作者：保罗·格雷厄姆
原文地址：How to Think for Yourself
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.
有些工作如果不与同事们有不同的思维方式，你是无法做好它的。例如，作为一个成功的科学家，仅仅正确是不够的。你的想法必须既正确又新颖。你不能发表其他人已经知道的内容。你需要说出别人尚未意识到的事情。
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.
对于投资者来说也是如此。对于公开市场的投资者来说，正确预测一家公司的表现是不够的。如果许多其他人做出相同的预测，股价已经反映了这一点，就没有赚钱的空间。唯一有价值的见解是大多数其他投资者不分享的。
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.
创业者也有类似的模式。你不想创办一个大家都认为是好主意的公司，否则已经有其他公司在做了。你必须做一些听起来像是坏主意但你知道不是的事情——比如为几千个爱好者使用的小型计算机编写软件，或者建立一个让人们在陌生人家里租用气垫床的网站。
Ditto for essayists. An essay that told people things they already knew would be boring. You have to tell them something new.
对于散文作家也是如此。告诉人们他们已经知道的事情的文章会很无聊。你必须告诉他们一些新的东西。
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.
但这种模式并不是普遍的。事实上，它不适用于大多数类型的工作。在大多数工作中——例如，作为一个管理员——你只需要前半部分。你只需要是对的。并不需要别人都是错的。
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.
在大多数工作中，有一点新颖性是可以的，但实际上，在需要独立思考的工作和不需要的工作之间有一个相当明显的区别。
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.
我希望在我还是个孩子的时候有人告诉我这个区别，因为这是你在决定要做什么工作时要考虑的最重要的事情之一。你是否想做那种只有通过与众不同的思考才能获胜的工作？我怀疑大多数人的潜意识会在他们的意识有机会回答这个问题之前就回答了。我知道我的就是这样。
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.
独立思考似乎更多的是天性而不是后天培养的。这意味着如果你选择了错误类型的工作，你会感到不快乐。如果你天生独立思考，你会发现做中层管理很沮丧。而如果你天生保守思维，试图做原创研究会像逆风行驶。
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.
然而，这里的一个困难是，人们经常对自己在保守思维到独立思维的光谱上的位置有误解。保守思维的人不喜欢把自己看作保守思维的人。而且无论如何，他们确实觉得自己对一切都有自己的看法。只是巧合的是，他们的信念与他们的同龄人相同。而独立思维的人，通常不知道他们的想法与传统的有多么不同，至少在他们公开表达之前是这样。
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.
到他们成年时，大多数人大致知道自己有多聪明（在解决预设问题的狭义能力上），因为他们不断根据这个被测试和排名。但学校通常忽略独立思考，除了在一定程度上试图压制它。所以我们没有得到关于我们有多独立思考的类似反馈。
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.
甚至可能存在类似邓宁-克鲁格效应的现象，最保守思维的人自信他们是独立思维的，而真正的独立思维的人担心他们可能不够独立思维。
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.
你能让自己更独立思考吗？我认为可以。这种品质可能主要是天生的，但似乎有方法可以放大它，或者至少不压制它。
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.
其中一个最有效的技巧是大多数书呆子无意中实践的：只是少了解传统信念是什么。如果你不知道你应该遵循什么，很难成为一个墨守成规的人。尽管如此，这样的人可能已经是独立思维的。保守思维的人可能会因为不知道其他人怎么想而感到焦虑，并更加努力地去了解。
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。如果你周围都是保守思维的人，这将限制你可以表达的想法，进而限制你的想法。但如果你周围都是独立思维的人，你会有相反的体验：听到别人说令人惊讶的事情会鼓励你去思考更多。
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. 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.
因为独立思维的人发现被保守思维的人包围是不舒服的，他们一有机会就倾向于自我隔离。高中的问题是他们还没有机会。此外，高中往往是一个内向的小世界，其居民缺乏信心，这两者都放大了墨守成规的力量。所以高中往往是独立思维的人不好的时期。但即使在这里也有一些优势：它教会你应该避免什么。如果你后来发现自己处于一个让你觉得“这就像高中”的情况，你知道你应该离开。
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.
另一个独立思维和保守思维混在一起的地方是成功的初创公司。创始人和早期员工几乎都是独立思维的；否则初创公司不会成功。但保守思维的人数量远远超过独立思维的人，所以随着公司的成长，原本的独立思维精神不可避免地被稀释。这导致了各种问题，除了公司开始变糟的明显问题。最奇怪的之一是创始人发现自己能够比与自己员工更自由地与其他公司的创始人交谈。
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，你不必把所有时间都花在独立思维的人身上。你只需要有一两个可以定期交谈的人。一旦你找到他们，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独立思维的人的绝佳途径。大多数学生仍然是保守思维的，但你至少会找到一些独立思维的人，而不是你在高中时可能找到的几乎为零。
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.
另一种方法是反其道而行之：除了培养一小群独立思维的朋友，还要尽量结识尽可能多的不同类型的人。如果你有几个其他群体的同龄人，这将减少你身边同龄人的影响。此外，如果你是几个不同世界的一部分，你通常可以将一个世界的想法引入另一个世界。
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.
