I'm new to your substack, so I have missed most of your antecedent writing. I love the clarity of your verbal reasoning. Regarding this exposition on worldview, I'm again impressed by the semi-mathematical rigor of your analysis. On the other hand, while I lack your knowledge of the literature, I'm old, so I have an independent knowledge base. I'm a little skeptical of the validity of assigning unitary worldviews (however many dimensions) to individuals, worldviews that provide major predictive value to their opinions and behavior.
I'd say that much of behavior is irrational, that most of us are largely unaware of our motivations, that much of behavior is random, and that much of it is guided largely by the opinions and behaviors of a very restricted social set (say 2-5 other people). To the extent that my critique is on-target, doesn't it question the value or even the meaning of an a priori worldview?
I think your point relates two questions: what does the concept of a worldview cover (and what behaviors or views should it predict) and how stable are these causes at the individual level (i.e. does it make sense to identify an individual’s worldview).
I agree much of our behavior is irrational, but our articulated political and moral views often rest on some conscious and rational thought, even if in reality your position is more a reflection of your social group than it is those arguments. As someone who grew up in a more progressive setting, I internalized various beliefs about human nature and potential and the causes of human suffering and injustice - maybe I wouldn’t have been able to precisely articulate them but they were there and they influenced my views on a whole host of other issues. And I think we can identify these sorts of core values and beliefs which lead to very different interpretations of the world even while recognizing that we didn’t come to hold them for rational reasons.
And on the stability part, my view is that worldviews shift significantly over your life but are actually very stable in the short term. Things that disagree with the worldview might get noticed, but they won’t cause a real change right away, only after many, many challenges have built up will someone have a shift and begin to see a bunch of issues in a new light. So I think it’s much less stable than a personality but stable enough to discuss. And at the level of a culture I think it’s more clear that there are shared worldviews which explain differences with the median person from another culture or time period.
Yeah. One of the things I especially enjoy in your substack is that I feel I'm learning stuff even when I don't agree. So let's see... Do I think (at least most) people have something that an outsider could call a "worldview"? Yup, though I'm not sure most people would call it that themselves, nor even that they would acknowledge having one.
Do I think they interpret stuff based on their worldview? Again yes. But I think some of it is circular rationalization. So, they have visceral reactions. If challenged by others (or if they wonder about it themselves) they construct reasons for their reaction. But while some of this reflects a logically-consistent perceptual process, much (I think most) reflects instead that, at least when talking to someone like you or me, they don't want to say "duhhh," or "I don't know," or even "because he pisses me off," so they come up with some narrative that sounds consistent. Moreover, even if they believe that's why, I'm not sure they're correct. I don't mean to degrade non-logical reasoning. Certainly most of the brain is concerned with such, and visceral judgments may well be more reliable for most practical purposes than logically rigorous ones, but still.
Finally, yeah, I'm confident that my own worldview was molded originally by my parents, and then by various life experiences before age 40 and especially before 30. On the other hand, probably even concepts as abstract as worldview probably have at least some genetic component.
In any case, whatever the true nature of worldview, it does seem like a potentially useful way to understand large groups of people across time or space. The one that really strikes me (not sure if it has any relationship to what you mean by "worldview" is to ask someone who they are. A member of a modern society will tell you their education, their occupation, their ambitions, etc. A member of a premodern society will tell you the names of their relatives and the nature of each relationship, their shared beliefs, the location of their community, etc.
Yes, I’ve heard that example around how individualized the “who are you” answer is before and think it’s getting at something.
I’d agree that most of this is not explicit but a reflection of the implicit worldview in your culture or subculture, and also that genetic/personality factors influence this (which gets at the folk idea of the “psychological conservative vs progressive”)
A thought on trad/liberation alliance. History has a cycle of religion being on the giving and receiving end of oppression. The arch narrative of being oppressed is Moses asking Pharaoh to free the people to make sacrifices to God in the desert. The oppressive side of the cycle demonstrates how easily power corrupts. Honest assessment of this cycle prioritizes freedom both as protection and self control.
