My sense (totally observing from the outside) is that competitive sports are really valuable developmentally for both of these types of people. My model is football but I think it's true of most American sports, and probably European football too.
There's a lot of objective reality in sports. You ultimately can't fake anything. If you want to win you have to engage with technique, think strategically about the other team, study tape, be systematic about training and nutrition. Good for people not inclined to be "stage 4" about systems and problem-solving.
On the relational side, you have to be able to relate to your teammates, in situations where everyone has intense positive and negative emotions. You also have to deal with those emotions in yourself. You also have to model the social dynamics on the other team and perhaps exploit them. And there are clear norms of "professionalism" which usually gets called "sportsmanship" or summarized in slogans like "do your job".
There's a whole giant institutional infrastructure of coaches and athletic programs that actually takes teaching these skills pretty seriously. Unfortunately, you need some athletic ability to be able to take part, so a lot of people get frozen out.
There aren't many opportunities to take up a new team sport as an adult. STEM dorks getting into an athletic activity late in life traditionally go for solo activities like climbing, running, cycling, presumably emotionally safer. Jiu jitsu used to be good for this, but with the popularity of MMA + high school wrestlers who realized they could continue grappling, it's much less welcoming to total beginners than it used to be.
This is really interesting—I hadn't thought of this, and it makes complete sense!
The nearest analog I'd considered was pointed out by Kegan, that the military also trains you in social systematicity; and for many people, that's the best route into stage 4.
I have a little martial arts background (and my spouse much more), and that also can work. But I hadn't though of team sports in the same category; and that does make good sense!
It's interesting you say there's a lot of objective reality in sports, I always thought they were just a bunch of rules that somebody else made up. Requiring significant suspension of disbelief to participate.
They are just a bunch of rules that somebody else made up, but they are what they are and you don’t get to socially maneuver your way out of them. It’s the difference between chess and high school debate.
I always tried to socially maneuver my way out of them by just not participating. I was like look guys, the brown leather ball doesn't mean anything, some evil magician has cast a spell on you and now you think this game matters when really it does not. But nobody likes Prometheus so I got a D in gym class. Fortunately gym class grades have roughly the same significance as a brown leather ball.
When you're waiting for the snap in front of a defensive lineman who is larger and faster than you, it is a profound experience of the objective reality of the laws of physics.
This is true, which is why I'd always just let the big guy have the ball without a fuss, since he seemed to care an awful lot about it for some reason, while I saw it as a dirty stinky object that everybody's hands had touched and probably hadn't been washed ever. Maybe it's a matter of taste!
This post matches well with what I've been reading in Halberstam's "War in a time of peace". His descriptions of the social, bureaucratic, and political competence of important people, and what that looks like when it is and is not present, is instructive. These people are operating at an entirely different level (possibly stage 5, possibly really good at stage 4) than most of us can imagine even in the abstract.
I suspect that one of the ways that certain groups or social classes (e.g. 'Boston Brahmins') maintain their status is by 'leveling up' the development of their children in these domains at an early age. I've always had this vague feeling that 'smart people from lower social classes' (like me) were missing something important, and this post captures it well.
Whoa, this is crazy. So relevant to what I’m working on now and provides accurate hindsight for what went wrong for me when I had authority issues when working as a software engineer.
The view from stage 3 felt like fear, righteous anger, and frustration, while stage 4 (ostensibly) is feeling like curiosity, clarity, and acceptance.
The upgrade cannot be understated, and I think stage 4 STEM thinkers have an advantage in teaching stage 4 relational dynamics to other stage 4 STEMers (I am obviously biased).
I think a big thing putting me off workplace social skills is many senior managers I've known, with good social skills, seem really stupid. Like they don't really know how to engage with ideas properly (you could say systematically) and they bullshit a lot. Some are also terrible at managment and strategy because they are chaotic. But I did find your description of sales people useful because it helped me see the systematicity of what they are doing, and how I don't have that.
It also helps to look at the people below me intellectually - often they seem weirdly incapable of treating ideas as objects, and they just have emotional reactions about them. They don't understand that there are intellectual systems within which ideas sit, and you can take different viewpoints depending on purpose and strength of evidence etc. They don't understand that there are continuums of views with gradations in between - instead they just pick an extreme to identify with and hate the opposite. They're not able to construct clear reasoning and explain what it's rooted it. So this is all a useful analogy for what I'm likely doing with relationships.
Also I agree with the other commenter that stage 4 relationships sounds manipulative, and like I can't be myself. I feel that being there would be giving up my values and becoming an empty manipulator, lost to a bullshit corporate purpose.
Also at least superficially "become more systematic" doesn't feel like what I need to become better in personal relationships and could lead to a decreasing ability to connect. It's almost the opposite - I need to become more intuitive, more free flowing, less in my head.
Thanks, this is great! I think you've understood this clearly.
> becoming an empty manipulator, lost to a bullshit corporate purpose.
Well... this is true in a bullshit corporate environment. Not all workplaces are like that. And, alternatively, there are many other sorts of social structures one can develop soft-domain systematicity in.
One of them is a serious intimate relationship. A quote about that from Kegan's *In Over Our Heads*:
> Like respectful and enlightened anthropologists, they regularly visit, and deeply appreciate, the other's "culture of mind." At their best, they suspend the tendency to evaluate the other's "culture" through the lens of their own, and seek rather to discover the terms by which the other is shaping meaning or creating value. Not only does each seem to benefit from frequent "travel" to the other's "culture," but the one who is being "visited" also seems to appreciate the experience of having the other come in with a non-imperial stance to see how reality is being constructed.
Thanks for that quote, that sounds like a nice relationship ideal.
Yes, not all workplaces. Maybe a difficulty is that I work in consulting, and small consultancy firms thrive on ability to win business via networking. This selects for leaders I don't trust intellectually, and a style of work which can tend towards bullshit (though not always). When I was working in EA it was different, I trusted the strategy and could see clearly how it was valuable. Perhaps it's worth finding the few leaders who have both aspects.
Is your thesis that maintaining successful interpersonal relationships of any sort necessarily requires systematicity (stage 4)? If so, this seems dubious to me. I buy that professionalism requires this, being an essential feature of rational modernity, but informal relationships, particularly romantic, are both much older and much more nebulous.
Some people seem naturally predisposed to intuitively grasp the rules of the game, so to speak, and become better at it through practice without any sort of painful transition that needs to be consciously triggered. I suppose one can say that this means that they unconsciously acquire systematization abilities, but I doubt that this matches their internal experience. Or is the point rather that nerds who aren't naturals in that way have to undergo a transition due to having no alternatives?
> Is your thesis that maintaining successful interpersonal relationships of any sort necessarily requires systematicity (stage 4)?
No; as the post said, "Stage 3 may work well in a romantic relationship, so long as both people are at that stage in all domains."
But, nerds may have a problem: "It may be dysfunctional for someone who is at stage 4 in hard domains, particularly when relating to someone who is at stage 3 overall."
If: "You can’t help judging their way of being from your partially stage 4 point of view."
This is common, based on conversations with numerous nerds over several decades.
Yep, sorry, looks like I somehow skipped over that part, no objections there. It does seem unlikely though that anybody can sufficiently "understand the whole structure of complex social systems", so probably moving beyond stage 4 is necessary to overcome that "uncanny valley".
"I have only limited experience of working with enterprise salespeople. I would appreciate feedback on the accuracy or errors in this section from them, if any read it."
Having been an IT Analyst at Gartner for 17+ years, and then a design thinker at IBM for 4+ years, I've interacted with enterprise salespeople extensively, both in critiquing them as an analyst and training them as a design thinker.
IME your description of enterprise salespeople is solid. I'd only add the following, potentially illuminating, nuances. Here I will be focused on the most complex, risk-your-business, enterprise software for the Fortune 500, where the contract size is in the millions, eg sales of ERP software such as SAP and Oracle Financials.
First on the issue of putting actual engineers in front of customers:
"Inconveniently, technical people in the customer company often want to know what the product actually does (and doesn’t do; and probably how). Generally, eventually, salespeople have to bring their company’s engineers with them on a customer company visit. This is awkward and risky for everyone involved."
IME this rarely happens BEFORE the contract is signed. ERP vendors have an entire cadre of "sales-y" engineers, sometimes titled solutions engineers or solutions consultants. They are hybrids. The great ones are very persuasive, even inspiring, about the capabilities of the software, so they can really help sell. But they also understand the architecture of the software pretty deeply, so they can handle almost all of the questions that the customer's IT folks may have. If they can't answer a question, they meet with the vendor's internal engineers and then get back to the IT folks with the answer. At smaller vendors selling less expensive software, it's more common to let the actual internal engineers building the software talk with customer IT folks before the sale.
Second, this gets to the superpower of great salespeople: getting a customer to "sign on the line that is dotted". Lot's of people in technology circles can be persuasive, can help convince a customer that they need a product. I could do it. This is less than half the battle. There's an immense chasm between getting an ERP customer near the brink of signing, and actually closing the sale. This is where the great salespeople distinguish themselves: cajoling a customer to take the immense risk to close the deal. This is where their people skills, their ability to manipulate the emotions of the buyer, really come into play. It has so little to do with the actual ERP software that such salespeople don't really need to be very technical. They're selling a strategic partnership more than a complex software system.
