8 ms·

The Structure of a Worldview

87 points by jger15 2y ago

bargainbot3k 2y ago
Yeah I actually read just about all of this. It’s amusing to me because the language used to express banal ideas is so over the top but the subject matter borders on pseudoscience. “Cultish academia”? Not sure. I’m still trying to determine if this is an elaborate troll.
- robertlagrant 2y ago
  > the subject matter borders on pseudoscience The subject matter being "fundamental worldviews"? How is that pseudoscience?
  - card_zero 2y ago
    The "Big Five personality traits" is apparently scientific and meaningful, while the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator is pseudoscientific nonsense that people used post to their Myspace.
    - corimaith 2y ago
      Ironically this is exactly what the article points out in the trait that primarily sees frameworks as the result of power struggles as opposed to a meaningful progression to the truth.
      - card_zero 2y ago
        I suppose out of any two things, one is closer to the truth than the other. Take any two giant piles of crap, and you can order them in a way that suggests they're part of progress.
    - rcxdude 2y ago
      The two correlate pretty well, in the end, it's just one fewer dimension. MBTI's problems are in large part how it was conceived and how it's presented, being rooted in Jungian psychology and being presented as a firm binary when each axis more or less has a bell curve distribution, making it inconsistent from test to test. But the underlying categorisation and test methodology isn't very far off, even if it's by accident, and I think people only hear about the problems and throw out the baby with the bathwater.
- zvorygin 2y ago
  My thoughts are similar. I don’t think it’s a troll, this type of thing is very common. You don’t have to engage or understand a topic if you can intellectualize it and create “theories” about it. It’s like when you read blog posts on dating filled with game theory and statistics. I would have liked to see the author try to spend a year or more trying to earnestly adopt an opposing worldview. Not to try to model another worldview from within their own, but to know what it’s like to be another way. That would have been more interesting.
  - cbogie 2y ago
    it’s the work of criticism, which often seeks to reframe an entire topic or institution by questioning assumptions girding legitimacy and asserting systemic contradictions. just as valid an approach as immersion into the domain in discussion.
    - cbogie 2y ago
      tbh indulgence in both practices is pretty revealing and eye opening for the earnest
- DeathArrow 2y ago
  I agree. To me it's trying to promote nonsense as scientific truth by using great words.
J05ephu5M13r 2y ago
[flagged]
loveparade 2y ago
[flagged]
- mandmandam 2y ago
  That piece was well written; surprisingly coherent on a topic that's very difficult to write about. The fact you didn't understand it on first read does not mean it was "probably written by an AI". Imo there's no chance whatsoever that it was written by an AI. You can google the author and see her consistent writing style, her qualifications, etc. There were no hallucinations or non sequiturs. The article was structured, with a clear thread through, and relevant examples. There were even quite human proofreading errors. The LLM you gave this to correctly delineated the thrust of the article, and gave a decent summary. Maybe try reading it again after coffee? And, please, refrain from accusing writers of being LLMs without the slightest bit of proof. It's terribly rude.
  - yodon 2y ago
    "This feels like it was written by AI" has become the single most tedious trope here on HN. I think it's time to start flagging it. In the lion's share of cases, it wasn't written by AI. Over time that will get even harder to assess. If it was written by, and it gets upvoted, does it really matter? The upvoting is itself a sign that the content is interesting, whether it was written by a human, a dog, or an ai.
delichon 2y ago
And while anyone can observe the very significant differences in income and wealth among individuals, on its own that observation implies nothing under the constrained vision in which “equality” is seen as a “process characteristic” (everyone is treated equally), but is proof positive of injustice in the unconstrained vision, where equality is seen as a “result characteristic” (everyone achieves equal outcomes). I think she puts her finger on a really fundamental divide here. I see variations on this theme argued about constantly, and neither side seems influenced by the other's arguments. On one extreme a rich man's wealth is evidence of his good character, on the other, his bad character. These world views can't be reconciled except by moral contortionists. If we let each camp vote for their own government the results would be at least as different as Kamala and Donald.
- cbogie 2y ago
  ‘views can’t be reconciled’ doesn’t leave room for much nuance or contextualising
  - delichon 2y ago
    This article is attempting just that.
    - bilbo0s 2y ago
      I think it’s trying to explain why there’s no room. There’s only so much room in the grab bag. Or only so many nodes on the tree.
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
- aebtebeten 2y ago
  Going a little further with this idea: how well do unequal outcomes reflect equal treatment? People like Pareto would say some people get better outcomes only because they make better life decisions; people like Veblen would say some people get better outcomes because they make better life decisions, like the decision of which parents to be born to. It's highly likely that outcomes reflect both decisions and chance (including initial aptitudes for decision making), but I'm unsure anyone to this point has been able to demonstrate what the breakdown between those two factors might be. (and indeed Pareto predicted that people will tend to fundamentally lean to favouring one or the other explanation, and only secondarily come up with rationalisations that support their basic worldview)
