Hi again,

Of course there will be errors. Stage theory is like any other domain of human inquiry, there will be mistakes and they improve over time.

IQ is not equivalent to MHC. We looked at it. IQ only measures up to formal stage. All IQ does is measure how fast and efficient a person is at doing those tasks. The median of IQ 100 changes based on an overall population performance so the 50% is somewhat arbitrary. 

I’m not sure which MHC instrument and paper you are referencing about developmental norms in education. There are several. If you link what you are referencing, I could respond more.

We agree, not all tasks require high stage performance. People are different stages in different domains, but people can sometimes carry over the learned complexity from one domain to another. This can happen when people participate in instruments. MHC instruments just measure the highest stage performed for that given domain.

Some models are more accurate than others, though the overall sequences seem somewhat similar. We also think that a lot of accuracy of models has to do with whether the author of the model can explain the specific transitions for how one stage builds on the previous in fine-grained analysis. This relates to how complex the author is in the stage model construction. And stage authors can sometimes downward assimilate their models into lower stage representations themselves, which compounds the issue. One has to answer: how do you get from N to N+1. The model of hierarchical complexity and dynamic skill theory do this well. There is no black box with increase in behavioral complexity between stages/skills.

We agree, there are abuses of stage models. But we would have to take "self-bettering through complex knowledge" situations on a case by case basis. Some are great, some not so much.