Third, thinking about the hybrid that is an enterprise sales executive reminded me of an even better example of a hybrid with hard and soft skills: strategic consultants, a la McKinsey et el. Unlike enterprise salespeople who may have never actually acquired engineering skills, junior consultants have to master actual hard skills regarding implementing and transforming business processes. But to make partner, they need to shift to mastering soft people skills. Come to think of it, an even better example might be law firm partners! (I was a litigation attorney for a few years as well.) Junior associates acquire deep hard skills in "engineering" litigation cases, but only associates who develop the soft skills required for "rain making" become partners.
Hope this is helpful feedback. Thanks for the food for thought!
If you have time, I'd be curious to hear your thoughts on https://scpantera.substack.com/p/the-skill-issue-issue both because it's also a bunch of thoughts on the interplay between talents and passions (and how they manifest) and because it devolves into other thoughts on how those relate to tensions wrt "meaning".
I just realized my antagonism toward stage three traits is a clue that I'm at stage two. I'm interested in creating some form of inventory for myself. When I think back to times when I felt confused and repulsed by another person's behavior or words, a clear picture emerges. "How the hell could you be interested in this stage three or four thing you're talking about?"
The key is "interested", a stage two word. I prefer to identify with my interests ("interested-in" and "self-interest"), I relate to others on the basis of what they are interested-in and an enlightened mutual self-interest.
This blog post has inspired in me, for the first time, an interest in receiving coaching.
Unfortunately, most therapists and coaches specialize in specific forms of distress and setback. In his song "In Old Mexico", Tom Lehrer coined the term "diseases of the rich" which applies here. There's a huge market for treating stably-employed depressed careerists. Whereas, my specific condition leads to a feast-and-famine pattern in which I pull down six figures for a while, and then I'm un- or under-employed, as I am now.
I think that's unlikely, from what I know of you, although not impossible. Also worth noting that stage theory is just a model, and doesn't seem to fit all people, and probably for many people doesn't fit some aspects of life.
"How the hell could you be interested in this stage three or four thing you're talking about?"
Well, interests are idiosyncratic. Being at stage four doesn't mean you find *everything* from stage four interesting, or even many things. (Being at stage five means you do find *everything* potentially interesting, but that's a whole 'nother pod of squid.)
"I relate to others on the basis of what they are interested-in"
That's not confined to stage two! It's common across stages.
"enlightened mutual self-interest"
That sounds four-ish to me. It could be two-ish without the "enlightened," and if it's purely transient. But you are capable of sustaining interests-in long-term, which stage two isn't.
"I pull down six figures for a while, and then I'm un- or under-employed, as I am now."
I am sorry to hear this is still the case!
Does it seem that this pattern results from interpersonal conflicts at work? That could suggest residual two-ishness, I suppose; or perhaps more likely residual three-ishness.
"times when I felt confused and repulsed by another person's behavior or words"
This might seem to fit the three-ish pattern I described of finding it difficult to be-with other people's different feelings and opinions.
At the same time, I suspect that you are feeling a repulsion from stage-three-ishness itself. Once you've recognized the limitations of a stage, it can come to seem loathesome in retrospect as you look back at it. That's part of what drives you through a transition.
Stage three behavior comes to seem incredibly tiresome once you've passed beyond it. People getting upset about nothing; people being unable to stick to plans, procedures, principles, and promises; histrionic acting-out of imaginary emotions; group-think and mindless conformity; etc. ad nauseam. I think I've heard you speaking negatively about these patterns.
Okay, that's all very interesting. I consider myself to excel at being with other people’s feelings and opinions, taking them as valid but distinct from my own. But consider the list of stage 3 capacities you provided, which implies that if we have not reached the following, we have not reached stage 3, and are therefore at 2 in some domains:
- Feel emotions in one's body (I don't perform this mystical exotic stunt, but that never causes any problems)
- Empathize reliably and accurately, not guess at them conceptually (I guess at them conceptually, and this is highly accurate and satisfactory)
- See myself in an interaction as another person sees me (I'm never sure, but I can guess at this conceptually, and this is also satisfactory)
- Anticipate how they would feel in response to different things one might say or do—and *feel* that (I never *feel* that, and this never causes any problems)
- Understand what your social group feels about you collectively, how they see you fitting in (or not), and why? (I have always believed such intuitions to be false, an illusion which is best disregarded and evidence should be sought in its place. And yet I have experienced conspicuous success in social groups.)
As for interpersonal conflict in the workplace, I never, ever have that. Doing so would usually result from taking a greater-than-absolutely-necessary interest in workplace projects, which I don't wish to do. I strive to avoid drawing attention to myself in workplaces, by being politely congenial and saying little, and keeping my distance.
I suspect co-workers actually wish that I would express disagreement more often, because it would be an expression of interest. But if the project is going in a direction I believe is wrong, I will offer only the mildest objection, because it puts me at risk, and it's not my problem. I have exactly one, and only one, project in the workplace: to stay employed, so that I don't financially burden my social groups.
My feeling of confusion and repulsion was with a co-worker who mentioned having looked up a bunch of things related to our project in his off-hours, when, in my opinion, he didn't have to. I felt like he was and wrecking the grade curve. However, I would never, ever let those feelings show on my face. I'm told I can be good at being unreadable.
> if we have not reached the following, we have not reached stage 3, and are therefore at 2
Well, to be a bit pedantic, I said these are a prerequisite for moving beyond 3; they are indications of having *completed* the work of that stage.
It is plausible here that the model just doesn't fit you well. However, I'll risk pointing out some possibilities. (This is a risk inasmuch as I am not qualified to do this, and don't know you well enough to do it even if I was, so whatever I say may be false and potentially misleading, or even potentially offensive.)
It sounds to me like you are pretty consistently thinking and acting at stage 4 (and beyond) in the social domain. This is reflected in your ability to nucleate and coordinate exciting, enduring new social groups, and complex social events with novel social norms. That's typically a >4 capability.
But, you say you aren't feeling it. So perhaps you actually are at <3 in the emotional domain? This would be quite unusual (according to theory). It might be the pattern associated with Asperger's/ASD, though. Or, just idiosyncratic to you?
Alternatively, it seems possible that you *are* feeling it, but haven't identified the thing typically described as "feeling other people's emotions" as that. Perhaps you actively resist describing it that way because it sounds like it would have to involve some sort of extra-physical ESP. Which, of course, it doesn't. Presumably the actual mechanism involves recognizing other people's body language, and processing their talk, in a particular way below the level of explicit conceptual awareness. And then the "feeling it" is a non-conceptual process that involves subtle sensations you may be overlooking. Becoming aware of these can be useful as an alternative source of information about social interactions, and your own psychology.
I will tentatively suggest two possible directions, that you might find intriguing, that stage theory might recommend.
First, you might just be curious about what "feeling your emotions" could be, and see whether you can learn this mystical trick. There's simple methods for doing this that take some work, but are apparently reasonably reliable in producing the result.
Second, I'm hearing a quite sharp distinction between "things I'm interested in" and "things I am not interested in." Everyone is more interested in some things than others, but for most people it's a nebulous gradient rather than a binary. The distinction gets increasingly blurry as you go beyond stage 4 (which I believe you already have done in some domains). At stage 5, you are at least somewhat interested in absolutely everything, because you care-for absolutely everything (to some degree). So you might consider relaxing your rejection of some topics as absolutely uninteresting.
(Except golf, of course. Golf is objectively, absolutely uninteresting.)
This is veering off topic, but this snippet just seemed incredibly unexpected and, if it's true, made me see a bit more what you're getting at with your whole thing:
"Junior developers often program by combining snippets of code they find on the web, or that they have learned and can recall. They may be able to create variants of these, adapting them to new uses. They may be able to write small new functions from scratch, by analogy with ones they’ve seen before. However, they lack fundamental understanding of how software works, or even *what it is*. They can’t reason accurately about the relationship between a program’s text and its runtime execution."
There are people who program computers for a living, manage to actually make a living, and are like that‽
I am not a programmer, but I studied physics in the same department as computer scientists, and I don't see how somebody in that mindset could survive three years of university without going insane. Programming can sometimes be an incredibly painful process even if you know exactly what you're doing, and without the sense of accomplishment of solving problems on your own, I can only imagine it bringing you suffering.
What happens to these people? The association with "junior" makes it sound like this is something you can learn on the job -- is that the case? If so, how, when an actual education couldn't accomplish that? If not, then that sounds... sad :(
I now wonder if I have to recontextualize things I've read online and thought hyperbolic, such as "99% of programming is looking things up on Stack Overflow" or "an LLM is like a junior developer". Terence Tao said something like this with "mediocre graduate student" (he then clarified it, see https://mathstodon.xyz/@tao/113145334235914812). But who else than Terence Tao should have access to students that know what they're doing?
