This essay, which you recommend “holding to a high bar of suspicion”, is basically “guilty” of contrasting “heart” and “head”, and claiming that personal experience or maturity can be differently valuable than explicit reasoning.
Gordon’s general corpus of work is about developing psychological maturity, which is pretty much Kegan’s topic as well. It’s about the squishy stuff that we call “wisdom.”
I can see some possible reasons why this topic and outlook is off-putting.
First of all, it’s squishy and hard to prove, by its nature. I don’t think that’s inherently bad—poetry and literature are also squishy insights into human nature, and I think they’re valuable.
Second of all, people like Gordon and the developmental psychologists have certain implicit presumptions about the Good Life that I’m not sure I share. They tend to favor adapting to the status quo more than changing it—in writers like Erikson and Kohlberg, there’s a lot of pro-death sentiment, and a lot of talk about cooperating with one’s dominant society. They tend to talk about empathy in ways that sometimes (though not always) conflict with my beliefs about autonomy.
At its worst, the ideal of humanely accepting the “complexity” of life leads people to commit some actual harms—Siddhartha Mukherjee, the cancer researcher and physician who wrote the Pulitzer-winning The Emperor of Maladies, is famous for his humane, compassionate, “mature” outlook, and probably would get classified as having a high “developmental stage”, and he’s a major popular promoter of the view that cancer is intrinsically incurable. In my opinion, passive acceptance that cancer cannot be cured is one of the reasons that we haven’t made more progress in cancer treatment. Medical progress is a real thing in the real world, and sounding wise by accepting death is not actually good for humankind.
But. I definitely don’t believe in jumping down the throat of everybody who sounds vaguely developmental-psych-ish or Continental-philosophy-ish and calling on the community to shun them! That’s not what people seeking truth would do.
I know the feeling of “this is scary voodoo designed to demoralize me, get it away!” I’ve learned that you have to take time on your own to face your fears, read the original sources behind the “voodoo”, and pull apart the ideas until they’re either trivially wrong (and hence not scary) or have a grain of truth (which is also not scary.)
I can see the voodoo too. I can see collectivist and mystical vibes a long way off. Let’s be gentlemen anyway.
To give an example, my first reaction to reading Heidegger is “this is voodoo!” I still think he’s a bad person with bad values. But I can clarify somewhat what I think is true in his philosophy and false in it, and I think my understanding of psychology (and potentially AI) is sounder for that struggle.
There’s stuff I can’t read without getting “triggered.” I know my limits and proceed slowly. But ultimately, if there’s something I have reason to believe has substance on topics I care about, I expect to eventually hit the books and wrestle with the ideas. I think I’ll eventually get there with developmental psychology. Which is why I think people like Gordon are good to have in my noosphere.
I disagree with very little in the above, and think that disagreement is mainly summed up with me being slightly more conservative/wary and you being slightly less so. =)
I do, however, object to the implication that I was, in any way, advocating “jumping down the throat of” or “calling on the community to shun” ideas that pattern-match to things that are bad-in-expectation. I think that people reading this thread will reasonably assume that that was your summary of me (since you were making that objection in response to my comment) and that this is an uncharitable strawman that clearly doesn’t match the actual words in my actual comment.
Perhaps that impression would not have been left if I had more strenuously objected to the specific over-the-top stuff in PDV’s post (“cancer” and so forth)? I left those out of my endorsement, but maybe that would’ve been clearer if I’d included specific lines against them.
Whoa whoa whoa.
This essay, which you recommend “holding to a high bar of suspicion”, is basically “guilty” of contrasting “heart” and “head”, and claiming that personal experience or maturity can be differently valuable than explicit reasoning.
Gordon’s general corpus of work is about developing psychological maturity, which is pretty much Kegan’s topic as well. It’s about the squishy stuff that we call “wisdom.”
I can see some possible reasons why this topic and outlook is off-putting.
First of all, it’s squishy and hard to prove, by its nature. I don’t think that’s inherently bad—poetry and literature are also squishy insights into human nature, and I think they’re valuable.
Second of all, people like Gordon and the developmental psychologists have certain implicit presumptions about the Good Life that I’m not sure I share. They tend to favor adapting to the status quo more than changing it—in writers like Erikson and Kohlberg, there’s a lot of pro-death sentiment, and a lot of talk about cooperating with one’s dominant society. They tend to talk about empathy in ways that sometimes (though not always) conflict with my beliefs about autonomy.
At its worst, the ideal of humanely accepting the “complexity” of life leads people to commit some actual harms—Siddhartha Mukherjee, the cancer researcher and physician who wrote the Pulitzer-winning The Emperor of Maladies, is famous for his humane, compassionate, “mature” outlook, and probably would get classified as having a high “developmental stage”, and he’s a major popular promoter of the view that cancer is intrinsically incurable. In my opinion, passive acceptance that cancer cannot be cured is one of the reasons that we haven’t made more progress in cancer treatment. Medical progress is a real thing in the real world, and sounding wise by accepting death is not actually good for humankind.
But. I definitely don’t believe in jumping down the throat of everybody who sounds vaguely developmental-psych-ish or Continental-philosophy-ish and calling on the community to shun them! That’s not what people seeking truth would do.
I know the feeling of “this is scary voodoo designed to demoralize me, get it away!” I’ve learned that you have to take time on your own to face your fears, read the original sources behind the “voodoo”, and pull apart the ideas until they’re either trivially wrong (and hence not scary) or have a grain of truth (which is also not scary.)
I can see the voodoo too. I can see collectivist and mystical vibes a long way off. Let’s be gentlemen anyway.
To give an example, my first reaction to reading Heidegger is “this is voodoo!” I still think he’s a bad person with bad values. But I can clarify somewhat what I think is true in his philosophy and false in it, and I think my understanding of psychology (and potentially AI) is sounder for that struggle.
There’s stuff I can’t read without getting “triggered.” I know my limits and proceed slowly. But ultimately, if there’s something I have reason to believe has substance on topics I care about, I expect to eventually hit the books and wrestle with the ideas. I think I’ll eventually get there with developmental psychology. Which is why I think people like Gordon are good to have in my noosphere.
D’awwww, thanks! :-)
I disagree with very little in the above, and think that disagreement is mainly summed up with me being slightly more conservative/wary and you being slightly less so. =)
I do, however, object to the implication that I was, in any way, advocating “jumping down the throat of” or “calling on the community to shun” ideas that pattern-match to things that are bad-in-expectation. I think that people reading this thread will reasonably assume that that was your summary of me (since you were making that objection in response to my comment) and that this is an uncharitable strawman that clearly doesn’t match the actual words in my actual comment.
Perhaps that impression would not have been left if I had more strenuously objected to the specific over-the-top stuff in PDV’s post (“cancer” and so forth)? I left those out of my endorsement, but maybe that would’ve been clearer if I’d included specific lines against them.