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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.

It might seem that these workplaces would fall into spectrums which encouraged their density and frequency of metarational so as to account for human differences valuing those people who could transcribe and translate at boundaries to rational links and collaborators allowing people as they felt like dipping their toes, being lowered in with a rope or those noticing stuff going on in these metarational pockets and wanted to serve as they develop.

My guess is that less than 1% are metasystematically reasoning with a lot of leeway for those in that mode of development a La Elliott Jaques (Human Capability)…which is far less than the 15% one might believe responsibility for innovation.

Taking into consideration how a world might benefit would be to allow those that could in a variety of forms to assume the “governance” that might “sponsor” these incubators of metarationality as either option or verse to foster the metarational unfolding, so to speak.

The paradigmatic problems which are emerging might be unpacked well enough by metarationalists as they go about the feeling and thinking of the freedom to do so without the rational nature of systematic problems running their course.

In a sense of collegiality there are many of us who “seem” without perhaps fully grokking metarationality to want this and are doing this collaboration in a virtual form…as if there isn’t any other…to formalize a process where the synergy might be enhanced is a question you might want to answer…let’s call it a bridge to metarational organizations.

Thanks for sharing your work;)

Was Ezra Pound perhaps talking about the control of language not the control of money ? For instance “In the beginning there was the Word & the Word is God”; now that sounds very restrictive.

An interesting failure even in pop science writing (as opposed to serious rationalists) is “structural color”.

I was looking up bluebirds and noticed there’s a lot of websites confidently declaring things like “they’re not really blue, they just look blue”. What they apparently mean is, if you took a bluebird apart, there wouldn’t be a piece of it that’s still blue.

But of course it really is blue! Looking blue to humans and cameras is the reasonable use of “is blue”.

Hi,

You mention that the scientific method can hardly be defined and is therefore implausible. I am by no means a rationalist who wants to believe in it, but I’ve caught glimpses of a certain “vastness” to the scientific method that I encountered in University, that goes beyond what they teach you in high school, and makes me wish I had learned more about it. It’s something about how you don’t just make a hypothesis, but you make two: a “null” hypothesis and a “positive” hypothesis, and you check to see how they interact before concluding anything. Also, making hypotheses is not the first step you do, but the last one, after much careful consideration. Something about how before that, you’re making a theory, but not applying it to the world and/or checking to see how it interacts with what you see. I might not be remembering it very well since it was a long time ago, but it seems like there is an ideal there that goes really deep.

I don’t necessarily disagree that nutritional science has some problems with research, but this article is guilty of the same faulty reasoning you find in pseudoscience. If nutritional scientists don’t know anything, even with all their data, how could you know for certain that the obesity epidemic was caused by eating a low-fat diet? This is another one of those outrageous claims you hear all the time that lacks any real evidence. Many things changed in the 1970s and 80s, most notably two working parent households increased, and as a result intake of processed foods exploded. There’s certainly no evidence that the majority of Americans during this time were chowing down on brown rice and green vegetables. Since it is almost impossible to get people to follow a strict low-fat diet outside of a very controlled research environment, this would have been an impressive feat indeed. Yes sales for processed foods marketed as low-fat increased, but the average American during this time was eating hamburger helper, mac and cheese, and TV dinners. Hardly what you would consider low-fat fare, even when it is marketed as such. The problem with ultra low-fat diets is not that they don’t work, they work almost too well, just look at traditional asian and blue zone diets. The traditional Japanese diet contains around 50 grams of fat per day (compared to 80 grams in the United States), while the Okinawa typically eat less than 20 grams of fat per day. People in these cultures are very thin, and only gain weight when they change to a more western style diet. The type of diseases most prevalent in these cultures are related to having too little body fat, instead of too much body fat as we see in the west. The problem is that low-fat diets don’t seem to be sustainable for the majority of people who were raised on a western diet and live in environments surrounded by high-fat food, our instincts are designed to seek out and eat the richest food in our environment in order to avoid starvation. I doubt we will ever find a solution to that in our current abundant food world, the people who are unusually motivated to lose the weight and get healthy will, the people who aren’t will continue to die of disease. It’s a sad reality, but reality nonetheless.

… but nebulous, particularly ephemeral.

I’d guess that some organizations have supported more-or-less meta-rational workplaces. The Manhattan Project immediately came to mind as one possibility.

I think my long-held preference for working at ‘startups’ or, at minimum, in small teams at ‘bigger’ organizations, is mainly because doing so affords me the ability to demonstrate ‘general competence’. Some of my favorite projects involved things like (sloppy) mathematical/academic research for particular problems (far outside of my nominal ‘position’). I find that generally very fun!

