Recent comments

So, if “true” as a concept scores only 2.2, what’s the meta-rational “workhorse” replacement? Something like “adequate”?

First–what a nightmarish situation you describe. I’m sure seeing your mother’s decline into more severe dementia is heartbreaking, and to spend this time battling colossally frustrating dead ends is the last thing you (or anyone) needs.
Second–the for-profit insurance model is inherently bad–especially medical insurance. Customers pre-pay for a service (paying their medical bills) that, if delivered, eats into the insurer’s profits. So their incentive is to dawdle, confuse, stonewall, etc.–and if they do that long enough, the patient may get better–or die–and they are off the hook. And not only do the customer’s pre-pay, they are required to buy the insurer’s product, and often have little choice which insurer to go with–and changing insurers is made absurdly difficult.
Third – I wonder if the move to concierge medicine by the wealthy is exacerbating these problems, as those with power and influence to enact big changes have removed themselves from this syster and thus, for the most part, from caring to fix it. (analoguous to private jets and the joys of economy commercial)

The way you described “the transition from cell to non-cell” makes me think of the Ship of Theseus. I’ve always considered the Ship of Theseus to be the the birth of postmodernism, and one of the most important thought experiments in all of ancient philosophy. (Despite its reputation as cute dinner party banter.)

If we accept that the idea of propositions is incoherent—that there is nothing that could be believed or true in the rationalist sense—then we have to abandon the rationalist models for belief and truth.

Is a model of belief and truth just a set of propositions? If so, what sense does it make to talk about abandoning them if the idea of propositions is taken as incoherent?

what if we just decided that every astrological body, including planets or things-that-might-be-planets or I-Can’t-Believe-It’s-Not-A-Planet… got an IAU number? like there are currently only 8 things that don’t have one, unless I’m misunderstanding, and they already gave Pluto a hilariously large one given how long we’ve known about it.

…and then the IAU wouldn’t have to sweat about what gets a number, because everything gets a number, and they could rest because THEY can do their job without THEM needing to be the ones who are responsible for coming up with a reasonable definition of “planet”.

and folk classifications could continue to treat Pluto as a planet for cultural reasons or whatever (I still call Venus “the evening star” sometimes even though that name is listed on wikipedia’s page “List of former planets”)

(more precisely, it seems like comets still wouldn’t get numbers?)

David, thinking about Brent’s comments from 2001, which you responded to by talking about the need for apprenticeship. Are you familiar with the system of Permaculture Design Certificate training?

David Holmgren and co designed this as a way to introduce people to the basics of the design system, in a short course (or a series of shorter ones). In a way that gives students a solid conceptual basis for lifetime learning about the application of the design principles, choice of material techniques to implement designs, and so on. Anyone who has completed a PDC is considered capable of teaching one.

First, I wondered if this could be a model for introducing people to meta-systemic thinking and practice. Then, I wondered if it might already be an example of doing exactly that? The approach that many of the “systems thinkers” often referenced by permies, eg Donella Meadows, author of Dancing With Systems, seem to me more akin to stage 5 than stage 4.

Hi David, I’ve found your writing on meta-rationality very illuminating, and have written an exposition of my understanding of meta-rationality and how it addresses a range of open problems in epistemology. I couldn’t track down your email address but I’d love to get your feedback on it - drop me a message if so!

You can find me at @richardmcngo on twitter, or via my homepage (richardcngo.com).

The only hit on google for “self-consciousness recognizes pure Thought or Being as self-identity, and this again as separation” is this blog.

Same for subsections of the quote, such as “self-consciousness recognizes pure Thought or Being as self-identity” and even “self-consciousness recognizes pure”

Is this an actual Hegel quote?

This blog post is really quite excellent and I also enjoyed all of the comments. I just wanted to add something that I found in a book which may be of interest.

“Probability Logics”, Ognjanovic, Raskovic and Markovic, Springer 2016, ISBN: 978-3-319-47011-5

On page 49, there is some discussion of John Maynard Keynes, and then “Thus probability extends classical logic” (ostensibly according to Keynes).

So I thought that this was an interesting thing to find in a book. Please bear in mind that I personally am in agreement with your overall thesis here, but the reference to Keynes is interesting and I just wanted to share that. Of course, Keynes interpretation of probability is pretty bizarre, so it might come as no surprise that he would take that view.

I bet early OpenAI was like this. Algorithms at SFIX when I joined (2015) was somewhat like this. Maybe you could think of YCombinator as being like this? In some ways the old Netflix culture doc implied something like this (maximal freedom from structure, if you do a bad job you are fired)

The biggest problem is there ends up being a superposition between L3 and L5. L3 stuff happens and drags the whole thing down. How can you staff your org only with L5 people? Natural tendency is to apply L4 systems to prevent the L3 stuff.

“Companies run on cargo cult business management; states run on cargo cult policies; schools run on cargo cult education theories (Feynman mentioned this one); mainstream modern medicine is mostly witch doctoring.”

