John Stuart Mill argued that protecting civil liberty is not enough; social liberty must also be protected. It is possible to force most people into conformity with prevailing opinion by criticism, disapproving glances, and mockery of nonconformity.
Pointer from Tyler Cowen.
I am afraid that this is the price that we pay for living in society. Any cohesive society will reward cooperators and punish defectors. Social sanctions are going to be part of that.
To put this another way, I would argue that conformity is usually good and nonconformity is often bad. Yes, we want our society to accept some nonconformity. However, I believe that those who profess to want to live in a society with a much higher tolerance for nonconformity are probably kidding themselves. Note that in the 1960s how quickly the expressions of non-conformity (long hair, etc.) came to be themselves enforced by standards of conformity.
In another interesting paragraph, Kimball writes,
As an academic, I notice how powerfully the opinion of other economists–whether right or wrong–operates in controlling the behavior and the research priorities of the typical academic. It is hard to think of many people who could be more safe from harsh practical consequences for a dissenting opinion than tenured professors, yet most still meekly follow the opinion of the crowd within their discipline. Is this the way it should be? Is this the way to best advance science? I don’t think so. Surely, a bit greater variance in expressed opinion would be more productive of scientific progress than the degree of conformity that prevails within most scientific disciplines, including economics.
My comments.
1. Do you remember what Paul Romer said?
The only way I can see to protect scientific discourse is to limit entry into the discussions of science.
2. If you are looking for an optimum degree of tolerance for divergent ideas, I do not think you will find it at either 0 percent of 100 percent. I do think that right now in economics, the tolerance for divergent ideas is too low. However, it is better than it was 30 years ago.
Heh, maybe we need a Fed which can raise and lower the interest rate of ‘contrarian tolerance’ in response to shifting confidence or doubt in (or apparent success or failure of) mainstream theories.
This might be an appallingly Straussian idea, but could we acknowledge in principle that maybe the professorate and society at large might need to operate at different levels of tolerance for noncomformity?
Perhaps of you think academia should have some authority as a gatekeeper of ideas you might have one standard of tolerance whereas if you think the purpose is to produce lots of ideas for consideration you will have the opposite standard.
If we are going to screen signals for access to scientific discourse, I propose doing it on the basis of scientific validity.
More racially and ethnically homogeneous means more social liberty and still high cohesion.
Less racial and ethnic homogeneity means more conformity necessary to reach the same amounts of cohesion.
And of course, while: “It is possible to force most people into conformity with prevailing opinion by criticism, disapproving glances, and mockery of nonconformity”, it’s much faster to get conforming behavior when the gov’t punishes those who don’t want to conform, or pushes other authorities to punish.
Christian bakers getting punished for not wanting to bake cakes for gay marriages leads to conformity; Universities loosing Fed funding when not punishing young men who are accused of sexual assault after drunken regret sex is a current attempt to create a new conformity.
In a reverse direction, there used to be social pressure against having children out of wedlock. The gov’t policies to reduce the bad effects of these personal lifestyle choices has essentially rewarded that behavior, and in poor areas the incentives to have babies without being married is leading to increasing numbers of children born to unwed mothers. See Muskogee’s rate of white children born thusly, approaching 50%.
In science, there should be a greater push for more raw data to made available, as well as explicit adjustments — global warming has been particularly opaque on this.