Nonconformity is the highest evolutionary attainment of social animals

[daylen]

That said, I think true non- conformists are also actually very good conformists. They are like silly putty, able to take on many shapes and perspectives.

To bounce off of this and the recent comments made about straddling the line between conformity and non-conformity: at the individual level, it seems that an internally consistent morality requires an acceptance of partial information. How should an individual make decisions when (a) time is finite, (b) space is finite, (c) attention is limited, (d) all information is incomplete, (e) decisions affect outcomes and outcomes affect survival, (f) unknown unknowns exist, and (g) imperfect recall.

In the Kohlberg's stages of moral development, the post-conventional stages are at the climax. In related studies, some of the test subjects started to regress backwards later in life.

The Haidt model looks at the primary human values (care, fairness, loyalty, authority, purity) and how liberals and conservatives rank them. Perhaps purity has two different levels of application. On a more rudimentary level, purity acts similarly to authority where an individual accepts that something should be preserved because someone they respect says so. On a more advanced level, purity could be accepting that something should be preserved simply because it has outlasted other things (therefore the functionality is likely more complex than humans can measure).

I think this relates to conformity, because after an individual has analyzed something to the point of diminishing returns they may start to recognize their own limitations in understanding. At this point they would be wise to accept their inherent limitations and respect that which has proven valuable (by being persistent). This implies to me that evolutionary theory cannot be decoupled from morality without loosing stability. Evolutionary theory attempts to model how complexity emerged, and this is necessary for defining systems in a stable way. Another way of saying this is that knowledge takes time, because a lone structural mapping does not indicate how parts are connected or influenced by each other (spooky action at a distance).

On a more practical level, perhaps a successful non-conformist is someone who is indistinguishable by the crowd, but that becomes more distinguished on the margins overtime. The crowd is stable since that is where gradualism dominates selection, but the margins are where punctuated equilibrium dominates selection.

[7Wannabe5]

@daylen:

As usual, I tend towards agreeing with you.

Let me share the personal anecdote I was thinking about when I typed the above. My parents were both raised in the Catholic church. They both attended a Catholic university. When I was around 9, they converted to the Episcopal church, because my mother believed the Catholic church had become too charismatic. At 14, I was given permission to leave the church after being confirmed. IOW, my parents required that I be designated adult by the church before being granted the privilege to choose. So, I functioned as something like easy-going Atheist or Agnostic for the next 30 years, and that is how I raised my own children. I gave them pile of books of bible stories, mythologies of the world, and told my daughter it was up to her if she wanted to join the other girls who prayed around the flag pole in the rural town where we lived, etc.

Then in my 40s after reading a book on happiness that recommended religion as an option, and shortly thereafter falling madly in love with a man who was a practicing Muslim, I did my very best to revert, submit or conform to Islam and aspects of the associated culture. Then, a little while after leaving both Islam and my partner, I briefly dated a man who had passionately returned to the Catholic Church at mid-life, and he took me to see a nearby Cathedral that had beautiful architecture. It was the strangest experience. Everything around me seemed both very familiar and absolutely arbitrary. So, I realized that my strong attempt to conform to Islam had actually made me less of a conformist to the religion of my childhood than the more typical anti-conformity of my rebellious youth. "Anti" is by necessity pushing against something, and is therefore strictly defined by the presence of the conventional, and this is very different than coming to the fork in the road where you recognize two or three very wide and valuable conventionally trodden paths, and you simply can't not choose to make your own way. Immature anti-conformity seeks company, or at least cries for attention. True conformity to your own path which differs from the conventional is lonely.

Changing gears towards aspect of this conversation only slightly related to the above. I just finished reading "Ten Million Aliens: A Journey Through the Entire Animal Kingdom" by Simon Barnes (Highly recommend!) Unfortunately, I can't find the exact quote, but he writes something along the lines of how it is a great mistake for humans to look to evolution as a basis for moral functioning, because it promotes misunderstanding of both topics or poor functioning in both realms. Anything or everything you might observe a human doing is a natural thing for a human to do, and if that behavior in any way contributes to that humans ability to produce offspring who produce offspring then it is also sound evolutionary behavior. Morality is concerned with how we might best get along as social animals in a group and is very much culturally constructed. IOW, it is very hard to do on your ownsome with no basis to build upon. Thus, the credibility of those who caution about throwing out the baby with the bathwater of Western, or any other reasonably successful at this purpose, culture.

[jacob]

If you formulate it in terms of Wheaton levels, it also holds that the most interesting interactions are between adjacent levels, that is, with N-1 and N+1. This can be generalized and holds regardless of level. You can't lead/teach if you're too far ahead. Ditto learning while being too far behind.

[Clarice]

@jacob:

This claim is consistent with the article I've once read claiming that IQ of US presidents has been consistently in 110-115 range. Makes sense - above the mean, but no more than one standard deviation above the mean.

[7Wannabe5]

If you formulate it in terms of Wheaton levels, it also holds that the most interesting interactions are between adjacent levels, that is, with N-1 and N+1. This can be generalized and holds regardless of level. You can't lead/teach if you're too far ahead. Ditto learning while being too far behind.

This is only partially true, because you can never just do one thing

For instance, obviously I am multiple levels above the third-graders when I am attempting to teach them math, but I am also at least a level or two below the master teachers who have a better grasp on educational psychology and much more experience at the task. OTOH, since I am also usually levels above these teachers in terms of pure mathematical training, I can amuse myself by pondering about how Poincare's thoughts on physiological basis of mathematics applies to the children counting on their fingers in front of me, but any attempt at discourse on the topic would likely gain very little traction in the teacher's lounge.