Original post: http://bearlamp.com.au/giving-people-personhood-and-taking-it-away

This post is about the Kegan levels of self development.  If you don't know what that is, this post might still be interesting to you but you might be missing some key structure to understand where it fits among that schema.  More information can be found here (https://meaningness.wordpress.com/2015/10/12/developing-ethical-social-and-cognitive-competence/)

I am not ready to definitely accept the Kegan levels as a useful model because often it makes retrospective predictions.  Rather than predictions of the future.  A model is only as useful as what it can predict, so if it can't be used on the fly when you want to explain the universe you might as well throw it out.  Having said that, this idea is interesting.

When I was little, people fell into different categories.  There was my parents - the olderClass humans (going to refer to them as Senior-humans), my siblings - which, as I grew up turned into my age-group humans and through school - my peergroup humans.

People like doctors fell into SeniorClass, Dentists, Vets, Plumbers, PIC (People In Charge) - all fell into the SeniorClass of humans.  A big one was teachers - they were all PIC.  A common trope among children is that the teachers sleep at school.  Or to use a gaming term - we feel as though they are the NPC's of that part of our journey in life.

As far as I can tell (from trying to pinpoint this today); the people I meet on my own terms become peergroup humans.  Effectively friends.  People I meet not on my terms; as well as strangers - first join some kind of seniorclass of humans, if I get to know them enough they transition to my peergroup.  Of course this is a bit strange because on the one hand I imagine I want to be friends with the PIC, or the senior-class humans because of the opportunity to get ahead in life.  the good ol' I know a guy who know's a guy.  Which is really not what a peergroup constitutes.

Peergroup humans are not "A guy with skills" much as we might hope for; they are (hopefully) all at our own, or near our own skill level.  (on Kegan's stage 3) people who's opinions and ideas we care about because they are similar to us.

Recently I have noticed events that have taken some of my long term SeniorClass and shift them into my peergroup.  Effectively "demoting" them from "Professional" to "human".  When I think "person has their shit together" or "person doesn't have their shit together".  I guess there were always people who seemed to have their shit together.  Now that I am an adult it's clear that less and less people are competent and more and more people are winging it through their lives.  It's mildly uncomfortable to think of people as being less "together" than I thought they were.

The other place where it's been an uncomfortable transition is in my memory.  I will from time to time think back to a time when I deferred judgement, decision making capacity, or high-level trust in someone else having my own best interests at heart - where now looking back retrospectively they were just as lost and confused as I was in some of those situations, but they had a little kid to take care of/be in charge of/be in seniority to.

What I wonder about this process of demoting people is - what if instead of demoting my adults as they prove their humanity; I instead promote all the humans to Senior-Class.  What would that do to my model of humans?  And I guess I don't really know where I stand.  Am I an adult?  Am I a peer?  I have always been an observer...

I'm not really getting at anything with this post.  Just interesting to observe this reclassification happening and fit kegan's stages around it.  Obviously some of the way that I sorted Senior-class humans is particularly relevant to a stage 3 experience of how I managed my relationships when I was smaller.  I also wonder that given the typical mind - whether this is normal or unusual.  

Question for today:

• Do you divide people into "advanced" and "equal" and "simpler" - (or did you do it when you were younger?)
• Do people ever change category on you?  In which direction?  What do you do about that?
• Assuming I am on some kind of path of gradually increasing understanding and growing and changing models of the world around me - what is next?

Meta: this took 3 hours to write over a few days.

This relates to my recent post on existence in many-worlds. 

I care about possible people. My child, if I ever have one, is one of them, and it seems monstrous not to care about one's children. There are many distinct ways of being a possible person. 1)You can be causally connected to some actual people in the actual world in some histories of that world. 2)You can be a counterpart of an actual person on a distinct world without causal connections 3)You can be distinct from all actual individuals, and in a causally separate possible world. 4)You can be acausally connectable to actual people, but in distinct possible worlds.

Those 4 ways are not separate partitions without overlap, sometimes they overlap, and I don't believe they exhaust the scope of possible people. The most natural question to ask is "should we care equally about about all kinds of possible people". Some people are seriously studying this, and let us hope they give us accurate ways to navigate our complex universe. While we wait, some worries seem relevant: 

1) The Multiverse is Sadistic Argument:

P1.1: If all possible people do their morally relevant thing (call it exist, if you will) and

P1.2: We cannot affect (causally or acausally) what is or not possible

C1.0: Then we cannot affect the morally relevant thing. 

2) The Multiverse is Paralyzing  (related)

P2.1: We have reason to care about X-Risk

P2.2: Worlds where X-Risk obtains are possible

P2.3: We have nearly as much reason to worry about possible non-actual¹ worlds where X-risk obtains, as we have to actual worlds where it obtains. 