The failure mode of undergrads (which is the closest thing to "junior developer" in my experience) I've seen is that they run into problems they don't know how to solve at all, or they don't find simple ways to solve a problem, press on with an obvious but too complicated approach, and get stuck in a mess that is too big to manage, but not that *they are fundamentally always running on the empirical method*.
I feel like maybe the development you are describing here actually happened for most people I know in the teenage years? I have another independent reason to think that: my sister is a scout leader and had to learn a lot of disparate stuff for the qualifying exam. The scout movement actually sounds a lot like your "fully meta-rational organization" (https://metarationality.com/meta-rational-workplace), since it requires skills from accounting to first aid, from law to knowing what to do when a storm comes in the wilderness. Though there is a hierarchy based on age, it's not quite the org-chart kind, and in any case terminates really early. People can and regularly do manage all of this before even reaching legal adulthood. (All of this is outside observation only, so of course take it with a grain of salt. For context: This is all in Europe; I don't know if things work the same way in the US.)
One part of the exams concerns child development and the relationship of children to rules, and I remember seeing a textbook with the example rule "you must change shoes when entering the clubhouse". It roughly said that initially, children will constantly try to break rules when they don't feel like following them (so you have to be an authority figure), then they often go through a phase where they follow the rules religiously and will protest if anybody breaks them for any reason (so you have to be careful not to), but eventually they get to a stage where they understand that the rules are there for a reason and that the reason for the rules also determines their range of validity (so when there's an emergency and your shoes aren't dirty from the outside, you don't have to slow down to change them). That sounds a lot like your 3->4->5 transition in this particular domain, but it's done somewhere around age 15.
Do I have this remotely correct, or is there something beyond this that you're trying to point towards?
"There are people who program computers for a living, manage to actually make a living, and are like that‽"
Yes. This is common. Maybe the majority of people employed as programmers.
"I don't see how somebody in that mindset could survive three years of university without going insane."
Many are self-taught, or took one or two introductory courses in high school and/or while doing a university degree in some other subject. However, it’s also possible to complete a university science degree, even at a reputable school, without actually ever understanding how computers work. Sad!
"I feel like maybe the development you are describing here actually happened for most people I know in the teenage years?"
It’s reasonably common to transition to stage four in the mid-teen years. Empirically, only a minority of adults—maybe 20%—ever reach stage 4 fully, but among those who do, it’s likely to be by the early 20s at the latest.
Since you did a physics degree, in high school you probably were mostly interacting with similar people, who would indeed have become systematic in the “hard domains” before graduating. Such people do tend to lag in the soft domains, but not necessarily.
"initially, children will constantly try to break rules when they don't feel like following them, then they often go through a phase where they follow the rules religiously and will protest if anybody breaks them for any reason, but eventually they get to a stage where they understand that the rules are there for a reason and that the reason for the rules also determines their range of validity. That sounds a lot like your 3->4->5 transition in this particular domain, but it's done somewhere around age 15."
This lines up well with 2→3→4. Stage 2 is self-interested, and considers other people’s concerns only when they are obstacles or resources for getting what one wants for oneself.
Would there be a way for stage 5 to apply to that situation? Ideally illustrated for this particular rule, and barring that, for relating to rules in general?
(Asking because I can see how stage 2 figures there, but not really how the end stage is 4. Shouldn't that be the stage where all exceptions should be codified, etc.?)
Well, stage 4 reasoning is principled, rational, and systematic. So "the rules are there for a reason and that the reason for the rules also determines their range of validity" is a great summary of ethics at stage 4.
"Stage 5 comes into its own when no ethical system has an adequate answer, yet action is required. Its improvisation follows no rules, but is responsive to the specifics of the situation. Typically it coordinates ethical considerations taken from multiple, incommensurable stage 4 systems, plus stage 3 communities and stage 2 interests."
I'm not sure how that would apply to changing shoes :)
Yes, excellent! Although it doesn’t have to be so grand. But it’s in system-creation and leadership that stage 5 becomes particularly significant.
In most situations, everyday concrete common sense (“mere reasonableness,” in the language of Meta-rationality: https://metarationality.com/reasonableness) works fine, so we go with that. In atypical situations, it breaks down. Then systematic rationality is usually valuable, and usually suffices. In rare, anomalous situations, rationality breaks down, and “post-formal thought” a/k/a “meta-rationality” may be necessary.
In the shoes example, it’s hard to imagine an anomaly that would cause stage 4 reasoning to fail. Maybe something involving space aliens.
Hmh, I understand, but can't say that this is satisfying :/ With every such comment you induce more curiosity about what one could do with that magic, but there seems to be a curse that prevents examples from appearing. On this particular page you mention an example you worked out in 2015 that then became too hot to handle -- perhaps it is a bit cooler now?
Or, if that doesn't make sense, work backward to earlier substages until they stop sounding like woo and you can see how they're a step beyond rationality.
I have low confidence in my understanding of the various stages, but my impression of the stages of this shoe rule ("you must change shoes when entering the clubhouse") is roughly as follows:
1) Reflexive distaste for shoes
2) Changing shoes is annoying and I don't want to
3) If I don't change shoes the teacher will be mad so it's bad
4) Changing shoes keeps places cleaner so it's good to change your shoes
5) Whether changing shoes is good depends on existing practices and cultures of a place, and "shoes on" and "shoes off" locations and households all have their place. A "dojo" feels dirtied by shoes, but a "gym" feels dirtied by unshod feet.
Oh, Terry Tao has a post about learning math that explicitly references Kohlberg’s stages of development of moral reasoning. (Kohlberg was a major figure in adult developmental stage theory; his stage numbering is a bit different than the one I was using here.)
Glad you liked that post :-) Always wanted to share it with you. I have another one about "3 tribes of programmers" https://josephg.com/blog/3-tribes/ which isn't explicitly hierarchical and doesn't map as cleanly to Kegan's stages but at least the ordering on the 3-4-5 axis should be clear. It also fits this post and I think provides a complementary, more-domain-heavy lens in order to understand programmers. My guess is that there are a even more typologies out there where these stages have been unknowingly rediscovered in some context. Which gives me confidence in the robustness of the stages concept.
Then I would love to see stages 3, 4, 5 crossed with other things, for example, how do the stages interact with conflict vs. mistake theory, how are jungian archetypes different at different stages and so on, it is an unending list. I think it could be helpful to see the stages in action in terms of other systems. Generally seeing a thing in action, say someone operating at a level just above mine, preferably repeatedly and with slight variations, really makes me grok that thing, and is in my opinion a much better way to understand something than e.g. lectures.
Another thing is this dilemma: How do I relate to a person at a lower stage when I have neither higher standing nor am willing to voluntarily lower my stage. I can't make them see my point of view because it would take years for them to develop, they are probably actively put off or even hostile to my point of view because they interpret it as a stage below them. I also don't want to pull the wool over their eyes and use my knowledge against? them, even if the outcome would be positive for all involved, and I probably couldn't even accomplish this consistently (This echoes the moral concerns other commentators also had). I'm kind of out of approaches here.
Next I have to admit that I am slightly skeptical that one can be relationally at stage 4, but not cognitively. Maybe this is hard for me to grok, since I guess I am further along cognitively, but when you write things like these:
> What are the motivations of relevant individuals, according to what incentives? (Knowing this is key to knowing how to persuade them.) Who has a personal like or dislike of who, and why? (You need to avoid getting pulled into personal vendettas that are irrelevant to your aims, but you might be able to leverage them for support.) Who operates at which developmental stage in which domains? (You have to talk to people at different stages quite differently. Do you present a case in terms of personal relationships, or structural ones?)
then I have difficulty to accept that someone can operate in this way without at least cognitive stage 4 support.
This made be think of my last question: What would stage 4.5 be like for someone who is further along in the social domain?
Happy to have any misconceptions showing through corrected :-)
" How do I relate to a person at a lower stage when I have neither higher standing nor am willing to voluntarily lower my stage. "
Yes, this is really difficult. I guess from a stage 5 pov, one tries to meet them where they are at, while supporting their development forward when possible and appropriate, and allowing space around their limitations.
"What would stage 4.5 be like for someone who is further along in the social domain?"
Back in the 1990s I sold American computer software and hardware in Japan.
Usually it was end-user products for scientists and engineers, but in one instance, we were trying to make a major sale of an infrastructure layer of software to a major Japanese electronics firm.
Our company was very active in the IEEE subcommittee tasked with developing a protocol for PC-based test and measurement devices to be used in factory automation (FA). The protocol defined everything down to the lowest level: on/off signals of 1s and 0s, voltage heights, the duration of signals in milliseconds, allowable lag times, everything!
Of course I wasn’t involved in the nitty-gritty details, but I personally knew the engineers who were involved, and they gave us regular presentations detailing the current state of progress.
As the final details of the IEEE protocol were being hammered out, our software developers had already built the set of software packages necessary to implement the physical layer, then the communication layer, up to the command layer.
It was at this point that the Japanese electronics firm first contacted us in the Tokyo office about purchasing this set to enable them to also start building the physical devices that used the new protocol.
