Cognitive Levels

Great minds discuss ideas; average minds discuss events; small minds discuss people.

— Eleanor Roosevelt

We can divide thought and discourse into three levels of abstraction that roughly correspond to the levels in that famous quote:

1. Thought/discourse about people and ordinary events.
2. Thought/discourse about entities and events that are beyond direct personal experience.
3. Thought/discourse about abstract systems, processes and theories.

At the first level, we think/talk about objects and events that we can directly engage with. At the second level, we think/talk about objects and events that are removed from personal experience, because they are too big, too small, too far away, etc. However, we are still talking about objects and events. At the third level, we think/talk about systems, processes and theories. We are either thinking/talking about abstract patterns that are divorced from any specific object or event, or we are thinking/talking about ideas and concepts themselves, such as whether a certain theory is correct. Each layer is more removed from direct experience and ordinary life.

Of course, this discretization is a simplification. In reality, cognitive levels are somewhere between continuous and discrete. Also, we could slice them more finely, such as making a distinction between thought/discourse about systems and processes (abstract objects and events) and thought/discourse about ideas themselves. But the 3-level discretization captures a lot of the variance in human mental abilities. It is a useful abstraction.

Most of the time, we operate at the first level, the personal level. We talk about what is for dinner, who said what to whom, who is kind or cruel, whether it will be sunny tomorrow, etc.

Occasionally, we rise to the second level, to talk about bigger issues, such as inflation, crime, geopolitics, etc. This is also the level of certain types of specialized knowledge, such as law and medicine. It is removed from direct personal experience, but not highly abstract.

We need certain conceptual tools to reach higher levels — conceptual ladders, so to speak. Statistics is one such conceptual ladder. It allows us to represent aggregate properties, such as the crime rate. We can use statistics to think/talk about properties that we cannot directly experience. Nobody can see the crime rate. But if we map the crime rate to a line on a chart, now we can “see” it and think about it.

Many people cannot understand statistics. In fact, many people cannot even understand simple ratios.

This was famously illustrated by the “80 miles per hour” test, in which people were asked “If you are going 80 miles per hour, how long will it take to go 80 miles?”. Many people don’t understand that miles per hour is a ratio. They understand speed experientially. They know that 80 mph is fast, and they have some sense of what it is like to be going that fast. But they don’t understand that speed is a ratio of distance to time. Thus, they can’t answer the question.

If you’re going 80mph how long will it take go to 80miles?

A map is another conceptual ladder. It allows us to reason about spatial relationships on a scale above the personal. Many people find it difficult to read maps. They simply don’t operate at that level.

You have probably seen videos of people on the street who can’t find their own country on a map. Let’s consider such a person. He is stupid, but he can handle ordinary life. He knows how to cross the street without getting hit by a car. He can find his way to the grocery store and back home. He can’t find his country on a map because “country” is a meaningless abstraction to him. He doesn’t think about things like countries. The grocery store and his home are things at the first level of abstraction. He knows them from personal experience. He learned a little geography at school, because he didn’t want to look stupid in front of his classmates, but he quickly forgot it, because it had no relevance to his life.

Most level-1 people can find their country on a map, because they have seen it so many times. They can recognize shapes in context. But they have trouble using a map to think about routes, distances, directions, etc.

Conversely, there are some people who can rise to level 2 or even level 3, and yet can’t find their country on a map, because they are interested in other things.

Chess Piece Drawing Challenge Goes HORRIBLY WRONG...

But most level-2 people have basic geographical knowledge. They understand the world on a scale above the ordinary. They also typically have basic historical knowledge.

Maps and statistics allow us to think/talk about countries and social issues. At level 2, we can think/talk about wars, demographics, inflation, government debt, etc. However, to understand what a society is, or what causes inflation, we need to rise to the next level.

The third level is the intellectual level, the level of real science, mathematics and philosophy. At this level, we can talk about abstract processes, such as the theory of evolution, or how the market balances supply and demand, or the absence of an objective foundation for subjectivity.

Again, conceptual ladders are required to reach this level, but so is innate mental ability — and most people don’t have the necessary mental ability. They can’t rise to level 3. This includes many people in STEM fields.

For example, a lot of scientific research is just “butterfly collecting” (compiling factoids) or routine analysis that requires little thought. It is level 2, not level 3. Scientific fields often sink to a lower level as they mature and accumulate more lower-level researchers who do routine tasks.

This is the cause of naive empiricism in the sciences. Statistics are very important for understanding reality on larger scales, but they are limited. It is useful to know that two variables are correlated, but it usually requires a level-3 theory to understand why they are correlated. Naive empiricism is the tacit assumption that we can acquire knowledge of nature just by gathering data and doing basic statistics. In other words, it is the assumption that science is level 2, not level 3.

Collecting factoids, organizing data (e.g. creating taxonomies, timelines and maps), and doing statistics can be part of a scientific inquiry, but these activities do not constitute science by themselves. To be part of a scientific inquiry, they must be carried out within a theoretical framework.

Cognitive levels are not entirely determined by intelligence. Generally speaking, greater intelligence is associated with greater abstraction, but the two are not equivalent. Other factors are involved, such as curiosity and the ability to view things from a detached perspective.

Some smart people operate mostly at the lower levels. They never develop level-3 abstractions, despite being intelligent. Staying at the lower levels can be a good strategy for social success. Many famous people have that kind of intelligence. They are smart, but they use their intelligence to solve problems at levels 1 and 2.

