Damn it Feels Good to be a Gangsta

[black_son_of_gray]

As someone (biomedical scientist) who has spent a lot of time in the world between "hard" (e.g. physics) and "soft" (e.g. social) sciences, I'll offer a few points in case people are interested. I'm not so much trying to argue with what people have already said, but to add some context from my own experience. Hopefully, I do not completely miss the point...

What I find interesting about post-modernism is its ability to go beyond the cold hard realities of modernism. Imo, runaway modernism is how you end up with consumerism, more for the sake of more, and institutions and technologies which service the idea of technological and economic progress while ignoring the human and environmental costs. If the true purpose of progress is supposedly to improve the human condition, then is it not eventually subjective experience that matters above objective metrics?

(Italics mine)

I think biomedical science offers an interesting case study, because there are ways in which 1) it operates, and 2) the public understands it, which kind of smear across the 'isms'. In particular: how it is funded, and what is considered progress.

It is true that large biotech companies do have substantial research budgets, but a huge chunk of funding of biomedical research (in the US) comes from public grants (i.e. the National Institutes of Health, in large part). Grant-writing to get this research money is a dark art, and involves a decent dosage of technical feasibility combined with the potential of the research to benefit mankind. The technical, experimental design component is pretty "nuts and bolts". A reviewer might quibble here and there as to whether a methodology is better or worse, but there isn't that much subjectivity involved (but humans gonna human...). Now, whether the potential of the research is enough, or a priority, or worth spending $600k dollars on (a typical size grant)...well, that is indeed subjective. Especially considering that funding one grant means turning down another (with it's own potential benefits). And yet, what is considered progress (by the public's standards, but also sometimes institutions as well) has more to do with outcome (e.g. whether a pill is better than placebo or an alternative treatment, whether lifespan/healthspan is lengthened) than with understanding (e.g. whether we actually know the biology going on). Deeper understanding is great, and can itself ultimately lead to improvements in outcome, but outcome is in itself immediately useful and therefore prioritized in many contexts. Indeed there are many layers to this, combined with the "messiness" of a non-hard science...

The main question in terms of a strategic vision for theoretical physics is thus: where do we spend the money? what do we focus on?

I'm not looking or predictability, I'm looking for descriptive power.

The messiness of biology I think serves to blur some of the clearer lines that might exist in the hard sciences. In particular, biology contains essentially an infinite number of 'truths', but only a tiny amount of these truths are relevant to human health (in a practical sense). Furthermore, it is relatively common for a researcher to stumble upon a very practical result without having a clue of its theoretical underpinnings. Allow me to expand on that a bit...

What I mean by infinite 'truths' is something like this: Let's say that you are a vision researcher, and the benefit to society you hope to provide (i.e. how you 'sell' your grants when you try to fund your research) is to "figure out how vision works". Strike that: no grant written like that would be funded, it's too generic... A better, narrower phrasing would be something like: "figure out protein X's role in human primary congenital glaucoma". Let's say that the way you want to set about studying this is that you have developed a mouse mutant model whereby you have genetically replaced the mouse's version of gene X (that codes the protein) with a human version of gene X (that codes a defective protein related to the glaucoma in humans). Let's say that, after many years of research, you discovered exactly what is going on in your mouse mutant model. Have you figured out a truth? Yes. A universal one? A useful one? This is quite tricky to answer. It may be the case that what is going on in humans is very similar to what happens in the mouse. Might even be identical. This is the hoped-for endgame of so-called "translational" or "bench-to-bedside" research. But sometimes the results don't translate. You just know a neat fact about glaucoma generation in an unnatural, non-human organism. And there are infinite neat little facts in biology just like this. Every organism is its own little world, and though there are indeed universal 'truths' that seem to apply across the tree of life, those 'truths' are way to higher-order to provide much insight into specific human health issues. I can't perfectly articulate why I think that these remote-from-human biological truths are less worthwhile or useful to know than a similarly narrow physics truth...but I do. Maybe it's because physics operates across time and space in the universe in a way that biology does not. (Biology somewhere else may be different; biology in the past/future may be different). Maybe physics is just more closely grounded to...something?...than biology.

The opposite also happens somewhat frequently, which is that--by dumb luck--some incredibly useful discovery is made. Solutions get mixed up or applied incorrectly, or a battery of thousands of random chemicals are fired at the problem like a shotgun, and viola: compound Y is incredibly good at taking out a certain kind of cancer cell. We don't have a clue why compound Y does this, but we tested the hell out of it and we are very sure that it reproducibly does. (The why experiments come later after writing a grant. Sometimes the funding is completely backwards this way.) Sometimes this kind of approach is derisively called a "fishing expedition", and from a certain statistical standpoint, it is kind of a logical nightmare (e.g. correcting for multiple comparisons). And yet, it does sometimes work to great effect (that is, to great practical benefit of human health). There are other large-scale, very expensive biomedical projects that are carried out enthusiastically without specific, identified goals... like projects to exhaustively map the human brain, or (decades ago) to map the human genome. These projects are purely descriptive in their aims.

At this point, modern science is definitely playing the very long game... not the next quarter bottom line. It should, however, also be noted that science is a very cheap investment compared to what society gets from it. For example, it's been estimated that classical electrodynamics is responsible for something like 25% of the GDP of any modern nation. That's a lot of value originating from the minds of what was but a handful of geniuses whose compensation at the time was very small.

I'm of two minds about the ROI argument. I thought a lot about it as a post-doc and my conclusion had a non-trivial role in my leaving the field. I think the degree of hardness of the science matters a great deal here. Whereas I don't think biological truths are any less objectively true...I do think the lack of ease in (generalizing them)/(practical relevance)/(combinatorial complexity) undercuts the ROI argument substantially in softer sciences. As @JnG mentioned above, I got a certain "more (research) for the sake of more (research)" vibe with a lot of research which butted up against my growing understanding of the costs (energy, resources, etc.) of doing such research. One particular colleague I remember having conversations with about this strongly agreed with "doing science for the sake of science".

Scientists are modernists to the core. Scientists, therefore, do not teach about truth in the "handed down facts" sense of traditionalism. Instead, science is teaching the process of using reason (theory and experiment) in pursuit of an objective truth. This is very different from the engineer or the technician, who just needs a number to plug into their design or machine. They could in principle obtain that from a numeric table in a giant book (like the Machinist's Bible) w/o having any understanding of how those numbers connect with each other. As long as the number works, the engineering is good.

