(Elsewhere I use other terms: I call meaning nuggets "values", and call social visions "ideological commitments", "norms to promote", or just "expectations".)
Another reason: a reorientation towards values is happening in many fields: economics, design, organizational theory, political theory, econometrics, product metrics, psychotherapy, international development, community, cryptocurrencies, etc. Getting clearer about what values are will help this reorientation along.
I only aim to show that meaning nuggets can be specified as clearly as goals. Language can only partially describe what we mean. When you say you have a goal of "going to the store to get bread". Well, which kind of bread? Which store? Presumably some kinds of bread would not actually meet your goal. So, there's always more to say. This is true for any specifications in language, from any human being. Capturing someone's meaning nuggets is, thus, a bit of an art—just like capturing their goals. We cover this art in chapter 4.
Here's some work I drew from:
- Charles Taylor, What is Human Agency? (1977)
- Ruth Chang, All Things Considered (2004)
- James J Gibson, The Senses Considered as Perceptual Systems (1966)
- David Velleman, Practical Reflection (1989)
- Amartya Sen, Equality of What? (1979)
- Elizabeth Anderson, Value in Ethics and Economics (1993)
One difference in my approach: in modern philosophy, especially meta-ethics, values are often considered as evaluative criteria or attitudes. Here, I treat them as policies, but I think these definitions are interchangeable. An evaluative attitude or criterion can be viewed as something a person does when making an evaluation or choice.
So, DAPs are a mapping of work by other philosophers into the realm of action, including especially work by Charles Taylor (who calls them "strong evaluative terms"), and Ruth Chang (who calls them "values").
My mapping of these attitudes or criteria into the realm of action is probably descended from James J Gibson's theory of affordances. But I doubt it would have occurred to me without the precedent of a similar theory, bridging criteria and action, by J David Velleman, wherein self-understandings (including values) become tools used for choice-making.
Other, closely-related strands of work are those of Amartya Sen, Martha Nussbaum, and Elizabeth Anderson.
- One difficulty in using the word "value" is that, in my sense, a value is quite distinct from a norm. If norms are notions of good behavior that are socially enforced, then this makes them strategic for agents to comply with. It means they are complied with for those strategic reasons, rather than because they are part of someone's concept of living well, and this puts them outside the definition of values used here. I believe many influential philosophers—including Nietzsche, Foucault, Kant, and Hume—used the term 'value' in a way that also covers norms.And the relevant literatures in economics and sociology, one often sees the construction "values and norms" without an attempt to pry the two apart.*
Self-improvement apps and social movements often push people towards theoretical ideas about the good life. Think about being Christ-like, being a good feminist, or being an entrepreneurial change-maker.
Perhaps that's why we talk of both theoretical and experiential ideas of the good life using the same word: "values".
[1] in actual fact, I think that the honesty that people enact is different in these different cases. The honesty that you've performed to spread a social vision is a different kind of honesty than the honesty that feels personal meaning personally meaningful. But we can leave that aside for the moment.
Even if there are attempts to help people avoid making their own mistakes. When those attempts are successful, they're often through narratives. simulations. Not a simple theoretical explanation of why a particular policy is important or best
The reader may wonder why these features come together.
Imagine there's a set of practices and values that mutually reinforce each other. They make for really good, sustainable life, for healthy relationships, and so on. This set contains 1000 different attentional policies—some apply when talking about feelings, some when planning projects, some when gardening, cooking food, etc.
Every time you add one of these 1000 policies to your repertoire, it reinforces the benefits that come from the other attentional policies in the set.
In such a case, living by a new one of these attentional policies will immediately result in diffuse benefits, and you'll have the feeling that there's always more benefit to be found.
Contrast this with someone who does not have this kind of lived experience of being in the sweet spot of these 1000 attentional policies—someone just hearing about this policy or that policy, and trying to build a story about why this or that policy they've heard of, but haven't tried, is part of the good life.
Such an agent, operating in theory, will be unable to notice the diffuse benefits of things. It's only when they get around to trying things out, like Andrew, that they discover that the rationale that led them, perhaps, to this family of policies, is no longer necessary, and is in fact not the reason to live that way at all.
This also has consequences for where our attention goes as we fulfill the policy. In the case of focused-benefit policies, it's feasible to modulate the policy according to its strength of connection to the benefit—when I am in more danger of crashing, because it's raining hard, I will pay more attention to the road.
With diffuse benefit policies, this is impossible.
I'm indebted to Boyd’s “How to Be a Moral Realist”, which I think helped me make this shift.
