In January I wrote a post inspired by economist Bryan Caplan’s book You Won’t Make Me Fall: Essays on Nonconformity (summarizes the themes here). While I agree with much of Bryan’s praise of nonconformity, I have outlined three types of situations in which conformity is often a useful heuristic: 1) social norms on issues you don’t care much about, 2) deferring to norms and traditions of institutions established by voluntary interactions in markets and civil society (as opposed to coercion), where people can “vote with their feet,” and 3) deference to experts in situations where they are likely to have insight superior to that of lay people. Bryan has now responded to these points. It turns out that he largely agrees that conformity is often helpful in these three situations. He just thinks they rarely occur. I think they are more common than he supposes.
Here’s Bryan on my point 1:
I agree in principle, but deny that they “come up often”. Ilya’s scenario requires that (a) other people around you care about you Very about some problem even if (b) you barely care. But in every society there is a rather short list of issues that others take very seriously. Given this high level, how often will it You does it happen to be indifferent or almost indifferent?
I don’t think this case requires “people around you to worry Very.” They just need enough attention to impose some social sanctions on those who violate the norm in question. If you oppose the norm, but don’t actually care much about it, conformity will often make sense. I think situations like this always happen on your feet, especially if you are a nonconformist who tends to question tradition and conventional wisdom.
For example, I have never been convinced that there was a good reason to switch from using “black” to using “African-American.” But once the latter became the norm in academic and intellectual writings, I mostly followed it in my work, because I really didn’t care much about this terminological question, and therefore concluded that it wasn’t worth alienating readers. More recently, “black” (or “Black” with a capital B) has come back into fashion, and I have quietly changed my usage.
I have a slightly stronger feeling that “Latinx” is a bad term. Therefore, in a future article on how power voting can benefit Hispanics, I have included a brief explanation of why I don’t use it.
Bryan’s response to my point 2:
Sure, but a key maverick insight is: “Don’t be afraid to vote with your feet”! The popular vote works poorly if conformity is high….
If you are new to an institution and have little knowledge of how it works, “Wait and see” is good advice. But how often does this exception arise? Rhythm Hume, when you become an adult, your experience with family institutions will be a good guide to non-family institutions. What is true at GMU is fundamentally true at UT. Caution may advise you to wait and see for a month. After waiting and seeing, though, why continue to fall back on the same old nonsense?
The popular vote can work well even if conformity is high. In that world, most people conform to the norms of the institution or group of which they are a part. But he can still vote with his feet for groups with different norms.
On the other hand, I think people often find themselves in new institutions, especially when – as in the modern world – we often change jobs and even careers. Even if you stay in the same field your whole life, different employers in the same industry will sometimes have widely divergent institutional cultures.
Bryan out of respect to the experts:
In absolute terms, Ilya’s position on experts is highly Not-conformist. Don’t trust experts if they show strong political biases, strong financial incentives to reach an approved response, or if they stray from their area of expertise. Good advice, but it incites deep skepticism from nearly all purported experts on hot topics.
Whether my position is “highly nonconformist” depends on what you compare it to. He is nonconformist about “always deferring to the experts,” but rather conformist about the growing tendency (even in some libertarian circles) to deny deference to “establishment” experts at all levels.
I would like to add that the issue of deference to experts is not limited to “hot issues”. It continually shows up in a variety of decisions we make almost every day, when it comes to issues as diverse as diet, medical care, investment decisions, education, and much more.
Finally, Bryan argues that intellectuals are highly conformist, and so perhaps they don’t really need advice outlining where conformity can be useful:
I know intellectuals. Many intellectuals. Legions of intellectuals. The vast majority are highly conformist. They often hold opinions that are unpopular among the broader population, but only because they slavishly conform to their intellectual subculture.
It is indeed true that intellectuals are often conformists on issues that have high relevance within their subculture. For example, left-wing intellectuals often conform to “woke” norms on issues of race and gender. But, even in the case of subculture, intellectuals seem to me more likely than the average person to disobey or ignore other, less important social norms. This may be because intellectuals care less about such norms or because (like stereotypical nerds) they tend to have relatively lower social skills. But twenty-five years’ experience in academic and intellectual circles leads me to conclude that intellectuals are actually less conformist on a variety of dimensions than the average person.
That said, both my and Bryan’s generalizations about intellectuals are based on conjectures drawn from personal experience, rather than systematic evidence. To really solve this problem, we would need systematic data. Perhaps survey data or experimental evidence could give us a better view of how conformist intellectuals really are.
In summary, there is a lot to be said about the various types of nonconformity. I’m less hostile to conformity than Bryan. However, I am much more in favor of nonconformity than the average person. But the audience for this blog, and many of my other writings, is disproportionately made up of academics, intellectuals, libertarians, and others who tend to distrust conformity. That constituency might sometimes benefit from being reminded of the reasons why conformity is not all bad.