Agree, although my observation from a softer field is that certain teachers/students certainly do have a "hand down the facts" orientation. But then, 1) the bulk of students in lower-level biology courses are 'pre-med', and doctors are essentially the engineer-equivalent of biology, and 2) there are just so many damn facts to know in biology before even getting to basic, conserved processes, 'rote' is often used by both teachers and students as a way of simply managing/surviving the volume until it becomes more relevant (much) further down the line. Consider all the little factoids and definitions needed before an explanation of e.g. mitosis is even remotely realistic and not just some cartoon diagram...

Note, though, that "better" doesn't imply "more useful" to the engineer. Nobody uses quantum electrodynamics to determine the design specs for the power transformer they're designing even if QED is one of the closest models of reality that human's know. Using QED instead of Maxwell's laws for transformer design is overkill to the point of being ridiculous. Classical ED is good enough for many applications. This is why it's still taught to engineers. Conversely, it is taught to scientists (in their junior year) to show how to build better and better models of reality. Learning QED is still the domain of 4th year physics masochists who are beginning to specialize and branch out (I was one). I'm almost certain that most electrical engineers would never be able to pass that course ... but I also know that they don't need to either. String theory is even harder requiring some 8 years of concentrated study before reaching the starting line.

In biomedical research, "more useful" usually implies "better" to the doctor. Again, "better" here is based on outcome rather than understanding for probably most in this field. And, if my cursory AI-answered googling is any indication, there are many more biomedical/"semi-hard" scientists in the US than there are physicists, or chemists, or mathematicians. Which isn't to argue against the point, just that...

The differences between the three *isms are sufficiently large to warrant the split in classification. Most people only ever spend time in one of these bubbles and so their respective *ism basically becomes the water they swim in to the point where they are not aware of it. They will in turn judge people from other bubbles based on their personal values rather than the values of the bubble the person inhabits.

(italics mine)
I feel fairly confident that most of my laboratory colleagues (grad students, post-docs, and staff scientists) would not be well acquainted with Popper or really any of the philosophical aspects of science/epistemology. Which is to say, most scientists probably are not well acquainted. I'd argue that the way a lot of scientists themselves operate (probably depending on the field, hardness, etc.) is often a blend of these *isms, to say nothing about whether there is a kind of mental 'compartmentalization' in their lives between how they think at their job and how they think while at home or in the community or at the mall on Black Friday. They bring 'thought baggage' into the laboratory; they still human hard. They may certainly be operating in modernist mode a much larger percentage of the time, though. One way to frame that, though, is to say that a good number of scientists aren't really 'scientists', or at least aren't acting like one a lot of the time, which could be a fair characterization.

It's kind of interesting to consider a kind of knowledge "event horizon" in the sciences, which is to say that a scientist would, over time, have to spend a progressively greater fraction of their career simply learning background information before being able to meaningfully contribute something new. That kind of limitation wouldn't not seem to exist with 'personal truths', though.

[Jean]

@bsog
Very interesting viewpoint.
Biology look likes if alien where trying to reverse engineer iphones, but they mostly worked on hacked xiaomi, because iphones are too expensives

Is biology often described as some sort of reverse engineering?

[delay]

As such, Newton's laws are not wrong. They do indeed model reality, just not all aspects of reality.

Thanks for your reply. Right, I like how Newton's law uses point masses. An almost ridiculous simplification. Newton's model with point masses is surprisingly accurate, but it's obvious it's an approximation of reality.

Have the scientists been lying to us engaging in a massive cover up to cash in those massive $30,000/year paychecks available in academia

Well, one of the lures of academia is that it is a ticket to higher paying jobs in government or business. Where I live, senior teachers make a comfortable salary, and live in the more expensive part of town.

The reason I say my teachers knew that what you call classical electrodynamics was not true is that they made cynical remarks, like "this law doesn't respect angular momentum, but you should just ignore that", and so on. A possible motivation is that Maxwell tried to make his equations work with Lorentz' theory, and placed that at a higher priority than matching experimental observations. I think that's a reasonable thing to try, certainly it was what the world was looking for at the time.

What Scordatura wrote, "physics has gone down a weird path", is a quote I hear more often. For me it's comfortable because I had the feeling something was wrong when I studied physics. People at my university where certainly not "teaching the process of using reason (theory and experiment) in pursuit of an objective truth". I hope you were more lucky.

[7Wannabe5]

Physicists become "weirder" as they intersect with theoretical mathematics or move more towards INTP than INTJ in personality type. For simple example, Lewis Carroll was a mathematician. One thing to bear in mind is that many of the most brilliant theoretical mathematicians do not very much concern themselves with Truth or Reality. Consider the origin of "true"; when applied to a human, it is often near synonymous with "loyal", because it implies a similarity of behavior with the sort of material objects in the world that do not display internal agency (life or biology.) Truth is sought and found in physics (or, at least, Physics 101) , because physics is concerned with objects that best hold the quality of Truth within Reality. As in, "The arrow was truly shot" or "The moon, ever loyal in her orbit."

In the physical sciences proper, such as optics and electrodynamics, the scene changes entirely and principles seem no longer to share the conventional character of geometric postulates. Poincare's "indifferent hypotheses" are those that the analyst assumes at the beginning of calculations and that are neither true nor false, but rather play roles as occupants in a structure. Indifferent hypotheses differ from geometrical conventions in one very important sense. While geometry rests on conventional decree, the structures of physics (mechanics included) do not systematically rest on indifferent hypotheses; rather, these hypotheses have only a psychological and pedagogic function as mental constructs that are in a sense superfluous, since they can change while leaving the experimental results intact. The basis of Poincare's structural realism can be seen in his idea that the content is superfluous and that it is the relations expressed in natural laws that remain through time that are essential to science.