The purchase price, for this one package, would be somewhere on the order of about a quarter million USD.
We were used to a sales process of days or weeks between initial contact and purchase order, but this would be a multi-month process. In the end, it took 2 years!
First mutual visits by salespeople from both sides, then engineer exchanges mediated by the Tokyo office engineers. Eventually we flew in some of the engineers on the IEEE subcommittee to personally explain a lot of the details to their people.
In the end our CEO came to Japan to meet his counterparts, I think at the Bucho level, and this clinched the deal. We even had a dinner together in one of those well-hidden, upscale Tokyo restaurants!
As a startup company based on PC technology, our biggest hurdle in the beginning was getting them, a well-established company with a legacy going back to pre-war Japan, to understand that although very young, we were a serious entity capable of providing what they needed.
That obstacle was overcome when we recommended them talking to one of their own engineers. This engineer was a huge fan of our flagship software product, and regularly attended our monthly user group meetings at our Tokyo office. We saw and talked with him regularly over a couple of years. He was a real “evangelist” as we used to say back then.
I’m pretty certain that his talking to them about his interactions with us convinced them we were an honest and trustworthy company.
I hope this has contributed to the conversation. It was the one time I was involved with an “enterprise-level” software sale that needed both sales savvy and technical skill to succeed.
Thanks! This was nostalgic for me... I had a very similar experience also in the late '90s. The Japanese company was (I learned) unusually easy to work with, because they did understand that small American software companies could do surprising things. But still it was an alien culture, and they cut me a lot of slack for being an uncooth foreigner, AND an engineer, which I appreciated!
This seems very compelling, but I find myself viscerally rejecting it. I'm one of those Asperger's software engineer types, more or less exactly who you're describing (except married). Based on your five questions I probably don't even meet stage 3 in the social domain.
The problem is that the way you describe stage 4 in the social domain sounds dishonest and manipulative. It's telling that you uses Salespeople as an example, because Salespeople are... dishonest and manipulative! I don't deny that navigating the social world in this way is effective, but it's also Wrong, and that's a huge barrier. It's easy to manipulate machines systematically because there's no moral dimension. But in the social realm morality is infused into every interaction and every choice. I don't want to go to work like it's a game of Diplomacy, I want to be myself. I used to be able to do that, but it feels like the world has changed.
> It's telling that you uses Salespeople as an example, because Salespeople are... dishonest and manipulative!
Sometimes some are. But sometimes they also can be honest and helpful. That's often the most effective way to sell things, especially when the stuff you sell is actually good.
When it's not so good, it's tempting to be tactical; and that can slide into dishonesty, and can be immoral.
This is not different for software developers! Most software products are mediocre, and many are even harmful. The people who build them rationalize their involvement with "Well, it's not my decision, it's management's fault, I'm just doing my job, I have to make money somehow. I'd rather work at a place that makes genuinely good, high quality software that helps many people, but it's hard to find jobs like that!"
I think salespeople think the same way. The same words fit exactly!
> in the social realm morality is infused into every interaction and every choice. I don't want to go to work like it's a game of Diplomacy, I want to be myself.
I hope this doesn't sound patronizing, and what I say may be inaccurate, but fwiw:
"Morality is infused into every interaction" is a stage 3 (mis)perception. Stage 4 doesn't see things that way. That doesn't make stage 4 immoral (it's arguably *more* ethical than stage 3: https://vividness.live/developing-ethical-social-and-cognitive-competence). It means that most specific interactions are morally neutral. The moral considerations apply at a higher, systemic level. For example: is the company I'm working for making high-quality, helpful products?
> I want to be myself. I used to be able to do that, but it feels like the world has changed.
Stage transitions are defined as building a new sort of self. I wonder whether it is you that has changed? So you are newly noticing that the world is demanding that you be a different sort of thing? And perhaps you are reluctantly coming to understand what that would mean?
Well no I mean more literally. At the first two companies I worked for (spanning 2005 to 2019) I could be myself, aka Not Mask. My personality quirks were tolerated at least and accepted at best. Since then I haven't found any similar environments and I have to Mask intensely or be shunned.
I don't buy the claim that interactions are morally neutral. If I lie to you to manipulate you into doing what I want, that's bad! And I see the neurotypicals around me lying to me, and each other, _constantly_. I would prefer not to participate in that.
Lastly I'll note that every sales person I've known (quite a few) has been as I described: dishonest and manipulative. Even the ones I counted as friends! They lied to customers, to coworkers, to management, to friends & lovers... it's their way of life, best as I can tell. I assume that's not what you're advocating for though, so I'm trying to understand better what you're getting at.
In some cases, it can be good for you to be able to truthfully say that you don't know a certain fact (for example: someone made a mistake at work which creates costly and pointless obligations for you, but only if you know about it). In such cases, someone lying to you or withholding information related to that fact, is definitely helping you.
More common are blurry situations, where someone's choice to deceive you might both help and harm you in different ways while benefiting them. But it could still be a net positive for you.
Still more confusing are situations where someone may lie to you with the expectation that you will understand they are lying. Or situations where someone's speech is concerned with creating or avoiding "common knowledge" to influence the broader situation in a positive direction.
This is all stressful and unpleasant, but they are real phenomena where accurately conveying true information may be the wrong choice. (Of course sometimes people do just lie for morally wrong reasons, too, sometimes with these more complex possibilities as an excuse.)
Ehhhhh... I'm trying to give this line of reasoning a fair shake but...
It's just consequentialist malarkey. Deceiving me with the intent of helping me (are you really?!) is still Wrong.
More to the point though, these are edge cases, and shouldn't distract us from the main event. If 1 or 2 or 5 percent of the time there's some plausible justification, and 95%+ it's just pure adversarial deception i.e. I am lying to you to help myself and/or harm you... that's what we should focus on.
I'm surprised no one is _denying_ that Stage 4 Social is heavy on deception. I felt sure someone would insist I was just wrong about that, and instead I'm getting justifications?? Weird. Not compelling.
You can be either honest or deceptive at any stage. Stage 4 is not intrinsically more likely to cause you to be deceptive than any other stage.
Less so, on the whole, because it is principled, in a way that stage 3 isn’t. But, nothing stops you from adopting wrong principles, nor from violating your principles, so this doesn’t guarantee anything. And I don’t know whether there’s any empirical data on whether people actually are more honest at stage 4 or 3.
Here's a concrete example: when I once saw a psychologist, he had me sign a bunch of intake documents. One of them laid out the protocol for if we happen to run into each other in public. He would pretend not to know me unless I initiated contact, and after that would not mention that he knew me as a client unless I said it first.
We were both professionals in the same small city, and there was a nonzero chance we'd run into each other at a social event where higher-ups in my organization were also present. Although it never came up, I was happy to have this option.
I think a lot of justifiable non-honesty happens because of situations like this, where somebody has a professional or fiduciary obligation to a third party. Perhaps defense attorneys are the most extreme example.
My own experience has been that 95% vs. 5% is not accurate, and the majority of non-honesty that's been directed at me has not harmed me. Some has, of course.
Here's another thought: What is your estimate of the average stage of your coworkers when you didn't have to mask vs now when you have to? Has it gone up or down, i.e. has your environment become more or less professional?
Yes, but I think there is a meaningful tradeoff with spontaneous romance and intoxication, which may be one of the most difficult things to give up. The fruit becomes different, and no cook can make chicken satay, or spicy mango jam, or even chocolate almonds taste like oreos.
Yes, that’s true! Fortunately, there is another stage after 4…
According to my stage theory index page (https://meaningness.com/adult-stages-index), there’s an upcoming post titled “The romance of the outlaw—and the lover, and the scientist”:
"it is about the nostalgia one feels for stage 3 when at stage 4: the sense of emotional connection, which stage 4 constricts excessively. It’s about how you can use that nostalgia to move on to stage 5, which offers intimacy beyond that available at any other stage."
If I were writing the piece on my platform, I might have a subtitle or sentence like "What does it take to create a partnership where you can do comprehensive budget planning together and also be surprised by the occasional blissful blowjob while playing video games. Is it even possible?"
This is a great article. Since I read about your description of stage theory I also figured that people have different aspects of their personalities(?) at different stages, but I wasn't sure how it worked. I thought it was closer to skill issues than what you describe but did suspect that it went deeper. This explains some of that.
My sense (totally observing from the outside) is that competitive sports are really valuable developmentally for both of these types of people. My model is football but I think it's true of most American sports, and probably European football too.
There's a lot of objective reality in sports. You ultimately can't fake anything. If you want to win you have to engage with technique, think strategically about the other team, study tape, be systematic about training and nutrition. Good for people not inclined to be "stage 4" about systems and problem-solving.
On the relational side, you have to be able to relate to your teammates, in situations where everyone has intense positive and negative emotions. You also have to deal with those emotions in yourself. You also have to model the social dynamics on the other team and perhaps exploit them. And there are clear norms of "professionalism" which usually gets called "sportsmanship" or summarized in slogans like "do your job".
