Needs to go farther into self-critique

 That's why I think sometimes that calling yourself second tier or integral is only slightly less arrogant than calling yourself a master or enlightened.  I think perhaps it's a term we should let other people give us as a complement rather pretending it's a label we could actually be objective about when it comes to ourselves.  It's possible, but not likely.  

There is no question that Integral Life's community is a broad cross-section of psychographic staging.  This is neither here nor there.  But the real ethical, and indeed just intellectually honest, way to proceed in this discourse is to stop using higher altitude as something that is "real" in a fixed, pre-existing way, or as a proxy for goodness, or in any way that is divorced from the methodological disclaimers that need to accompany all developmental discussions. 2nd tier is a barely-useful myth, and perhaps not even.  There is technically no such thing as an "integral" human being.

There are only linguistic performances when it comes to the developmental metrics that are (ab)used to specify developmental complexity.  The moment you extend a given linguistic performance - e.g., one that might indeed evidence integral-aperspectival complexity - to a generalized account of identity you have generally over-extended.  Whether that is a bad thing or not depends on the user.  The measure of a linguistic performance applies only to that performance and is subject to environmental, contextual and other supporting and inhibiting constraints (e.g., was I tired?).  So the notion of "center of gravity" is useful as a descriptive heuristic device to support self-understanding, compassion for self and others, cognitive development, etc.  And it is probably true that given a certain result on a developmental-ego assessment which is trying to ascertain the complexity of my self-system as indicated by a specific linguistic performance (i.e., I answer a series of questions and perhaps articulate my reasoning behind my answers), that I have a data point that will likely lie within spitting distance of my average self-system under normal conditions.  But those conditions change all the time and the way I show up can vary widely based on the context and environmental conditions.  So COG needs a huge disclaimer: "This COG should only be used for edutainment purposes."  And you're right to point out that cognitive complexity and self-systems are two very different ways of thinking about development. 

For people just starting out trying to understand the nature of integral-dialectical thinking, we do them a disservice.  We need to stop thinking of integral as somehow specifying the general status of a human being, which only conflates the term "integral" as derived from its methodological roots and extends it to general account of the status of people in a community whose name is Integral Life.  These cousins don't share a bloodline.

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Robb Smith