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原文： Paul Graham - How To Think For Yourself，作者著有《黑客与画家》

译注： 本文探讨的 Conventional-minded，下文可能译为思想传统、因循守旧或循规蹈矩的人，Independent-minded 可能译为独立思考的或思想独立的人

There are some kinds of work that you can't do well without thinking differently from your peers. To be a successful scientist, for example, it's not enough just to be correct. Your ideas have to be both correct and novel. You can't publish papers saying things other people already know. You need to say things no one else has realized yet.
有些工作如果做不到与同龄人思维方式不同就很难做好，例如成为一个成功的科学家，只做到正确是不够的。你的想法需要正确且新颖。你不能发表谈论众人皆知的观点的论文。你需要去谈其他人还不明白的事。

The same is true for investors. It's not enough for a public market investor to predict correctly how a company will do. If a lot of other people make the same prediction, the stock price will already reflect it, and there's no room to make money. The only valuable insights are the ones most other investors don't share.
对于投资者同样如此。公开市场的投资者准确预测到一个公司会怎么做是不够的。如果大部分人做出相同的判断，那早就体现在股价上了，也就没有赚钱的空间。唯一有价值的是大多数投资者不分享的洞见。

You see this pattern with startup founders too. You don't want to start a startup to do something that everyone agrees is a good idea, or there will already be other companies doing it. You have to do something that sounds to most other people like a bad idea, but that you know isn't — like writing software for a tiny computer used by a few thousand hobbyists, or starting a site to let people rent airbeds on strangers' floors.
在创业者身上你能发现类似的模式。你不会动身创业去做每个人都觉得是好点子或其他公司已经在做的事。你应该去做一些大部分人觉得是坏主意但你觉得不是的事——像是为几千个业余爱好者使用的迷你计算机编写软件，或是搭建一个让人们在陌生人地板上租赁气垫床的网站。

Ditto for essayists. An essay that told people things they already knew would be boring. You have to tell them something new.
对于作家也是如此。一篇聊着人们已经知道的内容是了然无趣的。你必须说点有新意的。

But this pattern isn't universal. In fact, it doesn't hold for most kinds of work. In most kinds of work — to be an administrator, for example — all you need is the first half. All you need is to be right. It's not essential that everyone else be wrong.
但这个模式也并非通用。实际上，对大多数的工作都不适用——例如，作为一个管理员——你只要做到前半句。只要你做对就够了。其他人做错了也不要紧。

There's room for a little novelty in most kinds of work, but in practice there's a fairly sharp distinction between the kinds of work where it's essential to be independent-minded, and the kinds where it's not.
大多数类型的工作都有一点创新的空间，但实际上，是否注重独立思考的工种之间有天壤之别。

I wish someone had told me about this distinction when I was a kid, because it's one of the most important things to think about when you're deciding what kind of work you want to do. Do you want to do the kind of work where you can only win by thinking differently from everyone else? I suspect most people's unconscious mind will answer that question before their conscious mind has a chance to. I know mine does.
我很希望在我孩提时期有人能告诉我这一差异。因为这是当你决定从事哪种类型工作时首要考虑的事情之一。你想从事那种仅当想法与众不同才能胜出的工作吗？我猜大多数人会先下意识地给出答案，而没机会有意地去回答这个问题。至少我是如此。

Independent-mindedness seems to be more a matter of nature than nurture. Which means if you pick the wrong type of work, you're going to be unhappy. If you're naturally independent-minded, you're going to find it frustrating to be a middle manager. And if you're naturally conventional-minded, you're going to be sailing into a headwind if you try to do original research.
独立思考似乎更像一种天性而非后天培养。这意味着当你选错工作的类型，你会觉得不悦。即便你天生具备独立思考的能力，你会发现成为一个中层管理者是件令人沮丧的事。而如果你天性循规蹈矩，做原创研究对你而言将如逆风航行。

