[not trying to be be comprehensible people that don’t already have some conception of Kegan stuff. I acknowledge that I don’t currently have a good link that justifies Kegan stuff within the LW paradigm very well]
Last year someone claimed to me is that a problem with Kegan is that there really are at least 6 levels. The fact that people keep finding themselves self-declaring as “4.5” should be a clue that 4.5 is really a distinct level. (the fact that there are at least two common ways to be 4.5 also is a clue that the paradigm needs clarification)
My garbled summary of this person’s conception is:
Level 4: (you have a system of principles you are subject to, that lets you take level 3 [social reality??] as object)
Level 5: Dialectic. You have the ability to earnestly dialogue between a small number of systems (usually 2 at a time), and either step between them, or work out new systems that reconcile elements from the two of them.
Level 6: The thing Kegan originally meant by “level 5” – able to fluidly take different systems as object.
Previously, I had felt something like “I basically understand level 5 fine AFAICT, but maybe don’t have the skills do so fluidly. I can imagine there being some special sauce that I don’t currently have but it doesn’t feel very mysterious. It’s not obvious what would be different about me that made me level 5.”
Once I heard this description, I thought “oh, yeah this new 4.5/5 makes a lot of sense, and clearly describes where I’m currently at. Like, the Noticing Frames subsequence (and past year of my life) was basically me gaining the skill of doing Dialectic reasonably well. And from that vantage point, it makes more sense that there’s a step beyond that that’s something like “the process of noticing frames/systems and dialoguing between them eventually becomes a simpler object in my suite of available actions, such that I can do it seamlessly.”
I’m not sure what you have in mind by “skipping” here, since the Kegan and other developmental models explicitly are based on the idea that there can be no skipping because each higher level is built out of new ways of combining abstractions from the lower levels.
I have noticed ways in which people can have lumpy integration of the key skills of a level (and have noticed this in various ways in myself); is that the sort of thing you have in mind by “skipping”, like made it to 4 without ever having fully integrated the level 3 insights.
I generally think that mindspace is pretty vast, and am predisposed to be skeptical of the claim that there’s only one path to a certain way of thinking. I buy that most people follow a certain path, but wouldn’t be suprised if for instance there’s a person in history who never went directly from Kegan 3 to 4.5 by never finding a value system that could stand up to their chaotic environment.
David Chapman says that achieving a particular level means that the skills associated with it become logically possible for you, which is distinct from actually mastering those skills; and that it’s possible for you to e.g. get to stage 4 while only having poor mastery of the skills associated with stage 3. So I would interpret “skipped stage N” as shorthand for “got to stage N+X without developing any significant mastery of stage N skills”.
I think this is right, although I stand by the existing numbering convention. My reasoning is that the 4.5 space is really best understood in the paradigm where the thing that marks a level transition is gaining a kind of naturalness with that level, and 4.5 is a place of seeing intellectually that something other than what feels natural is possible, but the higher level isn’t yet the “native” way of thinking. This is not to diminish the in between states because they are important to making the transition, but also to acknowledge that they are not the core thing as originally framed.
For what it’s worth I think Michael Common’s approach is probably a bit better in many ways, especially in that Kegan is right for reasons that are significantly askew of the gears in the brain that make his categories natural. Luckily there’s a natural and straightforward mapping between different developmental models (see Integral Psychology and Ken Wilber’s work for one explication of this mapping between these different models), so you can basically use whichever is most useful to you in a particular context without missing out on pointing at the general feature of reality these models are all convergent to.
Also perhaps interestingly, there’s a model in Zen called the five ranks that has an interpretation that could be understood as a developmental model of psychology, but it also suggests an inbetween level, although between what we might call Kegan 5 and a hypothetical Kegan 6 if Kegan had described such a level. I don’t think there’s much to read into this, though, as the five ranks is a polymorphic model that explains multiple things in different ways using the same structure, so this is as likely an artifact as some deep truth that there is something special about the 5 to 6 transition, but it is there so it suggests others have similarly noticed it’s worth pointing out cases where there are levels between the “real” levels.
Similarly it’s clear from Common’s model that Kegan’s model is woefully under describing the pre-3 territory, and it’s possible that due to lack of data all models are failing to describe all the meaningful transition states between the higher levels. As I recall David Chapman wrote something once laying out 10 sublevels between each level, although I’m not sure how much I would endorse that approach.
