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This is an experiment in short-form content on LW2.0. I'll be using the comment section of this post as a repository of short, sometimes-half-baked posts that either:
don't feel ready to be written up as a full post
I think the process of writing them up might make them worse (i.e. longer than they need to be)
I ask people not to create top-level comments here, but feel free to reply to comments like you would a FB post.
How (or under what circumstances), can people talk openly about their respective development stages?
Talking about one's own is easy. Talking about someone else's is, as you note, fraught. I'd like to focus on the "how can such conversations be effective" and "what do we want from such conversations" part of the issue.
I think a lot of harm is done by framing it as a linear set of stages, rather than a mesh of abstractions, and recognizing that object-level results are ALWAYS relevant, and the stages are mostly ways to take more factors into account for the models and beliefs that lead to results.
When it's a stage-based system, it implies such an overt status signal that it's hard to actually discuss anything else. People of higher levels can't learn anything from those lower, and lower levels just have to accept whatever the higher-level says. This is not useful for anything.
Basically, the social move of "you seem like you're at a lower development level than me" is often legitimately read as a status attack, and worse, a plausibly-deniable status attack*.
Go further. Phrased this way, it _IS_ a status attack. There's no possible useful further discussion. This is not plausibly-deniable, it's just plain asserting "I'm thinking deeper, so I'm right".
If you phrase it not about the participants, but about the discussion, "consider this higher-level abstraction - does it not seem relevant to the point at hand?", then you've got a hook to talk about it. You don't need to bring up cognitive stages or categorize the participants, you only need to make clear what levels THIS discussion is about.
There _MAY_ be a place for talking directly about what levels someone can operate at, for elitists discussing or reinforcing a membership filter. "Don't hire a CEO who can't handle level-5 thinking" is good advice. And in such cases, it's STILL entangled with status games, as the strong implication is that if you're not on that level, you're not part of the group.
This is an experiment in short-form content on LW2.0. I'll be using the comment section of this post as a repository of short, sometimes-half-baked posts that either:
I ask people not to create top-level comments here, but feel free to reply to comments like you would a FB post.