但不同类型的人，我指的不是人口统计学上的不同。为了使这种技术起作用，他们必须有不同的思维方式。所以虽然去访问其他国家是个好主意，但你可能会在附近找到思维不同的人。当我遇到一个对某些不寻常的事情了解很多的人（如果你挖得足够深，几乎包括所有人），我试图了解他们知道的其他人不知道的东西。这里几乎总是有惊喜。这是与陌生人交谈的好方法，但我不是为了交谈而这么做。我真的想知道。
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大影响源，不仅在空间上，也在时间上。当我读历史时，我不仅是为了了解发生了什么，而是试图进入过去生活的人的头脑。他们怎么看待事情？这很难做到，但值得努力，因为这与远足三角测量一个点是值得的。
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接受传统观点。最普遍的是培养一种怀疑的态度。当你听到有人说什么时，停下来问自己“那是真的吗？”不要大声说出来。我不是建议你强加给每个和你说话的人证明他们所说的负担，而是你自己承担评估他们所说的负担。
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.
把它当作一个谜题。你知道一些被接受的想法后来会被证明是错误的。看看你能不能猜出哪些。最终目标不是找到你被告知的事情中的缺陷，而是找到被破碎的东西掩盖的新想法。所以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？”时，你会惊讶地发现答案往往不是立即的肯定。如果你有任何想象力，你更有可能有太多的线索要跟踪而不是太少。
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未经检验的东西进入你的头脑，而事物并不总是以陈述的形式进入你的头脑。一些最强大的影响是隐含的。你如何注意到这些？通过退后一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.
当你站在足够远的距离时，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：你注意到几个人穿着某种衬衫，然后越来越多，直到你周围一半的人都穿着同样的衬衫。你可能不太在意你穿什么，但也有智力时尚，你绝对不想参与其中。不仅因为你想对自己的思想拥有主权，还因为不时尚的想法不成比例地可能会引导到有趣的地方。发现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.
要超越这些一般建议，我们需要看看独立思维的内部结构——就像我们需要锻炼的个别肌肉一样。在我看来，它有三个组成部分：对真理的挑剔，对被告知该怎么想的抵抗，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. To the independent-minded .
对真理的挑剔不仅仅意味着不相信错误的事情。它意味着对信念的程度要小心。对于大多数人来说，信念的程度在未经检验的情况下迅速趋向极端：不太可能的事情变得不可能，而可能的事情变得确定。
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，独立思维的人对意识形态感到恐惧，意识形态要求人们一次性接受一整套信念，并将其视为信条。对于独立思维的人来说，这会显得令人厌恶，就像对食物挑剔的人咬一口充满各种不确定年龄和来源的成分的潜艇三明治一样。
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.
没有这种对真理的挑剔，你就不能真正独立思考。仅仅抵制被告知该怎么想是不够的。这类人拒绝传统想法只是为了用最随机的阴谋论来代替它们。而且由于这些阴谋论通常是为了捕捉他们而制造的，他们最终比普通人更不独立思考，因为他们受制于比单纯的传统更严格的主宰。
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.
你能增加对真理的挑剔吗？我认为可以。根据我的经验，仅仅思考你挑剔的事情就会使这种挑剔增长。如果是这样，这是我们仅仅通过想要它就可以拥有更多的那些罕见美德之一。而且如果它像其他形式的挑剔一样，也应该可以在孩子身上鼓励。我肯定从我父亲那里得到了大量的这种挑剔。
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.
独立思维的第二个组成部分，对被告知该怎么想的抵抗，是三者中最明显的。但即使是这一点也经常被误解。人们对它的一个大错误是认为它仅仅是一种消极的品质。我们使用的语言强化了这种观念。你是不合常规的。你不在乎别人怎么想。但这不仅仅是一种免疫。在最独立思维的人中，不被告知该怎么想的愿望是一种积极的力量。这不仅仅是怀疑，而是对颠覆传统智慧的想法的积极喜悦，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.
一些最新颖的想法在当时几乎像恶作剧。想想你对新奇想法的反应有多频繁是笑。我不认为这是因为新奇的想法本身很有趣，而是因为新奇和幽默分享了一种特定的惊奇感。但虽然不完全相同，两者足够接近，以至于有一种明确的相关性，即有幽默感和独立思维之间——就像没有幽默感和保守思维之间一样。
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.
我不认为我们能显著增加对被告知该怎么想的抵抗。这似乎是独立思维的三个组成部分中最天生的；作为成年人拥有这种品质的人通常在儿童时期就显示出非常明显的迹象。但如果我们不能增加对被告知该怎么想的抵抗，我们至少可以通过让自己周围都是其他独立思维的人来巩固它。
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.
独立思维的第三个组成部分，好奇心，可能是最有趣的。在我们能够简要回答新奇想法从哪里来的问题的程度上，它是好奇心。这是人们在产生这些想法之前通常感受到的。
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.