[not trying to be be comprehensible people that don’t already have some conception of Kegan stuff. I acknowledge that I don’t currently have a good link that justifies Kegan stuff within the LW paradigm very well]
Last year someone claimed to me is that a problem with Kegan is that there really are at least 6 levels. The fact that people keep finding themselves self-declaring as “4.5” should be a clue that 4.5 is really a distinct level. (the fact that there are at least two common ways to be 4.5 also is a clue that the paradigm needs clarification)
My garbled summary of this person’s conception is:
Level 4: (you have a system of principles you are subject to, that lets you take level 3 [social reality??] as object)
Level 5: Dialectic. You have the ability to earnestly dialogue between a small number of systems (usually 2 at a time), and either step between them, or work out new systems that reconcile elements from the two of them.
Level 6: The thing Kegan originally meant by “level 5” – able to fluidly take different systems as object.
Previously, I had felt something like “I basically understand level 5 fine AFAICT, but maybe don’t have the skills do so fluidly. I can imagine there being some special sauce that I don’t currently have but it doesn’t feel very mysterious. It’s not obvious what would be different about me that made me level 5.”
Once I heard this description, I thought “oh, yeah this new 4.5/5 makes a lot of sense, and clearly describes where I’m currently at. Like, the Noticing Frames subsequence (and past year of my life) was basically me gaining the skill of doing Dialectic reasonably well. And from that vantage point, it makes more sense that there’s a step beyond that that’s something like “the process of noticing frames/systems and dialoguing between them eventually becomes a simpler object in my suite of available actions, such that I can do it seamlessly.”
I think the 4.5 thing splits based on whether you mostly skipped 3 or 4.
Which is which?
I don’t know how others are splitting 4.5 so I don’t know mapping.
I’m not sure what you have in mind by “skipping” here, since the Kegan and other developmental models explicitly are based on the idea that there can be no skipping because each higher level is built out of new ways of combining abstractions from the lower levels.
I have noticed ways in which people can have lumpy integration of the key skills of a level (and have noticed this in various ways in myself); is that the sort of thing you have in mind by “skipping”, like made it to 4 without ever having fully integrated the level 3 insights.
I generally think that mindspace is pretty vast, and am predisposed to be skeptical of the claim that there’s only one path to a certain way of thinking. I buy that most people follow a certain path, but wouldn’t be suprised if for instance there’s a person in history who never went directly from Kegan 3 to 4.5 by never finding a value system that could stand up to their chaotic environment.
David Chapman says that achieving a particular level means that the skills associated with it become logically possible for you, which is distinct from actually mastering those skills; and that it’s possible for you to e.g. get to stage 4 while only having poor mastery of the skills associated with stage 3. So I would interpret “skipped stage N” as shorthand for “got to stage N+X without developing any significant mastery of stage N skills”.
I think this is right, although I stand by the existing numbering convention. My reasoning is that the 4.5 space is really best understood in the paradigm where the thing that marks a level transition is gaining a kind of naturalness with that level, and 4.5 is a place of seeing intellectually that something other than what feels natural is possible, but the higher level isn’t yet the “native” way of thinking. This is not to diminish the in between states because they are important to making the transition, but also to acknowledge that they are not the core thing as originally framed.
For what it’s worth I think Michael Common’s approach is probably a bit better in many ways, especially in that Kegan is right for reasons that are significantly askew of the gears in the brain that make his categories natural. Luckily there’s a natural and straightforward mapping between different developmental models (see Integral Psychology and Ken Wilber’s work for one explication of this mapping between these different models), so you can basically use whichever is most useful to you in a particular context without missing out on pointing at the general feature of reality these models are all convergent to.
Also perhaps interestingly, there’s a model in Zen called the five ranks that has an interpretation that could be understood as a developmental model of psychology, but it also suggests an inbetween level, although between what we might call Kegan 5 and a hypothetical Kegan 6 if Kegan had described such a level. I don’t think there’s much to read into this, though, as the five ranks is a polymorphic model that explains multiple things in different ways using the same structure, so this is as likely an artifact as some deep truth that there is something special about the 5 to 6 transition, but it is there so it suggests others have similarly noticed it’s worth pointing out cases where there are levels between the “real” levels.
Similarly it’s clear from Common’s model that Kegan’s model is woefully under describing the pre-3 territory, and it’s possible that due to lack of data all models are failing to describe all the meaningful transition states between the higher levels. As I recall David Chapman wrote something once laying out 10 sublevels between each level, although I’m not sure how much I would endorse that approach.