How to Think for Yourself - Read & Written By Paul Graham (AI Paul Graham)

how to think for yourself November 2020 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 you can't publish papers saying things other people already know you need to say things no one else has realized yet 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 you see this pattern with startup

Founders too um 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 ditto for essayists an essay that told people things they already knew would be boring you have to tell them something new but this pattern isn't

Universal in fact it doesn't hold for most kinds of work in most kinds of work to be an administrator for example all you need is the first half all you need

is to be right it's not essential that everyone else be wrong there's room for a little novelty in most kinds of work but in practice there's a fairly sharp distinction between the kinds of work where it's

essential to be independent-minded and the kinds where it's not I wish someone had told me about this distinction when I was a kid because it's one of the most important things to think about when you're deciding what kind of work you

want to do do you want to do the kind of work where you can only win by thinking differently from everyone else I suspect most people's unconscious mind will

answer that question before their conscious mind has a chance to I know mine does 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 one difficulty here though is that people are often mistaken about where they fall on the Spectrum from conventional to independent-minded

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 and the independent-minded meanwhile are often

unaware how different their ideas are from conventional ones at least till they State them public publicly one convenient consequence of the fact that no one identifies as

conventional minded is that you can say what you like about conventional minded people without getting in too much trouble 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 find a specific passage to pin It On by the time they reach adulthood most people know roughly how smart they are in the narrow sense of

ability to solve preset problems because they're constantly being tested and ranked according to it but schools generally ignore independent mindedness except to the extent they try to

suppress it so we don't get anything like the same kind of feedback about how independent-minded we are there may even be a phenomenon like Dunning Krueger at work where the most con conventional

minded people are confident that they're independent-minded while the genuinely independent-minded worry they might not be independent-minded enough um so 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 one of the most effective techniques is one practiced

unintentionally by most nerds simply to be less aware what conventional beliefs are it's hard to be a conformist if you don't know what you're supposed supposed to conform to though again it may be

that such people already are independent-minded a conventional minded person would probably feel anxious not knowing what other people thought and make more effort to find out 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 because the

independent-minded find it uncomfortable to be surrounded by conventional minded people they tend to self-segregate once they have a chance to the problem with high school is that they haven't yet had

a chance to plus High School tends to be an inward-looking Little World whose inhabitants lack confidence both of which magnify the forces of conformism so high school is often a bad time for

the independent-minded but there is some Advantage even here it teaches you what to avoid if you later find yourself in a situation that makes you think this is like high school you

know you should get out 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 but while it probably is is a net loss to spend time

there it has at least made me think more about the distinction between independent and conventional mindedness which I probably wouldn't have done otherwise 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 one of the strangest is that the founders find themselves able to speak more freely

with founders of other companies than with their own employees the decrease in independent mindedness in growing startups is still an open problem but there may be

Solutions Founders can delay the problem by making a conscious effort only to hire independent-minded people which of course also has the ancillary benefit

that they have better ideas another possible solution is to create policies that somehow disrupt the force of conformism much as control rods slow

chain reactions so that the conventional minded aren't as dangerous the physical separation of Lockheed Skunk Works may have had this

as a side benefit recent examples suggest employee forums like slack may not not be an unmitigated good the most radical solution would be to grow

revenues without growing the company you think hiring that Junior PR person will be cheap compared to a programmer but what will be the effect on the average level of independent mindedness in your

company the growth in staff relative to faculty seems to have had a similar effect on universities perhaps the rule about Outsourcing work that's not your core

competency should be augmented by one about Outsourcing work done by people who'd ruin your culture as employees some investment firms already seem to be able to grow revenues without

growing the number of employees automation plus the ever increasing articulation of the tech stack suggest this may one day be possible for product companies

fortunately you don't have to spend all your time with independent-minded people it's enough to have one or two you can talk to regularly and once you find them they're usually as eager to talk as you

are they need you too although universities no longer have the kind of Monopoly they used to have on education good universities are still an excellent way

to meet independent-minded people most students will still be conventional minded but you'll at least find clumps of independent-minded ones rather than the near zero you may have found in high

school it also works to go in the other direction as well as cultivating A small collection of independent-minded friends to try to meet as many different 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 but by different types of people I don't

mean demographically different for this technique to work they have to think differently so while it's an excellent idea to go and visit other countries you can probably find people who think

differently right around the corner when I meet someone who knows a lot about something unusual which includes practically everyone if you dig deep enough I try to learn what they know

that other people don't there are almost always surprises here it's a good way to make conversation when you meet strangers but I don't do it to make

conversation I really want to know you can expand the source of influences in time as well as Space by reading history when I read history I do it not just to

learn what happened but to try to get inside the heads of people who lived in the past how did things look to them this is hard to do but worth the effort for the same reason it's worth traveling far to

triangulate a point um 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 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 treat it as a puzzle you know that

some accepted ideas will later turn out to be wrong see if you can guess which the end goal is not to find flaws in the things you're told but to find the new

ideas that had been concealed by the broken ones so this game should be an exciting quest for novelty not a boring protocol for intellectual hygiene and

you'll be surprised when you start asking is this true how often the answer is not an immediate yes if you have any imagination you're more likely to have

too many leads to follow than too few more generally your goal should be not to let anything into your head unexamined and things don't always enter your head in the form of statements some