Higher cognitive levels are a blind spot. People who operate at lower levels can’t see the levels above. They have a vague notion that some people are smarter, or that some types of discourse are over their heads, but that’s it.

When someone encounters discourse that is over his head, he often interprets it at a lower level. This is a common cause of false understanding. When people engage in discourse that is over their heads, they often try to drag it down to their level, subconsciously.

Imagine that you are stuck at level 1. On the internet, you see someone say “The per-capita homicide rate is higher for blacks than whites”. You can’t create the idea “blacks have a higher per-capita homicide rate than whites” in your mind. It simply doesn’t fit. You can’t even conceptualize a race of people, because that is too abstract. You can only imagine individual black and white people walking down the street. You know what homicide is, and that it is bad. So, you interpret the statement as “black people are bad and white people are good”. This is an attempt to project a level-2 idea into level-1 cognitive space. You assume that the other person is just using fancy words to convey a level-1 idea.

We understand other people by analogy to ourselves. We use our minds as models of other minds. This works pretty well most of the time, but not always. For example, a man can’t understand the sexual desires of a woman by analogy to his own sexual desires, and vice versa. Self-analogy also breaks down when trying to understand someone at a higher or lower cognitive level.

That’s why internet discourse tends to fall to the lowest level, from abstract discussions to personal attacks and virtue-signaling. It is not just that most people aren’t intellectual; it is also that they don’t know when discourse is over their heads. They don’t know that their petty insults and personal attacks are not at the same level as an abstract discussion about society and biology. So, they feel no shame about jumping in and dragging the discourse down to their level.

There is a general tendency for ideas to be dragged down to lower levels. For example, consider how the intellectual defense of free markets (Hayek) degenerated into anarcho-capitalism, a simplistic “freedom good, state bad” ideology. Or consider how quantum theory degenerated into level-1 woo (“You create your reality by perceiving it!!”) on the internet.

The theory of evolution is a good example. It is not complex, but it is very abstract. Evolution is mutation, reproduction and selection, iterated. The process involves a feedback loop, and it is distributed across time and space. It cannot be visualized. There is no ordinary analogy to it. Most people cannot think about evolution as an abstract process. So, they conceptualize it at a lower level.

Here are three views of evolution, at the three levels:

1. Of course I believe in evolution! I’m not an ignorant hick! Humans evolved from monkeys. There were dinosaurs, long ago, but they all died out.
2. Evolution is a struggle between races, in which the superior replace the inferior.
3. Evolution is a process that operates on populations and information. It consists of reproduction, mutation and selection, iterated. Forms are selected based on reproductive fitness.

The level-1 person knows that evolution is considered to be correct. It is a high-status belief, associated with authority, so she accepts it, even though she has only a vague notion of it. To her, “evolution” just means that things were different in the past. This helps her to understand popular discourse and entertainment about the distant past, such as the movie Jurassic Park. She has some notion that being “less evolved” is bad, and she might insult someone with a different political opinion as a “dinosaur” or a “Neanderthal”.

The level-2 person has some notion of evolution as a process, but he views it through the metaphor of group competition, analogous to a war between human societies. Mutation and reproduction are mapped to group differences and changes in group sizes. Selection is mapped to group conflict. There is no feedback loop. This metaphor is very misleading, but it creates the illusion of understanding.

There are other level-2 views of evolution. One is the (naive empiricist) notion that evolution can be reduced to changing gene frequencies and/or population histories. The native empiricist does not think about the process of evolution. He is concerned with FST scores, GWAS, etc. Most of the people who obsess online about population genetics (the HBD crowd) have a level-2 understanding of evolution, or no understanding at all. But they all assume that they understand evolution.

The level-3 person views evolution as an abstract process. He can use the theory of evolution to understand various things, such as human nature, the complexity of life, how organisms fit into niches, etc.

Each view provides useful knowledge at its cognitive level. The level-1 view provides the knowledge that things were different in the past, and that humans evolved from non-human ancestors. It explains why you might see dinosaurs or cavemen in popular TV shows and movies. The level-2 view includes the knowledge that life is competitive, that the process of change involves competition (of some kind), and that genes are involved. But only the level-3 view allows to correctly understand how the complex order of biology emerges from physics.

Maybe there is a higher level that humans cannot access, from which the level-3 theory seems wrong or incomplete.

Most people don’t understand evolution, and can’t understand evolution, because it is an abstract process that is beyond their cognitive level. Yet, many of those people believe that they do understand evolution, because they have a lower-level view of it.

Again, people at lower levels don’t really know that higher levels exist.

Because politics is about popularity, political discourse rarely rises above level 1. Politicians must use level-1 ideas to appeal to the masses. Most people can’t understand social issues, so politics becomes a popularity contest between politicians. It becomes personal. The great tragedy of politics is that only low-level ideas can win elections, but only high-level ideas can solve social problems.

Our culture has the assumption that smarter ideas will eventually replace dumber ideas. If ideas are tested rationally and empirically, that might be the case. But if ideas are tested by popularity, the dumber ones will often win, because they fit inside more heads.

Our culture also has the assumption (or pretense) of cognitive egalitarianism: that anyone can understand anything. This assumption is false. Most people cannot understand intellectual discourse. We should not expect them to. Conversely, we should not expect intellectuals to communicate their ideas to the masses. To make intellectual progress, we need cognitive elitism, not cognitive egalitarianism. But cognitive elitism is not popular, for obvious reasons. When we have high-level spaces, we pretend that they are based on specialized knowledge, not innate ability.

The 3-cognitive-levels model is simple, but I find it very useful for categorizing thought and discourse.