Could you please provide some evidence of this? And something to show it’s a significant percentage?

Too bad Vygotsky died young. But his focus was limited to the development of children and thus more closely tied to the biological development of their bodies. Kegan’s focus is on “adult development,” which is much harder to tie to biology or otherwise pin down empirically. This is why, in the realm of adult development, developmental psychology is woefully incomplete due to its lack of engagement with social ontology.

The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy contains a fairly recent article on social ontology …

https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/social-ontology/

… pointing out the downward causal influence of “joint commitments.” But due to the SEP author’s apparent metaphysical allergy, the aggregation of joint commitments into larger structures such as historically significant worldviews is not addressed.

Anyway, when it comes time to invite you on our podcast, should I post that invitation here, or is there a way to correspond with you outside the comments section? My email: steve@culturalevolution.org

Thanks for your quick and thoughtful reply.

I came across this piece of yours while doing research for an article I’m working on about the evolution of human nature—expanding the idea of “nature” to include the evolution of consciousness. My article includes an appreciative critique of developmental psychology: I appreciate Kegan and the neo-Piagetian school he represents for clearly framing “stage 5” in psychological terms. But I critique developmental psychology for inadequately integrating the evident impact of cultural evolution on psychological development—i.e. the relationship between the emergence of modernity and the growth of stage 4 cognition. Reading around in your larger body of work on meaningness has been stimulating.

Relatedly, for the past 10 years I’ve been working to build a stage 5 cultural institution (or perhaps just “a bridge to stage 5”) in the form of a think tank—the Institute for Cultural Evolution. We have recently received a new level of funding and are in the process of building up our staff. Perhaps we can find a way to engage you in our work, and promote your work in the process. This might take the form of us interviewing you on our soon to be launched podcast, or perhaps republishing excerpts from your work on our fledgling political magazine, “The Developmentalist.”

But whether you have any interest in collaborating or not, I salute you for your ongoing contribution to the evolution of the noosphere.

Where do Kegan’s stages come from?

This piece seems to contain the assumption that Kegan’s stages are universal and simply given. And this violates the author’s disputation of the “meaningness” of “eternalism.”

Is moving “up” a stage merely a matter of developing into a more complex form of brain wiring, requiring only neural plasticity as the ontological ground for this hierarchy of consciousness? Is it simply comparible to patterned stages of learning to play the violin? It seems to me that there must be more to it than that.

I think Chapman needs to do some more “ontological remodeling” to better include a “fluid” intersubjective ontology wherein these universal stages can be more systemically grounded.

People in stage 3 tend to misunderstand stage 4 as being stage 2

Which help do you see that can help stage 3 people to see and understand that there is something else (“stage 4”) that is different to what they are afraid of (“stage 2”)?, and that is not through Science, Technology, Engeneering or Mathematics (“STEM”), and not through a formalised education programme at all?

It does not need be a bridge to cross, but enough to see that there is something else which in fact is not stage 2, so that there is some ground for stage 3-people that acting and communicating from stage 4 is not attributed as stage 2-behaviour.

“Intuitive theories of causality don’t seem to be compatible with physicalism. A physics-grounded theory requires…” - there seem to be an implicit false dichotomy here, where a theory is either physics-grounded, out incompatible with physicalism. But that attitude would make pretty much everything about the manifest image incompatible with physicalism.

Thank you for your writings on stages 3, 4 and 5. Now I see clearer an aspect that happened to me: Gotten “traumatisesed” (not in the PTSD-sense) that a natural part of mine (logic) is bad. With your writings, I can now rephrase it as: While stage 4 functioning was a natural part if mine, stage 3 people told me that it is destructive and not-wished to be in stage 4. Thus did lead to an inner wound within myself.

I’m sure that there are other problems with that theory, but isn’t the causal theory of reference physicalist enough? The thought after all a physical thing, generated by the physical thinking process and usually whatever the thought I’d about.

This is a profound misrepresentation of anarchist organization. Freeman never uses the word anarchism and anarchist organizations have distributed this very essay as an example of what is not anarchist. Even a little research into actual real anarchist organizations would show you how wrong your representation. Try researching, for example, the Spanish CNT. This is an embarrassing strawman, David.

To remind me of awe-inspiring sensibility which occurs though overweight at by the darker side in structural discipline.. unfortunately, my conclusion is evolutionary discipline as mimeses are profoundly weighted toward on one hand inadequacy by ressentiments and a dual symmetry needed in both the casablanca shocked by gambling sense in inadequate risks of horror and backups serving the skeptic-cynic survivors and on the other hand chance by skinner vicarity.

It may be basically the engineer’s response from the end of the sequence, but I disagree with the characterization of nebulosity as “ontological”. In the boldness example (in the broad domain where humans and hairs and their positions are reasonably well-defined), there is a fact of the matter about the distribution of hairs on my head, and that of any other person. No relevant problem with the territory’s ontology. We want to define boldness for our own use, and are not very successful because the territory is continuous and does not cluster well. Which wouldn’t be a problem if we didn’t use discrete language - so I still see it as a linguistic problem, though not a solvable one.

