The Importance of Conformity
The Importance of Conformity
In Economics 101, students can learn from the law of diminishing marginal utility the reason why water is cheaper than diamond. It can be simply summed up as: the more we get, the less pleasure we can derive. Although water is essential to our life, we get such a large quantity that we are no longer sensitive to its additional happiness. On the other hand, the quantity of diamond is so limited that its marginal utility can easily outweigh that of water. We are more likely to value things in scarcity than things of implicit value.
When self-reliance and conformity come into comparison, I can hear the prevalent voice favoring self-reliance over conformity, just as the reality that diamond is priced over water.
People are either “drinking” conformity without being conscious of its values, or “dehydrated” because of its absence.
If we take a broad definition of conformity, which means following others, learning is at least partially an act to conform. Ever since when we totter as babies, we have learned language by conforming to the rules of language. The preservation of these grammatical rules, such as the subject-verb-object structure in English instead of the reverse, is conducted by the process of this innocent and innocuous conformity. Unimaginable is a world where every child, who refuses to conform even as a baby, creates its own grammatical structure and words. Thanks the God who didn’t take away this essential conformity when stopping the tower of Babel. People grow up with a great amount of practices to follow others in the milieu. For thousands of times we ruminate on classic works to shape our mind in a way that follows the thoughts of those dead men (yet can only pray for the serendipity of a good score in SAT). Even the most innovatively provocative technology in this globalizing age—the Internet—is built on top of conformities.
Computers have to send data in one particular format instead of others if it
In Economics 101, students can learn from the law of diminishing marginal utility the reason why water is cheaper than diamond. It can be simply summed up as: the more we get, the less pleasure we can derive. Although water is essential to our life, we get such a large quantity that we are no longer sensitive to its additional happiness. On the other hand, the quantity of diamond is so limited that its marginal utility can easily outweigh that of water. We are more likely to value things in scarcity than things of implicit value.
When self-reliance and conformity come into comparison, I can hear the prevalent voice favoring self-reliance over conformity, just as the reality that diamond is priced over water.
People are either “drinking” conformity without being conscious of its values, or “dehydrated” because of its absence.
If we take a broad definition of conformity, which means following others, learning is at least partially an act to conform. Ever since when we totter as babies, we have learned language by conforming to the rules of language. The preservation of these grammatical rules, such as the subject-verb-object structure in English instead of the reverse, is conducted by the process of this innocent and innocuous conformity. Unimaginable is a world where every child, who refuses to conform even as a baby, creates its own grammatical structure and words. Thanks the God who didn’t take away this essential conformity when stopping the tower of Babel. People grow up with a great amount of practices to follow others in the milieu. For thousands of times we ruminate on classic works to shape our mind in a way that follows the thoughts of those dead men (yet can only pray for the serendipity of a good score in SAT). Even the most innovatively provocative technology in this globalizing age—the Internet—is built on top of conformities.
Computers have to send data in one particular format instead of others if it