Traditional community must be an opt in for it to be fruitful. Forced sacrifice is theft or abuse, therefore a community that requires some level of sacrifice and subordination must be freely chosen. (The community is also free to reject your participation if you are not operating within the communal norms). I get this sounds like a cult, but the principal applies to a PTA or corporate business as much as a trad church. Liberty is one of many traditional virtues; it's elevated in libertarianism but recognized as part of the natural law by traditional folk.
Traditional subsidiarity looks like liberty in national politics. Both trads and utili-trads recognize that local decision making and adaptation is more functional, empowering and humane. At the national level this looks like libertarianism in many issues, but at the local level things may get socialist.
On dimensions:
I think there is a tension on which level so we care about: humanity generally, our corporate/community, individual experience. This isn't reducible to a particular individuals within culture it's a matter of focus/prioritization within the layers. We can optimize culture to minmax individual outcomes. We can elevate culture at with burden unevenly across individuals but the culture is of a higher quality elevating all participants. (I mean this in a manner that isn't necessarily reducible to individual experiences. in what sense is it elevated? Cultural fruit, narrative, sense of self vs other times and places?) Finally we can prioritize survival and progress of humanity without consideration of the individual. "We should terraform Mars even if millions live and die horribly in the effort".
I'm still wrestling with how we best model political ideology. Arguably one should characterize the culture and accept politics as a tribal manifestation of culture. (American liberal ideology reflect cosmopolitan educated affluence heavily influenced by post-relgious, postmodern, multicultural milue and economic centrality. Trump conservativism is blue collar, outer ring suburban, low brow football and reality TV influences and economic volatility.)
Alternatively you view ideology as a mash up coalition which is primarily a rationalization of an institutional artifact. There is an organic menu of positions without a deeper meaning.
I think of any given culture (or sub-culture) as occupying a certain region of our high-dimensional idea space, characterized by some central point. The vector separating the centers of two different cultures will have many components. But the two centers, hence the separating vector, can move within idea space over a timescale of years or decades.
When Sowell published *A Conflict of Visions* in 1987, what separated the left and right in America was something more like his idea of the constrained-vs.-unconstrained view of human nature. Both Keynesian and Marxist factions of the left were still operating on a positive, Enlightenment view of reason. But around this time is when something very deep started changing within the left, accelerating after its anti-market ethos was dealt a serious blow by the official collapse of the Soviet Union.
Stephen Hicks argues for this as the impetus behind the left’s turn to postmodernism. The big components of the left-right separating vector had been of a political nature. But the vector was now rotating and stretching into deeper, epistemological dimensions. This was more or less a continuous process, tracking the rise of wokism within the left. Later, the emergence of Trump shattered the right, with his populist faction undergoing a similar epistemological shift as the woke left had.
Once Trump’s faction had seized control of right-wing politics, the epistemological components of the separating vector were reduced, leaving a smaller gap, in absolute terms, between his faction and an increasingly woke left. At the same time, other factions have pealed off the woke left and populist right in order to preserve their Enlightenment-style views of reason. What we have now is a more complicated set of ideological clusters that have not yet re-solidified into a stable two-pole configuration.
I wanted to bring this out to distinguish between two different senses of “the fundamental axis.” One sense is about the separation between, e.g., two cultural factions that happen to be dominant at a given time. Another sense is about what separates a given modern faction from something more distant, like a pre-Enlightenment civilization. This second sense is what gets at the core values of our culture. The first sense of “fundamental axis” may or may not reach into those core values at any given time. In the 1980’s it didn’t do that as much. Today, unfortunately, it does.
yes, this all makes perfect sense and is helpful. And this is a more precise way of explaining what I meant by "it depends on the context you're interested in". So, if the context you're interested in is the clusters in America in 1987, Sowell's model is very useful for explanation, but the clusters his model was trying to separate didn't differ meaningfully on epistemological dimensions. And since you think the epistemological dimensions describe more of the variance when you zoom out to look at a bigger chunk of the ideological space, the clusters he was trying to separate are ultimately not so far apart. I think what I meant by fundamental axis over a context of all historical periods would be if you mapped all the people over all these periods and looked at if there were broader clusters in that picture of the space, which would cover more dimensions and include more distant points, and your suggestion is that if we did that we would notice clusters which map to post-Enlightenment values and epistemology vs. pre-Enlightenment. Would you say that this expectation is based on the different visible products of these cultures primarily? I.e. scientific progress, wealth creation...