I’ve long suspected this. And after reading Nina Teichold’s “Big Fat Surprise,” it pretty much confirmed what you write above. For me, the big warning sign was this focus on how dangerous saturated fats were, and how much superior were seed oils. Funny how humanity has evolved for thousands of years to be best suited to fats that were only invented about 120 years ago. And the fats we were eating meanwhile (animal fats) were somehow the problem all along.

I try to keep it simple: meat and vegetables, with a little wheat product thrown in in modest quantities. Little sugar.

Cheers,

Kim G
Roma Sur, CDMX
Where the obesity rate is appalling.

Are you able to share your bag of tricks?

I was thinking of this blog post recently because I have twin babies and me and my wife were arguing about whether to add salt to their baby food. They eat noticeably better when the food has a normal amount of salt on it, because otherwise it tastes bland, but you can find no end of advice online that tells you it’s dangerous to add salt to baby food.
Example: https://www.healthline.com/nutrition/salt-for-babies
Note all the links to scientific papers.

But what’s frustrating in that article (and similar articles) is that all the links go to papers like “babies who ate salty food, are more likely to eat salty food as adults.” The actual claims about salt being dangerous aren’t linked to papers. Why? Because it’s based on nothing, as this person found out:
https://lilynicholsrdn.com/salt-baby-food-infant-sodium-requirements/

To summarize that article: some nutritionists tried to figure out how much salt babies need. They didn’t know how to do that, so they said “lets assume human breast milk has the right amount of salt,” except that they got a number that’s too low. Human breast milk actually has like 50% more salt than they thought. When babies get old enough to eat solids, they concluded with the same assumptions that solids should have proportionally the same amount of salt as breast milk. (despite it being obvious that babies really like salt in their food. If you give a baby salty food, like a piece of fried bacon, they will suck the juices out of it for minutes)
Then in 2019 some other nutritionists came along and said “nah, that number is too high. We’ll make the official recommendation even lower.” With no evidence, and despite the fact that the first group got numbers that were too low.

Now lots of Americans are freaking out about salt in baby food, because the official numbers are crazy low, which suggests that you have to avoid salt altogether. Literally every book about feeding babies mentions that it’s dangerous to add salt, lots of online articles say the same, yet nobody ever links to any evidence for this, because there is no evidence.

What’s the right thing to do? Who knows, too much salt probably isn’t good, so now we just try to use a normal amount of salt.

What would recruitment look like for such a company?

RMCM: 5 … Mathematics is the manipulation of Function and Form to elucidate Cause and Effect.
RMCM: 6 … Science is the manipulation of Cause and Effect to elucidate Function and Form.
RMCM: 7 … In the cases of mathematics and science, technology is the final proof.

https://rationalmechanisms.com/first-principles-share/

STEM education has been on the rise in recent years. It is a field that covers many different disciplines, but one that is increasingly important for future job prospects.

STEM-related fields have always been a big draw for students, but the demand for STEM-related jobs has grown significantly as well. This is due to the fact that many of these jobs are high paying and offer opportunities to work with cutting-edge technology.

STEM education teaches students how to use their analytical and creative skills in order to solve problems and tackle challenges that arise in everyday life. It also helps them develop the skills needed to work with new technologies and innovations - which will be crucial in the future.

The fuzziness of objects, along with subjects, has long interested me. That comes up in discussions about hyper-objects, which are those that are so large and complex that we tend not to easily perceive them as coherent and unified things. And we can consider hyper-subjects of the bundled mind (4E cognition, communal, animistic, bicameral, etc)

But we don’t need to turn to unusual examples and speculations. Such vagueness can be observed directly in our own experience. It’s similar to how, in turning one’s awareness onto the mind, one will never discover a soul, ego, or a willpower. All that one can find is a stream of experience that has no clear boundary or stopping point. And that supposedly ‘inner’ experience is continuous with external perception. The metaphor of the body-mind as a container is a cultural bias.

I was finding this interesting and useful until I got to your footnote about it being mathematical rather than philosophical or scientific reduction. If so, what is the point? How can there be any practical significance in whether a process involves a mathematical reduction or not, given that mathematical processes are just shuffling round within the terms of a rationalized model? How can there be any basis for ‘right’ v ‘wrong’ forms of reduction if it is merely mathematical?

Where I think you might be onto something useful would be if you related this to the psychology of bias (e.g. Daniel Kahneman), which notes a process of substitution in biased thinking from a more difficult ‘slow’ process to an easier ‘fast’ one. When you talked about reduction being easier, at first I thought that was what you meant. I think philosophical reductionism is another version of the same process, i.e. the adoption of an easier model in the place of a more difficult one, and this is what it shares with more traditional forms of metaphysics. The significance of this seems to have nothing to do with mathematics though.