Mathematics is an intuitive art which is sometimes extremely helpful in allowing us to talk amongst ourselves about the relationships that form our reality. If you don't believe that it is an intuitive art, just spend some time talking to 3 to 6 year old humans about mathematics, or ask yourself why it took us so freaking long to invent the concept of zero. A simple example of constructed reality can be seen in the manner in which we generally teach addition and subtraction. A worksheet might require that a child solves 9+7 and 7+9 and 9-7, but not yet require a solution for 7-9, because the child is not yet expected to inhabit that "reality", although a few may intuit it and may attempt to express their intuition through language or demonstration. In the realm of concrete objects, subtraction seems to function in direct opposition to subtraction until (oops!) we run out of objects to count. Now what? This is f*cked up. I see that you do not have any more chickens to trade me for piglets, but I have two more piglets and you want two more piglets...how about you draw a picture of two chickens on that lump of raw clay not yet made into a water vessel, and I'll keep it in the leather pouch where I carry my talisman? Yes, I agree that the color of blood would be most appropriate for use on the lump of clay which you will keep to remind you that I will be coming to get two more chickens from you at the next multi-clan gathering. Damn, cuz, if we could intuit just a little better and also get a grip on the whole food constantly rotting predicament , we might even be able to invent Capitalism!

[jacob]

The messiness of biology I think serves to blur some of the clearer lines that might exist in the hard sciences. In particular, biology contains essentially an infinite number of 'truths', but only a tiny amount of these truths are relevant to human health (in a practical sense). Furthermore, it is relatively common for a researcher to stumble upon a very practical result without having a clue of its theoretical underpinnings. Allow me to expand on that a bit...

You need to zoom waaaaayyy awaaaaaay out from this [perspective] in order to see the difference in how traditionalism, modernism, and postmodernism approach (the process) and find (the goal) truth.

The fact is that you go into a lab believing that the truth is out there to be discovered. You might not have an overarching theory that can connect the mouse-model to the human, but the objectivity of your lab results are [hopefully] not in dispute. You're a modernist by vocation if not by heart

Contrast with how biology would proceed under traditionalism. Here there would be no need for labs. Indeed, the idea of a lab or performing an experiment to verify some observation would be rather inconceivable or at least a confusing concept. Instead, you would be memorizing https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Animals and other classical texts. Your work would consist in arguing whether whether an animal needs to have feathers to be a bird or everything that has a tail is an animal and thus whether a sperm cell is a kind of animal according the text. You would take the assertion that women have less teeth than men as a fact (after all, it's written in a book written by the highest authority, Aristoteles himself) w/o bothering to look for yourself. The idea of personally looking into people's mouth and counting teeth would seem strange and useless given how "everybody knows" that women generally have less teeth because it is so written.

Now, lets say that the grant committee or the depart management was replaced by postmodernists. The standard practice of looking and counting things about mice would be replaced by studies about the researchers themselves. You'd be publishing papers like "A hermeneutic study of early North American biologists" or "The ontology of simplistic models in biology". Instead of reading papers and debating on blackboards, you would engage in a dialectic with other researchers to discover their personal perspective and what's important to them and what they like about biology or how biology relates to their experience and perspective as a person. There may be a vote to release all the test animals because the majority have decided that testing theories on animals is cruel or at least make them feel rather bad.

If these examples sound like I'm making traditionalists and postmodernists sound stupid, it's only because science is so thoroughly dominated by modernism that any alternative just sounds bad. I can practically assure you that traditionalists and postmodernists would otherwise readily accept these approaches to understanding the natural world, because it's the approach these philosophies take to the world on their own turf as well as when entering other turs. Note, how these approaches do indeed work well for religious worship (traditionalism) or being kind and understanding/acceptance of other humans (postmodernism).

In terms of "infinite number of truths". The way modernism approaches the world is indeed that "there are many truths but some are better than others and it's up to us humans to converge on the best truth by increasingly figuring out a better truth". Unlike postmodernism, who are happy to leave it at anyone's personal perspective, modernists all converge on the same objective truth.

I feel fairly confident that most of my laboratory colleagues (grad students, post-docs, and staff scientists) would not be well acquainted with Popper or really any of the philosophical aspects of science/epistemology. Which is to say, most scientists probably are not well acquainted. I'd argue that the way a lot of scientists themselves operate (probably depending on the field, hardness, etc.) is often a blend of these *isms, to say nothing about whether there is a kind of mental 'compartmentalization' in their lives between how they think at their job and how they think while at home or in the community or at the mall on Black Friday. They bring 'thought baggage' into the laboratory; they still human hard. They may certainly be operating in modernist mode a much larger percentage of the time, though. One way to frame that, though, is to say that a good number of scientists aren't really 'scientists', or at least aren't acting like one a lot of the time, which could be a fair characterization.

Same for physicists in general. Most are unaware of the paradigm that guides them. In the hard sciences the philosophical perspective is universally one of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Instrumentalism That is, the important part is to explain and predict readings between different instruments (numerical data) using whatever thought models necessary. So e.g. when a physicist "assumes that a horse is a sphere" ... they're not really concerned about whether a horse is actually a sphere (or whether an electron is a point particle) but rather whether using this simplification (horse sphere, electron point particle) as an assumption allows them to make predictions about what they can measure. Basically "just shut up and calculate". Indeed, the maturing of a physicist is mostly about gaining the wisdom of exactly what simplifying assumptions can be made while retaining predictive computability.

As a real example, consider the question of quantum dynamics that early 20th century physicists debated endlessly: Is the electron a [point]-particle or a wave? Is it both? Is it but a probability wave with no real existence unless, indeed until, observed? The contemporary physicist doesn't really care. Instead, he looks at the situation and determines the best assumptions based on that situation. In this situation, [the electron] acts as if it's a wave. In that sitation, it acts like a particle. There's no concern what the reality of the electron actually is. Physicists are only concerned about how it acts and slapping some algebra on that behavior---the fewer assumptions the better. Physicists consider models using fewer assumptions to be more fundamental and thus in some sense more true (the grand goal is a Theory of Everything). The Standard Model (the theory that attempts to explain the masses and charges of all particles) starts with the presumption that particles are just a manifestation of interactions and that the more fundamental (<- requiring fewer assumptions) aspect of reality are fields creating and destroying such particles depending on what's going on.

[7Wannabe5]

Unlike postmodernism, who are happy to leave it at anyone's personal perspective, modernists all converge on the same objective truth.

