Are you a conflict-mistake theorist, who believes that the world is being deliberately pushed towards hard to shift equilibria by elites who want to keep power? Or a mistake-conflict theorist, who believes factions are inevitable due to impersonal game theory?
As you can see, there are more stances than just the ones above. You can believe that being pushed into conflicts is deliberate, or it is unescapable. Notice that this is a mistake theory, but it fits into neither your evangelical nor object level categories, it’s a different meta-level version of mistake theory.
Personally, I think having a sweeping theory of change like any of these stances is almost always pathological. Different problems have different effects, and the same problem can have aspects of both conflict and mistake, sometimes mutually reinforcing.
When, I’m babbling/creating ideas for how to approach a problem, I’ll view it through the lens of both conflict and mistake theory. When I’m then pruning, I’ll try to figure out the actually causality, and which parts are conflict-based and which parts are mistake based.
Then, when actually acting and communicating, I’ll try to frame the parts of the problem around either conflict or mistake, based on the audience and other context.
There might be many types of mistake theorists and conflict theorists!
My post was more about mistake theorists who implicitly deny the existence of conflict theory, who model the minds of conflict theorists as though they were just confused mistake theorists. It’s not so much about all the different ways we could assess object-level problems. More that mistake theorists should debate conflict theory as conflict theory, not reframe it as a badly-thought-out mistake theory.
A while ago, I made this twitter comment
As you can see, there are more stances than just the ones above. You can believe that being pushed into conflicts is deliberate, or it is unescapable. Notice that this is a mistake theory, but it fits into neither your evangelical nor object level categories, it’s a different meta-level version of mistake theory.
Personally, I think having a sweeping theory of change like any of these stances is almost always pathological. Different problems have different effects, and the same problem can have aspects of both conflict and mistake, sometimes mutually reinforcing.
When, I’m babbling/creating ideas for how to approach a problem, I’ll view it through the lens of both conflict and mistake theory. When I’m then pruning, I’ll try to figure out the actually causality, and which parts are conflict-based and which parts are mistake based.
Then, when actually acting and communicating, I’ll try to frame the parts of the problem around either conflict or mistake, based on the audience and other context.
There might be many types of mistake theorists and conflict theorists!
My post was more about mistake theorists who implicitly deny the existence of conflict theory, who model the minds of conflict theorists as though they were just confused mistake theorists. It’s not so much about all the different ways we could assess object-level problems. More that mistake theorists should debate conflict theory as conflict theory, not reframe it as a badly-thought-out mistake theory.