One difficulty here, though, is that people are often mistaken about where they fall on the spectrum from conventional- to independent-minded. Conventional-minded people don't like to think of themselves as conventional-minded. And in any case, it genuinely feels to them as if they make up their own minds about everything. It's just a coincidence that their beliefs are identical to their peers'. And the independent-minded, meanwhile, are often unaware how different their ideas are from conventional ones, at least till they state them publicly. [1]
难点在于，人们总误以为自己处在循规蹈矩者和独立思考者。循规蹈矩的人不会觉得他们是因循守旧的。在任何情况下，他们天然地认为所有事情都是他们自己做的主。他们所信奉的只是恰巧与同龄人相同。与此同时，对于独立思考的人来说，他们常常没意识到他们的想法与惯常守旧的人之间有怎样的不同，至少在公开发表他们的想法之前。

By the time they reach adulthood, most people know roughly how smart they are (in the narrow sense of ability to solve pre-set problems), because they're constantly being tested and ranked according to it. But schools generally ignore independent-mindedness, except to the extent they try to suppress it. So we don't get anything like the same kind of feedback about how independent-minded we are.
成年以后，大多数人能粗略了解自己的聪明程度(指狭义上的解决预设问题的能力)，因为他们一直被测试，并以此作为排名的依据。除非他们意欲打压，学校通常会忽略独立思考的能力。所以我们无法获得类似的反馈，来了解自己独立思考的程度。

There may even be a phenomenon like Dunning-Kruger at work, where the most conventional-minded people are confident that they're independent-minded, while the genuinely independent-minded worry they might not be independent-minded enough.
工作中甚至会有一种邓宁-克鲁格的现象出现(译注：Dunning-Kruger，即认知偏差)最循规蹈矩的人自信地认为自己是思维独立的，而天性独立思考的人却担心自己的思维不够独立。

Can you make yourself more independent-minded? I think so. This quality may be largely inborn, but there seem to be ways to magnify it, or at least not to suppress it.
有办法让自己更思维独立吗？我觉得可以，这个品质可能受天性影响很大，但有办法去放大它，至少不去压制它。

One of the most effective techniques is one practiced unintentionally by most nerds: simply to be less aware what conventional beliefs are. It's hard to be a conformist if you don't know what you're supposed to conform to. Though again, it may be that such people already are independent-minded. A conventional-minded person would probably feel anxious not knowing what other people thought, and make more effort to find out.
最有效的方法之一是像很多书呆子实践的：少去了解传统观念。你很难成为一个循规蹈矩的人，如果你连要遵守什么都不知道。话说回来，这样的人可能已经是思想独立的了。一个循规蹈矩的人可能会因为不知道其他人的想法而感到焦虑，并花更大力气去找到答案。

It matters a lot who you surround yourself with. If you're surrounded by conventional-minded people, it will constrain which ideas you can express, and that in turn will constrain which ideas you have. But if you surround yourself with independent-minded people, you'll have the opposite experience: hearing other people say surprising things will encourage you to, and to think of more.
你周围的人很重要。如果你被循规蹈矩的人所包围，这会限制你能表达的想法，并最终限制你能产生怎样的想法。但如果你周围的是思想独立的，你会有相反的体验：听到其他人聊着令人惊奇的事，会鼓励你多去思考。

Because the independent-minded find it uncomfortable to be surrounded by conventional-minded people, they tend to self-segregate once they have a chance to. The problem with high school is that they haven't yet had a chance to. Plus high school tends to be an inward-looking little world whose inhabitants lack confidence, both of which magnify the forces of conformism. And so high school is often a bad time for the independent-minded. But there is some advantage even here: it teaches you what to avoid. If you later find yourself in a situation that makes you think "this is like high school," you know you should get out. [2]
因为思想独立的人会发现被循规蹈矩的人所包围是很难受的，他们一有机会就会趋向于自我隔离。问题是，高中时期他们没有这样的机会。加上高中更趋向于一个内向的小世界，住着不自信的居民。两者都放大了因循守旧的力量。因此，高中对于思想独立的人而言通常不是一段好时光。但也有一个好处：它教会你要避开什么。如果你后面发现自己身处一个“像高中”的地方，你就知道你该走人了。