b800h 2y ago
This is quite interesting. I'm not convinced of the core hypothesis, ie. "Psychological Progressives" and "Psychological Conservatives" based on desire to create vs. a desire to preserve. People who are associated with the current "Progressive" culture are in a lot of cases involved in the project of preserving a number of traditions which have persisted for some time, e.g. access to abortion, or "centralised control of education policy". In this instance, "Conservatives" here are the ones calling for a change. I think that Carl Schmitt's view of politics as a set of interest groups which are naturally opposed to each other is much more valuable. The middle classes are now default-progressive, whereas the working classes are now default-conservative. Why has this changed? It's changed because the interests of these groups are now served by different policies than was the case 50 years ago as a result of structural economic changes, not because the big-5 personality characteristics of the working class have changed en masse.
- decasia 2y ago
  I'm not sure I'm totally convinced by the overall political analysis either. It can be both, though, right? There's a material-interests part of politics and there can also be an epistemic culture or worldview part of political divides.
  - b800h 2y ago
    Yes. There's an interesting question here of how basic realpolitik interacts with existential priors. Is it a question of "who does this belief serve?" In other words, socialism served the working classes in the 20th century. It was in their interest to hold the beliefs which underpin it. Is it simply that a intersectional coalition of the newly-empowered find postmodernism the most plausible philosophy to explain their new-found virtue? Perhaps that's too cynical. It probably works in both directions.
- DeathArrow 2y ago
  >I think that Carl Schmitt's view of politics as a set of interest groups which are naturally opposed to each other is much more valuable. I think that is the marxist view of politics, where society is divided in classes that have different views, different interests and a struggle appears between them. I never seen this theory work in practice.
decasia 2y ago
For me there were two key parts of this post: 1. On prediction: If you had a maximally detailed model of someone's worldview, you would be able to predict their views accurately at a given time. I'm sympathetic to this in principle, because people are often very predictable and stick within their rubric. I would add, though, that worldviews change and evolve in weird ways, and sometimes people also have views that ... don't seem entirely predetermined by their worldviews or their own history? I think there can be something situational and emergent about our views, and this isn't completely predetermined by a worldview. (Let's leave aside that we don't have enough data to accurately construct the originally suggested model — we aren't omniscient, but I for one am OK with that.) 2. On hidden premises: Sometimes you try to have a conversation with someone and find out that they have some basic differences in their theory of knowledge such that you can't get through to them at all. Like "No matter what you say is true, I will hypothesize that evil hidden forces are misleading us." (It's kind of the postmodern version of Descartes' evil demon hypothesis, if you like.) I don't find this claim too surprising in the general case, but I do think, in the specific political context of the USA at the moment, it's worth remembering that it is a nation divided not only by political but also by epistemological differences. It's a long post but these were the parts I found the most interesting.
- mandmandam 2y ago
  1. This was a hypothetical situation where perfect prediction were possible, explicitly stated as an assumption. Not as fact, but as the basis of a thought experiment. 2. I'm not sure what part of the article you're referring to here, because as far as I understand it, the author is speaking about political and epistemological and every other possible difference, framed as axes in a worldview space.
  - smeej 2y ago
    Not the person you're replying to, but I rolled my eyes and had trouble taking the rest of the article seriously when such an implausible thought experiment came so early in the article without being criticized for the deep flaws in this assumption. I don't think anyone is internally consistent all the time (yes, including me). Whatever principle or set of principles someone thinks they have, there's always some conceivable situation where we could line them all up so there should be an obvious "right" conclusion, but the person will still instinctively react against it and feel it's wrong. This is why we won't ever be able to, for example, train up AI surrogates to go have all our arguments for us, on a societal level, faster and in more depth than we ever could since we have to worry about things like continuing to eat, and let them make decisions about agreements that should govern our actions. The agents would run into our self-contradictions all the time, and have to point them out to us to try to get clarity, and then we'd get so frustrated with their pointing this out all the time that we'd turn them off and abandon the whole endeavor.
DeathArrow 2y ago
I like to think of world view as Weltaunschauung. A framework that is less defined by individuals but more by big and small power brokers, media, social media, hundreds of thousands of bureaucrats, activists, entertainment industry, celebrities, influencers, activists, academics. In most of the West, this people create the world view the society is supposed to adhere. By that they are the de facto policy makers, not the government. When regular people, simple people refuse to vouch for that world view, then there will be tensions.
openrisk 2y ago
