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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. 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 publicly.   
  
By the time they reach adulthood, most people know roughly how smart they are
(in the narrow sense of ability to solve pre-set 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-Kruger at work, where the most
conventional-minded people are confident that they're independent-minded,
while the genuinely independent-minded worry they might not be independent-
minded enough.  
  
___________  
  
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 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.   
  
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.   
  
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
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 travelling far to triangulate a point.  
  
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 likely to lead somewhere interesting. The best place to
find undiscovered ideas is where no one else is looking.   
  
___________  
  
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.  To the independent-minded,
this seems unpardonably sloppy. They're willing to have anything in their
heads, from highly speculative hypotheses to (apparent) tautologies, but on
subjects they care about, everything has to be labelled with a carefully
considered degree of belief.   
  
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
provenance.  
  
Without this fastidiousness about truth, you can't be truly independent-
minded. 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.   
  
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.   
  
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. You're _un_
conventional. 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.   
  
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-mindedness, 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 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. Whereas the independent-minded are the gluttons of
curiosity, who keep eating even after they're full.   
  
The three components of independent-mindedness work in concert: fastidiousness
about truth and resistance to being told what to think leave 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
two, 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."  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
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