Another place where the independent- and conventional-minded are thrown together is in successful startups. The founders and early employees are almost always independent-minded; otherwise the startup wouldn't be successful. But conventional-minded people greatly outnumber independent-minded ones, so as the company grows, the original spirit of independent-mindedness is inevitably diluted. This causes all kinds of problems besides the obvious one that the company starts to suck. One of the strangest is that the founders find themselves able to speak more freely with founders of other companies than with their own employees. [3]

另一个将思想独立者和循规蹈矩者放在一起的地方是成功的创业公司。创始人和早期员工几乎都是思想独立的；否则创业不会成功。但随着公司发展，循规蹈矩的人会远远多于思想独立的人，最初的独立思考精神不可避免地被冲淡了。除了公司开始陷入困境这样明显的问题之外，还会导致各种问题。最奇怪的一个是，创始人发现，比起自己公司的员工，和其他公司的创始人能更自在地交谈。

Fortunately you don't have to spend all your time with independent-minded people. It's enough to have one or two you can talk to regularly. And once you find them, they're usually as eager to talk as you are; they need you too. Although universities no longer have the kind of monopoly they used to have on education, good universities are still an excellent way to meet independent-minded people. Most students will still be conventional-minded, but you'll at least find clumps of independent-minded ones, rather than the near zero you may have found in high school.
幸运的是，你不必将所有时间都花在思想独立的人身上。有一两个可以定期交谈的就足够了。一旦找到他们，他们通常和你一样渴望交谈；他们也需要你。尽管大学不再像过去那样垄断教育，但好的大学仍然是结识思想独立的人的绝佳方式。大多数学生仍然循规蹈矩的，但你至少会发现一部分独立思考的学生，不像你在高中，可能一个都没有。

It also works to go in the other direction: as well as cultivating a small collection of independent-minded friends, to try to meet as many different types of people as you can. It will decrease the influence of your immediate peers if you have several other groups of peers. Plus if you're part of several different worlds, you can often import ideas from one to another.
另一个方向也是可行的：除了培养一小群思想独立的朋友之外，还可以尝试结识尽可能多不同类型的人。如果你有其他几组不同类型的朋友，将降低你在当下的同行影响力。另外，假如你身处多个不同的世界，通常可以将想法从一个导入另一个。

But by different types of people, I don't mean demographically different. For this technique to work, they have to think differently. So while it's an excellent idea to go and visit other countries, you can probably find people who think differently right around the corner. When I meet someone who knows a lot about something unusual (which includes practically everyone, if you dig deep enough), I try to learn what they know that other people don't. There are almost always surprises here. It's a good way to make conversation when you meet strangers, but I don't do it to make conversation. I really want to know.

但我所说的不同类型的人并非指人口统计学上的不同。为了使这个方法奏效，他们必须做不同的思考。因此，尽管去其他国家旅行是个好主意，但你可能会在某个角落就找想法不同的人。当我遇到一个对一些不寻常的事情了解很多的人(如果你深入挖掘的话，可能涵盖每个人)，我会尝试了解他们所知道而其他人不知道的事。惊喜几乎总在这里。和陌生人交谈是很好的方式，但我不是为了交谈。我真的很想了解。

You can expand the source of influences in time as well as space, by reading history. When I read history I do it not just to learn what happened, but to try to get inside the heads of people who lived in the past. How did things look to them? This is hard to do, but worth the effort for the same reason it's worth travelling far to triangulate a point.

你可以通过阅读历史来扩展时间和空间的影响来源。当我阅读历史时，我不只是要了解发生了什么，而要试着深入了解过去的人们是怎么想的。他们怎么看待事物？这不是件容易的事，但值得付出努力，因为同样值得远行去三角测量(triangulate)一个点。

You can also take more explicit measures to prevent yourself from automatically adopting conventional opinions. The most general is to cultivate an attitude of skepticism. When you hear someone say something, stop and ask yourself "Is that true?" Don't say it out loud. I'm not suggesting that you impose on everyone who talks to you the burden of proving what they say, but rather that you take upon yourself the burden of evaluating what they say.
你还可以采取更明确的措施来防止自己自动采纳常规的观点。最普遍的做法是培养一种怀疑的态度。当你听到他人的观点时，停下来问问自己“这是真的吗？”不用说出声。我不是建议你，让每个与你交谈的人承担证明他们所说的话的责任，而是由你担起评估他们观点的责任。