Okay, there have been some pretty terrible books written that abused science in service of the post-modern ridiculous. However, that doesn't mean that Postmodern functioning is akin to a conflict-avoidant human with bloated Fe (such as myself on occasion) attempting to placate all parties present at the Scopes Monkey Trial by handing out donuts and gold stars. One thing to realize about the Post-Modern is that it has the disadvantage of not possibly being able to encompass all of Modernity, whereas Early Moderns were well able to encompass Traditionalism and even a great deal of the breadth of Early Modernity. They could be true polymaths. If it seems like post-modern critique is guerilla-like, this is somewhat reflective of this limitation.

Another way to consider the Post-Modern perspective is to consider where you might be centered and directing your gaze when you read "The Bell Curve: Intelligence and Class Structure in American Life"- Herrnstein and Murray, and then you read the 1996 edition of Stephen Jay Gould's "The Mismeasure of Man: The Definitive Refutation to the Argument of The Bell Curve Aren't you at least a little bit rooting for Gould to score a goal with his better math? Wouldn't you feel inclined to assist him, kick the ball in his direction, if you could? How do I predict that this would be your perspective, but perhaps not the perspective of all the humans on this forum? The perspective of the non-stupid post-modern is that there is no way to separate the peanut butter from the jelly. It is often useful for me from post-modern perspective to be able to comprehend the social motives of a scientist as well as his scientifc motives. These together, along with many other strands, form his web of goals within the greater field(s) of probability -> possibility. Truth may be immortal, but scientists are just mortals like poets and the rest of us.

[Scordatura]

Obviously, predicting "what's next" from my own current extremely limited perspective is much more difficult and prone to error. By analogy, much more difficult to find/attract a human in masculine energy to enter into ecstatic sexual union with me at post-post-modern. I mean, it can happen, but it's about as likely as bumping into somebody on the bus who wants to talk to me about surreal numbers, but there are some signs I am aware of within the bounds of my ignorance.

My first thought upon reading this is your inputs and outputs are tangled. I’d be more impressed if you could predict someone else’s optimal sexual strategy, the more unlike you, the more impressed I’d be. It’s fairly easy for me to predict I’ll be eating cookies in the kitchen, because I have control of that.

My second thought is the phrase ‘ecstatic sexual union’ ought to be a bumper sticker. It could have stars and stripes as a background, and the lettering could form phallically across the banner. It could be placed right next to Calvin urinating on various truck company logos.

Hear, hear. Long before string theory there were Maxwell's equations. These are beautiful equations but they do not model reality. Maxwell himself was aware of it. My university teachers knew it, but they still taught it. The substack Fiat Lux carefully explores the situation.

That was an excellent read. Thank you. I also read the one about forcefully settling science. Fascinating.

I don’t think I have a huge amount to say about the process of science, though I DID actually know that Newton’s equations were approximations.

Mostly in response to (1) but all this should cover (2) and (3) as well.

The differences between the three *isms are sufficiently large to warrant the split in classification. Most people only ever spend time in one of these bubbles and so their respective *ism basically becomes the water they swim in to the point where they are not aware of it. They will in turn judge people from other bubbles based on their personal values rather than the values of the bubble the person inhabits.

The value systems are not just about ethics but also how people arrive at these values. To give an example, lets consider how the different *isms determine right from wrong.

I think you unintentionally ran into my point:
Beware the lens you think with, it inherently mashes nuance. The lens you use should match the use case. By the way, I don’t even have major problems with the lens you’re using, I just don’t know what the reward of using it is. Categorization for communication, maybe?

Some minor problems as examples:

The early traditionalism example has trial by combat. Were there no people past the SD: Red level at the time? No one practical enough even an intensely backward society to think that the system might be selecting for the wrong thing? Of course there were, hence the movement away from the system.

The traditionalism category both matches and does not match the traditionalists I actually know. Sure, it describes the faithful at the lowest competency levels excellently. Consult the book. But what about the religious scholars? They know the contradictions in the book from hard study. They tend to be higher on the color scale. Enlightenment thinking had its start in religion, after all.

I think the postmodern category has a lot of inherently conflicting parts. There’s the art side, the epistemological side with Critical Theory, and then the metanarrative dissolution. "Simplifying to the extreme, I define postmodern as incredulity towards metanarratives" – Jean Francois-Lyotard
I honestly don’t see how tolerance could be seen as a key tenant when many subjective perspectives are emphasized. I think the postmodern category is held together with tape and spit.

Personally, I would frame this all in terms of power struggle. The various philosophies morphed over time by the winners, what made the winners could be anything from martial might, to popular support by propaganda, to circulation of elites. The sophistication of an individual may very well influence which category they land in as well. People high in a hierarchy are likely to have different outlooks than those set low.

I tended to think debates were useless by a different framework: You are unlikely to convince somebody of something that conflicts with their personal incentives. The actual use of a debate, in my opinion, is to convince an audience. It’s why one of the more powerful debate tactics is to show the perverse incentives of your interlocutor, despite the fact that’s technically off topic. The Munk debate with Malcolm Gladwell and Douglas Murray is a good example. It was the most lopsided debate in the history of the Munk debates, but Malcolm Gladwell still wasn’t convinced of his wrongness. The audience WAS, however. Useful debate.

[7Wannabe5]

I’d be more impressed if you could predict someone else’s optimal sexual strategy, the more unlike you, the more impressed I’d be.

Sure, I could do this, but might vary significantly depending upon which dimension of "unlike me" was under consideration; take enough hard turns and you are bound to wind up back where you started. First broad stroke of my attempt would be based on my belief that the majority of humans in the cultures to which most of us belong are primarily seeking sexual/romantic "validation." Second broad stroke of my attempt would be based on my belief that every modern sexual contract or relationship, no matter how simple or complex, and of any duration is "fair" or at equilibrium in terms of the overall functional level (or market value inclusive of the behavioral) of the parties engaged. IOW, most humans are attempting to boost their self-esteem by getting a better deal than they merit on the market, but to the extent that they conform to market norms in this attempt, the likelihood of failure approaches 100% IOW, the efficient market hypothesis is not exactly "true", but it is good enough as a first approximation for majority of modern-centered humans.

My second thought is the phrase ‘ecstatic sexual union’ ought to be a bumper sticker. It could have stars and stripes as a background, and the lettering could form phallically across the banner. It could be placed right next to Calvin urinating on various truck company logos.

