Pros and Cons of Conformism—Rejoinder to Bryan Caplan

Two libertarian experts on public ignorance continue a debate about conformism.

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Back in January, I wrote a post inspired by economist Bryan Caplan's new book You Will Not Stampede Me: Essays on Non-Conformism (he summarizes its themes here). While I agree with much of Bryan's praise of nonconformism, I outlined three types of situations where conformism is often a useful heuristic: 1) social norms on issues you don't care much about, 2) deferring to the 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 superior insight to that of laypeople. Bryan has now responded to these points. It turns out he largely agrees that conformism is  often useful in these three situations. He just thinks they rarely arise. I believe 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 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?

I don't think this cases requires that "people around you care a lot." They need only care enough 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, conformism will often make good sense. I think situations like this come up all the time, particularly if you are a non-conformist who tends to question tradition and conventional wisdom.

For example, I was never convinced 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 own work, because I didn't actually care much about this terminological question, and therefore concluded it wasn't worth alienating readers over. More recently, "black" (or "Black" with a capital B) has come back into vogue, and I have quietly shifted my own usage.

I feel a bit more strongly that "Latinx" is a bad term. Thus, in a forthcoming article on how foot voting can benefit Hispanics, I included a brief explanation of why I don't use it.

Bryan's response to my point 2:

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

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?

Foot voting can work well even if conformity is high. In that world, most people conform to the norms of whatever institution or group they are in. But they can still vote with their feet for groups with different norms.

On the other point, I think people often find themselves in new institutions, especially when—as in the modern world—we often switch 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 on deference to experts:

In absolute terms, Ilya's position on experts is highly non-conformist. Don't trust experts if they have a… 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.

Whether my position is "highly non-conformist" depends on what you compare it to. It's non-conformist relative to "always defer to experts," but quite conformist compared to the increasing tendency (including in some libertarian circles) to deny deference to "establishment" experts across the board.

I would add that the issue of deference to experts isn't limited to "hot-button issues." It comes up all the time across a variety of decisions we make almost every day, when it comes to questions as varied as diet, medical care, investment decisions, education, and much else.

Finally, Bryan argues that intellectuals are already highly conformist, and therefore perhaps don't really need advice outlining where conformism can be beneficial:

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.

It is indeed true that intellectuals are often conformist on issues that have high salience within their subculture. For example, left-wing intellectuals often rigidly conform to "woke" norms on issues of race and gender. But, even within the subculture, intellectuals strike me as more likely than the average person to disobey or ignore other, less salient social norms. This may be because intellectuals care less about such norms, or because they (like stereotypical nerds) tend to have relatively lower social skills. But the experience of twenty-five years in academic and intellectual circles leads me to conclude intellectuals are in fact less conformist on a variety of dimensions than the average person is.

That said, both my generalizations about intellectuals and Bryan's are based on conjectures from personal experience, rather than systematic evidence. To really resolve this issue, we would need systematic data. Perhaps survey data or experimental evidence could give us a better handle on how conformist intellectuals really are.

In sum, there is much to be said for various types of non-conformism. Though, I am less hostile to conformism than Bryan, I am much more sympathetic to non-conformism than the average person is. 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 be suspicious of conformism. That constituency sometimes could use a reminder of the reasons why conformism isn't all bad.