Comments on: How to be Radical

By: Steve Witham

Steve Witham — Sun, 13 Dec 2009 00:34:03 +0000

Robin, your “free thinker” whose “negative self-definition seems to have more force” on him than rationality is a character I recognize from conversations, accusations, and sour opinions of my own, but not from real life. I don’t think that’s anybody’s actual central motivation. I don’t think that characterizes the middle of the clump of “free thinkers.”

I remember people with strong individual ideas, styles and approaches, and sometimes strong ideas about how to judge truth or falsehood. And of course all of these have ramifications. I remember cranky, lonely and broken people. Also I can think of lots of rationales for respecting or pursuing unconventionality per se in certain contexts.

I agree a lot of us have a reactions against conventional ways that we should watch for. “Shooting yourself in the foot” is a good metaphor for depriving yourself of a safe support while making a risky grab.

I suppose my main problem with this advice is that, to a weirdo, it’s not weirdness but conformity that seems problematic and to require deliberate effort. The idea that he’s turning up the weirdness knob and just needs to ease off… might have more truth to it than weirdos like me like to admit, but if so it’s hard or elusive.

By: eris

eris — Sun, 26 Apr 2009 10:28:37 +0000

I was ready to kiss someone when I found this site. People working to overcome cognitive bias? Fantastic!

Then, I read these two articles.

Evidence, Hanson?

By: Online Clothing Browser

Online Clothing Browser — Tue, 19 Feb 2008 12:29:57 +0000

Eliezer (and Robin), if you haven’t been exposed to it yet, I think you’ll find Hoffman’s work (and follow-up writings that cite Hoffman) on covering and performance interesting.

By: Hopefully Anonymous

Hopefully Anonymous — Sun, 26 Aug 2007 20:41:44 +0000

Eliezer, my memory was jogged by a recent commentor on “looking glass self”. The sociologist is Erving Goffman.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Erving_Goffman

By: Robert Rounthwaite

Robert Rounthwaite — Thu, 23 Aug 2007 06:30:32 +0000

Excellent point. It’s important to realize, though (regarding one of the ealier posts), that, although we may think of certain hairstyles or styles of clothing as “radical,” they are, in fact, not, but rather conventional signals that the person intends to be thought of as radical. Unless one is truly radical in this area (wearing little clothes in the winter, say, in order to burn more calories and lose weight), it’s hard for me to see how that could interfere with success in some other area. I’d say that as long as you are using clothing to correctly signal to others, you aren’t being “radical”. (So a banker could be radical by dressing oddly and would be risking no longer signaling safety and competency, but an eccentric life-extension advocate is not beeing radical by dressing to reflect that reality.)

By: Matthew C

Matthew C — Wed, 27 Jun 2007 01:06:18 +0000

Bleeding patients to restore the balance of their humours had an enormous practice behind it, but not an enormous experimental practice. Come on. We now know that very much of medicine's success is due to placebo effects. That even applies to many surgical techniques. So what you really want is a really convincing version of the shaman or witch doctor for whatever culture you happen to live in. The key is to make sure whatever version of the face paint, rattles and tambourines you use don't become an inadvertant cause of iatrogenic death. Not sure we're doing any better on that measure than our leech-prescribing predecessors. . .

By: Patri Friedman

Patri Friedman — Tue, 26 Jun 2007 23:34:05 +0000

Completely agreed. In the seasteading book, while we highlight neat wacky new technologies for fun (ie vanadium redox batteries), in general we try to stick to conventional tried-and-true stuff. It’s hard enough to do one crazy thing, let alone 10 crazy things at once.

By: Eliezer Yudkowsky

Eliezer Yudkowsky — Tue, 26 Jun 2007 20:51:19 +0000

Robin, I would distinguish between enormous practice and enormous experimental practice. Bleeding patients to restore the balance of their humours had an enormous practice behind it, but not an enormous experimental practice. If you don’t collect the results of the experiments, it’s not really an experiment – people who sit back and watch apples fall from trees aren’t performing experiments on gravity.

Again, I agree that deliberately being different on life practices is going to shoot your foot off sooner or later, but it’s not quite the same situation as deciding when to reject a scientific orthodoxy.

H. Anonymous, Hoffman+covering was insufficient as a Google keyword.

By: Robin Hanson

Robin Hanson — Tue, 26 Jun 2007 20:15:13 +0000

Eliezer, ordinary practice typically has an enormous experimental practice behind it. What it usually doesn’t have is controlled experiments to help one disentangle effects.

By: Hopefully Anonymous

Hopefully Anonymous — Tue, 26 Jun 2007 18:57:46 +0000

Eliezer (and Robin), if you haven’t been exposed to it yet, I think you’ll find Hoffman’s work (and follow-up writings that cite Hoffman) on covering and performance interesting. I think it’s had quite an impact in psychology, sociology, and the law (particularly critical theory). I’m unaware if it’s been applied specifically to science, free thinkers, academia, and organizing and communicating to solve collective action problems, but I think it would be enlightening to those topics.