One action might have aspects of both.
- This is not to say that being guided by goals and values are exclusive to one another. Someone might go into a salary negotiation with a goal — a concrete outcome they hope to achieve — but even with a goal, they still have ways they want to approach it. Someone may want to be courageous in their salary negotiation, or fair-minded.
- Finally, there's a game we call , where each player collects social visions by completing sentences like "Everyone should be more ___" and collects meaning nuggets by completing sentences like "I find it meaningful when I'm able to be ___". People share what they wrote in the blank, and others guess which sentence they were completing.Group Practice: 📬 Guess My Motive
Imagine you're playing with a particular friend, and they share a word like "honest", or "embodied", or "creative." With that friend in particular, which sentence do you think they were completing? If you can make such a guess, that means you know that, for some people, being creative is a social vision, and for others it's a meaning nugget. Which means they are not the same thing!
There is another problem, beyond the scope of this essay. It's too easy to justify arbitrary things with preferences, by rigging the choice set. I call this "inception" in
I spell this out in a longer doc:
We make policies because we have bounded rationality. When I stick with my policies, plans, and intentions, I'm freed up to think about other things. Instead of always asking if it's a good time to call my mom, I can think about what I'll tell her when we talk on Sunday.
- Like plans, values are necessary because of our bounded rationality. We are unable to calculate, in each conversation, at each moment, what to reveal and what to conceal. Instead, a person adopts the general value of being honest, because they’ve decided this is a good thing to aim at, in general. So we formulate values as guidelines for ourselves, because to live without them would mean continuous, difficult calculations. (Bratman)
This has many implications. I will mention a few without going into details:
- There can be no short, complete list of universal human values. Attempting such a list tends to (a) lead towards vague terms ("community", "success", "connection") that lack this attention-directing aspect; (b) ignore the millions of more specific values which only small groups of people have discovered.
- Two people who value "honesty" may differ substantially in what they attend to, and thus have a great deal to teach one another.
- One interpretation of honesty, H, may be supported by relationship R, environment E, or group practice P. But another interpretation H', may have different requirements.
(As part of our process, we replace these broad terms for values, like playfulness or open-mindedness, with more specific kinds of playfulness or open-mindedness, like these.)
- Some values only apply in extremely particular situations, for instance, a electric blues guitarist may have the value of “crispy licks”, a mother of “letting her child get bumped around a bit”, an improviser of “maintaining a loose awareness of the shape of the room”, etc.
- My essay , is about how it feels to be very aware of your meaning nuggets (in the section "Realm of Appreciation") compared to being aware of your social visions (in the "Realm of Expectations"). These things feel very different!Four Social Worlds 🕵️♂️🌳💍📈
[7]. I think people would mostly try to live by their values even without the positive feelings and sense of meaning that comes with living by values, although it would be much harder for these people to know when they were living by their values and when not.
A sharp reader may ask about Andrew's Monday honesty. As we've covered, it was not a DAP. And according to the argument here, that means it's not meaningful. But wouldn't Andrew say that his vision of spreading honesty was meaningful to him?
My vision of a meaning-based economy and democracy is a social vision. You may even find it inspiring and meaningful. (Wait! How is this possible? Haven't I said that meaning is in the realm of diffuse-benefits, and social visions are not? My hypothesis is that, if you seem to find my social vision meaningful, it's not because of the social vision itself. It's because of a DAP you have that the social vision can help you with—perhaps a DAP about "working towards a better world", or "responding to the current crises in a deep way". In your life, this DAP would be the things that's important to you, and my social vision is a venue for it. Something similar was going on with Andrew on Monday.)
My way of dividing up the meaningful and meaningless leads to question about Andrew. In Andrew's story, where did his meaning come from?
- On Monday, he likely derived meaning from "taking action, grappling with the biggest problem he sees in the world" — a diffuse-benefited attentional policy he already had, satisfying criteria (a) and (c).
- As he discovered the diffuse benefits of honesty itself, this may have felt meaningful, satisfying criteria (b) and (c).
- On Tuesday, it likely derived meaning from practicing his new kind of honesty, an honesty that's now diffusely-beneficial, satisfying (a) and (c).
One thing I did not include as a source of meaning is Andrew's social vision—which isn't diffusely-beneficial, nor part of his experienced good life. Andrew might say this was meaningful to him, but I think it's more likely his sense of meaning on Monday came from "taking action, grappling with the biggest problem he sees in the world". To test this, we could ask him:
- Can Andrew think of times when he was enacting his social vision of honesty, but without the sense that he was "taking action, grappling with the biggest problem he sees in the world"? How meaningful were those moments?