What if "worldviews" are simply a cheating mechanism invented by the brain to (ex-post) explain, organize and rationalize more innate responses? Hence, no point to try to deconstruct them because they have no internal consistency whatsoever. E.g., a person lacking in empathy (and acting on it) will find a mental scheme to justify the validity of their actions.
smeej 2y ago
After a recent argument with my brother in which he kept insisting we lived in different moral and factual realities, I've become much more interested in who and what we allow to form our worldview than what it ends up being. I realized during our conversation that he was citing mainstream media news sources, whereas I was citing primary sources. For example, we were talking about a change in a law and I was comparing the actual text of the law before and after the change, and he was citing commentary on it, or he was telling me he didn't believe certain things ever happened, and I was citing research data that said they actually happen consistently. I don't know how to speak to what someone has allowed to create the "reality" they believe they live in when it's abstracted away from primary sources. It would be one thing if he were citing different studies, different research, different legal records, but he's not. He's saying if a commenter he likes/trusts interprets something one way, it doesn't matter if there are facts that prove otherwise. Ironically, our dad is the same way, just with the politically opposite set of non-primary sources my brother relies on, and it frustrates my brother to no end. But if the foundations of each of their worldviews are several levels abstracted from the original source material, how are they ever going to live in the same "reality"? It was the first time in a long time that I've realized just how removed from what actually happens so many people are. So few people are actually even looking at primary sources anymore, and partially because they've become so hard to find beneath all the layers of commentary on them. But how are we ever supposed to talk about reality if we can't even agree what counts?
- bradleysz 2y ago
  On a practical level, some reliance on commentary is necessary, no? Or at least a combination of commentary and curation of the constant firehose of new information, which feels like a form of implied commentary itself. Primary sources are only an improvement on commentary if, between you and the commentator, you are the one with the combination of expertise, time, and objectivity better suited to extract truth from the source, and this weighing of suitability is going to vary from source to source. New Computer Science research? Maybe I can parse it better than some. New novel treatment for insert-disease-here? I need some help.
  - 2y ago
cynicalsecurity 2y ago
The related articles are wild. Looks like a crazy person for me. They are very well trying to disguise as a scientist though.
yapyap 2y ago
> help to explain seemingly unrelated differences among groups of individuals I always try to be sceptical of explaining behaviours by certain traits of people because it feels like sooner or later you’re gonna assume things about people which are moreso leaning on the trait than on the person and I think that’s a slippery slope. I wonder if other people feel like this too sometimes and how they deal with it
- bgoated01 2y ago
  All models are wrong, but some are useful. If you’re discussing large groups of people, you have to somehow compress the data. On the other hand, yeah, you probably shouldn’t prefer things like this to explain your neighbor/friend/in-laws over personal interactions with them.
bbor 2y ago
A) love to see some serious philosophy on hacker news! Well argued, and impressively interdisciplinary. Of course, this also means I’ve just gotta nitpick. B) The analytic mindset (worldview, even) rears its head yet again, with the same old “I’ll ask a question, list the possible answers, and select the best one” paradigm as always. It’s an understandable urge of course, but when it comes to philosophy it’s often applied to questions we should not feel quite so confident about our answers to. More specifically: the idea that worldviews exist as a thing is, IMHO, what the Churchlands (famous philosophy of mind duo in their 90s) would pejoratively call a “folk psychology” concept, a category that also includes Free Will, True Belief, Conscious Awareness, and other things that we feel like should exist but don’t really have a scientific way to phrase, much less prove the existence of. In this case, what makes it so obvious that worldviews exist in a “high dimensional space” that’s not simply the vector space representing each persons entire cognitive apparatus? You can construct models for this like you can construct models for anything, but the article talks like there really is an underlying structure that we just need to find, both for Personality and Worldview. This quickly leads us astray; rather than starting with political/philosophical/sociological goals and constructing one or more models accordingly, shes seemingly trying to build an argumentative decision tree and arrive at an ultimate conclusion. And it’s not that I don’t like her approach therein, I just don’t think that conclusion exists. This brings me to the most provocative part of the essay, the discussion (and quick dismissal) of postmodernism. Sure, some artists and Foucaultians can be read as having embraced the “there’s no true reality, all knowledge is derived only from power” thesis discussed here, but I think that’s mostly done for rhetorical and/or political effect. I prefer the “Standpoint Theory”/“Feminist Epistemolgy” phrasing: as imperfect cognitive apparatuses, we are all necessarily and inherently biased. This isn’t to say that we should abandon the (folk?) concept of “truth”, because it’s obviously insanely useful on an instrumental level, and hard to imagine a world-without on a metaphysical one; rather, it’s just to say that we should be realistically humble therein. *TL;DR:* there is no such thing as worldview or personality to discover, only to engineer. This essay is a great start on that, but seemingly too ambitious in scope. C) this quote made me throw up in my mouth a lil: the old vicissitudes of hard work, discovery, improvement, and fecundity. Let’s abandon some vicissitudes, y'all. Tradition for its own sake is how you get vague synonyms for “good” lumped in with “fecundity”!
