Systems!- Level 6 towards 7

Simple living, extreme early retirement, becoming and being wealthy, wisdom, praxis, personal growth,...
jacob
Site Admin
Posts: 15907
Joined: Fri Jun 28, 2013 8:38 pm
Location: USA, Zone 5b, Koppen Dfa, Elev. 620ft, Walkscore 77
Contact:

Re: Systems!- Level 6 towards 7

Post by jacob »

"Dissatisfaction" is a strong word but also a weak one. It's also possible to see "leveling up" as resolving whatever "contradiction" that eventually becomes apparent at the current stage. (This is my favorite good ole' Hegelian constructor dialectics.

For example, one problem with WL6 is that after adding skill after skill after skill, one eventually spreads oneself too thin. It's simply hard to be effective insofar one is 'holding down' five or seven different activities or pursuits. The WoG is a resolution that resolves this by applying Coordination(*) to create synergies at the meta-level (above the isolated skill level). Effectively, it adds a process for selecting and tuning what and how one works on the different forms of capital.

(*) A noob WL6 would just be accreting (Compiling) skills. An intermediate WL6 would select (Compute) them deliberately.

Also note that "dissatisfaction" can just as easily lead to regression and deciding that the current level is not worth it. E.g. one might decide that gardening or doing one's own taxes is pointless when it's "easier" to optimize one's schedule to make more money and pay one's way out... going back to WL5.

Also also note that 100% consistency or perfection is not required. I think this is particularly relevant in relationships which contain uneven levels.

Also also also note that dissatisfaction can be both "internally" and "externally" driven.

ertyu
Posts: 2893
Joined: Sun Nov 13, 2016 2:31 am

Re: Systems!- Level 6 towards 7

Post by ertyu »

This might be self-explanatory for others, but why does one first have to acquire skills haphazardly and then resolve that with a wog, and not first create a wog and then go acquire the requisite skills that fit in it?

jacob
Site Admin
Posts: 15907
Joined: Fri Jun 28, 2013 8:38 pm
Location: USA, Zone 5b, Koppen Dfa, Elev. 620ft, Walkscore 77
Contact:

Re: Systems!- Level 6 towards 7

Post by jacob »

ertyu wrote:
Sun Apr 25, 2021 1:46 pm
This might be self-explanatory for others, but why does one first have to acquire skills haphazardly and then resolve that with a wog, and not first create a wog and then go acquire the requisite skills that fit in it?
Making a wog is an iterative process. However, managing a system of operations that one has [for the sake of the argument] no experiental knowledge of makes it hard to capture/use all the stocks, flows, and potentials. If the manager doesn't know (kennen) what they're supposedly managing, the risk of mismanagement goes up.

(This is something franchise businesses and MBAs learn the hard way over and over and over.)

Another way of saying it is that each stage contains a functional understanding of the previous stages. In that way, it's more like climbing a stairway and less like taking an elevator to e.g. the 7th floor. You can not get to the 7th floor via the stairway by skipping e.g. the stairway to the 6th floor.

7Wannabe5
Posts: 9372
Joined: Fri Oct 18, 2013 9:03 am

Re: Systems!- Level 6 towards 7

Post by 7Wannabe5 »

Is there a particular book which discusses the CCCCC model? I've tried searching with no luck.

If I understand correctly, it seems to me that there is a great deal of interwoven overlap between all of these levels of functioning. I can't exactly remember when I wasn't actively designing my own lifestyle, inclusive of integrating new concepts at the margin. Maybe this is because I was first given permission and encouragement to do this, to some extent, in a program for gifted children when I was 8 or 9 years old. OTOH, internalization of creative license does not necessarily lead to emergence of functional plan :lol:

Okay, so when I was an 8 year old in the gifted program, I was given a notebook in which I was to record my daily plan, and access to a wide range of educational materials, and I was otherwise free to choose my activities. So, it was roughly analogous to achieving FI from Salarymanhood or maybe graduating from a more rigorously programmed educational system, but I was only 8, and I actually recall finding the core assignment to "be creative" as somewhat burdensome and confusing; easy to do when playing with my sisters or amusing myself, but difficult to achieve when assigned. I also recall that at that age I did not have any sense of integration or coordination, I assigned myself various activities such as "Learn Hebrew using recorded lessons", "Learn speed reading using slide projector system", or "Make puppets for a play using arts and crafts supplies", but I don't believe this ever led to thought such as "And then I could put on a puppet play in Hebrew!" However, at home with my sisters, we were always coming up with schemes to make money for candy and other fun stuff. For instance, we started an Art Gallery in our garage, and charged the neighborhood children for the use of our crayons and paper, and then also charged their mothers for admittance to the gallery (The neighborhood mothers were not happy when they learned of our "double dipping" and shut us down.)

Eventually you become an adult and then you have to come up with schemes that will not only pay for candy and fun stuff, but also the educational and arts and crafts supplies, the garage and the craft table, and the insurance and the property tax, blah...blah...blah...

When I first read and started integrating "ERE", I felt like I had most of the pieces of my self-designed alternative lifestyle together, but I needed to bolster up finances and fitness. I also recognized that "ERE" was an improvement, because much more generalized, over most other lifestyle design books I had read. The environmental/doomer piece, I didn't fully grok until I had read a great many books on these topics, starting with some recommended by Jacob. I was already reading books on permaculture, but that just grew organically out of my interest in gardening and self-sufficiency; I had very little interest in wider geopolitics.

