What are the odds that you, an average dude, is Tier 2? Not very high.

[Nivsch]

15 hours ago, Carl-Richard said:

That said, you only started learning about the model 6 months ago. Advancing through a stage takes decades.

From my own experience, just learning about a stage didn’t help me grow. Change only came when I chose to face a personal challenge more directly and independently, far from the common external thinking that didn’t help me. I learned it the hard way. This is what really changes your thinking structurally, because it comes from within. It makes the system truly believe it and shift. After that, this new structure translates itself to other areas of life.

Edited April 10 by Nivsch

[Carl-Richard]

6 hours ago, aurum said:

But is it safe to assume friends, community, network, business, career and creative work are associated with Tier 2? That's the whole question.

Why make that assumption in the first place?

Probably there is some correlation with Tier 2, but I wouldn't be surprised if it's actually stronger with people at Tier 1.

It seems to me Tier 2 is better off being assessed through cognitive function and perspective-taking, not your networking success. You can't assume those will go together.

Tier 2 could expressed purely mentally, could be more flexible with what environment they live in, etc. That's one side of the equation. The other side is that as humans and as organisms, we like to do things that are in accordance with our capabilities and values, we like to be with people who are like us, we like to create environments that support us and where we feel like we belong. And as development increases, power and general capability increases. And as development takes decades, you have a lot of time to make a change. If you truly understand "systems", you will put it into practice somehow, and at some point, it becomes hard to not cause a change. The inside will bleed to the outside somehow.

[Ulax]

5 minutes ago, Carl-Richard said:

Tier 2 could expressed purely mentally, could be more flexible with what environment they live in, etc. That's one side of the equation. The other side is that as humans and as organisms, we like to do things that are in accordance with our capabilities and values, we like to be with people who are like us, we like to create environments that support us and where we feel like we belong. And as development increases, power and general capability increases. And as development takes decades, you have a lot of time to make a change. If you truly understand "systems", you will put it into practice somehow, and at some point, it becomes hard to not cause a change. The inside will bleed to the outside somehow.

So you believe that our external choices will be reflective on the stage we’re at.  And that we can help tell what stage we are at by what choices we are making at this stage of our life?

[zurew]

16 hours ago, Leo Gura said:

it seeks to integrate many worldviews, and it understands that there is a hierarchy of worldviews based on development level and that each level serves its purpose and should not and cannot be eliminated or reduced away.

There can be an attitude and a habit to integrate and to synthesize, but to me it seems there is so much nuance when it comes to what "proper" integration/synthesis means. There is a normativity to it that is often times not specified - and because of it - talks about higher and lower perspectives becomes messy and unproductive.

I can be aware of multiple perspectives ,but then I can choose properties from each perspective randomly and create an assembled mess. What makes the outcome not an assembled mess? How can I know what kind of properties are relevant and what should be get rid of given a set of perspectives?

To me,  the answer to those questions is grounded in pragmatism - so when it comes to specifying based on what kind of norms and characteristics I create a hierarchy of perspectives - it will be based on the given purpose/goal/function and that will automatically give meaning to terms like "better" or "higher".

This provides the ability to define and to interpret those terms in a non-vague way , and this would be the opposite to the other approach where there is some kind of  vague goal and function independent meaning is attached to those terms. 

 

There is also often times an underlying assumption that if the context window that one consideres is bigger (which is often labeled as a more complex persepctive), that is in and of itself better, but that is purpose dependent as well. A bigger context window might give more noise to it and make it worse.

Edited April 10 by zurew

[Leo Gura]

12 minutes ago, zurew said:

I can be aware of multiple perspectives ,but then I can choose properties from each perspective randomly and create an assembled mess. What makes the outcome not an assembled mess? How can I know what kind of properties are relevant and what should be get rid of given a set of perspectives?

Of course. There is no authority to tell us what the right development pathway is. We have to figure that out ourselves and we will disagree about it.

For example, Don Beck thought that Trump is just what America's development required. Was he right? Who's gets to say? Does America need more Blue? More Orange? More Green? More Yellow? You could answer that 4 different ways depending on your biases and purposes.

Edited April 10 by Leo Gura

[zurew]

1 hour ago, Leo Gura said:

You could answer that 4 different ways depending on your biases and purposes.

Yeah sure, but once the purposes are specified, we can give an answer to that question.

If we care about x set of values and we are clear about what that set contains, then we can go on talking about how does Trump affect those values. Of course, there can be other layers of disagreement like - we disagree about how should we measure how much we progress or digress from that value set, but hopefully we can ground that in a shared meta-epistemic norm and using that we can figure out which epistemic norm is better for measuring more accurately.