P2.4: There are infinitely more worlds where X-risk obtains that are possible than there are actual¹

C2.0: Infinitarian Paralysis 

¹Actual here means belonging to the same quantum branching history as you. If you think you have many quantum successors, all of them are actual, same for predecessors, and people who inhabit your Hubble volume. 

3) Reality-Fluid Can't Be All That Is Left Argument

P3.1) If all possible people do their morally relevant thing

P3.2) The way in which we can affect what is possible is by giving some subsets of it more units of reality-fluid, or quantum measure

P3.3) In fact reality-fluid is a ratio, such as a percentage of successor worlds of kind A or kind B for a particular world W

P3.4) A possible World₃ with 5% reality-fluid in relation to World₁ is causally indistinguishable from itself with 5 times more reality-fluid 25% in relation to World_2. 

P3.5) The morally relevant thing, though by constitution qualitative, seems to be quantifiable, and what matters is it's absolute quantity, not any kind of ratio. 

C3.1: From 3.2 and 3.3 -> We can actually affect only a quantity that is relative to our world, not an absolute quantity. 

C3.2: From C3.1 and P 3.5 ->  We can't affect the relevant thing. 

C3.3: We ended up having to talk about reality fluid because decisions matter, and reality fluid is the thing that decision changes (from P3.4 we know it isn't causal structure). But if all that decision changes is some ratio between worlds, and what matters by P3.5 is not a ratio between worlds, we have absolutely no clue of what we are talking about when we talk about "the thing that matters" "what we should care about" and "reality fluid".

These arguments are here not as a perfectly logical and acceptable argument structure, but to at least induce nausea about talking about Reality-Fluid, Measure, Morally relevant things in many-worlds, Morally relevant people causally disconnected to us. Those are not things you can Taboo the word away and keep the substance around. The problem does not lie in the word 'Existence', or in the sentence 'X is morally relevant'. It seems to me that the service that that existence or reality used to play doesn't make sense anymore (if all possible worlds exist or if Mathematical Universe Hypothesis is correct). We attempted to keep it around as a criterial determinant for What Matters. Yet now all that is left is this weird ratio that just can't be what matters. Without a criterial determinant for mattering, we are left in a position that makes me think we should head back towards a causal approach to morality. But this is an opinion, not a conclusion. 

Edit: This post is an argument against the conjunctive truth of two things, Many Worlds, and the way in which we think of What Matters.  It seems that the most natural interpretation of it is that Many Worlds is true, and thus my argument is against our notion of What Matters. In fact my position lies more in the opposite side - our notion of What Matters is (strongly related to) What Matters, so Many Worlds are less likely.  

Full disclosure: This has already been discussed here, but I see utility in bringing it up again. Mostly because I only heard about it offline.

The Paper:

Some researchers were interested if, in the same way that there's a general intelligence g that seems to predict competence in a wide variety of tasks, there is a group intelligence c that could do the same. You can read their paper here.

Their abstract:

Psychologists have repeatedly shown that a single statistical factor—often called “general intelligence”—emerges from the correlations among people’s performance on a wide variety of cognitive tasks. But no one has systematically examined whether a similar kind of “collective intelligence” exists for groups of people. In two studies with 699 people, working in groups of two to five, we find converging evidence of a general collective intelligence factor that explains a group’s performance on a wide variety of tasks. This “c factor” is not strongly correlated with the average or maximum individual intelligence of group members but is correlated with the average social sensitivity of group members, the equality in distribution of conversational turn-taking, and the proportion of females in the group.

Basically, groups with higher social sensitivity, equality in conversational turn-taking, and proportion of females are collectively more intelligent. On top of that, those effects trump out things like average IQ or even max IQ.

I theorize that proportion of females mostly works as a proxy for social sensitivity and turn-taking, and the authors speculate the same.

Some thoughts:

What does this mean for Less Wrong?

The most important part of the study, IMO, is that "social sensitivity" (measured by a test where you try and discern emotional states from someone's eyes) is such a stronger predictor of group intelligence. It probably helps people to gauge other people's comprehension, but based on the fact that people sharing talking time more equally also helps, I would speculate that another chunk of its usefulness comes from being able to tell if other people want to talk, or think that there's something relevant to be said.

One thing that I find interesting in the meatspace meetups is how in new groups, conversation tends to be dominated by the people who talk the loudest and most insistently. Often, those people are also fairly interesting. However, I prefer the current, older DC group to the newer one, and there's much more equal time speaking. Even though this means that I don't talk as much. Most other people seem to share similar sentiments, to the point that at one early meetup it was explicitly voted to be true that most people would rather talk more.

Solutions/Proposals:

Anything we should try doing about this? I will hold off on proposing solutions for now, but this section will get filled in sometime.