My favorite bosses/supervisors have also been those that, so I realize now, were best at spotting ‘breakdowns’ in the organization’s ‘rational systems’ and then adapting those systems (or scrapping them entirely) to better serve newly-identified purposes (e.g. someone’s preferences for certain kinds of work or some new task(s) that must be done regularly).

I commented on another of your post’s recently expressing a desire for more concrete details about or examples of meta-rationality – this post delivers! Thanks!

Sorry – I wasn’t (or didn’t want to come across as) complaining as much as anticipating more details about meta-rationality (and the complete stance).

I’m extremely sympathetic about having dozens of projects (in various states of non-completion).

I’m looking forward to your explication of meta-rationality using the example of “choosing a web development framework” – that’s something I’m familiar with both professionally and personally (as the latter is relevant to a lot of my own personal projects).

I don’t entirely disagree with your description of “the LessWrong-adjacent subculture” as its “center of gravity [being] more-or-less rationalism”. I think the ‘center of gravity’ of my own perspective is skewed as the original active/popular participants have mostly dispersed to alternative venues and the site itself now being something like an archive/library and ‘community center’ for people new to the ‘movement’.

Also, seems like the Co-Founders page was moved to Meaningness, so the link needs to be updated.

It reminds me of Valve’s New Employee Handbook, as it is precisely about work culture in Valve, and The Glass Bead Game by Herman Hesse (there, the master musician says to Joseph about ‘generally competent’ ideal in Castalia somewhere at around 50-th pages).

I love how you laid it all out, both how & why it works. Tons of resonance with a lot of my own thinking on this. There’s definitely a puzzle in team design around how to bootstrap towards ever saner collaboration.

Having followed you now for quite a while, I notice I’m a little impatient for something ‘beyond intros’. I think I get what you’re pointing/gesturing at, but I feel like I’ve been ‘looking forward to’ the next ‘step’ in your description of meta-rationality.

There were some tidbits you’ve shared along the way. Some of what you’ve written for “In the Cells of the Eggplant” seemed to contain sufficient concrete details that it seemed like I had a better more specific idea of meta-rationality and how to maybe start practicing it myself.

I’ve also seen glimpses of it (or so I thought/think) in other things – that’s been exciting! But it’s also hard to gain much from other things generally – a lot of things are by, for, or about people that aren’t (consistently) ‘rational’.

I don’t use Twitter often but of the few times I have and I’ve seen a tweet (or retweet or whatever) from you, it seems to be criticizing ‘rationality’ but not (AFAICT) doing ‘meta-rationality’. It’s only because I’m familiar with your work that I know you’re not advocating for ‘pre-rationality’!

I also wonder if part of my confusion is because ‘rationality’ to you is very different than what others mean, e.g. the ‘modern rationality movement’. The idea of using ‘rational systems’, i.e. debating, discussing, and thinking about how they work, when they work, how they correspond to reality at different scales, and alternative ‘rational systems’ for specific problems or subjects; that all sure seems to me to be very much like what you describe as “conjur[ing] with systems as a magical dance of transparent illusions”.

And something I can’t quite shake is that ‘doing meta-rationality’ should ‘look’ like doing a lot of ‘regular rationality’, but different varieties of it (in the sense of something like ‘at the same time’).

Even if there are no “principles” or “methods” for doing meta-rationality, surely there must be examples.

Do you have any meta-commentary about your own various meta-rationality projects that might be useful as examples of meta-rationality itself?

I understand why stage 5 would be neither monist nor dualist in your definitions, but I wonder if stages 3-5 could be considered both monist and dualist (in perceptual-scientific terms).

People in stages 1 and 2 (kegan) are literally experiencing monism described by James Gibson. There is no abstract mental representation, but rather indexical-functional (concrete). Once they reach formal rationality, can’t they now look at things in terms of their literal affordances for action (concrete-monism), as well as their symbolic affordances for action (abstract -dualism)? I know this is not exactly what this page is about, but I’m wondering what you think of this.

Thanks!

In case anyone is interested, I really liked the discussion in the comments section of an old Beams and Struts article. Jeremy Johnson participated, but I really appreciated the view of T. Collins Logan.

There was much debate about integral thought requiring discernment where transcend involves both inclusion and exclusion. To integrate means to take what works and leave the rest behind. Not everything is equal and so we should avoid false equivalency.

That seems related to what is being talked of here. Discernment, of course, requires genuine understanding. We need to know what is 4.5 before we decide to dismiss or discard it. That is the challenge, if many at 5 tend to use straw man arguments against a caricature.

Some argue that it is problematic to equate 4.5 with postmodernism. That is because 4.5 has been taking hold for centuries, long before postmodernist writings. It has much more significance than that, specifically as it has played out in the larger world outside of academia.

http://www.beamsandstruts.com/articles/item/1143-eightperspectivespolitics.html