I’ll try to outline some of my thoughts below, and maybe that is helpful in some way. To me, it seems that there is a big split between what the text says it is about, and what its intentions are, and I was hoping to get some clarity on that.
What is good?
Where do good and bad come from?
Who deserves the good?
How can you do good or be good?
To me, the relevant pieces to a worldview are, as ChristianKl puts them, “When it comes to intrinsic values, “values that people consider valuable signals” and “values that people pursue when nobody is looking” are often two different things.” Worldviews are about the inner values, what you gravitate towards, how you think and your true motivations for doing things, even when you aren’t aware of them yourself. Which is also something you talk more extensively about in your original post.
Which is fine by itself, but it is usually very hard to ‘understand’ one’s own worldview. It is intrinsically linked to so many aspects. I imagine you have a deeper grasp of the differences and frictions between the progressive worldview and those of others already, but I am wondering if you are aware of the tension in this text?
On the one hand, you talk about understanding and truth-seeking, to learn to more accurately see the world. But, on the other, you also write this:
If you don’t understand that worldview, then you’ll be unable to predict what these groups will do. You will also struggle to communicate with them in a way that they care about, or persuade them to do things differently. When people engage with others who have a different worldview, they frequently make the mistake of relying too much on the stories and assumptions of their own worldview. But this is unlikely to work well, because the person they are talking to does not share these assumptions. To be really convincing to one another, you have to be able to see things from their perspective.
Which answers an entirely different question—how you ‘should’ use this knowledge to help predict, persuade and be convincing. I wonder how these two are linked. My thought is that the answer is linked to your own worldview, which you haven’t explicitly talked about. My best guess to what this text, and original post, is about, is some fleshed out idea on how to make progressive concepts more palatable and readable to a wider audience, and some dos and don’ts with regard to how a progressive should go about ‘understanding’ other worldviews. In short, a manual for instrumental power and influence with regard to progressive goals. Which makes the title very confusing to me. Maybe the text is about something else entirely, but since there seems to be such a split between the written goal and the unwritten, I was hoping you could clear this up for me. As it stands now, the text seems to be skirting around what it truly wants in a way that makes it very confusing to read, and unless confusion is the goal, I was hoping that this feedback could improve its clarity.
Hi Caerulea-Lawrence, thanks for your comment. The reason we say: “If you don’t understand that worldview, then you’ll be unable to predict what these groups will do. You will also struggle to communicate with them in a way that they care about, or persuade them to do things differently.” is not because we are trying to convince anyone to have a particular worldview with this piece—it’s because we are trying to motivate people to see other perspectives even if they are still stuck in their own perspective. That is, there are instrumental reasons to try to see things from other people’s perspectives, even if you are convinced you’re 100% right and they are totally wrong.
I wonder what about this piece makes you think we’re trying to use it to promote a particular worldview? The intention of the piece is precisely the opposite—to promote understanding multiple world views (and learning what the different worldviews have to offer).
A major goal in this piece is to try to be fair to every worldview without advocating for any worldview in particular. This is hard to do, and it’s possible we failed in specific ways—if you have specific examples of us being unfair to a worldview, please let us know, and if you make a case we find convincing that we’ve given short shrift to that perspective we’ll change it. We’ve already done that based on past feedback on this piece (updating a few of the descriptions based on feedback from people who hold that worldview). We’re trying to describe each worldview in a way that most of the people who hold that view agree with and endorse the way we describe it.
You are welcome. Maybe this answer will help answer some of your questions.
What I am imagining, is what your text would look like if you started your post by describing your own worldview and your own intentions and motivations; your own answers to the four questions?
You write that every worldview has their own truth, so wouldn’t it make things clearer if you acknowledge and specify the link between your own worldview and why you write this post?
I do acknowledge that you have already put in a lot of work in this, and my comments are not meant to address all the facets of your post in its entirety. I am honing in on the one part that seems a bit contradictory to me, and confusing, in the hopes that it can help in improving things the way you want to.
Hello spencerg,
I’ll try to outline some of my thoughts below, and maybe that is helpful in some way. To me, it seems that there is a big split between what the text says it is about, and what its intentions are, and I was hoping to get some clarity on that.
To me, the relevant pieces to a worldview are, as ChristianKl puts them, “When it comes to intrinsic values, “values that people consider valuable signals” and “values that people pursue when nobody is looking” are often two different things.” Worldviews are about the inner values, what you gravitate towards, how you think and your true motivations for doing things, even when you aren’t aware of them yourself. Which is also something you talk more extensively about in your original post.
Which is fine by itself, but it is usually very hard to ‘understand’ one’s own worldview. It is intrinsically linked to so many aspects. I imagine you have a deeper grasp of the differences and frictions between the progressive worldview and those of others already, but I am wondering if you are aware of the tension in this text?
On the one hand, you talk about understanding and truth-seeking, to learn to more accurately see the world. But, on the other, you also write this:
Which answers an entirely different question—how you ‘should’ use this knowledge to help predict, persuade and be convincing.
I wonder how these two are linked. My thought is that the answer is linked to your own worldview, which you haven’t explicitly talked about.
My best guess to what this text, and original post, is about, is some fleshed out idea on how to make progressive concepts more palatable and readable to a wider audience, and some dos and don’ts with regard to how a progressive should go about ‘understanding’ other worldviews. In short, a manual for instrumental power and influence with regard to progressive goals.
Which makes the title very confusing to me. Maybe the text is about something else entirely, but since there seems to be such a split between the written goal and the unwritten, I was hoping you could clear this up for me. As it stands now, the text seems to be skirting around what it truly wants in a way that makes it very confusing to read, and unless confusion is the goal, I was hoping that this feedback could improve its clarity.
Kindly,
Caerulea-Lawrence
Hi Caerulea-Lawrence, thanks for your comment. The reason we say: “If you don’t understand that worldview, then you’ll be unable to predict what these groups will do. You will also struggle to communicate with them in a way that they care about, or persuade them to do things differently.” is not because we are trying to convince anyone to have a particular worldview with this piece—it’s because we are trying to motivate people to see other perspectives even if they are still stuck in their own perspective. That is, there are instrumental reasons to try to see things from other people’s perspectives, even if you are convinced you’re 100% right and they are totally wrong.
I wonder what about this piece makes you think we’re trying to use it to promote a particular worldview? The intention of the piece is precisely the opposite—to promote understanding multiple world views (and learning what the different worldviews have to offer).
A major goal in this piece is to try to be fair to every worldview without advocating for any worldview in particular. This is hard to do, and it’s possible we failed in specific ways—if you have specific examples of us being unfair to a worldview, please let us know, and if you make a case we find convincing that we’ve given short shrift to that perspective we’ll change it. We’ve already done that based on past feedback on this piece (updating a few of the descriptions based on feedback from people who hold that worldview). We’re trying to describe each worldview in a way that most of the people who hold that view agree with and endorse the way we describe it.
Hi again spencerg,
You are welcome. Maybe this answer will help answer some of your questions.
What I am imagining, is what your text would look like if you started your post by describing your own worldview and your own intentions and motivations; your own answers to the four questions?
You write that every worldview has their own truth, so wouldn’t it make things clearer if you acknowledge and specify the link between your own worldview and why you write this post?
I do acknowledge that you have already put in a lot of work in this, and my comments are not meant to address all the facets of your post in its entirety. I am honing in on the one part that seems a bit contradictory to me, and confusing, in the hopes that it can help in improving things the way you want to.
Kindly,
Caerulea-Lawrence