I'm actually being a bit tongue in cheek myself in making use of this phrase, which to the best of my knowledge was coined by David Deida, "The Way of the Superior Man", Level Turquoise Sex Guru, but also (suspiciously to me) a white, American, upper-middle-middle-class, younger-end-of-Boomer-gen male which is the demographic I've been most likely to sexually interact with over the last 45 years (yes, 45 years, I just turned 60!), and, thus, possessing of a motivational strategy matrix not as unknown to me as it might be to those who are younger or from other realms. IOW, I tend to gaze upon one attempting to sell me on the concept of "ecstatic sexual union" much like I might gaze upon one who just placed the stereo needle in the album groove of "Well, there's a rose in a fisted glove. And the eagle flies with the dove. And if you can't be with the one you love, honey. Love the one you're with. Love the one you're with. Love the one you're with..."

However, that said, It has been my own personal experimental outcome/experience that the sexual dichotomy theory/practice/advice promoted by Deida and others, including some practitioners of Vudu, does work pretty well. In simplest terms, vibing asexual is not best strategy for getting laid, although it is, of course, a great strategy if your preference is to not get laid. Vibing gender queer can be very sexy. Vibing sex/gender neutral is pretty much by definition not sexy. If you attempt it, and other humans are still frequently approaching you with sexual intent, you are either not vibing neutral enough OR you might be displaying a good deal of intelligence, kindness, affluence, symmetrical facial features, or other attributes generally appreciated, but not strongly associated with sex/gender in the cultural field you inhabit. It would be an interesting experiment to attempt to maximize all these qualities/attributes while neutralzing those most associated with sex/gender and then see what happens. But, this is why I do not (any longer) attempt to help other humans with their sexual strategies; I prefer interesting failures to predictable successes, but my "clients", not so much.

[chenda]

Happy birthday @7w5

[jacob]

I think you unintentionally ran into my point:
Beware the lens you think with, it inherently mashes nuance. The lens you use should match the use case. By the way, I don’t even have major problems with the lens you’re using, I just don’t know what the reward of using it is. Categorization for communication, maybe?

For my purpose, it's categorization for effective communication. Knowing how statements are going to be understood according to the recipient's approach to engaging with their world makes using the corresponding framework and making the appropriate statements more effective. As such, I'm continually trying to guess/adjust where people are coming from in order to communicate in the values they understand. I change depending on where I'm talking and who I'm talking with.

(The reason I'm personally interested in this and why this is very relevant to me when promoting ERE is that I communicate far outside my local bubble of family-friends-neighbors-colleagues AND that I talk about deep values that people generally don't talk about when they have conversations about "how are your feeling today", "what do you want watch on TV", "what did you think of the game last night", "where do you want to go out tonight?", or "what are you currently working on?")

For example, I know that SD:Red care less for reason, facts, self-consistency, or the well-being of people outside their own tribe and mostly respect force, will, and action. I also know that for SD:Red, the power of who is making a statement is more important than whether that statement is logically consistent or objectively true. To SD:red "might is right".

Whereas if I was engaging with SD:blue, my traction would increase in accordance to how high I've risen in their hierarchy. My word would carry more weight, not because it made more sense/reason or because I was more caring, but because of whatever title I hold ("You can address me as Dr. Fisker...") or whether I was fulfilling my duty or providing service to whoever I was affiliated with. If I can make their hierarchy my own (and thus be at the top or higher relative to them, they'll listen---otherwise not. E.g. according the ERE book ... @jacob (or @MMM) says ... Otherwise, people would listen more to me for the sole reason that I'm member of their "church". Conversely, retiring early would be perceived as not fulfilling my duty [to work or] support or service my family or community.

Whereas if I was engaging with SD:orange (the majority in American Culture, not all), the key measure of whether people would take me seriously would come down to my accomplishments and material success. Living in an RV in a mobile home with savings of $150k while wearing shorts and old tshirts and most (SD:Orange) people think I'm a joke. Living in a fully owned brick house with savings of $1M+ wearing business or business casual clothes and people now take me seriously because now I've demonstrated that I won their game. For SD:orange, that's a huge difference. For other "colors", not so much.

Whereas if I was engaging with SD:green (contemporary Scandinavian Culture), the key measure of whether people would take me seriously or connect with my ideas would be determined by whether I found and demonstrate personal happiness according to common standards. Do I enjoy a life in the ways they can imagine life should be enjoyed? Like am I travellng the world or drinking designer coffees in cafes engaging in conversation with other people? Here living in an RV is not a problem as much as whether I do stuff that people can relate to.

All I can say---based on personal anecdotal experience [talking about ERE]---is that [applying different lenses] works. It bloody works like magic!! It's like the key to the universe of human beings and thought. When people are forced to think about ideas they've never encountered before (like ERE), it really matters what kind of thought process they have. It's important to match the key to the lock. Otherwise, people may hear you, but not listen.

The early traditionalism example has trial by combat. Were there no people past the SD: Red level at the time? No one practical enough even an intensely backward society to think that the system might be selecting for the wrong thing? Of course there were, hence the movement away from the system.

Yes, there are individual examples of advanced/nuanced development (all the way up) in ancient socieites but they were few and far in between and thus didn't have much influence on society. Advanced personal instances on the spiral has existed for thousands of years. However, if it's just one person saying advanced stuff, they're more likely to get burned at the stake. Like Green Jesus on the Red cross or Orange Bruno on the Blue stake. Thankfully, in my case people have refrained from outright murdering me or locking me up for "disturbing" public opinion, but you should see some of the public comments I got 15 years ago when ERE was still new.

The traditionalism category both matches and does not match the traditionalists I actually know. Sure, it describes the faithful at the lowest competency levels excellently. Consult the book. But what about the religious scholars? They know the contradictions in the book from hard study. They tend to be higher on the color scale. Enlightenment thinking had it’s start in religion, after all.

It's worthwhile to keep in mind that the average human is actually at "the lowest competence"---about as smart as a fifth grader. In particular, given the current paradigm that focuses on specializing, even a highly educated person in some field is rarely nothing but an amateur when going only slightly outside their wheelhouse. (See ERE book chap 3). To wit, as per the above, scientists might work with very technical models but leave the philosophical underpinnings of their entire worldview to others who work in specialized branches of philosophy.

