30 thoughts on “Conformism”

      2. Would that have been around the time Shuttle-C finally bit the dust and the Air Force went it’s own separate way and started the EELV program? Going back through old Mike Griffin speeches I noticed at least at one point he was still quite bitter about that and thought the Clinton Administration screwed NASA and Marshall by forcing not forcing the AF to work with NASA.

  2. I reserve the top two quads for the sociopaths and the bottom two for the ne’er do wells. But I’m an optimist at heart. 🙂

    1. The creative rule breakers, interestingly enough, are the attorneys. Being an attorney, it appears from experience with a social organization registered as a non-profit, is about what rule can be safely ignored or worked around.

      Teachers are the creative rule followers, the tattle-tales, who are anxious about the attorneys telling people about the rules that can be ignored. Andy Ngo claims a high number of public school teachers among the Rogues’ Gallery of arrested Anti-fa, and isn’t Anti-fa kind of an extreme version of people telling you about the way things ought to be?

      1. I’d promote politicians ahead of the ordinary (ambulance chasing) attorney in the upper right quad. Since change is affected largely by determining the excusable. But since modern pols are largely derived from the litigious classes the difference is hardly worth a mention. Other than that your characterization of the upper half sociopathy seems accurate.

  3. The trouble with things like this is everyone wants to be whatever subset is viewed at virtuous, so all the sheep claim to be aggressive nonconformists. Everyone wants to be an alpha, no one sees themselves as a gamma. my second wife’s nutjob friends all identified as “cultural creatives.” Etc. (Me, I’m a radioactive cannibal at heart.)

  5. There are two types of people in the world: Those who think there are two types of people, and those who think there are more. 😛

    Maybe replace 2 with 2^(N) if you want to be “sophisticated”.

    (Tongue partially in cheek – I understand the need to draw contrasts between extremes along some measure.)

    1. We have to keep it simple or we’ll be reading the rulebook all night and never get to play the game.

    2. I thought you were going for that old line: “There are two kinds of people in this world. Those that think in binary and the other nine.”

    3. There are two kinds of people in the world, those who think there are two kinds of people and those who don’t.

      1. There are actually four kinds of people in any large organization like an army or a corporation: The smart-and-industrious, the smart-and-lazy, the not-so-smart-and-industrious and the not-so-smart-and-lazy.

        The not-so-smart-and-lazy are going to be in any organization, and one can always assign them some menial task.

        The smart-and-lazy are predisposed to delegating work to other people and are suited for leadership.

        The smart-and-industrious, interestingly enough, are excellent for staff work in support of the leadership.

        The not-so-smart-and-industrious, however, are dangerous in the amount of damage they can cause and need to be purged from any organization, although unfortunately, they often are promoted to where they do bad things.

  6. Since one’s quadrant depends more on one’s personality than the nature of the rules, most people would occupy the same quadrant even if they’d grown up in a quite different society.

    Objection! The contents of the ideas do matter.

    It seems to me that part of this long overdue introspection is that lefty ‘smart-set’ types are realizing they don’t really like where their fellow travellers are taking them and are trying to draw some lines to distance themselves from them. Distance away, but let’s not pretend that you were “always secretly on the other side” than these totalitarian fanatics. Or that there is some sort of commonality between the “agressively conventional-minded”ness of an Antifa cancel culture thug and some poor yeoman shopkeeper who wants to keep things together and working and is suspicious of all the nonsense his kids heads are getting filled with.

    No, your fanatics weren’t always “secretly on the same side/of the same class” as the people you’ve always wanted to look down on and despise.

    1. Ehh, perhaps this is a bit unfair.

      The sooner we can all get back to agreeing that freedom of thought, speech, and inquiry is a good thing, the better. Anyone who is seriously opposed to the new thought police is a friend.

      1. But if we didn’t have “freedom of thought, speech, and inquiry,” we wouldn’t be in this mess, because communists would have been locked up instead of allowed to infiltrate and subvert the institutions.

        The left’s behaviour is perfectly rational for those in control. The problem is that the right didn’t behave the same way when they were in control decades ago.

  7. I’m sure there’s a test with 15 completely transparent questions too.

    Then there’s common sense. Paying attention to traffic laws and speed when there’s a cop behind you is not a indicator of conformance nor is declining to free climb El Capitan.

    A test to weed out stupid non conformists already exists, it’s called prison.

  9. “Could some universities reverse the current trend and remain places where the independent-minded want to congregate?”

    Wait what? When was this ever the case? Granted, I did my stints in college after he said the problems started so I don’t know what it was like in the olden days.

    1. I was there very close to “the transition” if that’s what you want to call it. Even then, if you wanted an “independent-minded” course experience you made sure you took the course pass/fail or outright dropped the course before your grade went onto your permanent GPA. Grades reflected your conformity to the predicates of the syllabus. The degree your formal credential of conformity to the system. What the system is actually based upon either in the form of credentials or syllabi is irrelevant. Like Tom Lehrer stated about “The New Math” it’s not the answer that is important but the process. Of course how you wasted your time in “student governance” or sit-ins and/or protests was spent on your time and your dime.

        1. Nothing like your own institution throwing one under the bus. If I were a student there I’d have serious second thoughts and might consider matriculating elsewhere, if I could afford to do so. And that is the real trick isn’t it?

      1. Look at the social group he belongs to, very conformist, and it isn’t much different than what some poor people who are part of that same social group would name their kids.

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