motohagiography 2y ago
glad to see people thinking metacognitively, and now meta-ideologically about these things. while the author concludes there isn't a lower dimensional model of worldviews that is analogous to the big-5 personality traits yet, my pet theory is that there in fact one available that comprises at least some types of views, and it's made up of categories of rules. there is a set of what I can only think of calling synthetic ideologies, which someone produces as a way to entrain others. they're basically mystery cults, where someone finds a recipe for internally consistent complexity based on an explanation, presents it as a model, and then acts as a gatekeeper to the model. my favourite version is ancient astronaut theory because it's a perfect instructive model, but things like astrology, critical theory, antisemitism, the occult, strains of esoteric conspiracy theory, some deep ecology, and transhumanism, are all analogs of each other in that they are predicated on the same iterative loop. string theory begins to look like a fancy one after listening to anyone talk about it at length at all as well. does the system have predictive power about the physical world, or does it just generate evidence for itself and non-contradictions of it's unfalsifiable premises, and centralize the "guide" to its mysteries? some ideas are filters that are structured very much like comedy, but for credulity instead of laughter. (hate figures fit into this meta model as a pattern of idolatry as well.) you can generate these logics of ideas and mystery cults with literally anything, and they are interpretive patterns over some legitimate or real things. critical theory appeals to a sense of unfairness, conspiracy theories are often predictive, racism uses a sense of other, the stars imply a sense of place and order, but it's the entrainment step into the promise of transformation and enlightenment that draws people into a worldview. "here is a solipsism with a seeming paradox that produces uncertainty, nobody has satisfying explanations, could it be our brainworms? virtuous people are open to the possibility!" etc... Maybe we're turning a corner where we can reason about why we believe things and how to evaluate the quality of a given belief. praise Bob, I am hopeful.
- aebtebeten 2y ago
  Ancient Aliens is interesting precisely because it doesn't explicitly advocate Ancient Astronaut Theory. Sure, there's a lot of weasel-wording and implication, but they regularly go up to that line without ever crossing it. I think it ought to be required viewing in elementary schools: spot the point in each episode where they jump the shark. see also https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42094214 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42094214 EDIT: > the stars imply a sense of place and order that order changes every now and then; see https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38761574 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38761574 (in conjunction with https://xkcd.com/3012/ https://xkcd.com/3012/ ?)
tolerance 2y ago
A flagged/dead comment alleged that this was written by an LLM. While I disagree, I don't think that their accusation was made in bad faith. This article reads like someone whose only human interactions are borne from text books and discussions with others about what comes from the text books.
skissane 2y ago
A certain subset of conservative evangelical Christians have this whole shtick in which they construct a typology of worldviews – see for example "Hidden worldviews : eight cultural stories that shape our lives" (IVP Academic, 2009), by Mark Sanford and Steve Wilkens, both Azusa Pacific University professors. I can't remember if I've read that specific book, but it was either that book or a similar entry in the genre. In the abstract it is an interesting idea, but their approach to it is very tendentious. But this post reminded me of it, because it is gesturing in the same direction, even if it never proposes a specific listing of worldviews.
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
svilen_dobrev 2y ago
maybe related: Geert Hofstede's cultural dimensions Started with 4 of them, added 5th, nowadays about 6-7 depending who you ask :/ Note they apply to the individual, group/s and larger/country level - each one can be different point/blob in that space.. https://www.theculturefactor.com/country-comparison-tool https://www.theculturefactor.com/country-comparison-tool https://clearlycultural.com/geert-hofstede-cultural-dimensions/ https://clearlycultural.com/geert-hofstede-cultural-dimensio... https://geerthofstede.com/landing-page/ https://geerthofstede.com/landing-page/
indigo945 2y ago
> And in general, to disagree with the postmodern conception of truth doesn’t imply that you think power is > irrelevant. Just that you believe it’s at least possible to construct rational or adaptive > processes for finding truth and designating authority, and that it’s possible to compare such systems and to > evaluate truth claims in light of the processes that produced them. Well, "postmodernists believe it's impossible to construct rational processes for finding truth" is a strawman if I've ever seen one. Ironically, a postmodern approach would have likely been more fruitful in this attempt to deconstruct ideology, er-hem, I meant to say, to discuss "some sort of complex, multi-layered construct that shapes and constrains our beliefs, values, and positions on a wide range of issues".

