People think in unremarkably similar ways.

As humans we all required a certain level of problem solving skills to work ourselves up the chain of civilization. As hunters and gatherers, or more likely, when we were more primitive than even that, we all needed to figure out means to do certain things in order to survive. Pre-civilization, most people had to demonstrate a certain amount of ingenuity and cleverness, and very little more. As we move through the different levels of civilization, the demand for higher levels of thought begins to increase, though to this day, most people likely do not need to think particularly hard about anything to get very far in life.

I think you can likely describe the approximate breadth of 99% of human thought within 7 tiers, with a few people likely with their heads in the sky a lot higher, and a couple of people who probably could not so much as pick a berry if you picked one right in front of them.

If one were particularly pessimistic, one might imagine that the tiers of comfortable comprehension might follow the Pareto principle to some degree. 80% of people can probably be contained in the first 20% or so of thought tiers and it becomes much harder to find people in higher degrees.

Level 0

Level 0 solutions look at a problem and try to find the most immediate way to get rid of that problem.

This is the most obvious level of solving a problem. It's practically a gut reaction. Everyone can create a level 0 solution. Level 0 solutions work well for very simple everyday things. For instance: I don't want to dirty my hands while eating food, so I will use a utensil to grab my food; I can't reach that jar in the cabinet, so I will stand on a stepladder to grab it. The stove is burning my hand, so I should move it. We work on level 0 very well.

When we get beyond these lone-monkey-in-the-jungle tier problems, level 0 solutions are at best the duct tape of problem solving; they are usually never permanent solutions because they never address a root cause.

A level 0 solution to drug abuse (viz. A pattern of habitual drug use that will ultimately result in physical or emotional ruin that the user himself is cognizant of on some level) is jailing or forcibly detoxing drug users...which almost always just leads to them either relapsing again or becoming a permanent number in the penal system. Or, perhaps, banning and capturing supplies...which for the most part only drive up price the captive audience is willing to pay.

A level 0 solution to a large homeless population is putting spikes on benches, or giving them money...which either just moves the problem somewhere else, or will only serve to temporarily relieve suffering, respectively.

Level 1

Level 1 solutions look at a problem that we have, and consider the immediate reasons why that problem exists, then fix that problem to prevent it from happening in the future.

Level 1 solutions are almost as common as level 0 solutions, and I would reckon that maybe 80% of people can think about and comprehend a level 1 solution to a problem. They may or may not be more difficult to implement than a level 0 solution. Most political discussions, debates, and proposals within the sphere of acceptable debate will never go beyond a level 1 solution.

The level 0 solution for food items is fully sufficient, so we won't move any deeper there. A level 1 solution to a jar you can't reach, perhaps, would be to store things you frequently use in lower cabinets in the future so that you don't need a to use a stepladder.

A level 1 solution to drug abuse is realizing that nearly all drugs that are abused cause an actual physical dependency, and it is smarter to give safe instruction for use, outlets to safely use, and make it easy to find a means to willingly, and therapeutically wean themselves off of the substance in question.

A level 1 solution to a homeless population is realizing that a large proportion of homeless people are homeless because they are lacking the proper mental faculty to function in modern society – mentally ill people that have mostly been abandoned by either the VA never giving them proper service, or asylums or halfway homes being shut down, etc. Thus to really get a large portion of people off the streets you need to improve the mental health system so that it is able to properly take them off the streets or grab them before they ever get on the street. The smaller portion is mostly filled with perfectly normal people simply down on luck, lacking friends, and in need of a temporary facilities to get back on their feet. The remaining couple of hobos and tramps that simply do not want to live in a normal home should simply just be left alone.

Level 2

But what if the cause of the problem, is itself caused by another, problem? A level 2 solution tries to make sure problems that lead to other problems don't exist in the first place.

Level 2 thinking is significantly more uncommon. Probably 20% of level 1 thinkers will likely advance to considering a level 2 solution. Most everyday problems don't really need level 2 solutions, but if you can find one a level 2 solution can likely be a prudent business opportunity or cottage industry. Level 2 solutions will be rarely discussed, and will often need to be paired with a level 1 solution to both remove the immediate cause and keep it down.

A level 2 solution to drug abuse might consider why people get hooked to highly abusable drugs in the first place. They might look at how corporations manipulate, or work with doctors to push their products onto people who have been forced into a position where they must trust a medical authority to survive. They might look at how depression or existential pain drive would drive people into taking drugs to temporarily relieve the pain they feel inside themselves.

Level 3

Level 3 solutions are purely the game of the radical. People who propose level 3 solutions are typically considered insane idealists, or abstract post-modernists. A level 3 solution will never be politically considered or understood by the majority of people, and can likely never be implemented politically peacefully.

Level 3 solutions are the realm of the anarchist, the communist, and the reactionary/primitivist. They don't believe that certain aspects of society simply need to be fixed, but that the entire system we live in is fundamentally ill thought out and broken, and that by fixing these fundamental problems the smaller issues will snap themselves into place.