There's a whole giant institutional infrastructure of coaches and athletic programs that actually takes teaching these skills pretty seriously. Unfortunately, you need some athletic ability to be able to take part, so a lot of people get frozen out.
There aren't many opportunities to take up a new team sport as an adult. STEM dorks getting into an athletic activity late in life traditionally go for solo activities like climbing, running, cycling, presumably emotionally safer. Jiu jitsu used to be good for this, but with the popularity of MMA + high school wrestlers who realized they could continue grappling, it's much less welcoming to total beginners than it used to be.
This is really interesting—I hadn't thought of this, and it makes complete sense!
The nearest analog I'd considered was pointed out by Kegan, that the military also trains you in social systematicity; and for many people, that's the best route into stage 4.
I have a little martial arts background (and my spouse much more), and that also can work. But I hadn't though of team sports in the same category; and that does make good sense!
It's interesting you say there's a lot of objective reality in sports, I always thought they were just a bunch of rules that somebody else made up. Requiring significant suspension of disbelief to participate.
They are just a bunch of rules that somebody else made up, but they are what they are and you don’t get to socially maneuver your way out of them. It’s the difference between chess and high school debate.
I always tried to socially maneuver my way out of them by just not participating. I was like look guys, the brown leather ball doesn't mean anything, some evil magician has cast a spell on you and now you think this game matters when really it does not. But nobody likes Prometheus so I got a D in gym class. Fortunately gym class grades have roughly the same significance as a brown leather ball.
Idk what system that puts me at, probably 2.
Sounds like an immature "3.5", maybe. Not fully within the communal frame, but still letting it live rent free in your head.
When you're waiting for the snap in front of a defensive lineman who is larger and faster than you, it is a profound experience of the objective reality of the laws of physics.
This is true, which is why I'd always just let the big guy have the ball without a fuss, since he seemed to care an awful lot about it for some reason, while I saw it as a dirty stinky object that everybody's hands had touched and probably hadn't been washed ever. Maybe it's a matter of taste!
This post matches well with what I've been reading in Halberstam's "War in a time of peace". His descriptions of the social, bureaucratic, and political competence of important people, and what that looks like when it is and is not present, is instructive. These people are operating at an entirely different level (possibly stage 5, possibly really good at stage 4) than most of us can imagine even in the abstract.
I suspect that one of the ways that certain groups or social classes (e.g. 'Boston Brahmins') maintain their status is by 'leveling up' the development of their children in these domains at an early age. I've always had this vague feeling that 'smart people from lower social classes' (like me) were missing something important, and this post captures it well.
Whoa, this is crazy. So relevant to what I’m working on now and provides accurate hindsight for what went wrong for me when I had authority issues when working as a software engineer.
The view from stage 3 felt like fear, righteous anger, and frustration, while stage 4 (ostensibly) is feeling like curiosity, clarity, and acceptance.
The upgrade cannot be understated, and I think stage 4 STEM thinkers have an advantage in teaching stage 4 relational dynamics to other stage 4 STEMers (I am obviously biased).
Thanks for your thinking, as always really valuable!
I have been experimenting with taking a "professional attitude towards life" and wrote a short post about what that feels like for me: https://psychophil.substack.com/p/a-professional-attidude-towards-life
I like that a lot! (And restacked it.)
appreciate it! :)
I think a big thing putting me off workplace social skills is many senior managers I've known, with good social skills, seem really stupid. Like they don't really know how to engage with ideas properly (you could say systematically) and they bullshit a lot. Some are also terrible at managment and strategy because they are chaotic. But I did find your description of sales people useful because it helped me see the systematicity of what they are doing, and how I don't have that.
It also helps to look at the people below me intellectually - often they seem weirdly incapable of treating ideas as objects, and they just have emotional reactions about them. They don't understand that there are intellectual systems within which ideas sit, and you can take different viewpoints depending on purpose and strength of evidence etc. They don't understand that there are continuums of views with gradations in between - instead they just pick an extreme to identify with and hate the opposite. They're not able to construct clear reasoning and explain what it's rooted it. So this is all a useful analogy for what I'm likely doing with relationships.
Also I agree with the other commenter that stage 4 relationships sounds manipulative, and like I can't be myself. I feel that being there would be giving up my values and becoming an empty manipulator, lost to a bullshit corporate purpose.
Also at least superficially "become more systematic" doesn't feel like what I need to become better in personal relationships and could lead to a decreasing ability to connect. It's almost the opposite - I need to become more intuitive, more free flowing, less in my head.
Thanks, this is great! I think you've understood this clearly.
> becoming an empty manipulator, lost to a bullshit corporate purpose.
Well... this is true in a bullshit corporate environment. Not all workplaces are like that. And, alternatively, there are many other sorts of social structures one can develop soft-domain systematicity in.
One of them is a serious intimate relationship. A quote about that from Kegan's *In Over Our Heads*:
> Like respectful and enlightened anthropologists, they regularly visit, and deeply appreciate, the other's "culture of mind." At their best, they suspend the tendency to evaluate the other's "culture" through the lens of their own, and seek rather to discover the terms by which the other is shaping meaning or creating value. Not only does each seem to benefit from frequent "travel" to the other's "culture," but the one who is being "visited" also seems to appreciate the experience of having the other come in with a non-imperial stance to see how reality is being constructed.
Thanks for that quote, that sounds like a nice relationship ideal.
Yes, not all workplaces. Maybe a difficulty is that I work in consulting, and small consultancy firms thrive on ability to win business via networking. This selects for leaders I don't trust intellectually, and a style of work which can tend towards bullshit (though not always). When I was working in EA it was different, I trusted the strategy and could see clearly how it was valuable. Perhaps it's worth finding the few leaders who have both aspects.
Is your thesis that maintaining successful interpersonal relationships of any sort necessarily requires systematicity (stage 4)? If so, this seems dubious to me. I buy that professionalism requires this, being an essential feature of rational modernity, but informal relationships, particularly romantic, are both much older and much more nebulous.
Some people seem naturally predisposed to intuitively grasp the rules of the game, so to speak, and become better at it through practice without any sort of painful transition that needs to be consciously triggered. I suppose one can say that this means that they unconsciously acquire systematization abilities, but I doubt that this matches their internal experience. Or is the point rather that nerds who aren't naturals in that way have to undergo a transition due to having no alternatives?
> Is your thesis that maintaining successful interpersonal relationships of any sort necessarily requires systematicity (stage 4)?
No; as the post said, "Stage 3 may work well in a romantic relationship, so long as both people are at that stage in all domains."
But, nerds may have a problem: "It may be dysfunctional for someone who is at stage 4 in hard domains, particularly when relating to someone who is at stage 3 overall."
If: "You can’t help judging their way of being from your partially stage 4 point of view."
This is common, based on conversations with numerous nerds over several decades.
Yep, sorry, looks like I somehow skipped over that part, no objections there. It does seem unlikely though that anybody can sufficiently "understand the whole structure of complex social systems", so probably moving beyond stage 4 is necessary to overcome that "uncanny valley".
"I have only limited experience of working with enterprise salespeople. I would appreciate feedback on the accuracy or errors in this section from them, if any read it."
Having been an IT Analyst at Gartner for 17+ years, and then a design thinker at IBM for 4+ years, I've interacted with enterprise salespeople extensively, both in critiquing them as an analyst and training them as a design thinker.
IME your description of enterprise salespeople is solid. I'd only add the following, potentially illuminating, nuances. Here I will be focused on the most complex, risk-your-business, enterprise software for the Fortune 500, where the contract size is in the millions, eg sales of ERP software such as SAP and Oracle Financials.
First on the issue of putting actual engineers in front of customers:
"Inconveniently, technical people in the customer company often want to know what the product actually does (and doesn’t do; and probably how). Generally, eventually, salespeople have to bring their company’s engineers with them on a customer company visit. This is awkward and risky for everyone involved."
IME this rarely happens BEFORE the contract is signed. ERP vendors have an entire cadre of "sales-y" engineers, sometimes titled solutions engineers or solutions consultants. They are hybrids. The great ones are very persuasive, even inspiring, about the capabilities of the software, so they can really help sell. But they also understand the architecture of the software pretty deeply, so they can handle almost all of the questions that the customer's IT folks may have. If they can't answer a question, they meet with the vendor's internal engineers and then get back to the IT folks with the answer. At smaller vendors selling less expensive software, it's more common to let the actual internal engineers building the software talk with customer IT folks before the sale.
Second, this gets to the superpower of great salespeople: getting a customer to "sign on the line that is dotted". Lot's of people in technology circles can be persuasive, can help convince a customer that they need a product. I could do it. This is less than half the battle. There's an immense chasm between getting an ERP customer near the brink of signing, and actually closing the sale. This is where the great salespeople distinguish themselves: cajoling a customer to take the immense risk to close the deal. This is where their people skills, their ability to manipulate the emotions of the buyer, really come into play. It has so little to do with the actual ERP software that such salespeople don't really need to be very technical. They're selling a strategic partnership more than a complex software system.
