I want to publicly express my strong support for this experiment/meta-experiment.
I think that my support is particularly noteworthy as I’m presently a core member of a different taking-each-other-seriously co-living experiment that is profoundly different in its philosophy. (Mine is not in Berkeley, nor rationalist.) Therefore some people might assume that I would be opposed to Dragon Army Barracks.
Things in common between the experiment I’m part of and Dragon Army Barracks:
is “high-commitment, high-standards, high-investment”
is trying to actually make & achieve something together
is addressing unanchored abandoned loneliness thing
has consciously explicated commitments and assumptions
is intended to produce a high-level of consistent excellence and ability to effectively collaborate
Things that are different:
We’re very far from authoritarian or hierarchical. Although we’re also not egalitarian, consensus-based, or even democratic per se… but we have essentially zero of telling-other-people-what-to-do
Our basic collective navigating framework is [Kegan-5 / fluid mode / post-rational], rather than [Kegan-4 / systematic mode / rational] (good summary of this distinction)
Our focus is almost entirely on the meta-level of building the new cultural platform we’re building. We don’t have any expectations of each other on the levels of specific object-level projects or explicit behavioral norms (aside from ones necessary for the house’s function)
I think that these differences are core to why I am part of this project that I’m part of, and why I consider it to be the most valuable investment I could be making with my time and energy. I am, therefore, non-Berkeley-residence aside, not going to be applying to DA. As I said above though, I strongly support Dragon Army Barracks as an experiment and potentially as an ongoing resource to individual and collective growth.
Reasons why I think that DA is a good idea:
Expected value of high amounts of worthwhile object-level output. As Sebastian Marshall says, “the gains made from living more purposefully are forever—the time you’ve spent well will remains well-spent even if you fall off for a while sometimes. Most people don’t even try, which is why most people don’t succeed.”
I expect it will also produce a lot of developmental progress for people involved; that if you were to be able to sort rationalists by amount of growth in a year, the Dragons would all be in the top quartile, and would occupy many of the top 10 slots. This, even if the experiment were to end after 6 months.
The DA Barracks is an intervention that is attempting to produce change on a very fundamental level of the system that is a group house. This is a powerful leverage point (see Donella Meadow’s article… I would say this is around a 2 or 3, and most group houses have only done mild experiments at the 4-6 level.)
I agree with and/or resonate with the six points that Duncan makes in Section 2 of this document.
The project-level value of learning here is also very high: this will greatly inform future experiments, whatever their leadership basis.
If I had kids, I would absolutely sign them up for any summer camps or classes Duncan was running. I think the amount of power he would have in relation to them would be similar to the amount of power he’ll have in this situation.
A final reason is this: I think that we as humanity need to rapidly make progress on being able to effectively coordinate in non-hierarchical ways, which is what the project I’m part of is about. Corollarily, humanity is kind of mediocre at doing this in many contexts. Therefore if non-hierarchical projects aren’t emphatically directed towards solving that challenge itself, I expect them to be outperformed by projects that are leveraging existing understanding about how to coordinate effectively in hierarchical ways. i.e. in this case, Dragon Army Barracks.
I really, really wish Kegan levels didn’t come in an order, so a claim to be at a higher Kegan level than someone else didn’t look so starkly like a claim to superiority. It’s turning me off even trying to take them seriously, because everyone who uses them looks like they’re just self-aggrandizing to me.
I’m totally with you in wishing that Kegan levels weren’t getting socially entangled with claims to superiority!
...but that can’t be achieved in the way you describe: they would be a fundamentally different thing if they didn’t come in the order they do. It’s not a personality typing system, it’s a model of human development over time. Probably some people who are talking about them are self-aggrandizing; people are known to do that with just about everything they can get their hands on.
I suspect that your heuristics about not trusting people who brag about their Kegan levels are probably decently good heuristics, as it could be reasonably expected that that would be ineffective in just the way you’re describing here.
I first learned about the CDT model from a conversation I had with someone who used to work with Kegan, and who readily noted that he was not himself consistently operating out of stage 5. Robert Kegan has said that about himself too, which I found surprising and originally interpreted as being a failure mode in the opposite direction—false humility or something. But now it strikes me as not that unlikely. There’s a big difference between being able to recognize abstractly (or in others) what it means to be subject to one’s own interpretations & ideologies, and being able to actually not do it.
There’s an unfortunate phenomenon here, where the value of the concept gets diluted because the people who are finding the Kegan models helpful but aren’t claiming to be at higher Kegan levels than others… are harder to notice.
Anyway, I realize that I may sound like I’m making a superiority claim here myself. I will address that directly, kind of like Duncan is doing re: skulls above.
My understanding—based more on reading things like this than Kegan’s own work—is that the “fluid mode” (~=K-5) does have capabilities that the “systematic mode” (~=K-4) does not; much like multivariate calculus can be used to re-derive the equation for the volume of a sphere, but not the reverse. Is multivariate calculus superior to sphere equations? In functional senses yes, but not in a social status way. And also not in all domains! It’s certainly slower if you just need to calculate the volumes of a bunch of spheres.