I think a lack of clarity and a lack of explication of what kind of norms we are using to collect a set of facts and what kind of norms we use to tell a story about that set of facts is one of the things that makes us very much prone to self-deception because our underlying biases can hop in the evaluative process (especially when it comes to the story telling part - the weight of each fact will be different and even what set of facts you collect will be different).

But yeah, of course this goes much deeper , because there are some meta-norms (that has to do with relevance-realization) that we unconsciously use to determine what we consider reasonable vs far-fetched and those meta-norms will probably never be exhaustively explicated, and because of that some disagreements in practice wont ever be "solved".

 

Even if we agree on an argument (with all the premises and the conclusion and with the rule of inference as well), we can still disagree on what kind of implications come from the conclusion. There is an infinite set of logically possible implications that can come from any given conclusion and this goes back to the  "reasonableness" problem I outlined above, which I have no good answer to, other than we should train our ability to explicate those epistemic norms as much as we can (so that ever deeper layers of disagreements can be specified, pointed out and then argued about without being vague).

 

Tldr - ultimately there has to be a norm when it comes to navigating any disagreement because otherwise disagreements wouldn't be possible. But exhaustively explicating that norm is impossible in practice, so we probably never solve the deepest disagreements.

Edited April 10 by zurew

[Carl-Richard]

2 hours ago, Nivsch said:

From my own experience, just learning about a stage didn’t help me grow. Change only came when I chose to face a personal challenge more directly and independently, far from the common external thinking that didn’t help me. I learned it the hard way. This is what really changes your thinking structurally, because it comes from within. It makes the system truly believe it and shift. After that, this new structure translates itself to other areas of life.

Yes. That is the distinction I'm talking about. On the one hand, you have those who learn about Spiral Dynamics, start talking the language, start thinking about the concepts that they may or may not have a firm grasp on, and then they become sort of an authority on Tier 2 and by sort of a mental osmosis seemingly turn Tier 2 essentially over night in developmental terms. Then you have those that do things in the world, encounter challenges, try to align their actions with their values, build things, create things, solve problems, and through that process, they find themselves drawing upon these principles, find themselves attracting these kinds of people, creating these types of environments and places that seem Tier 2. It comes from within, and it's expressed on the outside, in their actions, in their being.

Edited April 10 by Carl-Richard

[Sugarcoat]

I think for high stage development your interest for truth must dominate your emotional attachments, identity attachments, judgments, biases, so you’re interested in truth of the matter over being clouded by those mentioned things. Becuase let’s say someone is identifying with their nationality and attached to it, that might cloud their worldview so they’re likely to be biased in matters regarding their country, but with a genuine interest in truth it will triumph over that. 

[Nilsi]

49 minutes ago, Sugarcoat said:

I think for high stage development your interest for truth must dominate your emotional attachments, identity attachments, judgments, biases, so you’re interested in truth of the matter over being clouded by those mentioned things. Becuase let’s say someone is identifying with their nationality and attached to it, that might cloud their worldview so they’re likely to be biased in matters regarding their country, but with a genuine interest in truth it will triumph over that. 

So art - which, if you go by one of Plato’s central arguments, is pure simulacrum, the antithesis of truth, something that doesn’t just distort reality but makes it fundamentally inaccessible - is then just a symptom of low-stage development, or what?

Edited April 10 by Nilsi

[Elliott]

Van Gogh comes to mind.

[UnbornTao]

1 hour ago, Nilsi said:

So art - which, if you go by one of Plato’s central arguments, is basically the antithesis of truth - is then just a symptom of low-stage development, or what?

Sounds obvious, but falsehood or lying may be the antithesis of truth, or illusion perhaps.

A big picture point: One problem here is trying to fit reality into a model, overlooking what anything is for itself. This blinds us to the presence of things.

Edited April 10 by UnbornTao

[Nilsi]

5 minutes ago, UnbornTao said:

A big picture point: One problem here is trying to fit reality into a model, overlooking what anything is for itself. It blinds us to the presence of things.

Yes, absolutely!

It’s precisely this sensibility - or dare I say, empathy - for what things are in themselves, or to speak with Deleuze, for difference in itself, that’s hopelessly lost in these kinds of totalitarian models.

[blackchair]

I just honestly go to 2 subforums here, spirituality where everyone is above Leo, they figure it out what reality and God is, they have 12k posts, and all that jazz, and the same users complain and bitch about women in sexuality subforum. And plus there is only 2 women on the whole forum. Good vibes. But everyone is yellow and turquoise, and in reality, 50 users total on the whole forum who are bunch of 20 something years olds (most of it) chasing highs....

[Carl-Richard]

39 minutes ago, Nilsi said:

Yes, absolutely!

It’s precisely this sensibility - or dare I say, empathy - for what things are in themselves, or to speak with Deleuze, for difference in itself, that’s hopelessly lost in these kinds of totalitarian models.