87 points by jger15 2y ago

Yeah I actually read just about all of this. It’s amusing to me because the language used to express banal ideas is so over the top but the subject matter borders on pseudoscience. “Cultish academia”? Not sure. I’m still trying to determine if this is an elaborate troll.

robertlagrant 2y ago
> the subject matter borders on pseudoscience The subject matter being "fundamental worldviews"? How is that pseudoscience?
- card_zero 2y ago
  The "Big Five personality traits" is apparently scientific and meaningful, while the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator is pseudoscientific nonsense that people used post to their Myspace.
  - corimaith 2y ago
    Ironically this is exactly what the article points out in the trait that primarily sees frameworks as the result of power struggles as opposed to a meaningful progression to the truth.
    - card_zero 2y ago
      I suppose out of any two things, one is closer to the truth than the other. Take any two giant piles of crap, and you can order them in a way that suggests they're part of progress.
  - rcxdude 2y ago
    The two correlate pretty well, in the end, it's just one fewer dimension. MBTI's problems are in large part how it was conceived and how it's presented, being rooted in Jungian psychology and being presented as a firm binary when each axis more or less has a bell curve distribution, making it inconsistent from test to test. But the underlying categorisation and test methodology isn't very far off, even if it's by accident, and I think people only hear about the problems and throw out the baby with the bathwater.
zvorygin 2y ago
My thoughts are similar. I don’t think it’s a troll, this type of thing is very common. You don’t have to engage or understand a topic if you can intellectualize it and create “theories” about it. It’s like when you read blog posts on dating filled with game theory and statistics. I would have liked to see the author try to spend a year or more trying to earnestly adopt an opposing worldview. Not to try to model another worldview from within their own, but to know what it’s like to be another way. That would have been more interesting.
- cbogie 2y ago
  it’s the work of criticism, which often seeks to reframe an entire topic or institution by questioning assumptions girding legitimacy and asserting systemic contradictions. just as valid an approach as immersion into the domain in discussion.
  - cbogie 2y ago
    tbh indulgence in both practices is pretty revealing and eye opening for the earnest
DeathArrow 2y ago
I agree. To me it's trying to promote nonsense as scientific truth by using great words.

J05ephu5M13r 2y ago

[flagged]

loveparade 2y ago

[flagged]

mandmandam 2y ago
That piece was well written; surprisingly coherent on a topic that's very difficult to write about. The fact you didn't understand it on first read does not mean it was "probably written by an AI". Imo there's no chance whatsoever that it was written by an AI. You can google the author and see her consistent writing style, her qualifications, etc. There were no hallucinations or non sequiturs. The article was structured, with a clear thread through, and relevant examples. There were even quite human proofreading errors. The LLM you gave this to correctly delineated the thrust of the article, and gave a decent summary. Maybe try reading it again after coffee? And, please, refrain from accusing writers of being LLMs without the slightest bit of proof. It's terribly rude.
- yodon 2y ago
  "This feels like it was written by AI" has become the single most tedious trope here on HN. I think it's time to start flagging it. In the lion's share of cases, it wasn't written by AI. Over time that will get even harder to assess. If it was written by, and it gets upvoted, does it really matter? The upvoting is itself a sign that the content is interesting, whether it was written by a human, a dog, or an ai.

delichon 2y ago

And while anyone can observe the very significant differences in income and wealth among individuals, on its own that observation implies nothing under the constrained vision in which “equality” is seen as a “process characteristic” (everyone is treated equally), but is proof positive of injustice in the unconstrained vision, where equality is seen as a “result characteristic” (everyone achieves equal outcomes). I think she puts her finger on a really fundamental divide here. I see variations on this theme argued about constantly, and neither side seems influenced by the other's arguments. On one extreme a rich man's wealth is evidence of his good character, on the other, his bad character. These world views can't be reconciled except by moral contortionists. If we let each camp vote for their own government the results would be at least as different as Kamala and Donald.