A level 3 solution views drug abuse as a systemic problem. This sort of non-exploratory, socially negative drug use simply shouldn't happen unless society itself is fundamentally broken in some way; people do not really want to destroy themselves, though they do anyway. A large portion of drug abuse could be viewed as a level 0 solution to a level 3 problem: chasing cheap fleeting pleasures as a means to escape long-term existential misery from a society that has programmed people to be miserable with their lot in life. The primitivist, for instance, might say that the complications of modern life have forced us into toil, grief, and stress which we would have never been preoccupied with in the more simple needs of a hunter-gatherer or preindustrial society that are more in tune with our nature. A communist might note that the entirety of the suffering is brought on by the upper class, and the lower classes currently lacking the consciousness to realize that their suffering is entirely unnecessary – that there is more than enough to go around for a reasonably happy life, and they neither need to accept conditions as they are, nor attempt to escape from them; only their belief that they must have masters to control and pay them holds them back. An anarchist might point to how our own true individual/social needs have been supplanted by authoritarian hierarchy, and our submission to believing in these ghosts who hold no true power without every single one of us going along with it, have led to a condition of pain and despair.

The ideologies here don't really matter. I only give them as sake of example, and I'm sure that some people within those groups or subgroups will dispute some characterization of my statements. Level 3 thoughts can manifest in many more ways than this.

Level 4

Level 4 solutions aren't merely radical but post-radical. The level 4 solution doesn't look at the systems that we could create, it looks at the creators of the one actual dynamical economic system we implemented. It is an investigation into how the follies of human psychology and critical thinking result in the spontaneous creation of an equally defective and highly chaotic system.

These types of solutions are very difficult to implement, perhaps more so than a Level 3 solution, because they either require you to change yourself and individually convince people to go against the winds and currents to join you.

A level 4 solution can be thought of as a foundational change in what we all individually value or pursue. In the general system, we are told that we must do certain things and value certain things in order to be happy, or successful. People do and value these things, and we could surmise that the sum of all these activities creates and partially reinforces the world that exists today. If people can be convinced that holding other values ultimately creates a world that is more valuable to them, and that they themselves are capable of performing actions that can demonstrate these values without too much detriment to themselves, and this can be done effectively enough, then the construction we live in could slowly, but chaotically begin to tumble into something that is more desirable.

Level 5

Level 5 solutions might come in to effect with the less than pleasant prospect that these individual values can't actually be nurtured, or discoursed into fruition; the values which cause us to exist in an unpleasant world have in some way been genetically and evolutionarily baked into our fundamental psyche. We are in essence helpless to our own nature to generate oppressive hierarchical structures, so we must either extinguish within ourselves what we find repugnant, or in the case of some other persons, accept the ultimate conclusions of this idea, and work along with this unpleasant nature.

Level 5 solutions are fundamentally misanthropic, fatalistic, and permanent conclusions. At this level, I am not even sure whether it is fair to make assessments on Level 5 yet, because we simply do not know enough about our fundamental nature, or have a clear enough idea of what we ought to be, to construct a real determinative permanent solution. Because of this, they are mostly impossible to implement, and in some sense quite difficult to talk about and define.

One level 5 solution could be a foundational change in what we are, in which people would use genetic manipulation, artificial selection, and specifically manufactured, finely tuned environments in order to create societies which are capable of functioning in specific directions.

Another level 5 solution might consider humans to be so fundamentally flawed as to be incapable of ever generating an agreeable and total solution to their own problems so long as we hold charge over our own affairs. The only way to escape is in the creation of a being that functions beyond human reason and desire: a singularity, which will either manage human affairs for us in a far more optimal sensibility than we could hope for or act as a complete post-biological successor.

The most common level 5 solution is to simply tap out of humanity; that the system is too complex, too difficult, to chaotic to ever define or handle, and it is a waste of time to even bother with anything because people simply cannot fundamentally change in any meaningful way. Humanity is doomed to dance its dance until its own greed and gluttony kills itself. The only way to end suffering and solve all problems, in this case, is for everyone not to have children.

Overthinking it

At level 6, you might view some of the solutions themselves as a primitive residue of much less abstract forms of thinking that mostly betray the idea of who these people were in simpler lives. Wanting a machine to rule over you for instance is no better than the fellow 1000 years ago who too said we were too foolish and needed the King to rule over our affairs and make decisions, which is no better than the first cro-magnon to demand counsel from a tribal elder, who is no better than the chimpanzee you observed at the zoo 2 weeks ago that is showing deference to the alpha bearing his teeth. Then you wonder, how far did we really advance? Why am we so heavily attempting to distance ourselves from those apes when we too as hominids...well, now we're really off course and thinking about why we're thinking.

Is it better to think about things at a deeper level? Of course.

But if you go too far, the solutions to our problems become too abstract, and too unimplementable, and you just ultimately mentally exhaust and depress yourself. Maybe you do indeed want to explore these levels of thinking. But if you are here to solve a specific problem, you become, as some might say, "lost in the pancake", thinking too much about the details that you forget to bite into the flapjack.

Some things are just fine with a level 0 or a level 1 solution. I am just fine eating my flapjack with a knife and fork, thank you very much. But for other problems, there is a level of intellectual rigor that is demanded, that requires far more than level 1.

The Seven Tiers of Human Problem Solving