Somin on Conformism: A Reply

When You Will Not Stampede Me released, my friend Ilya Somin presented some thoughtful criticism on the Reason website. Here is my belated response. Ilya’s in blockquotes, I’m not.

But I think he and some other advocates of non-conformism may underrate some key arguments for—limited, but still substantial—conformity.

One is that conformism often makes good sense on questions you don't care much about. For example, I'm skeptical that moving towards gender-neutral language is a good idea, or that it does much to reduce sexism. But I don't actually care much about the terminology in question, and therefore usually go along with majority intellectual trends on these matters. I figure it's better to conform and thereby avoid unnecessarily alienating people, than to make a stand on a hill I don't care much about. Situations like this come up often.

I agree in principle, but deny that they “come up often.” Ilya’s scenario requires that (a) other people around you care a lot about some issue even though (b) you barely care at all. But in any given society, there is a fairly short list of issues that others take very seriously. Given this high bar, how often will you coincidentally be indifferent or nearly so?

Especially if part of the norm is that you’re supposed to earnestly care about the issue rather than shrugingly go with the flow!

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A more substantial problem is the possibility that some widely held norms and traditions might embody valuable wisdom, even if modern non-conformists don't understand why. This, of course, is the longstanding "Burkean conservative" argument for adhering to tradition.

The standard critique of Burkean conservatism is that history shows many longstanding, widely accepted traditions were horrifically wrong: slavery, serfdom, the subordination of women, persecution of religious dissenters, and more. This litany undermines the case for unthinking adherence to tradition, as a general rule. But there might be some categories of norms and traditions that deserve more deference than others… [S]ocial norms that emerge from market processes or civil society are more likely to be well-founded. In such situations, people "vote with their feet" and thereby have more incentive to get things right.

Sure, but a key non-conformist insight is, “Don’t fear to vote with your feet”! Foot voting works poorly if conformity is high.

…That's far from a guarantee of infallibility. But it does justify giving at least some substantial deference to norms in these situations. That's especially the case if you're new to the institution and have little knowledge of how it works, and what purposes its rules and norms might serve.

If you’re new to an institution and have little knowledge of how it works, “Wait and see” is good advice. Yet how often does this exception come up? Pace Hume, by the time you are an adult, your experience with familiar institutions is a good guide to unfamiliar institutions. What’s true at GMU is basically true at UT. Caution might advise you to wait and see for a month. After you’ve waited and seen, though, why keep deferring to the same old silliness?

…Experts are far from infallible, and we should keep in mind biases and poor incentives that make them unreliable in some situations (as well as the tendency of many of them to opine on issues that are actually beyond their expertise). But we should also remember there are important issues on which experts' views are more likely to be reliable than those of laypeople. In those situations, a degree of conformist deference makes sense.

In absolute terms, Ilya’s position on experts is highly non-conformist. Don’t trust experts if they have a show strong political bias, strong financial incentives to reach an approved answer, or stray outside of their area of expertise. Good advice, but it enjoins deep skepticism of almost all of the alleged experts on hot-button topics.

…They are also worth keeping in mind if you are the kind of person who views norms and traditions with suspicion. I am like that myself. Whereas the average person may tend towards excessive conformism, intellectuals—especially those who hold many unpopular views—may have the opposite bias. Such people are likely overrepresented among academics, political commentators, and possibly even readers of this blog.

I know intellectuals. Lots of intellectuals. Legions of intellectuals. The vast majority are highly conformist. They often hold views that are unpopular in the broader population, but only because they slavishly conform to their intellectual subculture.

Still, I agree that most self-conscious non-conformists are insufficiently strategic, which is one of the main reasons I wrote the book! I never imagined that I’d turn more than a handful of conformists into non-conformists, but I’m tolerably good at turning non-conformists into better non-conformists.