Yeah, visible products, and the sci/tech capabilities making them possible, and the academic/corporate/political institutions making those capabilities possible, and up the intellectual food chain. Hicks’ scheme, which I agree with, is really a three-cluster model: premodern, modern, postmodern, where “modern” basically means Enlightenment-derived culture.
It seems that once a large enough cohort adopts a worldview, it starts to seep into the culture, and becomes difficult to resist. This is the goal of most political power grabs.
The checks and balances that have evolved in democratic political systems are meant to limit this metastasis, however they are always under attack and need to be reinforced periodically and this is a platitude that is often ignored or discounted.
The old notion of "deadly sins" is an ancient approach to these checks and balances, since it postulates taboos against extreme behavior that can lead to slides towards instability and inequality.
For example, greed or lying both are both social mechanisms' that lead to power imbalances. On the other hand, the parliamentary system where tensions between "loyal" institutions are entrenched, is a dynamic mechanism to limit power.
So the left and the right that you discuss will continue to exist but need to be in tension. Right now I think we are on a saddle point, where the right has created a surface where any opposition slides towards the right. Truth has been weaponized and money can be made by lying and being extreme.
The media benefits, the stock market benefits and some people benefit over others. Not sustainable of course, but that is the nature of instability.
We need to reform the saddle point into a "bowl", where both right and left are forced to contend with each other and are prevented from escaping.
Unfortunately, history has shown that once this slide goes too far there are no easy ways to set things back, and revolution or war ensues when the situation affects enough people badly enough. We need to resist institutional erosion to prevent this unfortunate extreme. Attacks on "big government" or on "communism" are misguided.
"As Hanson has said, we tend not to tolerate much inter-cultural diversity on sacred values". My guess is that you meant "intra-cultural" rather than "inter-cultural"? Or maybe I misunderstood.
Surprised to see no mention to Deleuze and Guattari in the piece because they pretty much wrote an entire book about exactly this discussion. (A Thousand Plateaus), which is also in large parts a criticism of the tree-like (in their words literally "arborescent") view of knowledge and culture in society .
Many of the questions asked here "how can similar people end up on opposite sides" make much more sense when this tree-like model is dropped and replaced with what they termed "rhizomatic" view of knowledge and culture. People's believes are not linear, binary, dualistic, they have no start or endpoint, they're rhizomatic, decentralized, non-coherent. Everything connects with everything else.
Worldviews are organized the same way as hypertext on the internet or as knowledge is organized on Wikipedia. There's no left or right, no start or end, no center. There's no trees, no levels or hierarchies and no direction. Worldviews are horizontal, strongly interconnected networks. There's no totalizing taxonomy that can be imposed on this, and it explains why nobody has particularly great success at predicting how worldviews shift.
Isn't what you ask for at the end basically the problem Haidt was trying to solve by postulating the different foundations of moral opinions.I don't know if he's specifically correct but I think to the extent there is something there it's a good place to start.
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Having said that, I want to raise the possibility that alot of this is less fundamental than people think and it's really substantially driven just by familiarity. If you grow up around guns they seem about as threatening as a car and vice-versa with drag queens. The very fact that people's views are so dictated by those of their community suggests that lots of this is just accidental.
I think there are issues with Haidt’s work, in that it contains the sort of researcher bias which I mention, and that’s hard to avoid when you explicitly construct scenarios and assign categories in the way he did (this is why the lexical hypothesis is so central to the personality research approach). I’ll probably cover the related critiques and other attempts in a future piece.
