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]> wrote:

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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]> wrote:

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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]> On Behalf Of Victor MacGill
Sent: Thursday, September 2, 2021 6:30 AM
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: Video on Stages - Robert Ryan and Nora Bateson

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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://youtu.be/8ZNPE4spRok

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