Nat Eliason wrote this essay. If you are a Medium subscriber, you can applaud for it here. A random excerpt:
You might say “but I don’t want to read political philosophy.” That’s fine, but then don’t pretend that you’re interested in politics. If you want to watch the news but you don’t want to read some John Rawls, then you don’t actually care about politics: you just like feeling outraged and talking to your friends about how stupid/brilliant Trump is.
Another random excerpt:
Emotional reactions to an idea indicate that you have a Level 1 or Level 2 ideology around that idea. If you feel any emotional pull to defend Democrats / Republicans / College / Christianity / Bitcoin / Crossfit / New Gender Pronouns / Income Inequality in the face of new information, that’s a sign that you’re at Level 1 or Level 2 thinking.
I had a positive emotional reaction to the essay. So perhaps I have not reached Level 3 in thinking about it.
Interesting and provocative. On one level he strikes me as a bit like Tim Ferris. How many lifestyle bloggers are out there, anyway?
Point the first:
When he talked about people going from Level One to Level Two, I thought of the people in interwar Europe who abruptly switched their loyalty from Communism to Nazism. Apparently this really happened.
* Eric Hoffer quoted a Nazi functionary, somewhere, about how Social Democrats usually didn’t make good Nazis but Communists often made excellent ones.
* Patrick Leigh Fermor met some guys in a bar in Hamburg who let him sleep at their place for the night–he wrote they had recently become Nazis but hadn’t yet bothered to take down the Communist Party posters from their attic. They apparently had switched sides in the street battles–from beating up Nazis (or trying to do so) to actually being Nazis and beating up Communists.
Point the Second:
When he started talking about experts, I was reminded of the assertion in _The black swan_ that “some fields don’t have experts.” You can find this discussion in Taleb’s book from the index–it may be indexed under “expert problem, also known as the empty suit problem.”
Point the Third:
It would be nice if he would be more specific about the sorts of political philosophy we are supposed to read. Besides Rawls, who? Anyone? Rousseau? Weber? Kropotkin? Start anywhere?
Point the Fourth:
Methinks…no where in this essay is “hypothesis testing” used–nor “regression to the mean.” but I read quickly, might have missed it.
Point the Fifth:
A better read might be _How to think_ by Alan Jacobs, who is at Baylor U. But this was ok, and online for free. Jacobs talks about how to tip-toe around the mental module in which you automatically go into disputation mode based on emotional motivations. I don’t recall what he calls it.
Point the Sixth:
I also thought of Garrett Hardin’s statements about taboo. Fortunately, some of his work is online at the Garrett Hardin Society. Such as this quote:
“It takes five years for a willing person’s mind to change. Have patience with yourself and others when treading in an area protected by a taboo.”
My bad–methinks the Fermor anecdote is garbled. I think the attic / guest room was already full of Nazi paraphernalia, and the next morning Fermor’s hosts said “You should have seen it a few months ago, it was nothing but ‘workers of the world unite’ banners everywhere.” And I’ve never read much Fermor–I think it’s a second-hand anecdote, probably in something by Robert Conquest.
Great piece. Thanks. I suspect Marcus Aurelius’s apothegm “Whenever you are about to find fault with someone, ask yourself the following question: What fault of mine most nearly resembles the one I am about to criticize?” might be another way of reaching level 3 thinking.
Some interesting stuff to be sure, and in level 3 fashion, there are useful takeaways…
But not much is in there about how to move towards the “better” versions of things. I doubt he threw what I’ll call “standard foundational morality” out on the journey upwards, but there seems to me be missing here. Reason looks like the driver, in a Sam Harris sense, but some level 3 grappling with the limits of reason is missing as well.
Put more clearly: is there room for belief in objective truth in this approach?
I don’t think so. He uses the analogy of diet for level 1/2/3 where 1 is what you grew up with, 2 what you adopted wholesale, and 3 realizing everyone needs to pick out what works best for them.
Does that apply to poisonous things? Or things that just are not edible? Is there really no telling at all? Does every person have to try it out to see? Of course, back in reality, somethings may truly be poisonous for one person and not another, due to allergies, but there exist somethings that are just bad for anyone at anytime.
Applied the the political and moral sphere, what about a controversial topic like abortion? The very nature of the thing does not lend itself to being OK for some people but not for others, and they just have to figure out which one they are. It is either OK for anyone, or wrong for everyone.
Applied less controversially, but still to the political and moral sphere, what about theft. Should I calmly and reasonably weigh the pros and cons about stealing this thing? And coming to the conclusion that it is right for me, given my circumstances, and the concrete possibilities and exigencies, just go for it? Level 1 might have told me not to steal because my parents told me not to, Level 2 because the religion I follow forbids it, but Level 3 realizes I need to move beyond those constraints.