Scholars tend to be ahead of the general curve. Intellectuals truly do know more than the "I got common sense"-crowd. These days, religious scholars are Blue/Orange or Blue/Green: Willing to debate or willing to include or at least consider other opinions. This wasn't always so though. Blue used to hunt down Orange-types and burn them on the stake for doing unsanctioned science (witchcraft!!)

Every new thinking-mode had its start in previous thinking-mode. It's a dialectic reaction to that if you will. I don't think it's solid enough to be predictive in any way. We should not expect the social "sciences" to meet the standards of the physical sciences. Humans are more complex than electrons. Some general observations can be made though.

I think the postmodern category has a lot of inherently conflicting parts. There’s the art side, the epistemological side with Critical Theory, and then the metanarrative dissolution. "Simplifying to the extreme, I define postmodern as incredulity towards metanarratives" – Jean Francois-Lyotard
I honestly don’t see how tolerance could be seen as a key tenant when many subjective perspectives are emphasized. I think the postmodern category is held together with tape and spit.

The only thing postmoderns are intolerant of is intolerance. I mean, have you actually been part of a group where postmodernism was the dominamt sentiment? (They're kinda hard to find in the US.) Postmodernists are strangely hard to insult or offend. Tell them they're full of shit/that their ideas won't work in reality/that their conclusions are illogical, and they'll respond how "that's just your opinion and everybody is entitled to have one". The fact that you disagree with them won't even disqualify you(*)... they'll include your disagreemt as part of their [obnoxious to others] dialectic but basically dillute it according to everybody's opinion. Consensus(**) is huge for these guys. As such the dialectic is a feature not a bug.

(*) Whereas spouting BS will almost immediately disqualify one from a modernist group.
(**) An idea that's practically incomprehensible for the early Red. From their perspective, postmodernists are suckers.

(I should note that Critical Theory is not a defining characteristic of postmodernism. It's more of a contemporary bogeyman of the American political right. Outside the US (or ten years ago) very few would have a clue about what [Critical Theory] is or means. I'll bet ten to one that most people still have to look up exactly what it is.)

Personally, I would frame this all in terms of power struggle. The various philosophies morphed over time by the winners, what made the winners could be anything from martial might, to popular support by propaganda, to circulation of elites. The sophistication of an individual may vary well influence which category they land in as well. People high in a hierarchy are likely to have different outlooks than those set low.

I agree that it's an power struggle. Especially within Tier1. It's also an evolving power struggle. Hence the spiral. The reason is that every turn on the spiral is larger than the previous AND that it is very hard to put a larger perspective back in the box once it's out there in the wild. For example, annoying as it is, the postmodern critique of modernism will not go away. The modernist advances over traditionalism will not go away. Or to be fair, I should say that whatever humans have come up with in terms of suppression so far hasn't worked because the ideas will just go elsewhere and keep advancing there. Like if books are banned in some valley, the people reading them will just move outside the valley and continue reading them.

It's possible to suppress ideas to an extent: What people think about. Suppressing paradigms---how people think about things---is way way harder, because that can't be taken away. It has to be replaced by something better/cooler/more appealing.

To circle all this back to J+G's series of posts, it all comes down to what people value in their lives. Why people get up on the morning? For Blue it's a duty to work. For Orange it's becoming successful at acquiring stuff ("showing the world that you've arrived"). For Green it's being happy (somewhat part of the Declaration of Independence's "pursuit of happiness" but only fully realized in the Scandinavian welfare states, where being happy is both the starting point and end point of meaning.

The thing is that ERE1 left "purpose" up in the air. It just provided the means and the option to find one's purpose.

[delay]

All I can say---based on personal anecdotal experience [talking about ERE]---is that [applying different lenses] works. It bloody works like magic!! It's like the key to the universe of human beings and thought. When people are forced to think about ideas they've never encountered before (like ERE), it really matters what kind of thought process they have. It's important to match the key to the lock. Otherwise, people may hear you, but not listen.

Thanks for sharing your experience. I hope you don't mind the intrusion. What you describe here sounds like what in medieval times was called alchemy. They used different names, like Spiral Dynamics: Red would be the planet Jupiter, the element Fire, or the body humor Blood. They also used pompous terms like "the key to the universe". And if it "bloody works like magic", that might be because it is what magic is, the art and science of causing change in consciousness in accordance with will.

[jacob]

@delay - Your takeaway from all this was that it's magic complete with druids and all just because it works like magic?! Okay then,... that explains a few things.

[7Wannabe5]

I think delay was attempting to convey that there often is practical science to be found within magic. For example, if the Vudu love sorcery ritual prescribed is to chew on the fragrantly scented seeds while throwing back your shoulders and open-throat chanting, "I embody the power of the Thunder God" 100X from one moon to the next, from Modern perspective it's gonna work, because the seeds fix your bad breath (still in recent survey one of top reasons you might be rejected on first date), and the stance lends you the appearance of physical confidence and stature/breadth, and the chant combined with your belief in the power of Vudu lends you psychological confidence. And, all in all, this is supportive of frugality, because less expensive than having your gums scraped by a dental surgeon, hiring a physical trainer, and working with a therapist.

Based on my own personal experiments, I will absolutely expect different results on a first date if I prepare myself by thinking "I embody the power of the Thunder God" vs. "I embody the warmth held in a ripe peach." Up to 90% of what we communicate to others is conveyed non-verbally. Because my perspective is towards the post-post-modern, it is also likely that I might actually say something like, "I am attempting to embody the warmth held in a ripe peach, is that working for you?" if/when I come to believe such an attempt at humor might be appreciated.

[Scordatura]

@delay I cannot wait to see the werebears!

@jacob Understood. What did that for me was not the systems driven Spiral Dynamics. but Dale Carnegie's How to Win Friends and Influence People. It's considered fundamental for a reason. To this day, I greet people warmly and use their names. Stubbornly so. How you make people feel is huge, and that was a foreign concept for me in communication. I don't have anything I really feel the need to convince the world of like you do, but I'll chew on your SD analysis a bit longer.

We're on the same hill as far as the competence level of the average person in wheelhouses not their own. I assume you're referencing the 4 types including the Renaissance Man. When I think of competence levels, I actually think of the graph 2.2 in the ERE book, showing a sharp spike of competence in one domain and next to nothing everywhere else (specialist) vs a gentle, rounded gaussian curve (generalist). There's just something about a good graph.