Treat it as a puzzle. You know that some accepted ideas will later turn out to be wrong. See if you can guess which. The end goal is not to find flaws in the things you're told, but to find the new ideas that had been concealed by the broken ones. So this game should be an exciting quest for novelty, not a boring protocol for intellectual hygiene. And you'll be surprised, when you start asking "Is this true?", how often the answer is not an immediate yes. If you have any imagination, you're more likely to have too many leads to follow than too few.
把它视作谜题。你知道，一些被接受的想法，后来被证明是错的。看看你能否猜中是哪个。最终目标不是在你被告知的事情中找缺陷，而是找到被“错误”的想法所掩盖的新想法。这个游戏应该是一个令人兴奋的新奇探索，而不是一个无聊的智力卫生协议。当你开始问“这是真的吗？”，会觉得很惊讶，答案不是当下立判的肯定。如果你有任何的想象，你更可能拥有太多的线索去探索而不是太少。

More generally your goal should be not to let anything into your head unexamined, and things don't always enter your head in the form of statements. Some of the most powerful influences are implicit. How do you even notice these? By standing back and watching how other people get their ideas.
更普遍地说，你的目标应该是不要让任何事情未经检查就进入脑袋，并且事情并不总是以陈述的形式进入你的头脑。一些最强有力的影响是隐式的。那你怎么注意到它？退后几步，观察其他人如何获得他们的想法。

When you stand back at a sufficient distance, you can see ideas spreading through groups of people like waves. The most obvious are in fashion: you notice a few people wearing a certain kind of shirt, and then more and more, until half the people around you are wearing the same shirt. You may not care much what you wear, but there are intellectual fashions too, and you definitely don't want to participate in those. Not just because you want sovereignty over your own thoughts, but because unfashionable ideas are disproportionately likely to lead somewhere interesting. The best place to find undiscovered ideas is where no one else is looking. [4]
当你站得足够远，你可以看到想法像波浪一样在人群中传播。最明显的是时尚：你注意到有几个人穿着某种衬衫，然后越来越多，直到你周围有一半的人穿着同样的衬衫。你可能不太在意你穿什么，但也有思想潮流，而你肯定不想参与其中。不仅仅是因为你想要对自己的想法拥有主权，还因为不入流的想法很可能会引发一些有趣的事情。寻找未被发现的想法的最佳地点是，没有其他人关注的地方。

To go beyond this general advice, we need to look at the internal structure of independent-mindedness — at the individual muscles we need to exercise, as it were. It seems to me that it has three components: fastidiousness about truth, resistance to being told what to think, and curiosity.
为了超越这个一般建议，我们需要看看独立思考的内部结构——可以说，我们需要锻炼特定的肌肉。在我看来，它包含三个部分：苛求真相、拒绝被告知要怎么想，以及好奇心。

Fastidiousness about truth means more than just not believing things that are false. It means being careful about degree of belief. For most people, degree of belief rushes unexamined toward the extremes: the unlikely becomes impossible, and the probable becomes certain. [5] To the independent-minded, this seems unpardonably sloppy. They're willing to have anything in their heads, from highly speculative hypotheses to (apparent) tautologies, but on subjects they care about, everything has to be labelled with a carefully considered degree of belief. [6]
对真相的苛求不仅意味着不相信虚假的事情。它意味对信任程度要保持谨慎。对大多数人来说，信任程度未被检查就冲向极端：不太可能变成不可能，而可能变成一定。 [5] 对于独立思考的人来说，这似乎是不可原谅的草率。从高度投机的假设到(明显)正确的陈述，他们愿意在头脑中有各种东西，但在他们关心的主题上，每件事都必须贴上经过仔细思考的信任程度标签。