cbogie 2y ago
‘views can’t be reconciled’ doesn’t leave room for much nuance or contextualising
- delichon 2y ago
  This article is attempting just that.
  - bilbo0s 2y ago
    I think it’s trying to explain why there’s no room. There’s only so much room in the grab bag. Or only so many nodes on the tree.
deleted 2y ago
[deleted]
aebtebeten 2y ago
Going a little further with this idea: how well do unequal outcomes reflect equal treatment? People like Pareto would say some people get better outcomes only because they make better life decisions; people like Veblen would say some people get better outcomes because they make better life decisions, like the decision of which parents to be born to. It's highly likely that outcomes reflect both decisions and chance (including initial aptitudes for decision making), but I'm unsure anyone to this point has been able to demonstrate what the breakdown between those two factors might be. (and indeed Pareto predicted that people will tend to fundamentally lean to favouring one or the other explanation, and only secondarily come up with rationalisations that support their basic worldview)

b800h 2y ago

This is quite interesting. I'm not convinced of the core hypothesis, ie. "Psychological Progressives" and "Psychological Conservatives" based on desire to create vs. a desire to preserve. People who are associated with the current "Progressive" culture are in a lot of cases involved in the project of preserving a number of traditions which have persisted for some time, e.g. access to abortion, or "centralised control of education policy". In this instance, "Conservatives" here are the ones calling for a change. I think that Carl Schmitt's view of politics as a set of interest groups which are naturally opposed to each other is much more valuable. The middle classes are now default-progressive, whereas the working classes are now default-conservative. Why has this changed? It's changed because the interests of these groups are now served by different policies than was the case 50 years ago as a result of structural economic changes, not because the big-5 personality characteristics of the working class have changed en masse.

decasia 2y ago
I'm not sure I'm totally convinced by the overall political analysis either. It can be both, though, right? There's a material-interests part of politics and there can also be an epistemic culture or worldview part of political divides.
- b800h 2y ago
  Yes. There's an interesting question here of how basic realpolitik interacts with existential priors. Is it a question of "who does this belief serve?" In other words, socialism served the working classes in the 20th century. It was in their interest to hold the beliefs which underpin it. Is it simply that a intersectional coalition of the newly-empowered find postmodernism the most plausible philosophy to explain their new-found virtue? Perhaps that's too cynical. It probably works in both directions.
DeathArrow 2y ago
>I think that Carl Schmitt's view of politics as a set of interest groups which are naturally opposed to each other is much more valuable. I think that is the marxist view of politics, where society is divided in classes that have different views, different interests and a struggle appears between them. I never seen this theory work in practice.

decasia 2y ago

For me there were two key parts of this post: 1. On prediction: If you had a maximally detailed model of someone's worldview, you would be able to predict their views accurately at a given time. I'm sympathetic to this in principle, because people are often very predictable and stick within their rubric. I would add, though, that worldviews change and evolve in weird ways, and sometimes people also have views that ... don't seem entirely predetermined by their worldviews or their own history? I think there can be something situational and emergent about our views, and this isn't completely predetermined by a worldview. (Let's leave aside that we don't have enough data to accurately construct the originally suggested model — we aren't omniscient, but I for one am OK with that.) 2. On hidden premises: Sometimes you try to have a conversation with someone and find out that they have some basic differences in their theory of knowledge such that you can't get through to them at all. Like "No matter what you say is true, I will hypothesize that evil hidden forces are misleading us." (It's kind of the postmodern version of Descartes' evil demon hypothesis, if you like.) I don't find this claim too surprising in the general case, but I do think, in the specific political context of the USA at the moment, it's worth remembering that it is a nation divided not only by political but also by epistemological differences. It's a long post but these were the parts I found the most interesting.

mandmandam 2y ago
1. This was a hypothetical situation where perfect prediction were possible, explicitly stated as an assumption. Not as fact, but as the basis of a thought experiment. 2. I'm not sure what part of the article you're referring to here, because as far as I understand it, the author is speaking about political and epistemological and every other possible difference, framed as axes in a worldview space.
- smeej 2y ago
  Not the person you're replying to, but I rolled my eyes and had trouble taking the rest of the article seriously when such an implausible thought experiment came so early in the article without being criticized for the deep flaws in this assumption. I don't think anyone is internally consistent all the time (yes, including me). Whatever principle or set of principles someone thinks they have, there's always some conceivable situation where we could line them all up so there should be an obvious "right" conclusion, but the person will still instinctively react against it and feel it's wrong. This is why we won't ever be able to, for example, train up AI surrogates to go have all our arguments for us, on a societal level, faster and in more depth than we ever could since we have to worry about things like continuing to eat, and let them make decisions about agreements that should govern our actions. The agents would run into our self-contradictions all the time, and have to point them out to us to try to get clarity, and then we'd get so frustrated with their pointing this out all the time that we'd turn them off and abandon the whole endeavor.