Also yes, much is “accidental” in that it’s cultural rather than driven by personality primarily (although I think that’s also a factor), but it’s still useful to understand what is causing the actual disagreement between individuals, and what sorts of visions or frameworks tend to produce the best results (however defined) at the cultural level
I think that's probably right, but I don't think that means it's wrong that there are differences between people in what kind of moral considerations they find motivating.
I mean when I actually parse Haidt carefully it's not clear to me he is claiming all that much. Sure, he talks as if these 5 foundations were special but it's not clear he has made any explicit claim about them being some kind of maximally informative decomposition or anything which really leaves the claim as something just like: here are some ways people differ. And I think he has proved that people do differ in those ways -- even if not that it's intrinsic or even the most important way they differ.
So that's all I'm suggesting, that there do seem to be ways in which different people seem more compelled by different kinds of value considerations that seems like it's reasonably consistent over time to roughly same extent personality is. Maybe Haidt hasn't proven that but it's a relatively weak claim my priors support pretty well.
I agree with the concept of his research and am glad it exists as a starting point. But as far as I know he does claim that his findings are foundational and evolved even if different cultures emphasize them to different degrees
Yes, I think he does. I just kinda ignored that because I didn't see him spell out exactly what he meant by foundational.
I think you are probably right to critisize him but I also think it's a good way to read research -- if it's not operationalized it's probably not meaningful.
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Though. as I said in my initial comment, there is clearly a limit to how much this can drive differences rather than vice versa given by the ability of people to adopt the values of their neighbors.
I’m left wondering if it’s useful to think of political / moral opinion as a *point* in higher-dimensional space? People’s opinions change depending on e.g. life experiences, group dynamics, what book they just read, or even whether they have eaten recently.
Makes me think of the rejection of essentialism in philosophy/psychology circles, i.e. rejecting the idea of some stable “self” or “core" that could ostensibly be found if one digs deep enough within.
How would one model it mathematically? At the very least as a point with an uncertainty in the aforementioned “opinion space”. In other words a volume. The funny thing is that in higher dimensions, volume is concentrated at the edges, so if a person’s opinion over time boils down to randomly sampling this volume, one might end up with quite disparate beliefs!
Maybe one can reduce the uncertainty along certain dimensions by consciously deciding on an opinion and sticking to it (we have memory, and a desire to appear consistent, after all). But I would argue that for the vast majority of dimensions we don’t “care enough” to nail down our opinion, and the dimensions are numerous enough that we wouldn’t have time to go through any considerable fraction of them anyway.
An interesting slice might be homeostatic reductionists (force the world to fit us) vs homeostatic extenders (become the sorry of creatures who can inhabit more of the world).
You may also be interested in the Buddhist psychological model given that much of Western psychology is downstream of Eastern phenomenological techniques and results. The best elucidation I know of is the second half of Opening the Heart of Compassion.
I'm pushing 70 years old now, and of course age proves nothing, but I was more interested in this sort of grand theorizing when I was in my 20s, and was never any good at it. But hats off for trying, and may you get further than I ever did! Jumping ahead, I'm intrigued to consider that while I've rarely voted for a Republican, I more and more agree with the "constrained" views. But I think this is entirely consistent with the basic idea of giving more support to the less well off, through more progressive taxation as a starting point. Even accepting the controversial idea that internal qualities like intelligence and discipline are less prevalent on the lower end of the scale, that still doesn't mean they deserve a lot less. The structure of the economy (high rewards for an elite few) is such that such people will suffer more and more through no fault of their won, and only the government can provide systematic help, and since there's no other source of big bucks than rich people, it involves redistribution. They would still have a lot less than rich people but more than they have now. It's not an idea you would usually associate with the "constrained" view of things, but I think it is totally consistent. If there's a dimension where "redistribute to be more fair" varies independently from "constrained" it will be interesting.