I have not spent time with many postmodernists, no. I HAVE read some of Lyotard and some Foucault, however. I know nothing about the art side.

I think we're working off of different definitions of postmodern. Which I see is called "A highly contested term" directly on the Wikipedia page. I wasn't referencing Wikipedia before, but I wondered if I was out to lunch somehow. I don't think I was, but I see we're having a definitional problem.

You mentioned a joke earlier, and I've got one. Two modernists discuss postmodernism on a forum. They come away with two different definitions.

I agree Critical Theory is a bogeyman of the right, but I didn't mean Critical Race Theory or Critical Pedagogy itself. (I try to avoid politics whenever possible) What I meant when I said "epistemological side of Critical Theory" was the multiple "ways of knowing" that are described. Indigenous, feminist, etc. As if objective truth does not exist. I will mention the Critical Theory Wikipedia page has a section for postmodern thought under "schools and derivatives". I don't know how they could be considered separate considering they share members and argumentation.

In any case, have you considered analyzing ideologies cladistically? As in clades in biology? How related ideologies are really helps me find functional parallels between them. YMMV.

Back to the original point from J+G:

I do not think post modernism is a positive philosophy, as in it does not provide values. It is fundamentally an analytical framework.

I was reading the Mark Manson section, and I'm thinking the three planes need integrated, at least in the sense that the highest level (value based social interactions) contain the other two. Yes, transactional relationships may be gross if you notice the transactional nature, but even value based altruism has the postive feeling after giving, which seems transactional, even if the other party didn't give back.

[delay]

@delay - Your takeaway from all this was that it's magic complete with druids and all just because it works like magic?! Okay then,... that explains a few things.

Well, I read some blogs on druids and magic, and they describe what you're describing.

I thought that's interesting to share. It allows one to discard the idea that our ancestors were idiots who were trying to turn lead into gold. Instead, they used lead as a metaphor for a nervous state of mind, and gold as a metaphor for a successful state of mind. So alchemy is something like your "applying different lenses", and the result is like magic.

Based on my own personal experiments, I will absolutely expect different results on a first date if I prepare myself by thinking "I embody the power of the Thunder God" vs. "I embody the warmth held in a ripe peach."

This sounds like you are "causing change in consciousness in accordance with will", in yourself and your date. In my experience, if I walk around silently wishing people well, I get many smiles in return.

[7Wannabe5]

@Scordatura:

I think there is pretty good evidence that altruistic behavior is a social extension of breast-feeding. For example, in studies of multi-generational gift giving across cultures, more value consistently flows along maternal lines.

Altruism is like breast-feeding because it is painful not to give of yourself to the other. And it is sympathetic reflexive within certain bounds. For example, my babies very much resembled the babies of the British royal family, so on one occasion my milk rushed down when I happened upon a picture of Prince William in the supermarket checkout line. Classic example from literature would be the gift of breast milk from the poor young woman to the starving old man in Steinbeck’s “The Grapes of Wrath.”

I would posit that the extent to which one’s Fi (introverted feeling/idealism) is high in stack vs. one’s Fe (extroverted feeling/social harmony) may determine how values based one’s altruism is or seems to be. Also, it’s very difficult or less likely for a human to demonstrate financial independence style frugality if Fe is high on their stack, because the sympathetic press of the milk will gush over their boundaries. For example, Robin Greenfield has Fe high on his stack and he is currently doing experiment with giving everything away and owning nothing and devoting himself to service. And Nate Hagens personality type places him in yet another quadrant relative to ERE an/or Robin Greenfield in his approach to the meta crisis.

I’m not implying that one form is better than the other, just noting why it might be difficult for a form of frugality biased somewhat towards the low placement of Fe in the INTJ stack might not readily vibe with some others. In simplest terms, a naive Fe dominant might wonder why somebody who has saved more money than they need doesn’t give it to starving children in Africa.

[7Wannabe5]

This sounds like you are "causing change in consciousness in accordance with will", in yourself and your date. In my experience, if I walk around silently wishing people well, I get many smiles in return.

Yes, but I assume this is largely due to how holding varying thoughts will naturally tend to change many aspects of my physical presentation which other humans are very good at picking up on whether consciously or unconsciously. Counter example would be that many men have told me that the behavior they dislike the most on first date is being interrogated. Consider what differentiates “interrogation “ from “showing interest by asking questions “ and it’s 100% body language and verbal tone and intonation. If I wanted to vibe more like I was interrogating somebody, I would use mantra akin to “I don’t trust men. I will not allow myself to be hurt again. The stakes are very high here.” I try to tell the men that hate interrogation that the reason some women, such as myself, don’t come off that way is that we’re only playing for “low stakes”, so they should give the interrogators a second chance.

[jacob]

@delay - Maybe "works like magic" got lost in the translation. It's an English idiom that means "works very effectively": https://www.merriam-webster.com/diction ... ke%20magic If an English speaker says something works like magic, it just means that it works very well. It doesn't mean that it involves rituals, incantations, transmutations, or other hocus pocus. Similarly, if I say something "works like a dream", it doesn't mean I'm asleep and dreaming it or that the laws of physics have been suspended. It means it works beyond expectations. https://dictionary.cambridge.org/us/dic ... ke-a-dream

For example, "the transmission in this car works like magic, it drives like a dream" should not in any way imply that the car runs on fairy dust or that the car is able to fly and that auto-engineering has anything to do with magic or dreams.

The metaphorical or psychological reinterpretation of alchemy as some kind of spiritual journey is a contemporary perspective, not that of our ancestors. As far as nuclear chemistry goes, our ancestors were indeed ignorant fools who literally tried to turn lead, the metal, into the gold, the metal, to fill the king's treasure. Their intentions were maybe good, if greedy, but their means were primitive and their understanding was non-existent. They just didn't know any better. Some might call them proto-scientists but they lacked both a (scientific) method and a (scientific) theory for what they were doing and ultimately failed their goal. These are not the guys you want running your laboratory.

