Totalizing Worldviews are Scary
I have some mix of aversion/panic/anxiety/allergy upon encountering totalizing worldviews, ones that want to give me a totally different ontology of the world, especially ones that tell me I'm wrong about what I think and feel.
Even things as simple as an arrogant or condescending “the music you listen to affects tons about your emotional state, be sure you’re listening to things with lyrics that you think are good” drives a defensiveness, in that case I think I’m trying to protect myself from being able to be judged based on my music choices from someone who has this very strong view without knowing me that if I listen to music where people are excited about money, I’ll get greedy.
Other extensional examples: many kinds of conflict theory (good example), postrationality and egregores, Seeing Like a State, anything that claims rationality doesn’t work on it and that legibility is bad, Scott’s review of Sadly, Porn, things that resist just telling you what they’re about and how you could find out if they’re true, that claim hidden insight and wisdom if you just sink enough into it and spend the time and energy.
Some possibilities for what to do in those circumstances:
Really immerse myself in something for a day or week or month, read a book, talk to a million people, don't worry about how it maps onto any other ontology, just live and breathe it until you get it and then emerge on the other side and decide what to do
Play with it, grab what you want (anything from a tweet to many books), keep in touch with all the other things you think, switch back and forth between lenses, add it to the hammers you have when you encounter a nail, jump in and out of the worldview, maybe find some convergence or synthesis, maybe don’t, see where it’s useful and where it’s not, where it’s generative or insightful or lets you understand the world better. (the Tyler Cowen approach?)
Dig into it, ask what the world would look like if it were true, excavate for predictions and object level claims, check with the world or with 20 people to see if it says something true, change your worldview incrementally, accepting some claims but not others, scrap the worldview for parts
It's an axis of how fundamentally I'm open to being changed (explore vs. exploit) and how much slack I have to stop using my current frames and put that on hold while I change the very person I am. #3 seems great, but it reminds me of Agnes Callard’s point about humility stopping you from being really stopped in your tracks, having the emotional experience of being seriously wrong, which might be valuable (similarly, that your model being wrong stops you from having to be wrong - there are also great things about this approach).
Part of what’s hard is that I want to be the kind of person who is open to having their mind changed and who isn’t inflexible, so “I don’t have time to look into that” feels like a confession of failure. It also puts me in a mindset where I’m afraid of finding out I’ve been a fool, naively traversing the barest surface of the world while others have the truth and the deep wisdom.
I think #1 - deep dive - works especially well for people who don’t have the anxiety I’m describing here, or who get so immersed in something that it doesn’t matter - that describes me when I’m going down rabbit holes, which gives me hope. After all, I certainly get obsessed with new ideas, I do have quite a few frames I play with (often coming from weird people I know who live in my mental parliament), and they’re not all ones I’ve had my whole life.
Another thing about the deep dive is that people certainly claim that it’s required to really understand something, that there are things you just can’t get until you’ve sat with it a long time.
I also just get ungrounded and destabilized and existentially uncertain when I don’t even know which ontology I’m supposed to be working with. How does one even go about finding out? Well, #2 (playing with frames) and #3 (translating everything into comparable, commensurable, object level claims) above seem so reasonable, don’t they? But they make me worry that I’m only going to get the easiest and most legible aspects of the worldview, and that I’ll miss what’s most important, or won’t be really taking it seriously as a thing that should maybe change what I do and how I orient to the world. #3 especially feels extremely susceptible to the criticism that I’m making everything be in my language and my frame for me to be able to engage with it, which might be true, but that sure feels like a weakness!
Also, so many of these worldviews seem to come with arrogance, sneers and condescension, so it feels like playing with fire to let other people’s voices get to tell me what I think or feel and why. But they could be right, and I don’t want to ignore that because I don’t like their tone!
As I get older, I can feel myself having less energy and slack to just change everything about the way I think; it feels exhausting, the amount of reading and thinking and talking it would take, while also trying to be ambitious in the frame I’m currently in! How can I go full steam on both things? Especially when the ontologies don’t match up. Plus there’s so many possible things to go on deep dives for! Worldviews aren’t the half of it, there’s so much to learn! Maybe I’m picking up correctly on the fact that I’m going full steam and continuing to learn a lot in the set of worldviews in and around EA and rationality, and so there is in fact less room for a million other things.
But I sure don’t want to become the kind of old person who doesn’t want to learn things, who’s scared to change their mind.
There’s probably some sensible middle ground here, possibly starting with #3 and working your way up, or in assessing in advance how likely a worldview is to have a bunch of value, perhaps by first reading reviews of books or listening to your smart friends tell you what was valuable for them or reading twitter threads first or observing what the people you respect most are on about, but there also just does feel like something sticky here.
One note of hope is that even with the anxiety, I find I usually pick up plenty just by having the ideas swirling around me, even if it feels like I’m making no intellectual progress.
Which leads to a potential #4: All of 1-3 are individual pursuits, but this kind of work can be done with others, either intentionally, or just surrounding yourself with people talking about the ideas so that you osmose a lot and have conversation and cognition around it by default, so that naturally it will become a part of you, and it doesn’t have to feel so hard. Many ideas are diffuse in this way, so you can gravitate towards the ones you get a taste of and want more.
Props to the people who encounter new ideas with joy and enthusiasm even after having something that works for them, or who are not the youngest they’ve been, who stay grounded, who have good mental posture, who can dance and play among frames, or who can delve deep while still working hard, incorporating what’s useful and honing their judgement.
My plan is to join their ranks.