DeathArrow 2y ago

I like to think of world view as Weltaunschauung. A framework that is less defined by individuals but more by big and small power brokers, media, social media, hundreds of thousands of bureaucrats, activists, entertainment industry, celebrities, influencers, activists, academics. In most of the West, this people create the world view the society is supposed to adhere. By that they are the de facto policy makers, not the government. When regular people, simple people refuse to vouch for that world view, then there will be tensions.

openrisk 2y ago

What if "worldviews" are simply a cheating mechanism invented by the brain to (ex-post) explain, organize and rationalize more innate responses? Hence, no point to try to deconstruct them because they have no internal consistency whatsoever. E.g., a person lacking in empathy (and acting on it) will find a mental scheme to justify the validity of their actions.

smeej 2y ago

After a recent argument with my brother in which he kept insisting we lived in different moral and factual realities, I've become much more interested in who and what we allow to form our worldview than what it ends up being. I realized during our conversation that he was citing mainstream media news sources, whereas I was citing primary sources. For example, we were talking about a change in a law and I was comparing the actual text of the law before and after the change, and he was citing commentary on it, or he was telling me he didn't believe certain things ever happened, and I was citing research data that said they actually happen consistently. I don't know how to speak to what someone has allowed to create the "reality" they believe they live in when it's abstracted away from primary sources. It would be one thing if he were citing different studies, different research, different legal records, but he's not. He's saying if a commenter he likes/trusts interprets something one way, it doesn't matter if there are facts that prove otherwise. Ironically, our dad is the same way, just with the politically opposite set of non-primary sources my brother relies on, and it frustrates my brother to no end. But if the foundations of each of their worldviews are several levels abstracted from the original source material, how are they ever going to live in the same "reality"? It was the first time in a long time that I've realized just how removed from what actually happens so many people are. So few people are actually even looking at primary sources anymore, and partially because they've become so hard to find beneath all the layers of commentary on them. But how are we ever supposed to talk about reality if we can't even agree what counts?

bradleysz 2y ago
On a practical level, some reliance on commentary is necessary, no? Or at least a combination of commentary and curation of the constant firehose of new information, which feels like a form of implied commentary itself. Primary sources are only an improvement on commentary if, between you and the commentator, you are the one with the combination of expertise, time, and objectivity better suited to extract truth from the source, and this weighing of suitability is going to vary from source to source. New Computer Science research? Maybe I can parse it better than some. New novel treatment for insert-disease-here? I need some help.
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cynicalsecurity 2y ago

The related articles are wild. Looks like a crazy person for me. They are very well trying to disguise as a scientist though.

yapyap 2y ago

> help to explain seemingly unrelated differences among groups of individuals I always try to be sceptical of explaining behaviours by certain traits of people because it feels like sooner or later you’re gonna assume things about people which are moreso leaning on the trait than on the person and I think that’s a slippery slope. I wonder if other people feel like this too sometimes and how they deal with it

bgoated01 2y ago
All models are wrong, but some are useful. If you’re discussing large groups of people, you have to somehow compress the data. On the other hand, yeah, you probably shouldn’t prefer things like this to explain your neighbor/friend/in-laws over personal interactions with them.

bbor 2y ago

A) love to see some serious philosophy on hacker news! Well argued, and impressively interdisciplinary. Of course, this also means I’ve just gotta nitpick. B) The analytic mindset (worldview, even) rears its head yet again, with the same old “I’ll ask a question, list the possible answers, and select the best one” paradigm as always. It’s an understandable urge of course, but when it comes to philosophy it’s often applied to questions we should not feel quite so confident about our answers to. More specifically: the idea that worldviews exist as a thing is, IMHO, what the Churchlands (famous philosophy of mind duo in their 90s) would pejoratively call a “folk psychology” concept, a category that also includes Free Will, True Belief, Conscious Awareness, and other things that we feel like should exist but don’t really have a scientific way to phrase, much less prove the existence of. In this case, what makes it so obvious that worldviews exist in a “high dimensional space” that’s not simply the vector space representing each persons entire cognitive apparatus? You can construct models for this like you can construct models for anything, but the article talks like there really is an underlying structure that we just need to find, both for Personality and Worldview. This quickly leads us astray; rather than starting with political/philosophical/sociological goals and constructing one or more models accordingly, shes seemingly trying to build an argumentative decision tree and arrive at an ultimate conclusion. And it’s not that I don’t like her approach therein, I just don’t think that conclusion exists. This brings me to the most provocative part of the essay, the discussion (and quick dismissal) of postmodernism. Sure, some artists and Foucaultians can be read as having embraced the “there’s no true reality, all knowledge is derived only from power” thesis discussed here, but I think that’s mostly done for rhetorical and/or political effect. I prefer the “Standpoint Theory”/“Feminist Epistemolgy” phrasing: as imperfect cognitive apparatuses, we are all necessarily and inherently biased. This isn’t to say that we should abandon the (folk?) concept of “truth”, because it’s obviously insanely useful on an instrumental level, and hard to imagine a world-without on a metaphysical one; rather, it’s just to say that we should be realistically humble therein. *TL;DR:* there is no such thing as worldview or personality to discover, only to engineer. This essay is a great start on that, but seemingly too ambitious in scope. C) this quote made me throw up in my mouth a lil: the old vicissitudes of hard work, discovery, improvement, and fecundity. Let’s abandon some vicissitudes, y'all. Tradition for its own sake is how you get vague synonyms for “good” lumped in with “fecundity”!