The independent-minded thus have a horror of ideologies, which require one to accept a whole collection of beliefs at once, and to treat them as articles of faith. To an independent-minded person that would seem revolting, just as it would seem to someone fastidious about food to take a bite of a submarine sandwich filled with a large variety of ingredients of indeterminate age and provenance.
因此，独立思考的人对意识形态感到恐惧，这需要一个人同时接受一整套信仰，并将它们视为信条。对于思想独立的人来说，这似乎令人反感，就如同对老饕而言，咬一口装满不同年份、来源不明的成分的潜艇三明治(submarine sandwich)一样。

Without this fastidiousness about truth, you can't be truly independent-minded. It's not enough just to have resistance to being told what to think. Those kind of people reject conventional ideas only to replace them with the most random conspiracy theories. And since these conspiracy theories have often been manufactured to capture them, they end up being less independent-minded than ordinary people, because they're subject to a much more exacting master than mere convention. [7]
没有这种对真相的苛求，你就不能真正地思想独立。仅仅拒绝被告知要怎么想是不够的。那种拒绝传统观念的人，只是用最随意的阴谋论代替它们。而且这些阴谋论往往是为了抓住他们的心而制造的，最终会使得他们的思想比普通人更不独立，因为他们受制于一个比单纯的传统更严格的控制。

Can you increase your fastidiousness about truth? I would think so. In my experience, merely thinking about something you're fastidious about causes that fastidiousness to grow. If so, this is one of those rare virtues we can have more of merely by wanting it. And if it's like other forms of fastidiousness, it should also be possible to encourage in children. I certainly got a strong dose of it from my father. [8]
可以提高对真相苛求的能力吗？我觉得可以。以我的经验，仅仅想着你苛求的事情就会带来苛求度的增长。如果是这样，这是我们可以拥有的少数几个仅仅通过想要就可以获得的美德。如果它像其他形式的苛求一样，也应该可以鼓励孩子。我确实从我父亲那里得到了很多。

The second component of independent-mindedness, resistance to being told what to think, is the most visible of the three. But even this is often misunderstood. The big mistake people make about it is to think of it as a merely negative quality. The language we use reinforces that idea. You're unconventional. You don't care what other people think. But it's not just a kind of immunity. In the most independent-minded people, the desire not to be told what to think is a positive force. It's not mere skepticism, but an active delight in ideas that subvert the conventional wisdom, the more counterintuitive the better.
独立思想的第二个组成部分，即拒绝被告知该想什么，是这三个组成部分中最明显的。但即使这样也经常被误解。人们对此犯的最大错误是，认为它仅仅是一种消极的品质。我们所使用的语言强化了这一想法。你很反传统。你不在乎别人怎么想。但这不仅仅是一种免疫力。在思想最独立的人中，不被告知如何思考的愿望是一种积极的力量。这不仅仅是怀疑，而是对颠覆惯常思维的积极享受，越反直觉越好。

Some of the most novel ideas seemed at the time almost like practical jokes. Think how often your reaction to a novel idea is to laugh. I don't think it's because novel ideas are funny per se, but because novelty and humor share a certain kind of surprisingness. But while not identical, the two are close enough that there is a definite correlation between having a sense of humor and being independent-minded — just as there is between being humorless and being conventional-minded. [9]
一些最新颖的想法在当时看来几乎像是恶作剧。想想你有多少次对一个新想法的反应是笑。我不认为这是因为新颖的想法本身很有趣，而是因为新奇和幽默都有某种令人惊讶的地方。虽然不完全相同，但两者足够相近，以至于在具有幽默感和独立思想之间存在一定的相关性——就像在没有幽默感和因循守旧之间存在一定的相关性一样。

I don't think we can significantly increase our resistance to being told what to think. It seems the most innate of the three components of independent-mindedness; people who have this quality as adults usually showed all too visible signs of it as children. But if we can't increase our resistance to being told what to think, we can at least shore it up, by surrounding ourselves with other independent-minded people.
我不认为我们可以显著增加我们拒绝对被告知该怎么想的能力。它似乎是独立思想的三个组成部分中最受天性影响的；成年后具有这种品质的人通常在孩童时代就表现出明显的迹象。但是，如果我们不能增加对被告知该怎么想的抵抗力，我们至少可以通过与其他思想独立的人在一起来维持它。

