#separating layers

Disagreements are like onions II

(or “Why we shouldn’t put all our arguments in one rhetorical basket”) [Content note: Pulse shooting, homophobia, Islamophobia, gun issues, fundamentalist Christianity, and, sadly, more Donald Trump. A bit on the disjointed side, and perhaps best read as three separate sub-essays.] As the title suggests, this is a direct follow-up to my last post, “Disagreements are like onions“. I. Separation,…

Disagreements are like onions

[Content note: this is another attempt to convey one of those fundamental ideas which I feel strongly about deep down but is still a little hard to communicate, so I once again erred on the side of long and dry.  Part 1, hopefully to be continued.  Some political examples, especially Trump-related; how can I resist?] Finally I’ve gotten around to writing the remaining lengthy, cerebral post I’ve…

There's a certain way of thinking of different levels of meta as different orders of derivative, where the object level is describes the outputs of a function itself (the 0th derivative), the meta level has the capacity to effect change in an object-level situation and so can be viewed as the first derivative, the meta meta level affects the meta level and so can be viewed as the second derivative, and so on.

In situations where we might ask "should the object level or the meta level take precedence?", that's somehow equivalent to predicting the behavior of a function knowing its output as well as its first derivative at this point in time -- dislike of a low output of the function can be overcome if its first derivative is positive enough, but not if the output of the function is just too low.