Fair enough. Assuming that’s the case, then anyone proposing to defend that particular theory is exempt from that particular question.
Said Achmiz
Karma: 11,305
Whether I care is hardly at issue; all the theories of “adult development” and similar clearly deal with variation along normatively significant dimensions.
If, for some reason, you propose to defend a theory of development that has no such normative aspect, then by all means remove that requirement from my list. (Kegan’s theory, however, clearly falls into the “normatively significant variation” category.)
I did not say anything about the theory being normative. “A descriptive theory that says all humans go through stages where they get less moral over time” is entirely consistent with what I described. Note that “moral” is a quality with normative significance—compare “get less extraverted over time” or “get less risk-seeking over time”.
I have seen much talk on Less Wrong lately of “development stages” and “Kegan” and so forth. Naturally I am skeptical; so I do endorse any attempt to figure out if any of this stuff is worth anything. To aid in our efforts, I’d like to say a bit about what might convince me be a little less skeptical.
A theory should explain facts; and so the very first thing we’d have to do, as investigators, is figure out if there’s anything to explain. Specifically: we would have to look at the world, observe people, examine their behavior, their patterns of thinking and interacting with other people, their professed beliefs and principles, etc., etc., and see if these fall into any sorts of patterns or clusters, such that they may be categorized according to some scheme, where some people act like this [and here we might give some broad description], while other people act like that.
(Clearly, the answer to this question would be: yes, people’s behavior obviously falls into predictable, clustered patterns. But what sort, exactly? Some work would need to be done, at least, to enumerate and describe them.)
Second, we would have to see whether these patterns that we observe may be separated, or factored, by “domain”, whereby there is one sort of pattern of clusters in how people think and act and speak, which pertains to matters of religion; and another pattern, which pertains to relationship to family; and another pattern, which pertains to preferences of consumption; etc. We would be looking for such “domains” which may be conceptually separated—regardless of whether there were any correlation between clustering patterns in one domain or another.
(Here again, the answer seems clearly to be that yes, such domains may be defined without too much difficulty. However, the intuition is weaker than for the previous question; and we are less sure that we know what it is we’re talking about; and it becomes even more important to be specific and explicit.)
Now we would ask two further questions (which might be asked in parallel). Third: does categorization of an individual into one cluster or another, in any of these domains, correlate with that individual’s category membership in categories pertaining to any observable aspect of human variation? (Such observable aspects might be: cultural groupings; gender; weight; height; age; ethnicity; socioeconomic status; hair color; various matters of physical health; or any of a variety of other ways in which people demonstrably differ.) And fourth: may the clusters in any of these domains sensibly be given a total ordering (and the domain thereby be mapped onto a linear axis of variation)?
Note the special import of this latter question. Prior to answering it, we are dealing exclusively with nominal data values. We now ask whether any of the data we have might actually be ordinal data. The answer might be “no” (for instance, you prefer apples, and I prefer oranges; this puts us in different clusters within the “fruit preferences” domain of human psychology, but in no sense may these clusters be arranged linearly).
Our fifth question (conditional on answering yes to all four of the previous question) is this: among our observed domains of clustering, and looking in particular at those for which the data is of an ordinal nature, are there any such that the dimension of variation has any normative aspect? That is: is there a domain such that we might sensibly say that it is better to belong to clusters closer to one end of its spectrum of variation, than to belong to clusters closter to the other end? (Once more note that the answer might be “no”: for example, suppose that some people fidget a lot, while others do not fidget very much. Is it better to be a much-fidgeter than a not-much-fidgeter? Well… not really; nor the reverse; at least, not in any general way. Maybe fidgeting has some advantages, and not fidgeting has others, etc.; who knows? But overall the answer is “no, neither of these is clearly superior to the other; they’re just one of those ways in which people differ, in a normatively neutral way”.)
Finally, our sixth question is: does there exist any domain of clustering in human behavioral/psychological variation for which all of these are true:
That its clusters may naturally be given a total order (i.e., arranged linearly);
That this linear dimension has normative significance;
That membership in its categories is correlated primarily with category membership pertaining to one aspect of human variation (rather than being correlated comparably with multiple such aspects);
That in particular, membership in this domain’s clusters is correlated primarily with age.
Note that we have asked six (mostly[1]) empirical questions about humanity. And we have had six chances to answer in the negative.
