There Has To Be A First Post

Welcome to How To Get Things Less Wrong!

First, I'd like to congratulate you, reader, on being the sort of person who understands that getting things less wrong is something we can and should all consider trying sometimes. I'm hoping the blog title screens out people who think they're right about everything already, or who get defensive about any suggestion otherwise. Those people are boring.

Next, I suppose I should introduce what this blog will be about: everything. Literally. What I mean is that there are general frameworks we all implicitly apply whenever we think about any and every thing, about what makes a thing a thing and the kinds of things that constitute reality or existence, and this blog is about surfacing those high-level frameworks and getting them less wrong. Doing so is a path to consistently getting specifics less wrong as well, in domains from math and physics, to sociology and economics, to everyday life. Every thing!

These most general frameworks that structure our experience of the world carry the unfortunate label of metaphysics. Wait, don't go! It's fair to think that metaphysical questions are "non-substantive, pointless, trivial, incoherent, or impossible." I mean, that's from the advertising material for a metaphysics textbook. I thought that myself until a few years ago—even though my partner has a graduate degree in philosophy. Seeing the word pop up in association with astrologists and magic potion vendors didn't help. However, zoomed all the way out, it turns out there's a big, substantive, useful, important, coherent, and thoroughly empirically established pattern to metaphysical frameworks across cultures around the globe and over millennia of human inquiry. I think it's massively important for awareness of that pattern to break out of the academic silos it seems to be stuck inside (at least in the broadly Western culture of most of my likely readers). I also think it's doable, and rewarding.

The Pattern

The pattern is probably easier to understand in a more inductive way, through integrating wide-ranging concrete examples and illustrations. Most of this blog will be about providing those. Those are also just usually more fun than abstractions. But I'll try to lay a somewhat more first-principles foundation in this first post, as concisely as I can. It will help with interpreting the examples. The pattern is something of a two-ended gradient, axis, or duality (which might actually correspond with our left-brained and right-brained modes of cognitive processing; a topic for future posts).

On one end, we have what academic experts would mostly call substance metaphysics (or substance ontology), and what I'll somewhat derogatorily call map-metaphysics. This direction has been dominant, though not exclusive in or to, in Euro-Western cultures since the Ancient Greeks. Plato and Aristotle formalized versions of it. Alexander the Great spread it around his empire, and it influenced Christianity.* René Descartes led a major reformulation of it in the early to mid-1600s, a key part of the Scientific Revolution. It's still evolving and proliferating. What ties these diverse frameworks together in a shared direction is that they consider the things that constitute existence, in the broadest possible sense (objects, entities, kinds, categories, abstractions, systems, people, parts, and so on) to be fundamentally separate and essentialized, or primarily defined by inherent, determinate, and static core attributes and/or membership in idealized natural kinds. In this view, these building blocks of reality ground, precede, underlie, explain, or give rise to any interactions and processes involving them, like nouns precede verbs in our grammar. Thus, their truest nature is best understood in as much isolation from those relations as possible, shaving away the complexity, nuance, and uncertainty they introduce. The ultimate metaphysically defining “lines” around and between things are permanent and clear, like borders set down in ink on a map of The Truth that we can look down on from above.

On the other end, we have what academic experts would probably agree with me to call process-relational metaphysics. I'll also refer to it as getting closer to the territory or terrain of reality, as in "the map is not the territory." It's a framework and therefore arguably still a sort of map, but a vastly more complex and dynamic and accurate one, with, like, satellite layers and zoom and street view and crowdsourced updates and stuff. Variations of process-relational frameworks are even more diverse than map-metaphysics ones. In fact, most non-WEIRD (Western, educated, industrialized, rich, and small-d democratic) cultures around the world lean process-relational, from engaged Buddhism to African ubuntu philosophies to thousands of Indigenous worldviews, not to mention pre-Socratic philosophers like Heraclitus. They're not unfamiliar in modern Euro-Western cultures either, just suppressed in various ways. What ties them together is that they see reality as made of mutually co-constituting processes for which dynamism and change are as fundamental as stabilization and continuity. Relations among these processes matter at least as much as any pre-determinate essence; they are not merely derivative or "accidental." A thing's metaphysically defining boundaries and attributes are interdependent with its past and present relations, including systems, context, and perspective. In short, things are relational processes. But I think process-relationality is easier to say than relational-processuality or ‑processism, and it's more conventional.

Here’s a table I put together of some general attributes usually associated with one direction versus the other. Apologies that it's a bit long, but it's still an oversimplification of very high-level patterns across all of reality and our understanding of it. There’s a lot of space and movement in-between. That's where most of us live.

The Why

Just knowing how to spot these two general directions of reality offers advantages. People often talk past one another, using the same words for what turn out to be different understandings of a thing; surfacing hidden metaphysics assumptions can help illuminate and perhaps bridge those gaps. Seeing these two directions of metaphysics in action in realms like politics can also clarify otherwise confusing phenomena, as I'll illustrate in the next post.

But we can go further. We have increasingly abundant, weighty, and converging evidence from an enormously diverse range of scientific and other sources that thinking of things as process-relational lets us understand them more accurately and fully. In other words, it's always ultimately the less wrong direction. I'll curate and distill some of the best of that evidence here, but there's bookshelves' worth of evidence I won't be able to get to even if I blog every day for years. And it compounds all the time. At the very, very least, these ways of thinking are not less rational than map-metaphysics, despite millennia of Euro-Western dominant messaging to the contrary. I'll go further on this blog and argue that process-relational understanding of reality is absolutely essential for human survival and flourishing in the face of our wicked 21st century megacrises, and that map-metaphysics should never get the last word on anything important. I'll even show how mistaking the map for the territory is basically the core wrongness of everyone from Elon Musk to Ezra Klein to theory-bro Marxists, in varying degrees of course. I'll also provide practical tools to bring process-relational thinking to any situation. Ambitiously, I'd like to spread FOMO about and confidence in process-relational reality as superior. But refuting the way map-metaphysics proponents persistently denigrate this reality as "unrealistic" (!), irrational, feminine,** queer,** weak, primitive, foreign, weird, dangerous, unimportant, or mere opinion would be a good start.

I hope I've piqued your curiosity! Please sign up, share with your networks, and comment! (Somewhat unfortunately, this platform limits comments to signed-up members, but membership will always be free and I won't spam you.) I'd love for this blog to be an active dialogue. A relational process, if you will.

*There is (relatively) process-relational Christianity though! And Judaism, Islam, Hinduism, and so on. Much, but not all, of it is grouped as "process theology." However, you can also see it in Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King's work (hello, "inescapable network of mutuality tied in a single garment of destiny), the Catholic Pope's Apostolic Exhortation on Climate, and countless other examples. I'm not trying to convert or de-convert anyone here. Almost everyone already has relational, quantification-resistant values and beliefs they can connect this with.

**Process-relationality is intrinsically feminist and in opposition to gender binaries, to be clear. Those are good and rational things to be. And men do seem to be collectively rather more prone to reifying their abstractions and mistaking the map for the territory, which, after all, provides load-bearing support for patriarchy. I'm sure there will be some uncontroversial posts on those topics in this blog's future. Ha ha.