The Modern Problems with Conformity

post by Zero Contradictions · 2024-07-13T08:20:46.877Z · LW · GW · 5 comments

This is a link post for https://expandingrationality.substack.com/p/the-modern-problems-with-conformity

Contents

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We are social animals, and conformity is part of our social adaptation. We imitate others. This imitation is not just superficial. It is deep. We imitate the structure of knowledge in other brains. For example, you learned language by absorbing knowledge from other people. That knowledge is subconscious. You use it every time you interpret or generate language, but you have no conscious access to it. You absorbed it subconsciously, and you apply it subconsciously.

In the past, conformity was a good heuristic. Common memes were probably adaptive. If a meme was harmful to its hosts, they would not prosper. So, if you imitated the successful people in your community, you would likely be successful too. People lived in small societies, and they lived close to nature. Their memes were regularly tested by reality, and by each other. False beliefs could arise, such as religion, but such beliefs were tested for their adaptiveness. It was hard for a maladaptive meme to spread.

Conformity is unreliable if any of the following are true: 1. Most people are crazy. 2. You can choose your social circle. 3. You are exposed to artificial people. (see the rest of the post in the link)

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comment by Dagon · 2024-07-13T14:43:37.800Z · LW(p) · GW(p)

I think you're glorifying the past.  Historically, conformity was more enforced and more important for survival, but for many individuals it was likely more oppressive and limiting.  Memes were (and are) a mix of adaptive and random, attached to each other in hard-to-identify-in-the-moment ways.  For cultural norms, the various equilibria of different groups and behavioral/belief norms shift in ways that are a mix of adaptive and not.

Conformity is reliable only if the following is true: you are close to the median accepted member of the successful group with  which you're conforming. For outliers, conformity is not an option - either there are personal psychological reasons it's hard to conform, or the normies will notice and prevent you from getting the benefits of membership.  For members of less-successful groups, conformity with your group only brings group-level benefits, which aren't sufficient in today's information environment.

This has ALWAYS been the case, it wasn't that different historically.  The main difference was that prior to 1920s or so, many members of less-successful groups didn't know it, or didn't think there were other options.  

Replies from: NicksName, Zero Contradictions
↑ comment by NicksName · 2024-11-11T14:47:12.318Z · LW(p) · GW(p)

On net, conformity worked 'for us' in the past, because we are here, our ancestors made it. This is just the anthropomorphic principle - those who were too maladapted to conformity got weeded out and can't voice their grievances about it today. It's important to recognize how anyone in the present cannot rely on this, many will fall prey to bad memes like always, all the way back to the beginning of our big brains.

Replies from: Dagon
↑ comment by Dagon · 2024-11-11T18:42:39.222Z · LW(p) · GW(p)

You need to be careful to define "us" in these discussions.  The people for whom it worked in the past are not the people making behavioral choices now.  They are the ancestors of today's people.  You also have to be more specific about what "worked" means - they were able to reproduce and create the current people.  That is very different from what most people mean by "it works" when evaluating how to behave today.

It's also impossible to distinguish what parts of historical behavior "worked" in this way.  Perhaps it was conformity per se, perhaps it was the specific conformist behaviors that previous eras preferred, perhaps it was other parts of the environment that made it work, which no longer does.

Replies from: NicksName
↑ comment by NicksName · 2024-11-11T20:55:44.429Z · LW(p) · GW(p)

Not disagreeing with anything there, perhaps I should have added a bit more to the 'cannot rely on this' part. It will only be after the fact, from the perspective of a being in some present looking at the past, that they can say this or that did or didn't work in a pretty abstract sense, its the fundamental fallacy of conservatism or traditionalism to assume that we just have to repeat or go back to what worked in retrospective. It's a tempting illusion of any perspective looking at the past, that has a tendency to overlook all the beings that didn't make it. We are the winners of history if you will, but only up until this point, just by virtue of being here, in a weak sense we are these people by having inherited their genes, yet a lot of those winners will be dead ends, like in any generation.

Yea, you can only define 'it works' with respect to some value standard, reproduction is a sort of lowest common denominator, you don't have to value reproduction obviously, but if you don't reproduce your values tend to die with you, at least over the long run, so it's part of any bottom line. Their genes continue in us, those genes that lead to conformity/disobedience in these and those circumstances. It's a trite routine to point out how our environment changed a lot, but it's really important in this case. Just doing what everyone does and used to do unthinkingly, out of convergent herd mentality, is going to result in a lot of trouble, like the essay elaborated. We need new conscious and rational solutions that will work with our out of sync, anachronistic brains, that's the huge challenge of modernity.

↑ comment by Zero Contradictions · 2024-07-13T14:55:54.219Z · LW(p) · GW(p)

I'm not the person who wrote the linked post, but you can you add your comment to the Substack post if you want to talk to the author himself.