I’m a big fan of a concept of, what for lack of a better I’ll call babushkism: things coming in discrete layers that subsume one another. One specific such manifestation of this concept are layers of sophistication. It’s an extension of this. It’s always fun to interact with people who are at different levels of sophistication than you are (in particular those who are more sophisticated, since you can learn quite a lot from them).

Take Wittgenstein’s Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, for example. When my friend E.R. introduced me to it, I had no idea what it was. I didn’t really appreciate–or probably even understand–it at first. I was impressed by my friend’s sophistication–and excited about increasing my own degree of it through awareness, and then understanding. About a year later, I spoke to another friend V.M. and somehow Wiggtenstein came up. V.M. immediately dismissed TLP, calling it infantile (was that the word he used?) and suggesting several other books by the same author that were Wiggtenstein’s much better endeavors. E.R. hadn’t heard of any of these, but about two years later he came back to me and told me that V.M. had been right.

As we all increase our understanding of the world around us, our level of sophistication increases, usually in discrete ways for specific subjects. As the distribution of such sophistication is likely a Normal one, there’s always plenty of people who have given less thought to some thing and plenty of people who have given much more thought and are far more opinionated, have a broader context and understand it more.

I can also see this concept of hierarchical layers connected to personal development. As we go through stages in life, our sophistication in life itself increases. Usually this happens faster if we interact with people who have more experience and can unravel more of these layers for us (being several layers removed from someone is also fascinating because you can probably not even understand that top layer, let alone reach it in a reasonable timeframe; I liken it to the much-explored idea of hyperadvanced extraterrestials trying to explain their technology to us; or humans trying to visualize a five-dimensional object). Exposure to events that force you to evaluate things and operate on them also helps us become more sophisticated. I have been very fortunate to have a job that challenges me and gives me significant responsibilities, and friends that similarly challenge me but also expose the world to me, one layer of sophistication at a time.