The third component of independent-mindedness, curiosity, may be the most interesting. To the extent that we can give a brief answer to the question of where novel ideas come from, it's curiosity. That's what people are usually feeling before having them.
独立思想的第三个组成部分是好奇心，可能是最意思的一部分。在某种程度上，我们可以对新颖想法从何而来给出一个简短的回答，那就是好奇心。这是人们在拥有它们之前的一般感受。

In my experience, independent-mindedness and curiosity predict one another perfectly. Everyone I know who's independent-minded is deeply curious, and everyone I know who's conventional-minded isn't. Except, curiously, children. All small children are curious. Perhaps the reason is that even the conventional-minded have to be curious in the beginning, in order to learn what the conventions are. Whereas the independent-minded are the gluttons of curiosity, who keep eating even after they're full. [10]
在我的经验中，思想独立和好奇心可以完美地相互预测。我认识的每个思想独立的人都有很强的好奇心，而我认识的每个思想传统的人都没有。孩子们除外。所有小孩子都很好奇。也许是因为，即使是因循守旧的人，一开始也必须好奇，才能了解什么是惯例。而思想独立的人是好奇的大胃王，即使吃饱了也会继续吃东西。

The three components of independent-mindedness work in concert: fastidiousness about truth and resistance to being told what to think leave space in your brain, and curiosity finds new ideas to fill it.
思想独立的三个组成部分协同工作：对真理的苛求和拒绝被告知要如何思考会在你的大脑中留下空间，而好奇心会找到新的想法来填补它。

Interestingly, the three components can substitute for one another in much the same way muscles can. If you're sufficiently fastidious about truth, you don't need to be as resistant to being told what to think, because fastidiousness alone will create sufficient gaps in your knowledge. And either one can compensate for curiosity, because if you create enough space in your brain, your discomfort at the resulting vacuum will add force to your curiosity. Or curiosity can compensate for them: if you're sufficiently curious, you don't need to clear space in your brain, because the new ideas you discover will push out the conventional ones you acquired by default.
有趣的是，这三种成分可以相互替代，就像肌肉(译注：代偿)一样。如果你对真相足够苛求，你就不必拒绝被告知要怎么想，因为苛求本身就会在你的知识中形成足够的鸿沟。任何一种都可以弥补好奇心，原因是如果你在大脑中创造了足够的空间，你对由此产生真空的不适感，会增加你的好奇心。或者说好奇心可以弥补它们：如果你足够好奇，你不需要清理大脑空间，因为你发现的新想法会推出你默认获得的惯性思维。

Because the components of independent-mindedness are so interchangeable, you can have them to varying degrees and still get the same result. So there is not just a single model of independent-mindedness. Some independent-minded people are openly subversive, and others are quietly curious. They all know the secret handshake though.
因为独立思想的组成部分是可以互换的，你可以在不同程度上拥有它们，但仍然获得相同的结果。因此，不存在独立思想的单一模型。一些思想独立的人是公然颠覆的，而另一些人则是静默地好奇。他们都知道秘密握手(译注：识别相同成员的方式，典型的秘密握手是将一个人的手指或拇指放在特定位置，其他成员可以识别该位置，而对于非成员则是一般的握手)。

Is there a way to cultivate curiosity? To start with, you want to avoid situations that suppress it. How much does the work you're currently doing engage your curiosity? If the answer is "not much," maybe you should change something.
有没有培养好奇心的方法？首先，你要避免扼制它的情况。你目前从事的工作在多大程度上激发了你的好奇心？如果答案是“不多”，也许你应该做出一些改变。

The most important active step you can take to cultivate your curiosity is probably to seek out the topics that engage it. Few adults are equally curious about everything, and it doesn't seem as if you can choose which topics interest you. So it's up to you to find them. Or invent them, if necessary.
为了培养你的好奇心，你可以采取的最重要的正向步骤，可能是寻找与之相关的话题。很少有成年人对所有事情都同样好奇，而且你似乎无法选择自己感兴趣的主题。因此，取决于你能否找到他们。或者在必要时发明它们。

