The part about people closing their minds as they pursue a spiritual tradition is an interesting one; it seems to conflict with the historical examples of spiritual traditions. Consider for example how so much of the early information about Buddhism came from Jesuits who learned from Tibetan and Sri Lankan monks.
I deeply fail to grok the motivation for using simplistic schemes for things, like this color wheel example. I suspect that the goal is to make it seem easy to categorize so people feel like they are making progress. How it actually feels to me is like the author is planting a big STOP HERE sign. Sort of a macro-level motivated stopping sign.
But it is a cast-iron convention in self help books, and self help books sell a lot, so there must be something people like about it that I’m not getting.
Graves’s color levels aren’t simply a way to sell self help books. Clare W. Graves was a university professor who spent 7 years to gather data about >1000 people on which basis he came up with his system.
Colors have the advantage that they come with less preexisting notions then preexisting words like systemic or holistic.
It’s also not a wheel but a spiral (hence the name Spiral dynamics), it’s not a simple model.
I’m not questioning the qualifications of the source or the goodness of the concepts, just the method chosen to communicate them.
If the point of the system is to introduce an inferential gap on purpose, with the goal of leaving unintended associations behind, I can see the reasoning but disagree with it. I see a lot of attempts to do this, and a lot of discussion using such systems, and virtually nothing in the way of coming back down from the abstractions to object-level recommendations again.
This is likely the result of applying the system badly, but the ease with which a tool is misapplied an important factor in the goodness of the tool.
Would you say that Kahnman’s work of speaking about system I and system II doesn’t do anything to come to object-level recommendations and he should have used fast system and slow system instead of speaking about the numbers?
Kahneman’s work does an unusually excellent job of coming to object-level recommendations. That seems to be what he is doing with his time now.
I don’t think using fast and slow would have hurt those ideas at all, what with it being the title of the book. Further, I’ve seen plenty of cases of trying to wrangle the dichotomy by piling on additional words like the elephant-or-rider conversation.
I also note we don’t talk about system 1 and system II much anymore. Looking at the Curated list for the last three months, I see plenty of posts that are aiming squarely at system 1 or system II, applying one system to the other, or describing one specific technique that could be called system I or II...but virtually none of the posts say anything about either of them or mention Kahneman. We’ve moved past the point where a binary distinction is useful to our discussions, and broad familiarity with the underlying concepts is assumed without the need for additional terms.
This suggests some combination of system I/II being easy to apply correctly, or the community being unusually good at applying it, or both.
It looks to me like how powerful a system is and how difficult it is to apply correctly are very different questions, and it feels like they are rarely balanced well. I think this is probably very difficult to do, and have seen people failing to apply systems correctly way more often than I have seen them succeed, which gives me a very low prior for unfamiliar systems’ utility.
the motivation for using simplistic schemes for things, like this color wheel example.
I think the purpose* is to make it memorable/easy to teach. Someone who employs it might say they’re following the 80⁄20 rule. If you’re teaching, starting with a simple model is one approach—and not everyone is interested in more details (whether or not you have them). The main advantage (specific to this case) is that by coming up with stages being colors means you can classify other things by stage and use color as an adjective in the same way. Color wheel might be the wrong word—if you go all the way along a wheel, you’re back where you started. Whereas if you progress in the “red”/”blue” direction, eventually you leave the visible colors for the invisible (eventually stopping at radio waves/gamma radiation).
*It is also possible that things which have such traits (simple models like color wheels) become more popular/successful. I am not sure whether or not self help books are an intentional paradigm, or if the authors like it so they use it.
colours are meant for efficiency of communication. (Knowing the colour coding) I can describe bringing red values into a blue system, or wanting to bring in healthy orange to a crushing blue bureaucracy (Spiral dynamics colours). Assuming other people also know the system, conversation can go on without me having to explain a whole load of conceptual framework.
That’s a bit like saying that doctors shouldn’t use a category like major depressive disorder but instead speak about the object-level concerns of a individual symptoms.
Having a short handle for a complex concept makes it easier to talk which other people who understand the concept and now that the handle points to it.