Third, thinking about the hybrid that is an enterprise sales executive reminded me of an even better example of a hybrid with hard and soft skills: strategic consultants, a la McKinsey et el. Unlike enterprise salespeople who may have never actually acquired engineering skills, junior consultants have to master actual hard skills regarding implementing and transforming business processes. But to make partner, they need to shift to mastering soft people skills. Come to think of it, an even better example might be law firm partners! (I was a litigation attorney for a few years as well.) Junior associates acquire deep hard skills in "engineering" litigation cases, but only associates who develop the soft skills required for "rain making" become partners.
Hope this is helpful feedback. Thanks for the food for thought!
Thank you! Helpful, yes. Glad to have confirmation!
If you have time, I'd be curious to hear your thoughts on https://scpantera.substack.com/p/the-skill-issue-issue both because it's also a bunch of thoughts on the interplay between talents and passions (and how they manifest) and because it devolves into other thoughts on how those relate to tensions wrt "meaning".
Thanks, I read it! I didn't seem to have anything to say in response, though, sorry!
I just realized my antagonism toward stage three traits is a clue that I'm at stage two. I'm interested in creating some form of inventory for myself. When I think back to times when I felt confused and repulsed by another person's behavior or words, a clear picture emerges. "How the hell could you be interested in this stage three or four thing you're talking about?"
The key is "interested", a stage two word. I prefer to identify with my interests ("interested-in" and "self-interest"), I relate to others on the basis of what they are interested-in and an enlightened mutual self-interest.
This blog post has inspired in me, for the first time, an interest in receiving coaching.
Unfortunately, most therapists and coaches specialize in specific forms of distress and setback. In his song "In Old Mexico", Tom Lehrer coined the term "diseases of the rich" which applies here. There's a huge market for treating stably-employed depressed careerists. Whereas, my specific condition leads to a feast-and-famine pattern in which I pull down six figures for a while, and then I'm un- or under-employed, as I am now.
"a clue that I'm at stage two"
I think that's unlikely, from what I know of you, although not impossible. Also worth noting that stage theory is just a model, and doesn't seem to fit all people, and probably for many people doesn't fit some aspects of life.
"How the hell could you be interested in this stage three or four thing you're talking about?"
Well, interests are idiosyncratic. Being at stage four doesn't mean you find *everything* from stage four interesting, or even many things. (Being at stage five means you do find *everything* potentially interesting, but that's a whole 'nother pod of squid.)
"I relate to others on the basis of what they are interested-in"
That's not confined to stage two! It's common across stages.
"enlightened mutual self-interest"
That sounds four-ish to me. It could be two-ish without the "enlightened," and if it's purely transient. But you are capable of sustaining interests-in long-term, which stage two isn't.
"I pull down six figures for a while, and then I'm un- or under-employed, as I am now."
I am sorry to hear this is still the case!
Does it seem that this pattern results from interpersonal conflicts at work? That could suggest residual two-ishness, I suppose; or perhaps more likely residual three-ishness.
"times when I felt confused and repulsed by another person's behavior or words"
This might seem to fit the three-ish pattern I described of finding it difficult to be-with other people's different feelings and opinions.
At the same time, I suspect that you are feeling a repulsion from stage-three-ishness itself. Once you've recognized the limitations of a stage, it can come to seem loathesome in retrospect as you look back at it. That's part of what drives you through a transition.
Stage three behavior comes to seem incredibly tiresome once you've passed beyond it. People getting upset about nothing; people being unable to stick to plans, procedures, principles, and promises; histrionic acting-out of imaginary emotions; group-think and mindless conformity; etc. ad nauseam. I think I've heard you speaking negatively about these patterns.
Okay, that's all very interesting. I consider myself to excel at being with other people’s feelings and opinions, taking them as valid but distinct from my own. But consider the list of stage 3 capacities you provided, which implies that if we have not reached the following, we have not reached stage 3, and are therefore at 2 in some domains:
- Feel emotions in one's body (I don't perform this mystical exotic stunt, but that never causes any problems)
- Empathize reliably and accurately, not guess at them conceptually (I guess at them conceptually, and this is highly accurate and satisfactory)
- See myself in an interaction as another person sees me (I'm never sure, but I can guess at this conceptually, and this is also satisfactory)
- Anticipate how they would feel in response to different things one might say or do—and *feel* that (I never *feel* that, and this never causes any problems)
- Understand what your social group feels about you collectively, how they see you fitting in (or not), and why? (I have always believed such intuitions to be false, an illusion which is best disregarded and evidence should be sought in its place. And yet I have experienced conspicuous success in social groups.)
As for interpersonal conflict in the workplace, I never, ever have that. Doing so would usually result from taking a greater-than-absolutely-necessary interest in workplace projects, which I don't wish to do. I strive to avoid drawing attention to myself in workplaces, by being politely congenial and saying little, and keeping my distance.
I suspect co-workers actually wish that I would express disagreement more often, because it would be an expression of interest. But if the project is going in a direction I believe is wrong, I will offer only the mildest objection, because it puts me at risk, and it's not my problem. I have exactly one, and only one, project in the workplace: to stay employed, so that I don't financially burden my social groups.
My feeling of confusion and repulsion was with a co-worker who mentioned having looked up a bunch of things related to our project in his off-hours, when, in my opinion, he didn't have to. I felt like he was and wrecking the grade curve. However, I would never, ever let those feelings show on my face. I'm told I can be good at being unreadable.
> if we have not reached the following, we have not reached stage 3, and are therefore at 2
Well, to be a bit pedantic, I said these are a prerequisite for moving beyond 3; they are indications of having *completed* the work of that stage.
It is plausible here that the model just doesn't fit you well. However, I'll risk pointing out some possibilities. (This is a risk inasmuch as I am not qualified to do this, and don't know you well enough to do it even if I was, so whatever I say may be false and potentially misleading, or even potentially offensive.)
It sounds to me like you are pretty consistently thinking and acting at stage 4 (and beyond) in the social domain. This is reflected in your ability to nucleate and coordinate exciting, enduring new social groups, and complex social events with novel social norms. That's typically a >4 capability.
But, you say you aren't feeling it. So perhaps you actually are at <3 in the emotional domain? This would be quite unusual (according to theory). It might be the pattern associated with Asperger's/ASD, though. Or, just idiosyncratic to you?
Alternatively, it seems possible that you *are* feeling it, but haven't identified the thing typically described as "feeling other people's emotions" as that. Perhaps you actively resist describing it that way because it sounds like it would have to involve some sort of extra-physical ESP. Which, of course, it doesn't. Presumably the actual mechanism involves recognizing other people's body language, and processing their talk, in a particular way below the level of explicit conceptual awareness. And then the "feeling it" is a non-conceptual process that involves subtle sensations you may be overlooking. Becoming aware of these can be useful as an alternative source of information about social interactions, and your own psychology.
I will tentatively suggest two possible directions, that you might find intriguing, that stage theory might recommend.
First, you might just be curious about what "feeling your emotions" could be, and see whether you can learn this mystical trick. There's simple methods for doing this that take some work, but are apparently reasonably reliable in producing the result.
Second, I'm hearing a quite sharp distinction between "things I'm interested in" and "things I am not interested in." Everyone is more interested in some things than others, but for most people it's a nebulous gradient rather than a binary. The distinction gets increasingly blurry as you go beyond stage 4 (which I believe you already have done in some domains). At stage 5, you are at least somewhat interested in absolutely everything, because you care-for absolutely everything (to some degree). So you might consider relaxing your rejection of some topics as absolutely uninteresting.
(Except golf, of course. Golf is objectively, absolutely uninteresting.)
This is veering off topic, but this snippet just seemed incredibly unexpected and, if it's true, made me see a bit more what you're getting at with your whole thing:
"Junior developers often program by combining snippets of code they find on the web, or that they have learned and can recall. They may be able to create variants of these, adapting them to new uses. They may be able to write small new functions from scratch, by analogy with ones they’ve seen before. However, they lack fundamental understanding of how software works, or even *what it is*. They can’t reason accurately about the relationship between a program’s text and its runtime execution."
There are people who program computers for a living, manage to actually make a living, and are like that‽
I am not a programmer, but I studied physics in the same department as computer scientists, and I don't see how somebody in that mindset could survive three years of university without going insane. Programming can sometimes be an incredibly painful process even if you know exactly what you're doing, and without the sense of accomplishment of solving problems on your own, I can only imagine it bringing you suffering.
What happens to these people? The association with "junior" makes it sound like this is something you can learn on the job -- is that the case? If so, how, when an actual education couldn't accomplish that? If not, then that sounds... sad :(
I now wonder if I have to recontextualize things I've read online and thought hyperbolic, such as "99% of programming is looking things up on Stack Overflow" or "an LLM is like a junior developer". Terence Tao said something like this with "mediocre graduate student" (he then clarified it, see https://mathstodon.xyz/@tao/113145334235914812). But who else than Terence Tao should have access to students that know what they're doing?
The failure mode of undergrads (which is the closest thing to "junior developer" in my experience) I've seen is that they run into problems they don't know how to solve at all, or they don't find simple ways to solve a problem, press on with an obvious but too complicated approach, and get stuck in a mess that is too big to manage, but not that *they are fundamentally always running on the empirical method*.