I'm new to your substack, so I have missed most of your antecedent writing. I love the clarity of your verbal reasoning. Regarding this exposition on worldview, I'm again impressed by the semi-mathematical rigor of your analysis. On the other hand, while I lack your knowledge of the literature, I'm old, so I have an independent knowledge base. I'm a little skeptical of the validity of assigning unitary worldviews (however many dimensions) to individuals, worldviews that provide major predictive value to their opinions and behavior.
I'd say that much of behavior is irrational, that most of us are largely unaware of our motivations, that much of behavior is random, and that much of it is guided largely by the opinions and behaviors of a very restricted social set (say 2-5 other people). To the extent that my critique is on-target, doesn't it question the value or even the meaning of an a priori worldview?
Thank you very much, Richard!!
I think your point relates two questions: what does the concept of a worldview cover (and what behaviors or views should it predict) and how stable are these causes at the individual level (i.e. does it make sense to identify an individual’s worldview).
I agree much of our behavior is irrational, but our articulated political and moral views often rest on some conscious and rational thought, even if in reality your position is more a reflection of your social group than it is those arguments. As someone who grew up in a more progressive setting, I internalized various beliefs about human nature and potential and the causes of human suffering and injustice - maybe I wouldn’t have been able to precisely articulate them but they were there and they influenced my views on a whole host of other issues. And I think we can identify these sorts of core values and beliefs which lead to very different interpretations of the world even while recognizing that we didn’t come to hold them for rational reasons.
And on the stability part, my view is that worldviews shift significantly over your life but are actually very stable in the short term. Things that disagree with the worldview might get noticed, but they won’t cause a real change right away, only after many, many challenges have built up will someone have a shift and begin to see a bunch of issues in a new light. So I think it’s much less stable than a personality but stable enough to discuss. And at the level of a culture I think it’s more clear that there are shared worldviews which explain differences with the median person from another culture or time period.
Yeah. One of the things I especially enjoy in your substack is that I feel I'm learning stuff even when I don't agree. So let's see... Do I think (at least most) people have something that an outsider could call a "worldview"? Yup, though I'm not sure most people would call it that themselves, nor even that they would acknowledge having one.
Do I think they interpret stuff based on their worldview? Again yes. But I think some of it is circular rationalization. So, they have visceral reactions. If challenged by others (or if they wonder about it themselves) they construct reasons for their reaction. But while some of this reflects a logically-consistent perceptual process, much (I think most) reflects instead that, at least when talking to someone like you or me, they don't want to say "duhhh," or "I don't know," or even "because he pisses me off," so they come up with some narrative that sounds consistent. Moreover, even if they believe that's why, I'm not sure they're correct. I don't mean to degrade non-logical reasoning. Certainly most of the brain is concerned with such, and visceral judgments may well be more reliable for most practical purposes than logically rigorous ones, but still.
Finally, yeah, I'm confident that my own worldview was molded originally by my parents, and then by various life experiences before age 40 and especially before 30. On the other hand, probably even concepts as abstract as worldview probably have at least some genetic component.
In any case, whatever the true nature of worldview, it does seem like a potentially useful way to understand large groups of people across time or space. The one that really strikes me (not sure if it has any relationship to what you mean by "worldview" is to ask someone who they are. A member of a modern society will tell you their education, their occupation, their ambitions, etc. A member of a premodern society will tell you the names of their relatives and the nature of each relationship, their shared beliefs, the location of their community, etc.
Yes, I’ve heard that example around how individualized the “who are you” answer is before and think it’s getting at something.
I’d agree that most of this is not explicit but a reflection of the implicit worldview in your culture or subculture, and also that genetic/personality factors influence this (which gets at the folk idea of the “psychological conservative vs progressive”)
A thought on trad/liberation alliance. History has a cycle of religion being on the giving and receiving end of oppression. The arch narrative of being oppressed is Moses asking Pharaoh to free the people to make sacrifices to God in the desert. The oppressive side of the cycle demonstrates how easily power corrupts. Honest assessment of this cycle prioritizes freedom both as protection and self control.