Another way to increase your curiosity is to indulge it, by investigating things you're interested in. Curiosity is unlike most other appetites in this respect: indulging it tends to increase rather than to sate it. Questions lead to more questions.
增加好奇心的另一种方法是，通过调查你感兴趣的事物来沉浸其中。在这方面，好奇心与大部分食欲不同：沉迷于它往往结果是增加而不是满足。疑问会带来更多问题。

Curiosity seems to be more individual than fastidiousness about truth or resistance to being told what to think. To the degree people have the latter two, they're usually pretty general, whereas different people can be curious about very different things. So perhaps curiosity is the compass here. Perhaps, if your goal is to discover novel ideas, your motto should not be "do what you love" so much as "do what you're curious about."
好奇心似乎比对真理的苛求或拒绝被告知要怎么想更个性化。就人们拥有后两者的程度而言，它们通常非常笼统，而不同的人可能对非常不同的事物感到好奇。所以，也许好奇心是这里的指南针。或许，如果你的目标是发现新颖的想法，那么你的座右铭不应该是“做你喜欢的事”，而是“做你感兴趣的事”。

Notes
作者注

[1] One convenient consequence of the fact that no one identifies as conventional-minded is that you can say what you like about conventional-minded people without getting in too much trouble. When I wrote "The Four Quadrants of Conformism" I expected a firestorm of rage from the aggressively conventional-minded, but in fact it was quite muted. They sensed that there was something about the essay that they disliked intensely, but they had a hard time finding a specific passage to pin it on.
没有人自认为是因循守旧者这一事实的一个容易接受的结果是，你可以说出你喜欢因循守旧者的话，而不会遇到太多麻烦。当我写“墨守成规的四个象限”时，我预期会引起激进的因循守旧者的暴怒，但实际上却风平浪静。他们会感觉到这篇文章有一些他们很不喜欢的地方，但很难找到一个具体的段落来印证。

[2] When I ask myself what in my life is like high school, the answer is Twitter. It's not just full of conventional-minded people, as anything its size will inevitably be, but subject to violent storms of conventional-mindedness that remind me of descriptions of Jupiter. But while it probably is a net loss to spend time there, it has at least made me think more about the distinction between independent- and conventional-mindedness, which I probably wouldn't have done otherwise.
当我问自己，我的高中生活是怎样的，答案是跟推特一样。因为它的空间所限，高中不可避免地充满了循规蹈矩之人，同时还会受到传统思想的猛烈风暴，这让我想起了对木星的描述。虽然花时间在那里可能是一种净亏损，但它至少让我更多地思考独立思想和传统思想之间的区别，否则我可能不会这样做。

[3] The decrease in independent-mindedness in growing startups is still an open problem, but there may be solutions.
成长中的初创公司的思想独立性下降仍然是一个悬而未决的问题，但可能有解决方案。

Founders can delay the problem by making a conscious effort only to hire independent-minded people. Which of course also has the ancillary benefit that they have better ideas.
创始人可以通过有意识地只雇佣思想独立的人来延缓问题的发生。当然，这还有一个附带的好处，那就是他们有更好的想法。

Another possible solution is to create policies that somehow disrupt the force of conformism, much as control rods slow chain reactions, so that the conventional-minded aren't as dangerous. The physical separation of Lockheed's Skunk Works may have had this as a side benefit. Recent examples suggest employee forums like Slack may not be an unmitigated good.
另一种可能的解决方案是制定政策，以某种方式破坏因循守旧者的力量，就像控制棒减缓连锁反应一样，使因循守旧者不那么危险。洛克希德臭鼬工厂的物理隔离可能有一个附带的好处。最近的例子表明，像 Slack 这样的员工论坛可能不是一个绝对的好东西。

译注： 臭鼬工厂是洛克希德公司的核心部门，担任秘密研究飞行器为主，包括美国许多著名的侦察机、无人机，因当时其厂址毗邻一家散发着恶臭的塑料厂，而被工程师在组内称之臭鼬工厂，该部门直接受公司最高层垂直领导。