And note also that if we answer any of these questions in the negative, then any and all theories of “moral development” (or any similar notion) are necessarily nonsense—because they purport to explain facts which (in this hypothetical scenario) we simply do not observe. Without any further investigation, we can dispose of the lot of them with extreme prejudice, because they are entirely unmotivated by the pre-theoretical facts.
So, this is what I would like to see from any proponents of Kegan’s theory, or any similar ones: a detailed, thorough, and specific examination (with plenty of examples!) of the questions I give in this comment—discussed with utter agnosticism about even the concept of “moral development”, “adult development” or any similar thing. In short: before I consider any defense of any theory of “adult development”, I should like to be convinced of such a theory’s motivation.
The question of normative import is not quite empirical, but it may be operationalized by considering intersubjective judgments of normative import; that is, in any case, more or less what we are talking about in the first place. ↩︎
In the same vein—previously, on “Rationality Quotes”:
“It’s my fate to steal,” pleaded the man who had been caught red-handed by Diogenes.
“Then it is also your fate to be beaten,” said Diogenes, hitting him across the head with his staff.
And now, the devil’s-advocate position.
Clearly, it makes no sense to say that someone is mistaken about how happy they feel. However, it does not seem (obviously) mistaken to suppose that someone might be mistaken about how happy they feel relative to how happy it is possible for them to feel.
Now, this can (it seems to me) take two forms: the interpersonal, and the diachronic. The former first:
Consider someone who has never had anything truly unfortunate happen to them in their lives; the worst event he can recall is when his boyfriend dumped him, in middle school. Our protagonist is also blessed with perfectly normal brain chemistry, and does not suffer from any depressive disorders, etc.
Now suppose we ask this fortunate fellow how happy he feels, on a scale of 1 to 5. “3, I guess,” he answers—thinking to himself that his life has been going ok lately, but it could be worse (that boyfriend thing), but then again it could be better (like the time his friends surprised him with a birthday trip to Disney Land on the same day that he got his dream job).
Meanwhile, his twin brother (they were separated at birth and don’t know each other) has lived an almost identical life, except that several years ago he had a terrifying brush with cancer—which, however, is now in full remission, and has been for some time. His life is otherwise going about as well as his twin’s. When we ask this brother how happy he is, he tells us “5”—not because he’s happier than his twin, but because his baseline for comparison is something much, much worse.
The diachronic form, meanwhile, is essentially the same thing, only the two people we’re comparing are the same person at different times—whose baselines are different, because people’s memories of past experiences deceive them (in many ways that are quite well-documented).
This is an excellent analogy. I think, however, that your (tentative) conclusion is unwarranted.
The question is, what is the “objective” fact that we would want to measure, in the case of happiness? Does it make sense to say that while the self-report-based instruments only measure how happy you feel, what we would actually like to (but don’t know how to) measure is how happy you actually are (by analogy with the strength example)?
But this seems somewhat absurd, doesn’t it? Why?
Because (it seems to me) “happiness” already refers to a subjective phenomenon. “How happy you are” just means “how happy you feel”. There is no underlying objective phenomenon—or, to be more precise, the subjective phenomenon is the objective phenomenon. How happy people feel, is actually what we are trying to measure.
(Now, self-report-based instruments actually are problematic for measuring that, but for different reasons.)
Yes, I could cite many such posts. But I’m not entirely sure what the purpose would be, except to publicly antagonize popular contributors to Less Wrong. And the incentives for others to publicly disagree with my evaluation would obviously be great (while the incentives to agree, essentially nonexistent).
That said, your request for examples is, obviously, quite reasonable in the general sense (I would be quite hypocritical to claim otherwise). I’m willing to cite examples via private message, if you like. A question first, if I may: do you, yourself, think that examples of this sort of thing exist on Less Wrong? Or, do you think there are no such examples (or perhaps that they are very rare, at best)?
Yes, but “the best post of 2016” and “the best post of the last year-long period” are two different things I might want to see. “The best post in the year that starts 4 years ago” is, indeed, unlikely to be useful.
Good feature!
But, it seems odd that it’s “this calendar month”, “this calendar year”, etc., rather than “the month-long period ending today”, etc. The latter is certainly what I was expecting when I clicked.
See the “Edit:” part of this comment, which is my response to your comment also.