I feel like maybe the development you are describing here actually happened for most people I know in the teenage years? I have another independent reason to think that: my sister is a scout leader and had to learn a lot of disparate stuff for the qualifying exam. The scout movement actually sounds a lot like your "fully meta-rational organization" (https://metarationality.com/meta-rational-workplace), since it requires skills from accounting to first aid, from law to knowing what to do when a storm comes in the wilderness. Though there is a hierarchy based on age, it's not quite the org-chart kind, and in any case terminates really early. People can and regularly do manage all of this before even reaching legal adulthood. (All of this is outside observation only, so of course take it with a grain of salt. For context: This is all in Europe; I don't know if things work the same way in the US.)
One part of the exams concerns child development and the relationship of children to rules, and I remember seeing a textbook with the example rule "you must change shoes when entering the clubhouse". It roughly said that initially, children will constantly try to break rules when they don't feel like following them (so you have to be an authority figure), then they often go through a phase where they follow the rules religiously and will protest if anybody breaks them for any reason (so you have to be careful not to), but eventually they get to a stage where they understand that the rules are there for a reason and that the reason for the rules also determines their range of validity (so when there's an emergency and your shoes aren't dirty from the outside, you don't have to slow down to change them). That sounds a lot like your 3->4->5 transition in this particular domain, but it's done somewhere around age 15.
Do I have this remotely correct, or is there something beyond this that you're trying to point towards?
"There are people who program computers for a living, manage to actually make a living, and are like that‽"
Yes. This is common. Maybe the majority of people employed as programmers.
"I don't see how somebody in that mindset could survive three years of university without going insane."
Many are self-taught, or took one or two introductory courses in high school and/or while doing a university degree in some other subject. However, it’s also possible to complete a university science degree, even at a reputable school, without actually ever understanding how computers work. Sad!
"I feel like maybe the development you are describing here actually happened for most people I know in the teenage years?"
It’s reasonably common to transition to stage four in the mid-teen years. Empirically, only a minority of adults—maybe 20%—ever reach stage 4 fully, but among those who do, it’s likely to be by the early 20s at the latest.
Since you did a physics degree, in high school you probably were mostly interacting with similar people, who would indeed have become systematic in the “hard domains” before graduating. Such people do tend to lag in the soft domains, but not necessarily.
"initially, children will constantly try to break rules when they don't feel like following them, then they often go through a phase where they follow the rules religiously and will protest if anybody breaks them for any reason, but eventually they get to a stage where they understand that the rules are there for a reason and that the reason for the rules also determines their range of validity. That sounds a lot like your 3->4->5 transition in this particular domain, but it's done somewhere around age 15."
This lines up well with 2→3→4. Stage 2 is self-interested, and considers other people’s concerns only when they are obstacles or resources for getting what one wants for oneself.
Would there be a way for stage 5 to apply to that situation? Ideally illustrated for this particular rule, and barring that, for relating to rules in general?
(Asking because I can see how stage 2 figures there, but not really how the end stage is 4. Shouldn't that be the stage where all exceptions should be codified, etc.?)
Well, stage 4 reasoning is principled, rational, and systematic. So "the rules are there for a reason and that the reason for the rules also determines their range of validity" is a great summary of ethics at stage 4.
Quoting myself elsewhere (https://vividness.live/emptiness-form-and-dzogchen-ethics#beyond):
"Stage 5 comes into its own when no ethical system has an adequate answer, yet action is required. Its improvisation follows no rules, but is responsive to the specifics of the situation. Typically it coordinates ethical considerations taken from multiple, incommensurable stage 4 systems, plus stage 3 communities and stage 2 interests."
I'm not sure how that would apply to changing shoes :)
On second thought, leaving the shoes by, perhaps stage 5 rather applies to things like "found the scouting movement and establish its culture"...?
Yes, excellent! Although it doesn’t have to be so grand. But it’s in system-creation and leadership that stage 5 becomes particularly significant.
In most situations, everyday concrete common sense (“mere reasonableness,” in the language of Meta-rationality: https://metarationality.com/reasonableness) works fine, so we go with that. In atypical situations, it breaks down. Then systematic rationality is usually valuable, and usually suffices. In rare, anomalous situations, rationality breaks down, and “post-formal thought” a/k/a “meta-rationality” may be necessary.
In the shoes example, it’s hard to imagine an anomaly that would cause stage 4 reasoning to fail. Maybe something involving space aliens.
Hmh, I understand, but can't say that this is satisfying :/ With every such comment you induce more curiosity about what one could do with that magic, but there seems to be a curse that prevents examples from appearing. On this particular page you mention an example you worked out in 2015 that then became too hot to handle -- perhaps it is a bit cooler now?
Hmm. Maybe the closest thing I've written is in "The Cofounders." You might start reading at stage 4.8: https://meaningness.com/cofounders-in-relationship#four.8
Or, if that doesn't make sense, work backward to earlier substages until they stop sounding like woo and you can see how they're a step beyond rationality.
I have low confidence in my understanding of the various stages, but my impression of the stages of this shoe rule ("you must change shoes when entering the clubhouse") is roughly as follows:
1) Reflexive distaste for shoes
2) Changing shoes is annoying and I don't want to
3) If I don't change shoes the teacher will be mad so it's bad
4) Changing shoes keeps places cleaner so it's good to change your shoes
5) Whether changing shoes is good depends on existing practices and cultures of a place, and "shoes on" and "shoes off" locations and households all have their place. A "dojo" feels dirtied by shoes, but a "gym" feels dirtied by unshod feet.
Oh, Terry Tao has a post about learning math that explicitly references Kohlberg’s stages of development of moral reasoning. (Kohlberg was a major figure in adult developmental stage theory; his stage numbering is a bit different than the one I was using here.)
Tao’s stages correspond to 3, 4, and 5 in the scheme I use: https://terrytao.wordpress.com/career-advice/theres-more-to-mathematics-than-rigour-and-proofs/
Glad you liked that post :-) Always wanted to share it with you. I have another one about "3 tribes of programmers" https://josephg.com/blog/3-tribes/ which isn't explicitly hierarchical and doesn't map as cleanly to Kegan's stages but at least the ordering on the 3-4-5 axis should be clear. It also fits this post and I think provides a complementary, more-domain-heavy lens in order to understand programmers. My guess is that there are a even more typologies out there where these stages have been unknowingly rediscovered in some context. Which gives me confidence in the robustness of the stages concept.
Then I would love to see stages 3, 4, 5 crossed with other things, for example, how do the stages interact with conflict vs. mistake theory, how are jungian archetypes different at different stages and so on, it is an unending list. I think it could be helpful to see the stages in action in terms of other systems. Generally seeing a thing in action, say someone operating at a level just above mine, preferably repeatedly and with slight variations, really makes me grok that thing, and is in my opinion a much better way to understand something than e.g. lectures.
Another thing is this dilemma: How do I relate to a person at a lower stage when I have neither higher standing nor am willing to voluntarily lower my stage. I can't make them see my point of view because it would take years for them to develop, they are probably actively put off or even hostile to my point of view because they interpret it as a stage below them. I also don't want to pull the wool over their eyes and use my knowledge against? them, even if the outcome would be positive for all involved, and I probably couldn't even accomplish this consistently (This echoes the moral concerns other commentators also had). I'm kind of out of approaches here.
Next I have to admit that I am slightly skeptical that one can be relationally at stage 4, but not cognitively. Maybe this is hard for me to grok, since I guess I am further along cognitively, but when you write things like these:
> What are the motivations of relevant individuals, according to what incentives? (Knowing this is key to knowing how to persuade them.) Who has a personal like or dislike of who, and why? (You need to avoid getting pulled into personal vendettas that are irrelevant to your aims, but you might be able to leverage them for support.) Who operates at which developmental stage in which domains? (You have to talk to people at different stages quite differently. Do you present a case in terms of personal relationships, or structural ones?)
then I have difficulty to accept that someone can operate in this way without at least cognitive stage 4 support.
This made be think of my last question: What would stage 4.5 be like for someone who is further along in the social domain?
Happy to have any misconceptions showing through corrected :-)
" How do I relate to a person at a lower stage when I have neither higher standing nor am willing to voluntarily lower my stage. "
Yes, this is really difficult. I guess from a stage 5 pov, one tries to meet them where they are at, while supporting their development forward when possible and appropriate, and allowing space around their limitations.
"What would stage 4.5 be like for someone who is further along in the social domain?"
Maybe this: https://meaningness.com/cofounders-in-relationship#four.5
Back in the 1990s I sold American computer software and hardware in Japan.
Usually it was end-user products for scientists and engineers, but in one instance, we were trying to make a major sale of an infrastructure layer of software to a major Japanese electronics firm.
Our company was very active in the IEEE subcommittee tasked with developing a protocol for PC-based test and measurement devices to be used in factory automation (FA). The protocol defined everything down to the lowest level: on/off signals of 1s and 0s, voltage heights, the duration of signals in milliseconds, allowable lag times, everything!