Unlike alchemy, there's actually a consistent method behind these psychological development models. I don't want to write another wall of text, but it's possible to get the general idea here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Graves%27 ... tal_design

Graves settled on the following questions to frame his experiments:

What will be the nature and character of conceptions of psychological maturity, in the biologically mature human being, produced by biologically mature humans who are intelligent but relatively unsophisticated in psychological knowledge in general, and theory of personality in particular?
What will happen to a person's characterization of mature human behavior when s/he is confronted with the criticism of his/her point of view by peers who have also developed their own conception of psychologically mature behavior?
What will happen to a person's conception of mature human behavior when confronted with the task of comparing and contrasting his/her conception of psychologically mature human personality to those conceptions which have been developed by authorities in the field?
Into what categories and into how many categories, if any, will the conceptions of mature human personality produced by intelligent, biologically mature humans fall?
If the conceptions are classifiable, how do they compare structurally and how do they compare functionally?
If the conceptions are classifiable, how do the people who fall into classes compare behaviorally as observed in quasi-experimental situations and in every day life?
If the conceptions are classifiable, how do the people who fall into one class compare to people who fall into other classes on standardized psychological instruments?

These questions led him to design a four-phase experiment, in which collected pertinent data from his psychology students and others. His initial research, conducted between 1952 and 1959, involved a diverse group of around 1,065 men and women aged 18 to 61.[14] Supplemental studies were carried out over the next twelve years.

Think about it! Graves asked what would happen if "intelligent laymen without a background in psychology" were to engage in a discussion of personality and human behavior and how they would respond if their ideas were confronted by others. This is exactly what we're doing here in this thread. Our respective answers are as such not surprising or novel. They (we) fit the findings of Graves and other researchers. People can be classified and once classified they will make the corresponding arguments about what they believe and what they don't believe about human development according to their respective class.

Every single psychological development model I know (more than a handful) was developed with similar research methods. You can roll your own if you have enough data. This is what we did with the ERE WL model (10 years and 1000 journals). All these models show self-similar patterns to each other.

Also note, that the goal here is to understand humans on a more strategic level. Not everybody is interested in that. Some prefer a tactical approach of becoming a better conversationalist. Rather than understand the other person as that person understands themselves, they focus on getting good at engaging with them. This group, of course, fits into its own class above. As does the group of people who claim to fit in all the classes.

[7Wannabe5]

Also note, that the goal here is to understand humans on a more strategic level. Not everybody is interested in that. Some prefer a tactical approach of becoming a better conversationalist.

I think this is one of the realms in which practicing with "tactics" will inform/improve strategy and perspective. For example, I found the experience and result of following rote instructions for "creating a swale on permaculture project" to be very similar to following rote instructions for "behaving/appearing charming." Especially in the sense that my fails provided more feedback than my successes.

Of course, the downside of the modern^^ approach is that it does tend towards draining out the magic towards the predictable. For example, the fact that I now can predict whether or not a man will eventually want me to be his girlfriend based on very predictable behavior set on first date is rather dispiriting. I mean, I could just send ChatGPT Android out in my stead and have it listen for frequency of the words, "pretty", "good", "beautiful", "like", etc. This corresponds so predictably with whether or not he finds my facial features, hair, wardrobe choices, etc pleasantly feminine, as well as passing me on the more primal neck-down imagined without clothing appearance "hawt" scan (sigh.) One way in which I have semi-consciously (I was running too late to change my shirt) tested this is by keeping all other variables the same, but showing up wearing an obnoxious t-shirt for first date. I was instantly and obviously rejected by my date which is otherwise a very rare occurrence for me. So, this might also be a successful tactic for women who are so attractive they are constantly bothered by strange men (not my appearance/experience, but I can empathize.) I would suggest a t-shirt featuring a design along the lines of maybe Mickey Mouse being choked by Scrooge McDuck to the point that his eyeballs are popped out and bleeding or maybe the opposite depending on venue. For the opposite effect on frugal budget, simply mix some Dollar Store vanilla with apple cider spice mix and some skin lotion and apply liberally before meet and greet.

[black_son_of_gray]

Hopefully, I do not completely miss the point...

You need to zoom waaaaayyy awaaaaaay out from this [perspective] in order to see the difference in how traditionalism, modernism, and postmodernism approach (the process) and find (the goal) truth.

The fact is that you go into a lab believing that the truth is out there to be discovered. You might not have an overarching theory that can connect the mouse-model to the human, but the objectivity of your lab results are [hopefully] not in dispute. You're a modernist by vocation if not by heart

Ok, I think I get it now. Thank you for holding my hand!

@J+G

Considering all the different concepts you define in this post, you may derive some value from investigating "the types of conflict in stories".

I say that because (and please correct where I'm wrong) there seems to be a lot of conceptual overlap between terms like "conflict", "trauma", "alignment", etc., and the different "types" of conflict that show up offer a way to more finely put a point on what exactly is opposing what with respect to self-actualization. Usually, there are multiple sources of conflict happening at the same time, and it's useful to be able to disentangle them.

For example, some stories are framed as "man vs. society" at one level, in which case the conflict may be (current state of man's desire/nature) vs. (current state of society's desire/nature). This kind of conceptual framing can be helpful because the different ways to resolve the conflict come to mind easily: 1) man changes his desire/nature to be consistent with society's, or 2) society's desire/nature changes to be consistent with the man's, or 3) man leaves particular society to join one that matches better, etc.* You've mentioned a number of concepts in your "Important Concepts" post linked above that seem to have this framing. Of course, simultaneously a story may also have other conflicts. There are many aspects of self-actualization that could be helpfully explored from this framing (man vs. society), but some that might be better explored with other framings (e.g. "man vs. himself" or "man vs. nature/god"). I see some Important Concepts related to those as well.

As an off-the-cuff example, suppose our hero, the Prince, falls in love with a woman at a masquerade ball. By evening's end, they declare their intent to marry each other. Come morning, however, it is revealed that the woman is a peasant from neighboring enemy lands...Oh no! For conflict to be fully resolved (for our "Happily Ever After" moment), the Prince must overcome any personal conflicts (man vs. himself), interpersonal conflicts--say, with the presumptive in-laws, who might hate his guts (man vs. man), and broader animosity between the warring territories in general or arising from the beloved woman's class (man vs. society).

*Basically, there is an axis of "freedom-from" vs. "freedom-to" for possible conflict resolutions...