motohagiography 2y ago

glad to see people thinking metacognitively, and now meta-ideologically about these things. while the author concludes there isn't a lower dimensional model of worldviews that is analogous to the big-5 personality traits yet, my pet theory is that there in fact one available that comprises at least some types of views, and it's made up of categories of rules. there is a set of what I can only think of calling synthetic ideologies, which someone produces as a way to entrain others. they're basically mystery cults, where someone finds a recipe for internally consistent complexity based on an explanation, presents it as a model, and then acts as a gatekeeper to the model. my favourite version is ancient astronaut theory because it's a perfect instructive model, but things like astrology, critical theory, antisemitism, the occult, strains of esoteric conspiracy theory, some deep ecology, and transhumanism, are all analogs of each other in that they are predicated on the same iterative loop. string theory begins to look like a fancy one after listening to anyone talk about it at length at all as well. does the system have predictive power about the physical world, or does it just generate evidence for itself and non-contradictions of it's unfalsifiable premises, and centralize the "guide" to its mysteries? some ideas are filters that are structured very much like comedy, but for credulity instead of laughter. (hate figures fit into this meta model as a pattern of idolatry as well.) you can generate these logics of ideas and mystery cults with literally anything, and they are interpretive patterns over some legitimate or real things. critical theory appeals to a sense of unfairness, conspiracy theories are often predictive, racism uses a sense of other, the stars imply a sense of place and order, but it's the entrainment step into the promise of transformation and enlightenment that draws people into a worldview. "here is a solipsism with a seeming paradox that produces uncertainty, nobody has satisfying explanations, could it be our brainworms? virtuous people are open to the possibility!" etc... Maybe we're turning a corner where we can reason about why we believe things and how to evaluate the quality of a given belief. praise Bob, I am hopeful.

aebtebeten 2y ago
Ancient Aliens is interesting precisely because it doesn't explicitly advocate Ancient Astronaut Theory. Sure, there's a lot of weasel-wording and implication, but they regularly go up to that line without ever crossing it. I think it ought to be required viewing in elementary schools: spot the point in each episode where they jump the shark. see also https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42094214 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42094214 EDIT: > the stars imply a sense of place and order that order changes every now and then; see https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38761574 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38761574 (in conjunction with https://xkcd.com/3012/ https://xkcd.com/3012/ ?)

tolerance 2y ago

A flagged/dead comment alleged that this was written by an LLM. While I disagree, I don't think that their accusation was made in bad faith. This article reads like someone whose only human interactions are borne from text books and discussions with others about what comes from the text books.

skissane 2y ago

A certain subset of conservative evangelical Christians have this whole shtick in which they construct a typology of worldviews – see for example "Hidden worldviews : eight cultural stories that shape our lives" (IVP Academic, 2009), by Mark Sanford and Steve Wilkens, both Azusa Pacific University professors. I can't remember if I've read that specific book, but it was either that book or a similar entry in the genre. In the abstract it is an interesting idea, but their approach to it is very tendentious. But this post reminded me of it, because it is gesturing in the same direction, even if it never proposes a specific listing of worldviews.

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svilen_dobrev 2y ago

maybe related: Geert Hofstede's cultural dimensions Started with 4 of them, added 5th, nowadays about 6-7 depending who you ask :/ Note they apply to the individual, group/s and larger/country level - each one can be different point/blob in that space.. https://www.theculturefactor.com/country-comparison-tool https://www.theculturefactor.com/country-comparison-tool https://clearlycultural.com/geert-hofstede-cultural-dimensions/ https://clearlycultural.com/geert-hofstede-cultural-dimensio... https://geerthofstede.com/landing-page/ https://geerthofstede.com/landing-page/

indigo945 2y ago

> And in general, to disagree with the postmodern conception of truth doesn’t imply that you think power is > irrelevant. Just that you believe it’s at least possible to construct rational or adaptive > processes for finding truth and designating authority, and that it’s possible to compare such systems and to > evaluate truth claims in light of the processes that produced them. Well, "postmodernists believe it's impossible to construct rational processes for finding truth" is a strawman if I've ever seen one. Ironically, a postmodern approach would have likely been more fruitful in this attempt to deconstruct ideology, er-hem, I meant to say, to discuss "some sort of complex, multi-layered construct that shapes and constrains our beliefs, values, and positions on a wide range of issues".