libertarian, a socialist, an environmentalist, and a pro-development YIMBY
ah, I see you met any one of my friends. I'm disappointed in how little this piece steps outside its own snowglobe - the snowglobes it mentions are all impoverished versions visible from a conservative perspective, none of the high quality versions come up. what about the libertarian socialists? what about the pro-choice libertarians? what about the actual leftists? of course liberals support capitalism; the snowglobe for liberalism has become somewhat distorted but maintains most of the shape defined in the writings on classical liberalism. how do you not notice the pro market anti capitalists, the pro government control conservatives, the authoritarians ...
I'm surprised you see this as coming from a conservative perspective, because neither Amber nor I are conservatives. You're right that there are lots of other views that are not addressed in this piece. We focused on a small list of some of the most popular views, and of course, any one individual will have some differences in opinion with the world view that best represents them, as we mentioned in the piece.
How did you come up with your lists that describe world-views? To me, they look like an exercise of writing down stereotypes about a world-view and not one of deep understanding. I think you would end up with a more useful list if you would write the list as a result of having a huge questionaire instead of writing down stereotypes.
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.
If you take for example what you wrote about Social Justice Advocates, you might ask yourself: "Why don't they oppose Washington requiring a bachelor's degree for childcare?" If you use a bit of critical race theory, it's not hard to see that in the eyes of critical race theory that policy is about preventing Black people without college degrees to engage in childcare. It's textbook structural racism, where when you can't prevent Black people from doing the childcare directly, you can use a proxy.
If you instead see the position of Social Justice Advocates as "My Black classmates shouldn't be discriminated against and deserve the same outcomes as my White classmates" it's easier to predict actions. It also makes it less mystical that San Fransico with its liberal thought doesn't build enough housing to house all the homeless.
Loyalty seems to be a pretty big value in the Social Justice Advocate worldview.
When talking about policy in Wikimedia there was the question "Should a language version of Wikipedia in an African language be run according to the values of the speaker of those languages or should the global community override the values of that local language community when it doesn't like them."
If you think about all the talk about the evils of colonialism you might think, that the Social Justice Advocate position would be that the speaker of the African language should be able to run their Wikipedia according to their values. But that's not their position because loyalty is a bigger value and they care that those Wikipedias are loyal.
Contrapoints which you list as one of the primes Social Justice Advocates being canceled for associating with a transperson who self-identifies in a way that the trans-community dislikes is another good example of how central the value of loyalty is to the worldview.
Many hundreds of people read this piece, and whenever we received feedback from people who identified with one of the worldviews, if they believed their views were being misrepresented, we made adjustments in line with their feedback when we felt that the case they made was convincing (but like we acknowledged in the piece, we're not going to be covering everyone's perspective here). Your characterization of what the world looks like from the point of view of a Social Justice Advocate seems like something that a Social Justice Advocate would genuinely disagree with.
That process gives you what people believe they should believe and not what they actually believe. The sequences have a lot about the problems of belief in belief.
If faith, piety, humility, and self-sacrifice were the driving values for American Christian Conservatives you wouldn't see them driving big pickup trucks. Being gun-owning wouldn't be central either, if those would be the values that people actually used to make decisions.
If you believe that those are the actual values, then you would predict that American Christian Conservatives have a problem with Trump, but they don't.
If you doubt the importance of loyalty, you can ask Social Justice Advocate "How important do you think it is for white men to be allies?" Allyship is about loyalty and the answer you will get is that it's very important.
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.
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.
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
This is a linkpost from ClearerThinking.org. We've included some excerpts of the article below, but you can see the full post here.
A libertarian, a socialist, an environmentalist, and a pro-development YIMBY watch an apartment complex being built. The libertarian is pleased - "the hand of the market at work!" - whereas the socialist worries that the building is a harbinger of gentrification; the YIMBY sees progress, but the environmentalist is concerned about the building’s carbon footprint. They’re all seeing the same thing, but they understand it differently, because they inhabit different worldviews.
We can think of worldviews as snow globes. We each occupy our own snow globe and, when we’re inside it, it can seem like the whole world. If it’s snowing in our snow globe, we think it’s snowing everywhere; if our snow globe is made of green glass, everything looks green to us. We might not even realize that there’s anything beyond our snow globe! But if we can step outside, we see that our view from inside was only part of a much larger picture. If you can step outside your snow globe - and visit other people’s - you’ll be able to see a more accurate representation of the world and communicate better with others. For every snow globe you master, you’ll gain a powerful new lens through which to see the world - and you’ll see that no single snow globe has all the answers.
Image generated using the AI DALL•E 2
What makes a worldview?
Worldviews are a type of story we learn about how the world works and about what things matter and why. In this post, we put forward a theory of worldviews that will help you understand how different worldviews work. We call this "Snow Globe Theory." Every worldview includes many beliefs, but after reflecting on a wide variety of worldviews, we believe that almost every one has four central components. There are other common elements that some worldviews have but others don’t - for example, a strong culture, or a theory about trustworthy sources of knowledge – but this article will focus on these four central elements:
What is good?