根据我的经验，独立思维和好奇心完美地预测了彼此。我认识的所有独立思维的人都非常好奇，而我认识的所有保守思维的人都不是。奇怪的是，除了孩子。所有小孩子都很好奇。也许原因是即使是保守思维的人在开始时也必须好奇，以便了解什么是常规。而独立思维的人则是好奇心的贪吃者，即使饱了也继续吃。
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.
独立思维的三个组成部分协同工作：对真理的挑剔和对被告知该怎么想的抵抗在你的大脑中留下空间，而好奇心则找到新的想法来填充它。
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，这三个组成部分可以像肌肉一样相互替代。如果你对真理足够挑剔，你不需要对被告知该怎么想有那么强的抵抗力，因为仅挑剔就会在你的知识中创造足够的空隙。两者中的任何一个都可以弥补好奇心，因为如果你在大脑中创造了足够的空间，你对由此产生的真空的不适感会增加你的好奇心。或者好奇心可以弥补它们：如果你足够好奇，你不需要清空大脑中的空间，因为你发现的新想法会推开你默认获得的传统想法。
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.
因为独立思维的组成部分是如此可互换，你可以以不同程度拥有它们并仍然得到相同的结果。所以独立思维并不是只有一种模式。有些独立思维的人是公开的颠覆性，而另一些是安静的好奇心者。不过他们都知道秘密握手。
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.
有没有办法培养好奇心？首先，你要避免压制它的情况。你目前的工作在多大程度上激发了你的好奇心？如果答案是“不多”，也许你应该改变一些东西。
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.
你可以采取的最重要的积极步骤可能是寻找激发好奇心的主题。很少有成年人对所有事情都同样好奇，而且似乎你不能选择哪些主题让你感兴趣。所以找到它们是你的责任。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放纵它，调查你感兴趣的事情。在这方面，好奇心与大多数其他欲望不同：放纵它往往会增加而不是满足它。问题引发更多问题。
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挑剔或对被告知该怎么想的抵抗更加个性化。人们在后两者上的程度通常相当普遍，而不同的人对非常不同的事情好奇。所以也许好奇心是这里的指南针。也许，如果你的目标是发现新奇的想法，你的座右铭不应该是“做你喜欢的事情”，而是“做你感兴趣的事情”。
Notes
注释
[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.
[1] 没有人认同自己是保守思维的一个方便结果是，你可以随意谈论保守思维的人而不会惹上太多麻烦。当我写《顺从的四个象限》时，我预料到会有来自激进保守思维的愤怒风暴，但实际上却相当平静。他们感觉到这篇文章有他们非常不喜欢的地方，但很难找到具体的段落来指责。
[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.
[2] 当我问自己生活中有什么像高中时，答案是 Twitter。它不仅充满了保守思维的人，正如任何其规模的事物不可避免的那样，而且还受到保守思维暴风雨的影响，这让我想起了对木星的描述。但虽然在那里花时间可能是净损失，但它至少让我更多地思考了独立思维和保守思维之间的区别，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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
[3] 独立思维在成长中的初创公司中的减少仍然是一个未解决的问题，但可能有解决方案。
创始人可以通过有意识地努力只雇用独立思维的人来延迟这个问题。当然，这也有附带的好处，他们有更好的想法。
另一种可能的解决方案是制定政策，以某种方式破坏顺从的力量，就像控制棒减缓链式反应一样，使保守思维的人不那么危险。洛克希德的臭鼬工厂的物理分离可能有这个附带好处。最近的例子表明，像 Slack 这样的员工论坛可能不是完全的好事。
最激进的解决方案是增加收入而不增加公司规模。你认为雇佣那个初级公关人员比程序员便宜，但这对公司独立思维的平均水平有什么影响？（相对于教师的员工增长似乎对大学产生了类似的影响。）也许关于外包非“核心竞争力”工作的规则应该增加一个关于外包那些会破坏你公司文化的人的工作的规则。
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“技术堆栈”的不断增加的关节化表明，这一天对产品公司来说可能是可能的。
[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.
[4] 在每个领域都有智力时尚，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它极其受其影响。对政治有意见的门槛比对集合论有意见的门槛低得多。所以虽然政治中有一些想法，但实际上它们往往被智力时尚的浪潮淹没。
[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.
[5] 保守思维的人往往被他们意见的强度所愚弄，以为他们是独立思维的。但强烈的信念不是独立思维的标志。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.
[6] 对真理的挑剔并不意味着独立思维的人不会不诚实，而是他不会被迷惑。这有点像绅士的定义，即从不无意中粗鲁的人。
[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.
[7] 你特别能在政治极端分子中看到这一点。他们认为自己是非顺从主义者，但实际上他们是小众顺从主义者。他们的意见可能与普通人不同，但他们往往比普通人更受同龄人意见的影响。
[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.
[8] 如果我们扩大对真理挑剔的概念，使其排除迎合、虚假和浮夸以及严格意义上的虚假，我们的独立思维模型可以进一步扩展到艺术领域。
[9] This correlation is far from perfect, though. Gödel and Dirac don’t seem to have been very strong in the humor department