“Filter bubbles” are a model, but I’m not confident their merely a ‘frame’ in the sense they’re using them. Newtonian mechanics is a misleading frame compared to Einsteinian physics. We can choose to use either. Yet both are similar enough, and both are enmeshed with how we perceive reality enough, it’s acceptable for casual purposes to use Newtonian mechanics to think about physics.
I think of filter bubbles similarly: they’re casually enmeshed with reality. It’s a description of the effects had by progressives/liberals typically having a disproportionately progressive/liberal social media bubble, and respectively likewise for conservatives.
I think Kegan’s levels of development are a more useful frame for understanding the problem.
When I came to understand the basic premise of Kegan levels, I heard one issue a lot of people can have in applying them is that someone who is on Kegan level 4 might appear to people on Kegan level 3 to be on Kegan level 2. Or someone on level 5 will appear to someone on level 4 to only be on level 3. This seems like the kind of thing that could be exacerbated by, e.g., political disagreements, such that 2 different people who are both aware of Kegan levels won’t be able to reach a better disagreement because they still don’t know how to initiate conflict resolution with one another. I’ve never seen anyone suggest how this potential problem might be remedied, so I’m not confident a Kegan levels framing makes much progress.
Two people who are at Kegan level 4 are likely to have a debate that is at it’s core about which ideas are better.
Two people at Kegan level 2 or 3 are going to put more value in their tribe winning than in the inherent quality of the ideas that are under discussion.
It’s a description of the effects had by progressives/liberals typically having a disproportionately progressive/liberal social media bubble, and respectively likewise for conservatives.
It’s largely a non-evidence based description of effects. Horoscopes are also descriptions of effects of people being classified in a certain way.
I think he common narrative about filter bubbles makes assumptions about effect sizes that aren’t well backed by empirical data even if I grant that the effects aren’t zero.
Upvoted. Those are good points. I still don’t know enough about how to evaluate the quality of the ‘Kegan levels’ framework, so I’m not sure what I should make of its application in this context.
I’m personally unsure about how reliable Kegan’s framework is. But in this case I think there’s a basic idea that I believe to be true:
Considering signaling and whether one’s tribe wins to be the most important is not an human universal. It takes a certain amount of mental maturity to move past it and the humanities are at the moment not teaching mental maturity at the quality they used to. The democratization through the internet additionally moved power about the public narrative to people with less mental maturity.
I don’t like the Kegan framework, as I think it’s missing an important factor about what level of map is important to correct decision-making. And it tends to ignore actual value divergence between individuals.
Keep in mind that it takes both “mental maturity” AND trust in your correspondents’ maturity to focus on communication and truth rather than personal and tribal signaling. As trust erodes, training and encouragement of individual maturity is reduced in value, which further erodes trust. It’s not clear that either one (education reduction or trust erosion) caused the other.
“Filter bubbles” are a model, but I’m not confident their merely a ‘frame’ in the sense they’re using them. Newtonian mechanics is a misleading frame compared to Einsteinian physics. We can choose to use either. Yet both are similar enough, and both are enmeshed with how we perceive reality enough, it’s acceptable for casual purposes to use Newtonian mechanics to think about physics.
I think of filter bubbles similarly: they’re casually enmeshed with reality. It’s a description of the effects had by progressives/liberals typically having a disproportionately progressive/liberal social media bubble, and respectively likewise for conservatives.
When I came to understand the basic premise of Kegan levels, I heard one issue a lot of people can have in applying them is that someone who is on Kegan level 4 might appear to people on Kegan level 3 to be on Kegan level 2. Or someone on level 5 will appear to someone on level 4 to only be on level 3. This seems like the kind of thing that could be exacerbated by, e.g., political disagreements, such that 2 different people who are both aware of Kegan levels won’t be able to reach a better disagreement because they still don’t know how to initiate conflict resolution with one another. I’ve never seen anyone suggest how this potential problem might be remedied, so I’m not confident a Kegan levels framing makes much progress.
Two people who are at Kegan level 4 are likely to have a debate that is at it’s core about which ideas are better.
Two people at Kegan level 2 or 3 are going to put more value in their tribe winning than in the inherent quality of the ideas that are under discussion.
It’s largely a non-evidence based description of effects. Horoscopes are also descriptions of effects of people being classified in a certain way.
I think he common narrative about filter bubbles makes assumptions about effect sizes that aren’t well backed by empirical data even if I grant that the effects aren’t zero.
Upvoted. Those are good points. I still don’t know enough about how to evaluate the quality of the ‘Kegan levels’ framework, so I’m not sure what I should make of its application in this context.
I’m personally unsure about how reliable Kegan’s framework is. But in this case I think there’s a basic idea that I believe to be true:
Considering signaling and whether one’s tribe wins to be the most important is not an human universal. It takes a certain amount of mental maturity to move past it and the humanities are at the moment not teaching mental maturity at the quality they used to. The democratization through the internet additionally moved power about the public narrative to people with less mental maturity.
I don’t like the Kegan framework, as I think it’s missing an important factor about what level of map is important to correct decision-making. And it tends to ignore actual value divergence between individuals.
Keep in mind that it takes both “mental maturity” AND trust in your correspondents’ maturity to focus on communication and truth rather than personal and tribal signaling. As trust erodes, training and encouragement of individual maturity is reduced in value, which further erodes trust. It’s not clear that either one (education reduction or trust erosion) caused the other.
Is there a “not” missing from this?
Yes.