Where do good and bad come from?
Who deserves the good?
How can you do good or be good?
You can understand a worldview quite well if you know what thoughtful people with that worldview would all answer in response to these four questions. While each individual member of a group will have somewhat different answers to the questions above, it is the portions of their answers that most members of that group share with each other that compose the group's worldview. Our article explains these four components in more detail, along with other factors that can contribute to worldviews.
Why it's important to understand how people think through the theory of worldviews
The truth lies outside any one worldview
Most of us are taught a worldview growing up, or we pick up one in college or from media that we consume. It can be tempting to stay in that snow globe forever. However, being stuck in just one worldview limits our ability to see the world as it truly is. Worldviews tend to be simplistic, which has some advantages - it’s easier to understand the world and relate to other people if you share simple stories about good and bad, right and wrong. But because worldviews are simple, and the world is complex, any one worldview necessarily misses a lot of nuance. Just about every worldview has some truths that it is good at seeing accurately, and some truths that it is systematically blind to. But you don't have to be stuck in just one worldview. The more worldviews you understand, the more accurately you'll see the world.
Occupying many snow globes lets you better understand the world and communicate more effectively
You might think, "Ok, but I know that my worldview is correct - otherwise, it wouldn’t be my worldview! Why should I waste my time understanding people whose beliefs are flawed or toxic?" For instance, if you’re strongly committed to one of the progressive worldviews, you might not see the value in understanding the point of view of one of the conservative worldviews, and vice versa. However, it’s useful to know how other people think even if you believe that their worldview is deeply wrong. Governments, corporations, non-profits, religions, political parties, and other powerful groups are often guided by a particular worldview. 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. To give a topical example: in abortion debates, pro-choice progressives often misunderstand the worldview of pro-life conservatives. We’re publishing this article only a few days after Roe v Wade was overturned; since then, abortion has been banned or restricted in several U.S. states.
We originally drafted this section before the overturning, and know that some of our readers will be feeling immense grief or distress at this ruling, and that abortion is an exceptionally fraught and emotionally-charged issue at the best of times. No matter how much you believe that the overturning of Roe v. Wade was harmful and wrong, and even if your only goal is to win a political victory, we believe it’s still going to be useful to understand what pro-lifers really think: that way, you’ll be better placed to predict what they’ll do, or persuade them of your own point of view.
When talking about abortion, progressives sometimes say things like this tweet by @leilacohan which has been retweeted more than one hundred thousand times:
"If it was about babies, we’d have excellent and free universal maternal care. You wouldn’t be charged a cent to give birth, no matter how complicated your delivery was. If it was about babies, we’d have months and months of parental leave, for everyone.
If it was about babies, we’d have free lactation consultants, free diapers, free formula. If it was about babies, we’d have free and excellent childcare from newborns on. If it was about babies, we’d have universal preschool and pre-k and guaranteed after school placements."
From a progressive worldview, this tweet is powerful and persuasive; but it’s unlikely to be persuasive to U.S.-based Christian conservative pro-lifers - the group that it’s apparently discussing - because it misunderstands their worldview. The argument is that if conservatives cared about babies, they would support babies and children through funding and social programs. The subtext is that since conservatives don’t support those things, they are being dishonest about what they care about, and just pretending that they care about not letting fetuses die. But the idea that we should try to make good things happen through government intervention is itself a progressive belief. Conservatives tend to think that individual responsibility is more important, and to be skeptical that large government-run social programs produce good outcomes. While modern Christians have a variety of views on abortion (depending on factors such as their denomination), and the Bible doesn't address the topic directly, within the first few hundred years of Christianity there were Christian scholars arguing that life begins at conception (rather than birth). In the U.S., many Christian conservatives who oppose abortion believe that fetuses should have the same rights as born babies: we polled 49 people in the US who say that they’re "very happy" that Roe v Wade has been overturned. Of these, 90% said that they think abortion is wrong because it’s murder (i.e., similar to killing an adult human).
From within a U.S. Christian conservative worldview, there is no tension between (1) thinking that abortion is murder and (2) not supporting free diapers and childcare. If you momentarily step inside the snowglobe of this worldview, it becomes clear that you can oppose what you see as murder without believing that the government should fund large programs aimed at improving people’s quality of life. Another common misunderstanding (from the other side of the political spectrum) is that conservatives sometimes label anyone left-of-center as a "socialist," and believe that liberals oppose capitalism (see the chart below which demonstrates the misunderstanding). But this is a misunderstanding of the average liberal’s worldview: in the U.S., most self-identified liberals (for example, Democrat voters) aren’t "socialists" in the sense of "people who want to abolish capitalism and private ownership." Most support capitalism, but they differ from conservatives in that they support an expanded social safety net and favor moderate wealth redistribution through progressive tax policies.
Image Source
This is just an excerpt from our article on ClearerThinking.org. You can use this link if you'd like to read the entire piece.