Traditional community must be an opt in for it to be fruitful. Forced sacrifice is theft or abuse, therefore a community that requires some level of sacrifice and subordination must be freely chosen. (The community is also free to reject your participation if you are not operating within the communal norms). I get this sounds like a cult, but the principal applies to a PTA or corporate business as much as a trad church. Liberty is one of many traditional virtues; it's elevated in libertarianism but recognized as part of the natural law by traditional folk.
Traditional subsidiarity looks like liberty in national politics. Both trads and utili-trads recognize that local decision making and adaptation is more functional, empowering and humane. At the national level this looks like libertarianism in many issues, but at the local level things may get socialist.
On dimensions:
I think there is a tension on which level so we care about: humanity generally, our corporate/community, individual experience. This isn't reducible to a particular individuals within culture it's a matter of focus/prioritization within the layers. We can optimize culture to minmax individual outcomes. We can elevate culture at with burden unevenly across individuals but the culture is of a higher quality elevating all participants. (I mean this in a manner that isn't necessarily reducible to individual experiences. in what sense is it elevated? Cultural fruit, narrative, sense of self vs other times and places?) Finally we can prioritize survival and progress of humanity without consideration of the individual. "We should terraform Mars even if millions live and die horribly in the effort".
Thanks for the comment, Paul! Lots of interesting points here.
Yes, agree on the levels - was getting at somewhat similar ideas in this older post but maybe with less breadth: https://www.allcatsarefemale.com/p/whose-welfare-are-we-talking-about?r=ipqw
I'm still wrestling with how we best model political ideology. Arguably one should characterize the culture and accept politics as a tribal manifestation of culture. (American liberal ideology reflect cosmopolitan educated affluence heavily influenced by post-relgious, postmodern, multicultural milue and economic centrality. Trump conservativism is blue collar, outer ring suburban, low brow football and reality TV influences and economic volatility.)
Alternatively you view ideology as a mash up coalition which is primarily a rationalization of an institutional artifact. There is an organic menu of positions without a deeper meaning.
I think of any given culture (or sub-culture) as occupying a certain region of our high-dimensional idea space, characterized by some central point. The vector separating the centers of two different cultures will have many components. But the two centers, hence the separating vector, can move within idea space over a timescale of years or decades.
When Sowell published *A Conflict of Visions* in 1987, what separated the left and right in America was something more like his idea of the constrained-vs.-unconstrained view of human nature. Both Keynesian and Marxist factions of the left were still operating on a positive, Enlightenment view of reason. But around this time is when something very deep started changing within the left, accelerating after its anti-market ethos was dealt a serious blow by the official collapse of the Soviet Union.
Stephen Hicks argues for this as the impetus behind the left’s turn to postmodernism. The big components of the left-right separating vector had been of a political nature. But the vector was now rotating and stretching into deeper, epistemological dimensions. This was more or less a continuous process, tracking the rise of wokism within the left. Later, the emergence of Trump shattered the right, with his populist faction undergoing a similar epistemological shift as the woke left had.
Once Trump’s faction had seized control of right-wing politics, the epistemological components of the separating vector were reduced, leaving a smaller gap, in absolute terms, between his faction and an increasingly woke left. At the same time, other factions have pealed off the woke left and populist right in order to preserve their Enlightenment-style views of reason. What we have now is a more complicated set of ideological clusters that have not yet re-solidified into a stable two-pole configuration.
I wanted to bring this out to distinguish between two different senses of “the fundamental axis.” One sense is about the separation between, e.g., two cultural factions that happen to be dominant at a given time. Another sense is about what separates a given modern faction from something more distant, like a pre-Enlightenment civilization. This second sense is what gets at the core values of our culture. The first sense of “fundamental axis” may or may not reach into those core values at any given time. In the 1980’s it didn’t do that as much. Today, unfortunately, it does.