- Can Andrew name a time when he was "taking action, grappling with the biggest problem he sees in the world"—but in a manner unrelated any social vision? Imagine he tells us of a time when he headed out to the library, to research how to take action in a new way, all without a clear vision. Was that meaningful?
A "yes" to these questions would suggest his meaning comes from his experienced good life, not his social visions.
- For an example from my own life: I have a social vision to spread values-articulacy, but it's execution does not map cleanly to my sense of meaning. I work on this vision because of a DAP—responding as deeply as I can to the situation of the world I find myself in. The meaning comes from the DAP, not the vision or its execution.
With another person, it might seem goals are meaningful to them. Check for a DAP like aiming high or being diligent. Careful questions may show that it's not the goals themselves which are meaningful.
A similar analysis could be used regarding feelings, preferences, the quest for knowledge or clarity, etc, to see if the person's conception of the good life can be described mainly in terms of values.
Furthermore, even when people say their life is about accomplishing goals, spreading social visions, satisfying tastes, etc, you'll often find that the goals, visions, etc don't line up with what's meaningful to them.
- Collect meaningful and meaningless times in their life. List DAPs they could and couldn't operate by. (). Compare this to other, non-DAP things that could be sources of meaning: social visions, goals, etc.Meaning Analysis
- Most importantly, use to design around the DAPs you collect. Can you can create a richly meaningful environment?Values-Based Data Science & Design
The society that I advocate for which supports meaning amongst its citizens and users would be obligated to support Andrew and his meaning nugget. Whether that supports his social vision or not, is perhaps besides the point.
We see this process in Brenda's story and in Andrew's. In general, the word admiration refers to gleaning DAPs by watching a role model, the word inspiration refers to moments like Brenda's, and we also get new policies by attending to our feelings.
E.g., what do they attend to while socializing? (Is it how much space they give the people around them? Is it saying things carefully, so that their friends aren't upset?).
People lie (to you and to themselves) about what their policies are. But there are simple ways to filter what they say, and eliminate the lies.
They may, for instance, say they have policies that would in fact be impossible. If I said "I try to take the trash out while monitoring my effect on global ecosystems"—this is not something I can actually do. A good question to ask would be: how do you monitor your effects on global ecosystems? And how does this relate to taking the trash out? Maybe I just imagine my trash going into a landfill.
Or, they'll say they do something for diffuse benefit, when really, there is a very concrete benefit.
- For instance, they want to be liked in their ecological friend group, and so they imagine the trash going to a landfill, or claim they imagine it. If they were assured of being liked, they wouldn't do the trash thing.
- Or they're trying to spread and ecological vision. And they believe that if they do this imagination thing, this will help to spread it—by keeping it forefront in their mind so that they can spread it better.
None of these are diffuse benefits. You can check this kind of thing by asking the appropriate "would you still x if y" question, and by making sure that these various outcomes are untracked. If they don't pay much attention to whether they're spreading the social vision or whether their friends like them, that's a good sign.
You can also test that it's really adoped as a policy. If so, it will have crowded out other policies that would have seemed almost as important. You can ask: what would you do if you weren't doing this? When did you switch?
In practice, by interrogating someone in this way, you can usually get to something deeply meaningful, with an untracked outcome and a real presence in their life.
Or we measure the impact directly, if we have the data.
I believe DAPs could actually be made much more robust than preferences. But that's a subject of another paper.
Much is diffusely-beneficial, but no longer require attention. A naive approach to DAPs would undercount this.
I don't think we can gather this data directly without sacrificing grounded, local, and specific. But there are ways to gather it indirectly: For every person like Brenda at , there'll be one for whom "being an explorer of what it is to be alive" still requires attention. By connecting DAPs across a population, we can account for much of this material.
These non-attentional-but-important things are, I think, closely related to DAPs / meaning nuggets. If we wanted to collect them, we could ask people hypotheticals. If you suddenly didn't have X, in which contexts would you be attending to getting it?
In many cases of using the word value, it makes sense to call these things values, because they're very important to people. There's a strong argument to be made that, if values are to form the basis of an economic system, or some prioritization of projects, these things must be strongly prioritized and incentivized.
I don't have a way to collect information about these "potential meaning nuggets". But I guess collecting DAPs might be a good first step.
- Inchoate meaning. Moments like Brenda's with the bird will not be captured by DAPs.
Such moments are special, but I don't know how to collect them while staying grounded. Only once we exercise judgement about adopting a policy against its alternatives do we gain this property.