On avoiding groups and thinking about groupthink

I avoided Covid groupthink not because I’m immune, but because I have long recognized the danger of groupthink generally.

I had never formally worked on groupthink or mass hysteria before Covid hit, but as I look back, my career path actually was designed so as to minimize the chances that I would succumb to it.

More generally, my primary goal was to remain intellectually independent. And groupthink was a big part of that.

The first worry for any student ought to be, How to proceed through graduate school, postdocs, and professorships while being able to research what I want to research, rather than what an advisor or granting agency will pay me to research.

Romantic young folks have no idea that that almost never happens. Rather than becoming a professor and working on grand ideas, most careers are shaped by the funding. They get their grad student position in the first place because a professor accepts them into his or her lab. They thereby end up working on those ideas, ones given to them.

And, their first postdoc? That invariably ends up being some close colleague of one’s graduate advisor, because that’s how you get into a really good lab as a postdoc.

Finally you get an assistant professorship, and you then have to get grants as quickly, and as large, as possible. The pressure is intense. So, of course you’re going to try to follow up on the stuff your postdoc advisor had you doing.

In a blink of an eye, your career is eyeballs deep in whatever field some random graduate advisor was in when he or she accepted your young know-nothing self.

Sure, you guided the research a bit, hither and thither. But you were mostly guided. …at first by explicit guides (your advisors), and then later guided by the habitat of money available given your resume thus far.

And that just scratches the surface of how non-independent a successful professor often is tricked into thinking he or she is.

The real creativity killer is just being in one field all those years. You become socially connected to a community, and that swallows you up. I talk about this in number 4 of my seven “rules” to aid a theorist’s creativity (but they mostly apply to any creative).

4. [Aloof] Avoid feeling part of any specific academic community.

• When you become part of any community, you learn all the personalities—both your peers and the bigwigs. You naturally can’t help but want to impress them, to even become them. That’s just human.

• You learn from the community the “big problems” they respect.

• You learn about the problems in other fields that they “poo-poo.”

• All this serves to greatly constrain your ability to find a great idea, because it makes you psychologically less able to go outside your own community.

• And it can happen without you ever noticing.

• Not only are you less able to take up other kinds of problems, but it makes you less able to freshly see the problems in your own community, because you are too much of an insider. You know what “everyone knows.” That is, “Everyone knows X,” and so you wouldn’t dare put forth ideas contrary to X.

• …and you wouldn’t even realize you were being deferential in this way.

• You need to be an outsider so that you are free to stick your middle finger up at the discipline, in the form of an idea that contradicts “what everyone knows.”

• A corollary: Avoid conferences.

• Staying aloof does not locally optimize your career, because of the relative dearth of contacts.

• But it can help globally optimize your career, via your research standing out.

  https://www.benchfly.com/blog/the-7-requirements-of-all-effective-scientists/

It’s like that NYC map I once saw (although can’t now find online) where the Earth is shown with NYC filling up most of it, and all the other places are shown as tiny vestiges at the border.

It’s these psycho-social issues that are the most dangerous to one’s creativity, not the oppressive structural issues I referred to earlier. And the psycho-social ones are usually the most difficult to even notice. You simply don’t even realize it’s happening to you, as I talk about in this earlier piece.

I had meticulously chosen each step of my career to try to avoid groupthink. I had decided that I was willing to overlook greedy career local optimization, and aim instead for global optimization.

This would eventually lead me to leave academia altogether, as I discuss in this piece from a little over ten years ago: 

P, NP, And Is Academia Inhospitable to Big Discoveries?
To tackle the brain, academia must be turned upside down.

https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/nature-brain-and-culture/201008/p-np-and-is-academia-inhospitable-big-discoveries

As it turns out, this attitude of mine toward science seems to have bled over into my politics. I’ve been libertarian my whole life, but never attached to any movement. I never let myself get caught up in politics. Although I wasn’t aware of the psychology literature on it, it was clear since childhood that all those talking heads on political TV arguing weren’t really truly arguing. They were effectively just holding up signs saying, “My team, WOOT!” It was all bullshit, and I didn’t want anything to do with it.

So, I had an instinctive feel for groupthink, enough to practically avoid it, and to write up highly practical advice for students.

And my hybrid novel, HUMAN 3.0, concerns human nature and mass hysteria.

But even HUMAN 3.0 doesn’t concern research on mass hysteria and groupthink. It focuses on how the principles that brought us to our current Human 2.0 selves — the topic of my earlier book HARNESSED — might transform us in the future.

And… that’s just a long way of mayyybe explaining why it is that I didn’t get ensnared in the Great Covid Hysteria.

As I discuss in this FreeX Newsletter, I believe it’s mostly or entirely due to where one sat within the network when the panic hit.

Who was immune to COVID hysteria? Not Scott Adams.

https://www.getrevue.co/profile/markchangizi/issues/who-was-immune-to-covid-hysteria-not-scott-adams-341539

My history of trying to avoid groupthink had saved me.

But I still didn’t truly know anything about it. Other than vague intuitions, I had not ever properly studied it, much less had built my own theoretical framework.

It wasn’t until COVID hit, and it was overwhelmingly obvious to me that a mass hysteria had been whipped up, that I decided to set forth to study it, along with totalitarian forces as a special case. That’s what we do at our research institute, the Free Expression Institute, or FreeX.

Below I talk about being aloof, but in the context of Covid hysteria. It may well be one of the simplest, and most effective, brakes on mass hysteria. …if we can just get people to truly aim to be aloof.