yes, this all makes perfect sense and is helpful. And this is a more precise way of explaining what I meant by "it depends on the context you're interested in". So, if the context you're interested in is the clusters in America in 1987, Sowell's model is very useful for explanation, but the clusters his model was trying to separate didn't differ meaningfully on epistemological dimensions. And since you think the epistemological dimensions describe more of the variance when you zoom out to look at a bigger chunk of the ideological space, the clusters he was trying to separate are ultimately not so far apart. I think what I meant by fundamental axis over a context of all historical periods would be if you mapped all the people over all these periods and looked at if there were broader clusters in that picture of the space, which would cover more dimensions and include more distant points, and your suggestion is that if we did that we would notice clusters which map to post-Enlightenment values and epistemology vs. pre-Enlightenment. Would you say that this expectation is based on the different visible products of these cultures primarily? I.e. scientific progress, wealth creation...
Yeah, visible products, and the sci/tech capabilities making them possible, and the academic/corporate/political institutions making those capabilities possible, and up the intellectual food chain. Hicks’ scheme, which I agree with, is really a three-cluster model: premodern, modern, postmodern, where “modern” basically means Enlightenment-derived culture.
It seems that once a large enough cohort adopts a worldview, it starts to seep into the culture, and becomes difficult to resist. This is the goal of most political power grabs.
The checks and balances that have evolved in democratic political systems are meant to limit this metastasis, however they are always under attack and need to be reinforced periodically and this is a platitude that is often ignored or discounted.
The old notion of "deadly sins" is an ancient approach to these checks and balances, since it postulates taboos against extreme behavior that can lead to slides towards instability and inequality.
For example, greed or lying both are both social mechanisms' that lead to power imbalances. On the other hand, the parliamentary system where tensions between "loyal" institutions are entrenched, is a dynamic mechanism to limit power.
So the left and the right that you discuss will continue to exist but need to be in tension. Right now I think we are on a saddle point, where the right has created a surface where any opposition slides towards the right. Truth has been weaponized and money can be made by lying and being extreme.
The media benefits, the stock market benefits and some people benefit over others. Not sustainable of course, but that is the nature of instability.
We need to reform the saddle point into a "bowl", where both right and left are forced to contend with each other and are prevented from escaping.
Unfortunately, history has shown that once this slide goes too far there are no easy ways to set things back, and revolution or war ensues when the situation affects enough people badly enough. We need to resist institutional erosion to prevent this unfortunate extreme. Attacks on "big government" or on "communism" are misguided.
"As Hanson has said, we tend not to tolerate much inter-cultural diversity on sacred values". My guess is that you meant "intra-cultural" rather than "inter-cultural"? Or maybe I misunderstood.
Yes, thank you!
Surprised to see no mention to Deleuze and Guattari in the piece because they pretty much wrote an entire book about exactly this discussion. (A Thousand Plateaus), which is also in large parts a criticism of the tree-like (in their words literally "arborescent") view of knowledge and culture in society .
Many of the questions asked here "how can similar people end up on opposite sides" make much more sense when this tree-like model is dropped and replaced with what they termed "rhizomatic" view of knowledge and culture. People's believes are not linear, binary, dualistic, they have no start or endpoint, they're rhizomatic, decentralized, non-coherent. Everything connects with everything else.
Worldviews are organized the same way as hypertext on the internet or as knowledge is organized on Wikipedia. There's no left or right, no start or end, no center. There's no trees, no levels or hierarchies and no direction. Worldviews are horizontal, strongly interconnected networks. There's no totalizing taxonomy that can be imposed on this, and it explains why nobody has particularly great success at predicting how worldviews shift.
Isn't what you ask for at the end basically the problem Haidt was trying to solve by postulating the different foundations of moral opinions.I don't know if he's specifically correct but I think to the extent there is something there it's a good place to start.
--
Having said that, I want to raise the possibility that alot of this is less fundamental than people think and it's really substantially driven just by familiarity. If you grow up around guns they seem about as threatening as a car and vice-versa with drag queens. The very fact that people's views are so dictated by those of their community suggests that lots of this is just accidental.