of the most powerful influences are implicit how do you even notice these by standing back and watching how other people get their ideas when you stand back at a sufficient distance you can

see ideas spreading through groups of people like waves the most obvious are in fashion you notice a few people wearing a certain kind of shirt and then more and more until half the people

around you are wearing the same shirt you may not care much what you wear but there are intellectual Fashions too and you definitely don't want to participate in those not just because you want

sovereignty over your own thoughts but because unfashionable ideas are disproportionately like to lead somewhere interesting the best place to find undiscovered ideas is where no one else

is looking there are intellectual fashions in every field but their influence varies one of the reasons politics for

example tends to be boring is that it's so extremely subject to them 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 to go beyond this general advice we need to look at the internal structure of

independent mindedness at the individual muscles we need to exercise as it were it seems to me that it has three components fastidiousness about truth resistance to being told what to think

and curiosity fastidiousness about truth means more than just not believing things that are false it means being

careful about degree of belief for most people degree of belief rushes unexamined toward the extremes the unlikely becomes impossible and the

probable becomes certain 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 to the independent-minded this seems unpardonably sloppy they're willing to have anything in their heads from from highly speculative hypotheses

to apparent tautologies but on subjects they care about everything has to be labeled with a carefully considered degree of belief fastidiousness about truth

doesn't imply that an independent-minded person won't be dishonest but that he won't be deluded it's sort of like the definition of a gentleman as someone who is never unintentionally

Rude the independent-minded thus have a horror of ideologies which require one to accept a whole collection of beliefs at once and to treat them as articles of Faith to an independent-minded person

that would seem revolting just as it would seem to someone fastidious about food to take a bite of a submarine sandwich filled with a large variety of ingredients of indeterminate age and

Providence without this fastidiousness about truth you can't be truly independent-minded um it's not enough just to have resistance to being told what to think

those kind of people reject conventional ideas only to replace them with the most random conspiracy theories and since these conspiracy theories have often been manufactured to capture them they end up being less independent-minded

than ordinary people because they're subject to a much more exacting Master than mere convention you see this especially among political extremists they think themselves non-conformists but actually

they're Niche conformists their opinions may be different from the average persons but they are often more influenced by their peers opinions than the average average

persons are um can you increase your fastidiousness about truth I would think so in my experience merely thinking

about something you're fastidious about causes that fastidiousness to grow if so this is one of those rare virtues we can have more of merely by wanting it 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 if we broaden the concept of f

ousness about truth so that it excludes pandering bogus and pomposity as well as falsehood in the strict sense our model of independent mindedness can expand

further into the Arts 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 your unconven 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 some of the most novel ideas seemed at the time almost like practical

jokes think how often your reaction to a novel idea is to laugh I don't think it's because novel ideas are funny per se but because novelty and humor share a certain kind of

surprisingness but while not identical the two are close enough that there is a definite correlation between having a sense of humor and being independent-minded just as there is between being humorless and being

conventional minded this correlation is far from perfect though goal and D don't seem to have been very strong in the humor department but someone who is both

neurotypical and humorless is very likely to be conventional minded 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 but if we can't

increase our resistance to being told what to think we can at least Shore It Up by surrounding ourselves with other independent-minded people the third component of

independent mind nness curiosity may be the most interesting to the extent that we can give a brief answer to the question of where novel ideas come from it's

curiosity that's what people are usually feeling before having them in my experience independent mindedness and curiosity predict one another perfectly everyone I know who's independent minded

is deeply curious and everyone I know whose's conventional minded isn't except curiously children all small children are Cur 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 whereas the independent-minded are the gluttons of curiosity who keep eating

even after they're full exception gossip almost everyone is curious about gossip the three components of independent mindedness work in concert fastidiousness about truth and

resistance to being told what to think leaves space in your brain and curiosity finds new ideas to fill it interestingly the three components can substitute for one another in much the

same way muscles can if you're sufficiently fastidious about truth you don't need to be as resistant to being told what to think because fastidiousness alone will create

sufficient gaps in your knowledge and either one can compensate for curiosity because if you create enough space in your brain your discomfort at the resulting vacuum will add Force to your

curiosity or curiosity can compensate for them if you're sufficiently curious you don't need to clear space in your brain because the new ideas you discover will push out the conventional ones you

acquired by default because the components of independent mindedness are so interchangeable you can have them to varying degrees and still get the same

result so there is not just a single model of independent mindedness some independent-minded people are openly subversive and others are quietly curious they all know the

secret handshake though is there a way to cultivate curiosity to start with you want to avoid situations that suppress it how much does the work

you're currently doing engage your curiosity if the answer is not much maybe you should change something the most important active step you can take

to cultivate your curiosity is probably to seek out the topics that engage it few adults are equally curious about everything and it doesn't seem as if you can choose which topics interest you so

it's up to you to find them or invent them if necessary another way to increase your curiosity is to indulge it by investigating things you're interested in curiosity is unlike most other

appetites in this respect indulging it tends to increase rather than to Sate it questions lead to more questions curiosity seems to be more individual than fastidiousness about truth or

resistance to being told what to think to the degree people have the latter to they're usually pretty General whereas different people can be curious about very different things so perhaps

curiosity is the compass here perhaps if your goal is to discover novel ideas your motto should not be do what you love so much as do what you're curious about