Most importantly, going meta often a mistake when trying to solve real-world problems. Going meta again is almost always a mistake.
I think your concept of “the real world” is insufficiently broad. I think there is a moral imperative to figure out morality, and I think figuring out morality requires going ridiculously meta—including asking deep questions like “what policies justify having policies?”. I think intelligent reflective people should spend as many hours as they can thinking about questions like these.
Perhaps now everyone can consider the “how meta should we go in our daily lives?” debate over—both sides have aired their opinions, and there’s not much else to do beyond that.
I agree that everyone ought to deeply think about deep questions at least long enough to come up with answers or have a satisfactory explanation of why no answers are there. But you only need to go through this process once. After you have the answers to these questions, there’s no call to continue thinking at this level unless you come to believe that the answers you found are wrong.
In short, there’s no reason to go seeking new deep answers unless you have reason to think your deep answers don’t work for you as well as they could. As I implied in my sanity line point, developing a sense of when that is happening is a valuable skill that most people simply don’t have. But meta-level thinking doesn’t develop that skill.
I think your concept of “the real world” is insufficiently broad. I think there is a moral imperative to figure out morality, and I think figuring out morality requires going ridiculously meta—including asking deep questions like “what policies justify having policies?”. I think intelligent reflective people should spend as many hours as they can thinking about questions like these.
Perhaps now everyone can consider the “how meta should we go in our daily lives?” debate over—both sides have aired their opinions, and there’s not much else to do beyond that.
I agree that everyone ought to deeply think about deep questions at least long enough to come up with answers or have a satisfactory explanation of why no answers are there. But you only need to go through this process once. After you have the answers to these questions, there’s no call to continue thinking at this level unless you come to believe that the answers you found are wrong.
In short, there’s no reason to go seeking new deep answers unless you have reason to think your deep answers don’t work for you as well as they could. As I implied in my sanity line point, developing a sense of when that is happening is a valuable skill that most people simply don’t have. But meta-level thinking doesn’t develop that skill.