I think there are issues with Haidt’s work, in that it contains the sort of researcher bias which I mention, and that’s hard to avoid when you explicitly construct scenarios and assign categories in the way he did (this is why the lexical hypothesis is so central to the personality research approach). I’ll probably cover the related critiques and other attempts in a future piece.
Also yes, much is “accidental” in that it’s cultural rather than driven by personality primarily (although I think that’s also a factor), but it’s still useful to understand what is causing the actual disagreement between individuals, and what sorts of visions or frameworks tend to produce the best results (however defined) at the cultural level
I think that's probably right, but I don't think that means it's wrong that there are differences between people in what kind of moral considerations they find motivating.
I mean when I actually parse Haidt carefully it's not clear to me he is claiming all that much. Sure, he talks as if these 5 foundations were special but it's not clear he has made any explicit claim about them being some kind of maximally informative decomposition or anything which really leaves the claim as something just like: here are some ways people differ. And I think he has proved that people do differ in those ways -- even if not that it's intrinsic or even the most important way they differ.
So that's all I'm suggesting, that there do seem to be ways in which different people seem more compelled by different kinds of value considerations that seems like it's reasonably consistent over time to roughly same extent personality is. Maybe Haidt hasn't proven that but it's a relatively weak claim my priors support pretty well.
I agree with the concept of his research and am glad it exists as a starting point. But as far as I know he does claim that his findings are foundational and evolved even if different cultures emphasize them to different degrees
Yes, I think he does. I just kinda ignored that because I didn't see him spell out exactly what he meant by foundational.
I think you are probably right to critisize him but I also think it's a good way to read research -- if it's not operationalized it's probably not meaningful.
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Though. as I said in my initial comment, there is clearly a limit to how much this can drive differences rather than vice versa given by the ability of people to adopt the values of their neighbors.
I’m left wondering if it’s useful to think of political / moral opinion as a *point* in higher-dimensional space? People’s opinions change depending on e.g. life experiences, group dynamics, what book they just read, or even whether they have eaten recently.
Makes me think of the rejection of essentialism in philosophy/psychology circles, i.e. rejecting the idea of some stable “self” or “core" that could ostensibly be found if one digs deep enough within.
How would one model it mathematically? At the very least as a point with an uncertainty in the aforementioned “opinion space”. In other words a volume. The funny thing is that in higher dimensions, volume is concentrated at the edges, so if a person’s opinion over time boils down to randomly sampling this volume, one might end up with quite disparate beliefs!
Maybe one can reduce the uncertainty along certain dimensions by consciously deciding on an opinion and sticking to it (we have memory, and a desire to appear consistent, after all). But I would argue that for the vast majority of dimensions we don’t “care enough” to nail down our opinion, and the dimensions are numerous enough that we wouldn’t have time to go through any considerable fraction of them anyway.
An interesting slice might be homeostatic reductionists (force the world to fit us) vs homeostatic extenders (become the sorry of creatures who can inhabit more of the world).
You may also be interested in the Buddhist psychological model given that much of Western psychology is downstream of Eastern phenomenological techniques and results. The best elucidation I know of is the second half of Opening the Heart of Compassion.
I'm pushing 70 years old now, and of course age proves nothing, but I was more interested in this sort of grand theorizing when I was in my 20s, and was never any good at it. But hats off for trying, and may you get further than I ever did! Jumping ahead, I'm intrigued to consider that while I've rarely voted for a Republican, I more and more agree with the "constrained" views. But I think this is entirely consistent with the basic idea of giving more support to the less well off, through more progressive taxation as a starting point. Even accepting the controversial idea that internal qualities like intelligence and discipline are less prevalent on the lower end of the scale, that still doesn't mean they deserve a lot less. The structure of the economy (high rewards for an elite few) is such that such people will suffer more and more through no fault of their won, and only the government can provide systematic help, and since there's no other source of big bucks than rich people, it involves redistribution. They would still have a lot less than rich people but more than they have now. It's not an idea you would usually associate with the "constrained" view of things, but I think it is totally consistent. If there's a dimension where "redistribute to be more fair" varies independently from "constrained" it will be interesting.