The part about people closing their minds as they pursue a spiritual tradition is an interesting one; it seems to conflict with the historical examples of spiritual traditions. Consider for example how so much of the early information about Buddhism came from Jesuits who learned from Tibetan and Sri Lankan monks.
I deeply fail to grok the motivation for using simplistic schemes for things, like this color wheel example. I suspect that the goal is to make it seem easy to categorize so people feel like they are making progress. How it actually feels to me is like the author is planting a big STOP HERE sign. Sort of a macro-level motivated stopping sign.
But it is a cast-iron convention in self help books, and self help books sell a lot, so there must be something people like about it that I’m not getting.
Graves’s color levels aren’t simply a way to sell self help books. Clare W. Graves was a university professor who spent 7 years to gather data about >1000 people on which basis he came up with his system.
Colors have the advantage that they come with less preexisting notions then preexisting words like systemic or holistic.
It’s also not a wheel but a spiral (hence the name Spiral dynamics), it’s not a simple model.
I’m not questioning the qualifications of the source or the goodness of the concepts, just the method chosen to communicate them.
If the point of the system is to introduce an inferential gap on purpose, with the goal of leaving unintended associations behind, I can see the reasoning but disagree with it. I see a lot of attempts to do this, and a lot of discussion using such systems, and virtually nothing in the way of coming back down from the abstractions to object-level recommendations again.
This is likely the result of applying the system badly, but the ease with which a tool is misapplied an important factor in the goodness of the tool.
Would you say that Kahnman’s work of speaking about system I and system II doesn’t do anything to come to object-level recommendations and he should have used fast system and slow system instead of speaking about the numbers?
Kahneman’s work does an unusually excellent job of coming to object-level recommendations. That seems to be what he is doing with his time now.
I don’t think using fast and slow would have hurt those ideas at all, what with it being the title of the book. Further, I’ve seen plenty of cases of trying to wrangle the dichotomy by piling on additional words like the elephant-or-rider conversation.
I also note we don’t talk about system 1 and system II much anymore. Looking at the Curated list for the last three months, I see plenty of posts that are aiming squarely at system 1 or system II, applying one system to the other, or describing one specific technique that could be called system I or II...but virtually none of the posts say anything about either of them or mention Kahneman. We’ve moved past the point where a binary distinction is useful to our discussions, and broad familiarity with the underlying concepts is assumed without the need for additional terms.
This suggests some combination of system I/II being easy to apply correctly, or the community being unusually good at applying it, or both.
It looks to me like how powerful a system is and how difficult it is to apply correctly are very different questions, and it feels like they are rarely balanced well. I think this is probably very difficult to do, and have seen people failing to apply systems correctly way more often than I have seen them succeed, which gives me a very low prior for unfamiliar systems’ utility.
I think the purpose* is to make it memorable/easy to teach. Someone who employs it might say they’re following the 80⁄20 rule. If you’re teaching, starting with a simple model is one approach—and not everyone is interested in more details (whether or not you have them). The main advantage (specific to this case) is that by coming up with stages being colors means you can classify other things by stage and use color as an adjective in the same way. Color wheel might be the wrong word—if you go all the way along a wheel, you’re back where you started. Whereas if you progress in the “red”/”blue” direction, eventually you leave the visible colors for the invisible (eventually stopping at radio waves/gamma radiation).
*It is also possible that things which have such traits (simple models like color wheels) become more popular/successful. I am not sure whether or not self help books are an intentional paradigm, or if the authors like it so they use it.
colours are meant for efficiency of communication. (Knowing the colour coding) I can describe bringing red values into a blue system, or wanting to bring in healthy orange to a crushing blue bureaucracy (Spiral dynamics colours). Assuming other people also know the system, conversation can go on without me having to explain a whole load of conceptual framework.
But if we assume other people also know the system, why would you have to explain a whole load of conceptual framework?
How is this superior to addressing the object-level concerns directly?
Edit: I definitely misread that last sentence. Ignore me!
That’s a bit like saying that doctors shouldn’t use a category like major depressive disorder but instead speak about the object-level concerns of a individual symptoms.
Having a short handle for a complex concept makes it easier to talk which other people who understand the concept and now that the handle points to it.