I don’t see what could be simpler. Alice does something. That action has some result. We reward Alice, or punish her, based on the results of her action. There is nothing unusual or obscure here; I mean just what I say.
(There are cases where we do not want to take this approach, but they tend to both be controversial and to be unusual in certain important respects.)
Edit: And if you’re trying to use operant conditioning, of all things, to decide what social norms to have on a forum devoted to the art of rationality, then you’ve already admitted defeat, and this entire project is pointless.
I have been thinking more about this comment by clone of saturn, which seems to be even more insightful and relevant than I noticed at first:
I don’t think high-effort posts are more likely to contain muddled thinking, but I do think readers are less likely to notice muddled thinking when it appears in high-effort posts, so suppressing criticism of high-effort posts is especially dangerous.
I have long noticed (both on Less Wrong and elsewhere) that people often can’t tell the difference between something that looks very impressive (or high-effort, etc.), and something that is actually good.
This is a huge problem.
As has been alluded to elsethread, people are liable to conflate “high-effort” with “high-value”. But that’s not the whole of the problem. In fact all of the following things often get conflated—despite the fact that they’re very different:
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A post that is correct and/or valuable and/or good, etc.
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A post that took a great deal of effort to produce.
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A post that looks like it took a great deal of effort to produce.
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A post that is long.
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A post that contains a great deal of information.
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A post which contains a very high density of information.
That Dijkstra quote I cited in another comment—it applies to posts at least as much as to comments. It is a grave mistake, to reward mere visible quantity of effort. If a post is long, and has many diagrams, and other clear markers of work put in—what use is that?
Pascal once wrote:
I have made this longer than usual because I have not had time to make it shorter.
Consider a very short post (or comment), which—briefly, elegantly, with a minimum of words—expresses some transformative idea, or makes some stunningly incisive point. Forget, for now, the question of its quality, and consider instead: how much effort went into writing it? Do you tally up only the keystrokes? Or do you count also the years of thought and experience and work that allowed the writer to come up with this idea, and this sequence of words to express it? Do you count the knowledge of a lifetime?
If I write six thousand words on some point, and it is rambling, verbose, meticulously cited, illustrated, etc., but it is all nonsense, and this fact is obscured by the post’s sheer weight… why is it a good thing, that I should write this, and post it? Especially given that readers are less likely to notice mistakes, confusions, etc., than they would in a shorter post? (And those mistakes and confusions take considerably more effort to unravel—which often means they simply aren’t unravelled.)
If Hegel and Gettier both posted their work on Less Wrong, which of them should we reward more?
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You’re still missing my point.
We didn’t (or rather, shouldn’t) intend to reward or punish those “ancestor nodes”. We should intend to reward or punish the results.
You seem to have interpreted my comments as saying that we’re trying to reward some particular behavior, but we should do this by rewarding the results of that behavior. As you point out, this is not a wise plan.
But it’s also not what I am saying, at all. I am saying that we are (or, again, should be) trying to reward the results. Not the behavior that led to those results, but the results themselves.
I don’t know why you’re assuming that we’re actually trying to encourage some specific behavior. It’s certainly not what I am assuming. Doing so would not be a very good idea at all.
You certainly shouldn’t hit your friend with a stick if he loses $5 of your club’s money. I think this is fairly obvious, and it seems quite improbable that you were assuming that I was suggesting any such thing. So, given that we can’t possibly be talking about injuring anyone, or doing any such thing, how can your point about net-negative punishment apply? The more sensible assumption is that the punishment is of the same kind as the reward.
If your boss isn’t paying you, then what’s the point of the employment analogy? That’s not employment at all, is it?
What does this have to do with anything? You originally said:
Youu pay your plumber if they show up, not only if they successfully fix your toilet.
I don’t see the connection between “should you pay your plumber even if they don’t actually fix your toilet” and “should you pay your plumber twice as much if they fix your toilet twice as well”; the latter seems like a nonsensical question, and unrelated to the former.
Punishment is also usually net-negative, whereas rewards tend to be zero-sum
Could you elaborate on this? I’m not at all sure what this is referring to.
Ah, my mistake.
However, in that case I don’t really understand what you mean. But, in any case, the rest of my original comment stands.
I look forward to any such detailed commentary on the fact-based motivation for any sort of developmental theory, from anyone who feels up to the task of providing such.