On marrying the egregore

I mentioned in the last post that Kegan's lumping of all "relationships" including identification with one's community into stage 3 has some interesting implications.

The big divergence starts where I ended describing stage 3 as about being subject to dyadic relationships and stage 4 about making these object in serving larger group coordination. Kegan calls stage 3 about "relationships" without this distinction, and stage 4 is when you transcend external validation and "self author" a "system". I think this is nonsense though, because as anyone who has ever met anyone insecure will know, people at stage 3 are absolutely internally self validating/judging — they're just doing it according to their imagination of what other people will/should think. Similarly, stage 4 is only "self authoring" in this same sense, because it's not a coincidence that everyone "self authors" the same kind of system that everyone around them has "self authored".

This is related to the puzzle that a lot of community identification is treated as stage 3 in Kegan stuff, but what I just laid out suggests that community identification must be stage four. I think the resolution here is that at stage 3 you relate to "your community" as if it was an individual itself rather than an interaction between many individuals. The "stage 3" people who are prioritizing their culture over individual relationships are genuinely doing so out of stage 3 attachments to dyadic relationships, it's just that they're married to the egregore, and this marriage can be more important to them than the marriage to their human spouse, their relationship with their parents/etc. The egregoric marriage facilitates coordination with larger structures of people without having to pay the computational complexity cost of navigating multiple contradictory relationships by forcing relationships into standardized form. The egregore may demand faithfulness and primary status, but is a bit poly, I guess.

I'm gonna expand on this here, and explain why I think this is a big problem.1

So what the heck is an "egregore" anyway, and how distinct is it from "the stuff lots of individuals are thinking?"

I think pretty different, and not in a good way.

One classic example of divergence is "The emperor has no clothes". If you ask the egregore, the emperor's clothes are magnificent. If you ask an individual in public, or in any context they mentally represent as potentially connecting back to the group, they will speak from the egregore and tell you the clothes are magnificent. Get that same individual in private, in a context where they know their behavior will never get back to the group,2 then the group's belief is irrelevant and they can tell you what they personally see. Which is a completely different story.

Another example — a real example, from a friend when discussing these matters, but with the name changed — is "Amie has big feet, and is trollish". "Everyone knows" that Amie has big feet and is trollish. At the same time, my friend says that she's objectively attractive. That I would find her attractive too, and that she doesn't actually have big feet. But that in highschool, Amie was a big footed troll, and apparently this individual named "everyone" hasn't updated on what every individual knows.

These beliefs can take on a life of their own when they become reinforced despite disconnection from reality. It doesn't really work the same when they don't.

Consider the alternative.

Is the sky blue? No trick questions, just like, clear sunny day, you look up, what is the main color you will see?

Does your way of thinking change when you're in public speaking in front of a mass of your peers vs if you're in private with a trusted confidant?

Everyone knows the sky is blue. But for the most part, that's just every individual knowing that the sky is blue, so "everyone knows" is nothing more than an aggregate belief. There is no distinction between the aggregate belief and "belief of the egregore", because the ghost of the knowledge has not floated apart from the grounding in reality. When there's a bunch of fires and sunset comes around, what everyone knows will change to "the sky is [currently] red", because it just is. Unlike the case with poor Amie and her no longer oversized feet, where changing reality is not enough to change what "everyone knows".

With well developed stage 4 "self authoring" capacities, this matters much less. Stage 4 Amie can laugh it off, because she doesn't actually have big feet (anymore). Amie's dates aren't gonna be put off, because they can see what they see, every individual can see it too, and it doesn't matter what the individual "everyone" thinks.

A more subtle problem is described by Feynman in his 1974 Caltech commencement address, relating to the measurement of the charge of an electron:

It's interesting to look at the history of measurements of the charge of an electron, after Millikan. If you plot them as a function of time, you find that one is a little bit bigger than Millikan's, and the next one's a little bit bigger than that, and the next one's a little bit bigger than that, until finally they settle down to a number which is higher.

Why didn't they discover the new number was higher right away? It's a thing that scientists are ashamed of — this history — because it's apparent that people did things like this: When they got a number that was too high above Millikan's, they thought something must be wrong — and they would look for and find a reason why something might be wrong. When they got a number close to Millikan's value they didn't look so hard. And so they eliminated the numbers that were too far off, and did other things like that.

If you get results that don't match what's been established before, it's perfectly rational to take into account what other people have found and conclude that the results are somewhere in the middle. The problem here is when posteriors are conflated with evidence and the experimental results contain the former dressed up as the latter. Another way of looking at this is that it's losing track of the distinction between your own perspective and the perspective of the group.

The more you're subject to the judgement of the group, the harder it is to track this distinction and publish good science. The less these distinctions are tracked, the more the egregoric "scientific consensus" will take on a life of its own, rather than simply reflecting an aggregate of the data. Which isn't what we want.

The more you attend to "What everyone knows", the more you feed into it, and create it as a distinct and real abstraction as separate from what every individual knows — which is necessarily bringing group beliefs and behaviors out of touch with reality as experienced.

If instead, we don't pretend egregores into existence as distinct entities we can relate to, we're left with the boring aggregate of individual beliefs. We can say the sky is blue because the sky is blue, and when people look they will see it. Or that the emperor has no clothes. Focusing on the layer underneath binds "What everyone knows" to what every individual knows, and this is better grounded to actual reality.

The downside, of course, is that there are few things every individual knows. And N² relationships is a lot to track without some sort of simplification.