I’ve spent a considerable amount of time over the past year working to develop the ability to operate in the fluid mode, and I think that that makes a lot of sense for me and many other people, but I don’t think that that’s highest priority for everyone right now. Hence my strong support for Dragon Army.
I like the paragraph “my understanding” a lot. In particular, while I think I have some limited, flickering access to K5, I notice that operations which come out of being solidly K4 often cause me to outstrip/outperform people who are entirely in K5, which seems to me to be something analogous to “I’m successfully calculating the volumes of a bunch of spheres and you’re just stuck there mired in re-derivation.”
I’m not sure what it means to be entirely K5. To me the phrase sounds like Chapman’s description of the postmodernists who are at K3 and tried to skip K4 entirely and are without any real access to the ability to use a system.
Fair. “People who overwhelmingly operate from a thing where I’m comfortable applying the label K5,” where overwhelmingly means 90+% and comfortable means 90+%.
Our basic collective navigating framework is Kegan-5 / fluid mode / post-rational, rather than Kegan-4 / systematic mode / rational (good summary of this distinction)
How do you filter for people who are Kegan-5 when you are seeking to accept members?
We don’t! Each of the individual members themselves aren’t necessarily Kegan-5, but the person spearheading the project (who is in her 70s) certainly is. And so, therefore, are our models, our equivalent to a “charter”, etc.
It’s also the case that the mode of interaction that we’re training here is fluid as opposed to systematic, which shows up in the ways that we make agreements, commitments, and the general way-we-do-things-here. I was very much operating in (and committed to!) systematic mode when I first joined several years ago, and I’m still getting comfortable with this. It’s challenging but worth it, and we’re working to build a bridge to meta-rationality to make that learning process easier.
I think that Duncan’s intended context will potentially be (a) an awesome place to go from Kegan-3 to Kegan-4, and (b) an awesome place to operate in an exceedingly high-functioning Kegan-4 way. It asks that of its members. I don’t expect it to create a demand for most Dragons to operate in a Kegan-5 way, which is the core different between it and the project I’m a part of.
Not officially at this stage; we’re in a process of overhauling a lot of things, including answers to questions like “who are we?” and “what are we calling ourselves?”
That said, this category of posts on my blog has a lot of content about our philosophy, models, culture, etc.
I want to publicly express my strong support for this experiment/meta-experiment.
I think that my support is particularly noteworthy as I’m presently a core member of a different taking-each-other-seriously co-living experiment that is profoundly different in its philosophy. (Mine is not in Berkeley, nor rationalist.) Therefore some people might assume that I would be opposed to Dragon Army Barracks.
Things in common between the experiment I’m part of and Dragon Army Barracks:
is “high-commitment, high-standards, high-investment”
is trying to actually make & achieve something together
is addressing unanchored abandoned loneliness thing
has consciously explicated commitments and assumptions
is intended to produce a high-level of consistent excellence and ability to effectively collaborate
Things that are different:
We’re very far from authoritarian or hierarchical. Although we’re also not egalitarian, consensus-based, or even democratic per se… but we have essentially zero of telling-other-people-what-to-do
Our basic collective navigating framework is [Kegan-5 / fluid mode / post-rational], rather than [Kegan-4 / systematic mode / rational] (good summary of this distinction)
Our focus is almost entirely on the meta-level of building the new cultural platform we’re building. We don’t have any expectations of each other on the levels of specific object-level projects or explicit behavioral norms (aside from ones necessary for the house’s function)
I think that these differences are core to why I am part of this project that I’m part of, and why I consider it to be the most valuable investment I could be making with my time and energy. I am, therefore, non-Berkeley-residence aside, not going to be applying to DA. As I said above though, I strongly support Dragon Army Barracks as an experiment and potentially as an ongoing resource to individual and collective growth.
Reasons why I think that DA is a good idea:
Expected value of high amounts of worthwhile object-level output. As Sebastian Marshall says, “the gains made from living more purposefully are forever—the time you’ve spent well will remains well-spent even if you fall off for a while sometimes. Most people don’t even try, which is why most people don’t succeed.”
I expect it will also produce a lot of developmental progress for people involved; that if you were to be able to sort rationalists by amount of growth in a year, the Dragons would all be in the top quartile, and would occupy many of the top 10 slots. This, even if the experiment were to end after 6 months.
The DA Barracks is an intervention that is attempting to produce change on a very fundamental level of the system that is a group house. This is a powerful leverage point (see Donella Meadow’s article… I would say this is around a 2 or 3, and most group houses have only done mild experiments at the 4-6 level.)
I agree with and/or resonate with the six points that Duncan makes in Section 2 of this document.