Of course I wasn’t involved in the nitty-gritty details, but I personally knew the engineers who were involved, and they gave us regular presentations detailing the current state of progress.
As the final details of the IEEE protocol were being hammered out, our software developers had already built the set of software packages necessary to implement the physical layer, then the communication layer, up to the command layer.
It was at this point that the Japanese electronics firm first contacted us in the Tokyo office about purchasing this set to enable them to also start building the physical devices that used the new protocol.
The purchase price, for this one package, would be somewhere on the order of about a quarter million USD.
We were used to a sales process of days or weeks between initial contact and purchase order, but this would be a multi-month process. In the end, it took 2 years!
First mutual visits by salespeople from both sides, then engineer exchanges mediated by the Tokyo office engineers. Eventually we flew in some of the engineers on the IEEE subcommittee to personally explain a lot of the details to their people.
In the end our CEO came to Japan to meet his counterparts, I think at the Bucho level, and this clinched the deal. We even had a dinner together in one of those well-hidden, upscale Tokyo restaurants!
As a startup company based on PC technology, our biggest hurdle in the beginning was getting them, a well-established company with a legacy going back to pre-war Japan, to understand that although very young, we were a serious entity capable of providing what they needed.
That obstacle was overcome when we recommended them talking to one of their own engineers. This engineer was a huge fan of our flagship software product, and regularly attended our monthly user group meetings at our Tokyo office. We saw and talked with him regularly over a couple of years. He was a real “evangelist” as we used to say back then.
I’m pretty certain that his talking to them about his interactions with us convinced them we were an honest and trustworthy company.
I hope this has contributed to the conversation. It was the one time I was involved with an “enterprise-level” software sale that needed both sales savvy and technical skill to succeed.
And a bit of luck, as usual!
Thanks! This was nostalgic for me... I had a very similar experience also in the late '90s. The Japanese company was (I learned) unusually easy to work with, because they did understand that small American software companies could do surprising things. But still it was an alien culture, and they cut me a lot of slack for being an uncooth foreigner, AND an engineer, which I appreciated!
Or you can just, you know, accept that you won't be able to find love. Practicing meditation makes that level of acceptance easier.
This seems very compelling, but I find myself viscerally rejecting it. I'm one of those Asperger's software engineer types, more or less exactly who you're describing (except married). Based on your five questions I probably don't even meet stage 3 in the social domain.
The problem is that the way you describe stage 4 in the social domain sounds dishonest and manipulative. It's telling that you uses Salespeople as an example, because Salespeople are... dishonest and manipulative! I don't deny that navigating the social world in this way is effective, but it's also Wrong, and that's a huge barrier. It's easy to manipulate machines systematically because there's no moral dimension. But in the social realm morality is infused into every interaction and every choice. I don't want to go to work like it's a game of Diplomacy, I want to be myself. I used to be able to do that, but it feels like the world has changed.
Thanks, this was interesting!
> It's telling that you uses Salespeople as an example, because Salespeople are... dishonest and manipulative!
Sometimes some are. But sometimes they also can be honest and helpful. That's often the most effective way to sell things, especially when the stuff you sell is actually good.
When it's not so good, it's tempting to be tactical; and that can slide into dishonesty, and can be immoral.
This is not different for software developers! Most software products are mediocre, and many are even harmful. The people who build them rationalize their involvement with "Well, it's not my decision, it's management's fault, I'm just doing my job, I have to make money somehow. I'd rather work at a place that makes genuinely good, high quality software that helps many people, but it's hard to find jobs like that!"
I think salespeople think the same way. The same words fit exactly!
> in the social realm morality is infused into every interaction and every choice. I don't want to go to work like it's a game of Diplomacy, I want to be myself.
I hope this doesn't sound patronizing, and what I say may be inaccurate, but fwiw:
"Morality is infused into every interaction" is a stage 3 (mis)perception. Stage 4 doesn't see things that way. That doesn't make stage 4 immoral (it's arguably *more* ethical than stage 3: https://vividness.live/developing-ethical-social-and-cognitive-competence). It means that most specific interactions are morally neutral. The moral considerations apply at a higher, systemic level. For example: is the company I'm working for making high-quality, helpful products?
> I want to be myself. I used to be able to do that, but it feels like the world has changed.
Stage transitions are defined as building a new sort of self. I wonder whether it is you that has changed? So you are newly noticing that the world is demanding that you be a different sort of thing? And perhaps you are reluctantly coming to understand what that would mean?
Well no I mean more literally. At the first two companies I worked for (spanning 2005 to 2019) I could be myself, aka Not Mask. My personality quirks were tolerated at least and accepted at best. Since then I haven't found any similar environments and I have to Mask intensely or be shunned.
I don't buy the claim that interactions are morally neutral. If I lie to you to manipulate you into doing what I want, that's bad! And I see the neurotypicals around me lying to me, and each other, _constantly_. I would prefer not to participate in that.
Lastly I'll note that every sales person I've known (quite a few) has been as I described: dishonest and manipulative. Even the ones I counted as friends! They lied to customers, to coworkers, to management, to friends & lovers... it's their way of life, best as I can tell. I assume that's not what you're advocating for though, so I'm trying to understand better what you're getting at.
In some cases, it can be good for you to be able to truthfully say that you don't know a certain fact (for example: someone made a mistake at work which creates costly and pointless obligations for you, but only if you know about it). In such cases, someone lying to you or withholding information related to that fact, is definitely helping you.
More common are blurry situations, where someone's choice to deceive you might both help and harm you in different ways while benefiting them. But it could still be a net positive for you.
Still more confusing are situations where someone may lie to you with the expectation that you will understand they are lying. Or situations where someone's speech is concerned with creating or avoiding "common knowledge" to influence the broader situation in a positive direction.
This is all stressful and unpleasant, but they are real phenomena where accurately conveying true information may be the wrong choice. (Of course sometimes people do just lie for morally wrong reasons, too, sometimes with these more complex possibilities as an excuse.)
Ehhhhh... I'm trying to give this line of reasoning a fair shake but...
It's just consequentialist malarkey. Deceiving me with the intent of helping me (are you really?!) is still Wrong.
More to the point though, these are edge cases, and shouldn't distract us from the main event. If 1 or 2 or 5 percent of the time there's some plausible justification, and 95%+ it's just pure adversarial deception i.e. I am lying to you to help myself and/or harm you... that's what we should focus on.
I'm surprised no one is _denying_ that Stage 4 Social is heavy on deception. I felt sure someone would insist I was just wrong about that, and instead I'm getting justifications?? Weird. Not compelling.
Oh! I will deny that :)
You can be either honest or deceptive at any stage. Stage 4 is not intrinsically more likely to cause you to be deceptive than any other stage.
Less so, on the whole, because it is principled, in a way that stage 3 isn’t. But, nothing stops you from adopting wrong principles, nor from violating your principles, so this doesn’t guarantee anything. And I don’t know whether there’s any empirical data on whether people actually are more honest at stage 4 or 3.
Here's a concrete example: when I once saw a psychologist, he had me sign a bunch of intake documents. One of them laid out the protocol for if we happen to run into each other in public. He would pretend not to know me unless I initiated contact, and after that would not mention that he knew me as a client unless I said it first.
We were both professionals in the same small city, and there was a nonzero chance we'd run into each other at a social event where higher-ups in my organization were also present. Although it never came up, I was happy to have this option.
I think a lot of justifiable non-honesty happens because of situations like this, where somebody has a professional or fiduciary obligation to a third party. Perhaps defense attorneys are the most extreme example.
My own experience has been that 95% vs. 5% is not accurate, and the majority of non-honesty that's been directed at me has not harmed me. Some has, of course.
Here's another thought: What is your estimate of the average stage of your coworkers when you didn't have to mask vs now when you have to? Has it gone up or down, i.e. has your environment become more or less professional?
> And no less loving!
Yes, but I think there is a meaningful tradeoff with spontaneous romance and intoxication, which may be one of the most difficult things to give up. The fruit becomes different, and no cook can make chicken satay, or spicy mango jam, or even chocolate almonds taste like oreos.
Yes, that’s true! Fortunately, there is another stage after 4…
According to my stage theory index page (https://meaningness.com/adult-stages-index), there’s an upcoming post titled “The romance of the outlaw—and the lover, and the scientist”:
"it is about the nostalgia one feels for stage 3 when at stage 4: the sense of emotional connection, which stage 4 constricts excessively. It’s about how you can use that nostalgia to move on to stage 5, which offers intimacy beyond that available at any other stage."
If I were writing the piece on my platform, I might have a subtitle or sentence like "What does it take to create a partnership where you can do comprehensive budget planning together and also be surprised by the occasional blissful blowjob while playing video games. Is it even possible?"
Wonderful, yes, exactly!
This is a great article. Since I read about your description of stage theory I also figured that people have different aspects of their personalities(?) at different stages, but I wasn't sure how it worked. I thought it was closer to skill issues than what you describe but did suspect that it went deeper. This explains some of that.