Cory

> On Sep 2, 2021, at 5:57 PM, ryanrc111 <[log in to unmask]> wrote:
> 
> CAUTION: This email originated from outside of JMU. Do not click links or open attachments unless you recognize the sender and know the content is safe.
> Cory,
> 
> otherwise said, this argument may seem like old news to the complexity elite. 
> but for over 90 percent of people, they still think the world is explainable by simple stage hierarchies...
> and the worst part is that models like integral and spiral dynamics aren't actually helping with that. 
> Sure, you can read the fine print of Piaget or Graves, where the fine print says: "these stages aren't really that consistent or true, but its good enough for now".
> 
> For example, Graves began with a six level model, and he asserted people simply graduate in levels over time, as they get wise. 
>  He also claimed that if you were level 4, you would only do about half of your reasoning there, and a symmetrical 25 % would be below/above.
> As it turns out, that wasnt remotely true. He realized that many of his measures were confusing and placed people at several simultaneous levels. 
> 
> Since Graves, Gerd Gigerenzer of the Max PLank Institute did studies on cognitive reasoning. 
> He found out that over 90 percent of problems were solved at the level of simple heuristics with NO ETHICAL JUDGMENT WHATSOEVER.
> In other words, every single model of moral development or consciousness raising was wrong - over 90 percent of cognitive reasoning is pre-ethical. Furthermore, learning to use simple rules has more impact on good decisions than meditating on complexity. 
> 
> On the other hand, the Hierarchical complexity model of tasks is also misleading. They claim extremely high correlations between task complexity and the developmental norms for learners in education. However, this is grossly misinterpreted as being a "model of development", rather than a "model of human language acquisition". 
> The task levels in the HC are literal descriptions of linguistic structures in order of how much information complexity a block of information possesses. Certainly the human mind becomes increasingly capable of managing complexity of language it has acquired. What these models really are measuring is the specificity of knowledge.... for example, you need to be able to parse complex paragraphs to understand particle physics. Basically, this correlates directly to the old model of IQ as being a proxy for "bitrate" - i.e., how many chunks of information your mind can process at once. 
> 
> However, "normal development" is personal not standard, because "Development" has to do with whether the individual has the skills they need to thrive. You dont need complex skills to thrive, unless the task you are attempting requires complex information. It's that simple: its not a model of development so much as a model of how much a learner specializes in complex tasks. Otherwise our universal life goals would be to "alter paradigms". Every human on the planet would be "better" if we could all work on meta-analytical problems.
> 
> Half the population has an IQ below 100, and thus "development" stops where half the population decide to focus on being really good at simpler tasks rather than all quest to be the egghead who takes on particle physics. It has a subtle eugenic insinuation that most people are "underdeveloped" and that advanced education for all solves every problem. Actually, most college students DO NOT PROGRESS MUCH AT ALL in their abilities to manage complex information, and never do for the rest of their lives...and yet they do keep getting wiser.  
> 
> thus, there are widespread abuses of such theories as if they were some sort of map of wisdom. They arent. They are map of raw bitrate, at best, and at worst, a map of how many hours you have been exposed to human language, and how many times you spotted broader patterns that can be chunked into fatter bits. Doesnt make you any wiser.
>  
> It has absolutely nothing to do with making "good judgments". You could be able to manage very high levels of complexity and be an absolute idiot in managing your life or a sociopath. 
> 
> However, most pop psychology tries to infer some sort of "self bettering through complex knowledge". 
> 
> thanks!
> 
> Robert
> 
>  
> 
> On Thu, Sep 2, 2021 at 6:30 PM Cory David Barker <[log in to unmask] <mailto:[log in to unmask]>> wrote:
> CAUTION: This email originated from outside of JMU. Do not click links or open attachments unless you recognize the sender and know the content is safe.
> As I said, the argument she makes is accurate to some degree in some cases, but not accurate in all degrees in all cases.
> 
> Cory
> 
>> On Sep 2, 2021, at 5:24 PM, ryanrc111 <[log in to unmask] <mailto:[log in to unmask]>> wrote:
>> 
>> CAUTION: This email originated from outside of JMU. Do not click links or open attachments unless you recognize the sender and know the content is safe.
>> Cory,
>> 
>> She is a complexity scholar and scientist, affiliated with the Santa Fe Institute. 
>> She is a member of the Club of Rome, who argued to them two weeks ago that they were not using complexity enough in their math.  
>> She is no fool. 
>> 
>> There is the constant misunderstanding of the argument she is making, as if she doesnt understand complexity. 
>> Nora Bateson's father, Gregory Bateson, was the GODFATHER OF COMPLEXITY SCIENCE AND CYBERNETIC THEORY!!!!
>> She's part of the inner circle. 
>> 
>> Her argument is against historical stage theories that ARENT complex. 
>> And in the video, she exactly says so, and I exactly back her up by dismissing gaussian assumptions made by mainstream psychology in the 20th century. 
>> We were emphatically clear that "normal mathematics" is the key to the problem, and that only about 2 mainsteam models exist in psychology that are both stagey and also complex....and neither of them count as "theories of development" but are really measures of the complexity of tasks. 
>> 
>> So i admire your push toward complex cognition, but you're making the same mistake as everyone else: not listening to the core argument and the context of it....
>> 
>> She is making NO ERROR OF REASONING. What is happening is that everyone else is trying to mistranslate her warnings, misunderstand who is being addressed, and misdiagnose the difference between an explanatory theory of development and scale/measure, and misundersand exactly how prevalent nonc-omplex stage theory still is...it dominates textbooks and it dominates legal practice of psychology, despite complexity being on the horizon. 
>> 
>> so calling an accurate historical analysis a "Straw man" is a misunderstanding of the conversation....
>> 
>> 
>> Robert
>> 
>> 
>> 
>> 
>> 
>> On Thu, Sep 2, 2021 at 6:11 PM Cory David Barker <[log in to unmask] <mailto:[log in to unmask]>> wrote:
>> CAUTION: This email originated from outside of JMU. Do not click links or open attachments unless you recognize the sender and know the content is safe.
>> This is an old argument that has came up many times before. As someone who has a stage theory that has already integrates these types of concerns such that my stage theory is both hierarchical and heterarchical, here is my interpretation:
>> 
>> The fallacies
>> 
>> Her fallacies are association and stereotype fallacies. She confuses hierarchy of power (colonialism) as being synonymous and inseparable with hierarchy of complexity (development sequences).
>> 
>> Counter examples
>> 
>> One counter example is that if there was no hierarchical complexity of behavior, then babies would be inventing complex scientific innovations right out of the womb. If there was no developmental sequence going on between sensorimotor learning to move the body to coordinating principles for a paradigm, then we would expect children to be super geniuses because there would be no stacking of behavioral complexity between A and B.
>> 
>> A second counter example, is that no one wants a doctor operating on them who hasn’t been thoroughly measured for their knowledge and skill to do surgery. If we didn’t have measurements for knowledge and skill based on performance and merit, then inaccurate knowledge and incompetence of skill would make science and its application not just unreliable but also dangerous.
>> 
>> A third counter example, is that the internet being created in the post-colonial west does not implicate the internet as necessarily having colonial values. If we over-generalize that things that come out of colonial eras is also defaultly colonial, then this also must necessarily include everything else including her own argument, otherwise it is cherry picking.
>> 
>> And fourth, the very act of her trying to say that there is a better way of making sense of behavior than developmental psychology, is in itself constructing a hierarchy, thereby doing the very thing she seeks to undo. If at any time you place one way of sense-making over another as better or worse, then you create a hierarchy where one must graduate from one way of sense-making to another. The only alternative is to view things to exist side by side simultaneously, which is actually what is already going on insofar as we all have the freedom to think and act with any models we want.
>> 
>> When you follow her reasoning to its conclusions, it doesn’t make any sense.
>> 
>> Contextualizing her argument
>> 
>> Notice how her arguments are mostly just generalizations without discussion of the actual scientific foundations of the models. For example, she glances over Piaget, but doesn’t say anything about Piaget’s methodology for how he was mapping and describing stages of child development in logic notation that follows a sequence in any detail at all. 
>> 
>> Her argument attempts to implicates through over-generalization everyone who creates or uses the stage models as being colonial-like who are trying to exert dominance over others. But in doing so, she exerts colonial-like power over others herself, stripping away the explanatory power (which is different from colonial power) that stage theory has.
>> 
>> All stage theories are, are observations of behavioral emergences, mappings of the sequential trajectories of them, and explanations. People can use stage theories at different stages, and when people describe a stage theory with lower complexity than the model itself was designed, the model gets downward assimilated into less complex thought-forms which do not accurately reflect the higher complexity the model was designed with. This is what is happening here. The context she creates around meaning making about them, demands adherence to her abstract system of sense-making with the implication, and that to disagree with her implicates that you yourself are the over-generalization about stage theories she makes.
>> 
>> The argument she makes is accurate to some degree in some cases, but not accurate in all degrees in all cases.
>> 
>> Cory
>> 
>>> On Sep 2, 2021, at 6:48 AM, Henriques, Gregg - henriqgx <[log in to unmask] <mailto:[log in to unmask]>> wrote:
>>> 
>>> <<<Reminder/Announcement for those new to list…Please place “TOK” in the subject line, as it helps people track list emails>>>
>>>  
>>> Hi Victor,
>>>  
>>>   Thanks for this.
>>>  
>>>   I agree with the basic sentiment. That is, stage theories are dangerous when arranged in a hierarchy that lays out a simple “growth to goodness” formula and suggests that some people are better or more highly developed than others. It is a recipe for trouble and results in much bathwater.
>>>  
>>>   At the same time, the stage theories of Piaget, Michael Commons, and even Wilber, clearly have value, at least IMO. Thus, there is a baby in there. In UTOK, I tend to emphasize the broad human psychological developmental view of: child, adult, sage. The first is “pre-conventional” and engages in concrete justifications. The second is a conventional socialized agent who has the full capacities of a person. The third is post-conventional and enters into a trans-egoic state of justification. Note, if one starts to compete amongst the sages to see who the higher sage, we have regressed into conventional egoic justification.
>>>  
>>>   At the societal level, I use the meta-justificatory values of dignity and well-being with integrity to evaluate where societies are ethically. That is, to the extent that a society cultivates dignity and well-being with integrity is better than societies that do not. The modern Nordic societies are better than Hitler’s Nazism. That is hardly a profound insight. But the point is that there is a universal moral-ethical backbone that can be used to evaluate societies.  
>>>  
>>> Finally, I like Lene Rachel Andersen’s take on metamodernity. Properly interpreted, it lays out four cultural sensibilities in terms of oral indigenous, traditional, modern, and postmodern and highlights emphases and values in all four and orients toward a metamodern sensibility embraces the best of these. A similar view is expressed by Steve McIntosh in his Developmental Politics.
>>>  
>>> Best,
>>> Gregg   
>>>  
>>> From: tree of knowledge system discussion <[log in to unmask] <mailto:[log in to unmask]>> On Behalf Of Victor MacGill
>>> Sent: Thursday, September 2, 2021 6:30 AM
>>> To: [log in to unmask] <mailto:[log in to unmask]>
>>> Subject: Video on Stages - Robert Ryan and Nora Bateson
>>>  
>>> CAUTION: This email originated from outside of JMU. Do not click links or open attachments unless you recognize the sender and know the content is safe.
>>> Here is a discussion between Robert Ryaan nad Nora Bateson. There are some real issues that need to be grappled with and put into context, but it odes feel like the baby has gone out with the bathwater.
>>>  
>>> https://urldefense.proofpoint.com/v2/url?u=https-3A__youtu.be_8ZNPE4spRok&d=DwIFaQ&c=eLbWYnpnzycBCgmb7vCI4uqNEB9RSjOdn_5nBEmmeq0&r=HPo1IXYDhKClogP-UOpybo6Cfxxz-jIYBgjO2gOz4-A&m=APJSH2Gi2Z-5Rr2L76soW8Cu91Qg3QtGbAtwUB1Ykhg&s=3WaRS5aiNmWn5QjASse6XtbqjOggp06TuPJ-yDLFsgc&e=  <https://urldefense.proofpoint.com/v2/url?u=https-3A__youtu.be_8ZNPE4spRok&d=DwMCaQ&c=eLbWYnpnzycBCgmb7vCI4uqNEB9RSjOdn_5nBEmmeq0&r=HPo1IXYDhKClogP-UOpybo6Cfxxz-jIYBgjO2gOz4-A&m=fQILl_hOmU-m86RsdT8i8ZoWYQWsrmP9Ed7rYLP7fs8&s=OTfEjs0tM93zXSyUlZZP5MM4W8guNGRokzT9F6L7-kM&e=>
>>>  
>>>  
>>>  
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