All models reduce differences, even your man Delulu's.

[Nilsi]

18 minutes ago, Carl-Richard said:

All models reduce differences, even your man Delulu's.

There’s a big difference between some pseudo-intellectual astrology - like “which of the 7 colors am I?” - and Deleuze’s subversion of the identity principle in favor of a worldview grounded in difference in itself.

The only reduction happening there is the reduction of reductionism itself.

Saying Deleuze reduces difference is like Alexander Dugin arguing that if postmodernism says all perspectives are equal, then the perspective that not all perspectives are equal must be equally valid. Which is, of course, reactionary bullshit.

Edited April 10 by Nilsi

[PenguinPablo]

Well thank fucking God I found guys like Leo. I'm stage Green-Yellow btw according to FapGPT.

[aurum]

7 hours ago, Carl-Richard said:

Tier 2 could expressed purely mentally, could be more flexible with what environment they live in, etc. That's one side of the equation. The other side is that as humans and as organisms, we like to do things that are in accordance with our capabilities and values, we like to be with people who are like us, we like to create environments that support us and where we feel like we belong. And as development increases, power and general capability increases. And as development takes decades, you have a lot of time to make a change. If you truly understand "systems", you will put it into practice somehow, and at some point, it becomes hard to not cause a change. The inside will bleed to the outside somehow.

My point isn't that Tier 2 will express purely mentally. It's more so about what criteria you are using to assess whether someone is Tier 2.

Assuming your power and influence over systems will increase as your development increases is an extremely shaky assumption, if not flat out wrong. Systems are often influenced by those who are the least developed or near average. Not the most.

I think this is a problem with stage Orange personal development advice generally. They sell you this idea that developing yourself =  meeting survival needs like money, power, status, relationships etc. Owen Cook is a master of this. 

At some point though, you have to grow up and drop this fantasy. You might get some power, but overall developing yourself is often far more sophisticated and intangible than that.

If development is about power and human survival needs, then Donald Trump is more developed than all of us. That's where that logic eventually leads you.

 

Edited April 10 by aurum

[UnbornTao]

On 4/10/2025 at 8:33 PM, Nilsi said:

Yes, absolutely!

It’s precisely this sensibility - or dare I say, empathy - for what things are in themselves, or to speak with Deleuze, for difference in itself, that’s hopelessly lost in these kinds of totalitarian models.

This seems to apply to any model, in the sense that none are true in and of themselves, but some can be useful.

As a simplistic analogy: We can categorize every variety of apple and create an intricate model of their distinctive traits, yet this effort doesn’t provide access to what the object is, nor does it change our fundamental relationship to it. More concepts are added to the experience, which is further from the presence of it, if getting closer to it is our goal. Besides, we tend to confuse proficiency in the workings of the model with an experience of the things that are being referred to, which is much easier to do than experiencing things for yourself.

Edited April 11 by UnbornTao

[Carl-Richard]

54 minutes ago, aurum said:

Assuming your power and influence over systems will increase as your development increases is an extremely shaky assumption, if not flat out wrong. Systems are often influenced by those who are the least developed or near average. Not the most.

That's Beck's assumption (I presume, referencing an article that excerpted a keynote speech by Whole Foods Market CEO John Mackey who gave an overview of SD while applying it the food industry and global agricultural system). But it makes sense that it would increase your power on average, as with IQ or anything else powerful. But maybe it's a more complicated picture.

 

54 minutes ago, aurum said:

I think this is a problem with stage Orange personal development advice generally. They sell you this idea that developing yourself =  meeting survival needs like money, power, status, relationships etc. Owen Cook is a master of this. 

At some point though, you have to grow up and drop this fantasy. You might get some power, but overall developing yourself is often far more sophisticated and intangible than that.

If development is about power and human survival needs, then Donald Trump is more developed than all of us. That's where that logic eventually leads you.

Well, we're really just talking about getting friends and getting your ideas rolled out in some tangible format. It doesn't necessarily require to become a billionaire or anything. You can be heavily "strategic" about it, as the Yellow stage suggests.

Edited April 10 by Carl-Richard

[Carl-Richard]

1 hour ago, Nilsi said:

There’s a big difference between some pseudo-intellectual astrology - like “which of the 7 colors am I?” - and Deleuze’s subversion of the identity principle in favor of a worldview grounded in difference in itself.

The only reduction happening there is the reduction of reductionism itself.

Yep. Reducing difference to mere difference.

 

1 hour ago, Nilsi said:

Saying Deleuze reduces difference is like Alexander Dugin arguing that if postmodernism says all perspectives are equal, then the perspective that not all perspectives are equal must be equally valid. Which is, of course, reactionary bullshit.

Which is true.