Short version, the idea fits well enough if you keep your analogies humble, to things like a diet, where it is constrained by the implicit assumption that it is a diet of “the kind of things people have normally eaten somewhere at sometime”.
Applied consistently and generally, it is complete subjectivist.
Writing an article like this seems like a very Level II thing to do.
Responding only to the second quote, I don’t think it really tracks very far.
“New information” is one thing, but what about falsehood? Should there be no emotional pull towards denouncing a lie? Put another way, should all lies be treated as “new information”?
And there is the intractable problem, because rarely do you see bare new information, calmy presented that causes a need for a serious but dispassionate re-evaluation.
In most cases, you get, perhaps, a tidbit of new information jumbled up with a great deal of invective, aspersions, calumny, carried in by a troop of straw men.
That can even be a strategy. I can toss out fifteen howlers while you are still trying to calmly explain why the first one is wrong, and I can keep saying things completely unconstrained by truth or reality faster than you can dispel the fog.
I am all for the project of taking the charitable view and engaging your opponent’s best arguments, etc. but you still have to be able to recognize when that is *not* what is happening.
Not everything is “new information”. The trick, as far as that goes, is to be willing to listen to the real deal when it shows up.
I think he is trying to get toward LessWrong-style rationalism with Bayesian thinking and all that stuff.
I also think his is totally wrong on “level 3” with regard to politics and beliefs. Transcending ideology is essentially to embrace moral nihilism – stop privileging your level 1/2 beliefs over those other people, even if they seem true to you. The entire point of evolved morality is to generate beliefs that seem externally true – recognizing this makes it really easy to get along with others. You don’t need to deny emotional experience to do this, in fact you become very sympathetic to the experiences of others
Think of the wars, the famines, the dramas that killed millions, the rise and fall of empires throughout history. Do you claim that no one had a genuine opinion on any of it because they didn’t spend large quantities of time reading political philosophy?
I suspect the author is annoyed at hearing the political opinions of regular people and found a snobbish way to dismiss them.
This post is so absurd, I’m disappointed in Kling for featuring it.
In Level 3 thinking he says:
Level 3 is recognizing that different people respond differently to different diets, especially based on their genetics, and everyone should experiment to see what works best for them.
So let’s contrast this to another cliche:
Everybody learns from their own mistakes. The wise learn from the mistakes of others.
In diet, making mistakes about low-carb / high-carb / fasting for a while is unlikely to cause long term problems, and small mistakes can be corrected.
In voting, if you make a mistake and your guy gets in, you’re stuck for years and possibly with changes that cannot be easily changed. Most Venezuelans probably wish they had learned about how terrible socialism is, and NOT voted for Chavez, before he got power and helped destroy rich Venezuela.
The lack of a good way to avoid Big Mistakes is hugely missing. Considering how many elite thinkers continue to support socialism, both passionately and dispassionately/rationally, it’s terrible to support such experimentation based on the rationalization that “real Socialism has never been tried”.
J. Peterson has a good video rant against such elites. With emotion, sincerity, AND logic. It’s good to get some emotion for Truth — it’s true that such emotions combined with differences in opinion about Truth can and often do cause problems.
There is an infinite regress problem in Eliason’s essay.
Indeed, we are all born into “ideology”–level one ideas that we just accept. If we hear opposing ideas and get emotional reactions, that may well indicate we are wrong. But there are millions and millions of opposing ideas that will induce negative emotions. How to choose which ones to take seriously?
I was born into the idea that the position of the stars at my birth has no effect on my life. But lots of people are into astrology, which says the opposite. I feel that such a belief is idiocy–a negative emotional reaction. Does that mean that I should spend a lot of time reading astrology books and talking with people who believe in astrology? Would that be “leveling up”? When I read astrologers, I certainly get “brake lights” and quickly jump to the conclusion that what I am reading is sh*t.
I need some way of picking and choosing which of the many things I disagree with I should seriously consider might actually be right. But that requires it’s own preconceptions. And if I try to judge those preconceptions, I need yet another level of preconceptions. On to infinity.
Should I take Rawls seriously? Well, some academics think he’s profound and some think he’s silly. I have to choose which ones to take seriously, or even whether I should take academics as a group seriously when it comes to political philosophy. Are they just engaging in intellectual masturbation? Are they just justifying their politics?
At Level 3, you don’t interpret information emotionally because you see all information as potentially useful. Even when faced with someone totally against their beliefs, a Level 3 thinker will react with curiosity. And when faced with a Level 1 or 2 thinker being obnoxious about their beliefs, a Level 3 thinker doesn’t get angry or annoyed, they get amused. They can laugh about it and ignore them instead of getting sucked into the fray.
But if all information is potentially useful, you can’t ignore any of it. “Elephants all the way down.”