The most radical solution would be to grow revenues without growing the company. You think hiring that junior PR person will be cheap, compared to a programmer, but what will be the effect on the average level of independent-mindedness in your company? (The growth in staff relative to faculty seems to have had a similar effect on universities.) Perhaps the rule about outsourcing work that's not your "core competency" should be augmented by one about outsourcing work done by people who'd ruin your culture as employees.
最激进的解决方案是在不发展公司的情况下增加收入。你觉得雇佣一个初级公关人员会比程序员便宜，但是对公司的独立思想的平均水平有什么影响？ (教职工的增长似乎对大学产生了类似的影响)也许关于外包工作的规则除了不是你公司的“核心竞争力”，还应该增加一个规则，这些外包工作由那些会破坏公司文化的雇员完成。

译注： 公关人员，PR，Public Relationship

Some investment firms already seem to be able to grow revenues without growing the number of employees. Automation plus the ever increasing articulation of the "tech stack" suggest this may one day be possible for product companies.
一些投资公司似乎已经能够在不增加员工数量的情况下增加收入。自动化加上不断提高的“技术栈”清晰度表明，有朝一日，这对产品公司而言是可行的。

[4] There are intellectual fashions in every field, but their influence varies. One of the reasons politics, for example, tends to be boring is that it's so extremely subject to them. The threshold for having opinions about politics is much lower than the one for having opinions about set theory. So while there are some ideas in politics, in practice they tend to be swamped by waves of intellectual fashion.
每个领域都有思想潮流，但它们的影响各不相同。例如，政治往往很无聊的原因之一是，非常受制于政治本身。对政治有意见的门槛远低于对集合论有意见的门槛。因此，虽然在政治上有一些想法，但在实践中，它们往往会被思想潮流的浪潮所淹没。

[5] The conventional-minded are often fooled by the strength of their opinions into believing that they're independent-minded. But strong convictions are not a sign of independent-mindedness. Rather the opposite.
因循守旧者经常被他们的观点所愚弄，即相信他们才是思想独立者。但坚定的信念并不是思想独立的标志。而是相反。

[6] Fastidiousness about truth doesn't imply that an independent-minded person won't be dishonest, but that he won't be deluded. It's sort of like the definition of a gentleman as someone who is never unintentionally rude.
对真相的苛求并不意味着一个思想独立的人不会不诚实，但他不会被欺骗。这有点像绅士的定义，即一个永远不会无意粗鲁的人。

[7] You see this especially among political extremists. They think themselves nonconformists, but actually they're niche conformists. Their opinions may be different from the average person's, but they are often more influenced by their peers' opinions than the average person's are.
你在政治极端分子中更能看到这一点。他们认为自己是不因循守旧的人，但实际上他们是小众的因循守旧者。他们的观点可能与普通人不同，但他们往往比普通人更受同类人观点的影响。

[8] If we broaden the concept of fastidiousness about truth so that it excludes pandering, bogusness, and pomposity as well as falsehood in the strict sense, our model of independent-mindedness can expand further into the arts.
如果我们扩大对真相苛求的概念，使其排除拉皮条、虚假和浮夸以及严格意义上的虚假，我们独立思想的模型可以进一步扩展到艺术。

[9] This correlation is far from perfect, though. Gödel and Dirac don't seem to have been very strong in the humor department. But someone who is both "neurotypical" and humorless is very likely to be conventional-minded.
然而，这种相关性远非完美。哥德尔和狄拉克在幽默方面似乎不是很强。但是一个既“神经质”又没有幽默感的人很可能是因循守旧者。

译注： Kurt Gödel，库尔特·哥德尔，奥匈帝国数学家、哲学家和逻辑学家，死于因人格障碍导致的营养不良。
Paul Dirac，保罗·狄拉克，英国理论物理学家，1933年与薛定谔一同获得诺贝尔物理学奖，狄拉克发展了量子力学，提出了著名的狄拉克方程。因其工作细致且沉默寡言而著称，其剑桥的同事开玩笑地定义了一个“狄拉克”的单位，即每小时一个字。

[10] Exception: gossip. Almost everyone is curious about gossip
例外：八卦。几乎每个人都对八卦好奇。