The project-level value of learning here is also very high: this will greatly inform future experiments, whatever their leadership basis.
If I had kids, I would absolutely sign them up for any summer camps or classes Duncan was running. I think the amount of power he would have in relation to them would be similar to the amount of power he’ll have in this situation.
A final reason is this: I think that we as humanity need to rapidly make progress on being able to effectively coordinate in non-hierarchical ways, which is what the project I’m part of is about. Corollarily, humanity is kind of mediocre at doing this in many contexts. Therefore if non-hierarchical projects aren’t emphatically directed towards solving that challenge itself, I expect them to be outperformed by projects that are leveraging existing understanding about how to coordinate effectively in hierarchical ways. i.e. in this case, Dragon Army Barracks.
I really, really wish Kegan levels didn’t come in an order, so a claim to be at a higher Kegan level than someone else didn’t look so starkly like a claim to superiority. It’s turning me off even trying to take them seriously, because everyone who uses them looks like they’re just self-aggrandizing to me.
I’m totally with you in wishing that Kegan levels weren’t getting socially entangled with claims to superiority!
...but that can’t be achieved in the way you describe: they would be a fundamentally different thing if they didn’t come in the order they do. It’s not a personality typing system, it’s a model of human development over time. Probably some people who are talking about them are self-aggrandizing; people are known to do that with just about everything they can get their hands on.
I suspect that your heuristics about not trusting people who brag about their Kegan levels are probably decently good heuristics, as it could be reasonably expected that that would be ineffective in just the way you’re describing here.
I first learned about the CDT model from a conversation I had with someone who used to work with Kegan, and who readily noted that he was not himself consistently operating out of stage 5. Robert Kegan has said that about himself too, which I found surprising and originally interpreted as being a failure mode in the opposite direction—false humility or something. But now it strikes me as not that unlikely. There’s a big difference between being able to recognize abstractly (or in others) what it means to be subject to one’s own interpretations & ideologies, and being able to actually not do it.
There’s an unfortunate phenomenon here, where the value of the concept gets diluted because the people who are finding the Kegan models helpful but aren’t claiming to be at higher Kegan levels than others… are harder to notice.
Anyway, I realize that I may sound like I’m making a superiority claim here myself. I will address that directly, kind of like Duncan is doing re: skulls above.
My understanding—based more on reading things like this than Kegan’s own work—is that the “fluid mode” (~=K-5) does have capabilities that the “systematic mode” (~=K-4) does not; much like multivariate calculus can be used to re-derive the equation for the volume of a sphere, but not the reverse. Is multivariate calculus superior to sphere equations? In functional senses yes, but not in a social status way. And also not in all domains! It’s certainly slower if you just need to calculate the volumes of a bunch of spheres.
I’ve spent a considerable amount of time over the past year working to develop the ability to operate in the fluid mode, and I think that that makes a lot of sense for me and many other people, but I don’t think that that’s highest priority for everyone right now. Hence my strong support for Dragon Army.
I like the paragraph “my understanding” a lot. In particular, while I think I have some limited, flickering access to K5, I notice that operations which come out of being solidly K4 often cause me to outstrip/outperform people who are entirely in K5, which seems to me to be something analogous to “I’m successfully calculating the volumes of a bunch of spheres and you’re just stuck there mired in re-derivation.”
i.e. relative strengths in different domains.
I’m not sure what it means to be entirely K5. To me the phrase sounds like Chapman’s description of the postmodernists who are at K3 and tried to skip K4 entirely and are without any real access to the ability to use a system.
Fair. “People who overwhelmingly operate from a thing where I’m comfortable applying the label K5,” where overwhelmingly means 90+% and comfortable means 90+%.
How do you filter for people who are Kegan-5 when you are seeking to accept members?
We don’t! Each of the individual members themselves aren’t necessarily Kegan-5, but the person spearheading the project (who is in her 70s) certainly is. And so, therefore, are our models, our equivalent to a “charter”, etc.
It’s also the case that the mode of interaction that we’re training here is fluid as opposed to systematic, which shows up in the ways that we make agreements, commitments, and the general way-we-do-things-here. I was very much operating in (and committed to!) systematic mode when I first joined several years ago, and I’m still getting comfortable with this. It’s challenging but worth it, and we’re working to build a bridge to meta-rationality to make that learning process easier.
I think that Duncan’s intended context will potentially be (a) an awesome place to go from Kegan-3 to Kegan-4, and (b) an awesome place to operate in an exceedingly high-functioning Kegan-4 way. It asks that of its members. I don’t expect it to create a demand for most Dragons to operate in a Kegan-5 way, which is the core different between it and the project I’m a part of.
Is there more information available on your project publically? Or some information I can get non-publically?
Not officially at this stage; we’re in a process of overhauling a lot of things, including answers to questions like “who are we?” and “what are we calling ourselves?”
That said, this category of posts on my blog has a lot of content about our philosophy, models, culture, etc.