-o, plus organize international E-o meetups.)
During the same time in Mensa... generally, whenever I suggested anything, it was almost certainly rejected; and even when by miracle people finally agreed about something, when we looked at the details, the same pattern repeated on the lower level. It was a fractal of nitpicking. At the end, nothing got done. We succeeded to agree that we ought to change our web forum, because it had no moderation and was dominated by a few prolific crackpots (who weren't even our members). But during two years we were unable to agree on which software solution to use, and what specific rules should the new forum have.
I spent about the same amount of energy in both groups, and the difference in outcome was staggering. This is how I learned that productivity is a two-place word: how much I am productive is a function of both my personal traits and the traits of the environment I am trying to work in. When you have people who second-guess everything but contribute nothing, the output is close to zero. When you have people who can go along with your crazy experiments, some of those experiements succeed, and a few of them will be really impressive. (But going along with something that you have a different opinion about, that's conformity.)
When programming, you have the option to do the whole thing yourself, and then you don't need to cooperate with anyone. But even that applies to specific kinds of projects, where you can become an expert at every relevant aspect. (For example, if you make a computer game, it is unlikely for the same person to be great at coding and graphics and music and level design and balancing multiplayer.) But when you look at the real world, you have basically two options: either cooperate with non-nerds, or find nerds who are able to cooperate.
My first thought is that it's easier to get things done in an Esperanto group because the goal-- spread Esperanto-- is more obvious than what a Mensa group should do, but perhaps I'm underestimating how much is obvious for a Mensa group to do.
I was a member of Mensa for a while, but was underwhelmed by the intellectual quality. I know a couple of very smart people who are or were in Mensa, but they weren't local to me. I've been told that there's a lot of variation between local groups.
There's a pattern I saw in local Mensa publications that I now have filed under people trying to appear intelligent. The article starts with a bunch of definitions that don't look obviously awful, but which somehow lead to a preferred conclusion.
Um, this is getting complicated :-)
First, terminology. By "conformity" I mean matching the social expectations. If your tribe expects people like you to dance naked under a full moon, you dance naked under a full moon. If your tribe expects people like you to catch and burn witches, you catch and burn witches. That's conformity.
As an aside, conformity is NOT "having social skills" and non-conformity is NOT "lacking social skills". These are rather different things.
Second, success. Speaking crudely, there are people who Get Shit Done and there are people who don't. People who don't, as you point out, talk and critique and nitpick and delay and form committees and find reasons why that's impossible, etc. etc. (see Mensa).
Basically whether you successfully Get Shit Done depends on your executive function and on the incentives. For a given person the executive function is fairly stable and the incentives, of course, vary a lot in each situation. Notably, people who Get Shit Done are often more non-conformist because they can afford to. They are valuable to their group/organisation/tribe and that gives them the freedom to ignore (within limits) the social expectations. Those who are not as capable are more conformist because they are less valuable, more fungible, and so more in need of maintaining high social approval of themselves.
Third, cooperation. I don't think that cooperation is a function of conformity, outside of extreme cases. Or, rather, let me put it this way: people who Get Shit Done tend to cooperate with those who can provide what they need. They don't care much about social expectations because they care about Getting Shit Done and the conformity is rather peripheral to that. On the other hand people who play social power games do care about conformity because conformity is a major dimension in these social power games.
Not recognizing what the rules are or not understanding why they exist could be more easily confused with non-conformity, while recognizing the rules but failing to apply them is more apparently incompetent. Volitional non-conformity requires understanding of the rules and the ability to apply them, and it's not entirely obvious what constitutes understanding in this highly subjective matter. The aspect of opting in/out of acquiring the skills needed for conformity complicates things further.