My problem is that I can't change who I am, so I can only integrate the environmental/doomer package through motivation towards "candy and fun stuff" by way of "educational and arts and crafts materials." This is going to sound like the world's worst analogy, but I had a similar problem with my experience with S&M. I don't do "dungeons, torture, humiliation and dark passion", I can only do variations on "naughty schoolgirl accidentally on purpose kidnapped down Alice's very strange rabbit hole." IOW, if I focus on "the world as we know it is fucked", I become functionally depressive (flat motivation, low arousal) , so I have to focus on solving the puzzle of "how do we still get to candy and fun stuff given these new limitations" instead.

jacob
Site Admin
Posts: 15907
Joined: Fri Jun 28, 2013 8:38 pm
Location: USA, Zone 5b, Koppen Dfa, Elev. 620ft, Walkscore 77
Contact:

Re: Systems!- Level 6 towards 7

Post by jacob »

7Wannabe5 wrote:
Mon Apr 26, 2021 10:23 am
Is there a particular book which discusses the CCCCC model? I've tried searching with no luck.
ERE book section 4.3.

When making it, I was particularly inspired by Dreyfus's learning model, but I felt his was missing some rungs/differentiation at the lower (context-free) stages, so I added them in.

7Wannabe5
Posts: 9372
Joined: Fri Oct 18, 2013 9:03 am

Re: Systems!- Level 6 towards 7

Post by 7Wannabe5 »

@jacob:

Thanks, I have read the section in the book recently, I was just wondering if you had drawn it from other source where it might have been discussed more extensively. I’ll add Dreyfus to my list.

I used to work in a bookstore that had a tremendous selection of periodicals, something for every possible interest. So, I had the idea that you could create an entirely new lifestyle for yourself by closing your eyes, spinning yourself around and randomly picking 3-7 different magazines from this selection. Sort of an extreme lifestyle redesign exercise at the level of compile towards compute. As in, you thought you were interested in biking, woodworking, math, vegan cooking and frugality, but for the next year you will instead be interested in motorcycles, embroidery, military history, collectible dolls, and pop music. Your initial resistance might be intense, but would force effect of knocking thinking and functioning out of comfort zone. This is likely reflective of a bit of post-modern perspective; the notion that on some level it doesn’t matter what you choose, because the process of integration is what matters. All you really want is the feeling like a crusty old glacier just fell off a ledge inside your brain, because that’s a fun new candy store for you kind of feeling.

Of course, IRL, sometimes new magazines get dropped off at your doorstep without being selected. To extend on my semi-ridiculous example, I feel like I chose an interest In frugality in my early 20s (symbol lentil due to being what you have to eat if you don’t want to do the Emperor’s bidding), but experience of becoming something like a Sugar Baby in my 40s was just dropped on my doorstep, but I still came to “ken” it, and thus created the concept of Lentil Baby. I think this must be an example of “create”, because I could, in theory, write a book entitled “How to Become a Lentil Baby” and I don’t think anybody would say (or likely want to say :lol: ) that I copied them in creating this “strategy.” OTOH, maybe that would just be an example of compiling/integrating “sugar baby”, “frugality”, and “writing.” Dunno.

7Wannabe5
Posts: 9372
Joined: Fri Oct 18, 2013 9:03 am

Re: Systems!- Level 6 towards 7

Post by 7Wannabe5 »

Okay, I read Dreyfus’ paper. In their model, expertise is described as level where intuition rather than analysis is applied. This is easier for me to grok than level where you commence to create. Easy example for me would be that I was intuitive level good at being a book scout.

So, one observation I would suggest that might be relevant to Level 6 towards Level 7 would be that even if you are at intuitive/expert level and you are communicating with somebody else who is also at intuitive/expert level in the same field, you will still have to use terms relevant to analysis towards teamwork. IOW, maybe you still have to come to agreement on context.

jacob
Site Admin
Posts: 15907
Joined: Fri Jun 28, 2013 8:38 pm
Location: USA, Zone 5b, Koppen Dfa, Elev. 620ft, Walkscore 77
Contact:

Re: Systems!- Level 6 towards 7

Post by jacob »

Yes! I'm actually working a Stoa presentation that touches on [the importance of] this; how teamwork or inspiration is limited by the context-free communication lines of intermutual non-experts.

Also, this might be interesting ... (somewhat tangential to the overall thread)
https://earlyretirementextreme.com/the- ... -made.html

Miss Lonelyhearts
Posts: 176
Joined: Tue Oct 08, 2013 12:53 am

Re: Systems!- Level 6 towards 7

Post by Miss Lonelyhearts »

Jacob, have you read Rules for Radicals by Saul Alinsky? A good portion is devoted to effective communication and I dare say the ERE project qualifies for the title.

7Wannabe5
Posts: 9372
Joined: Fri Oct 18, 2013 9:03 am

Re: Systems!- Level 6 towards 7

Post by 7Wannabe5 »

“Sex in the Afternoon” would have been my blog title suggestion.

Maybe I should do some reading in operations research. From my perspective, there is too much of an odd discontinuity in mapping/modeling ERE vs permaculture. I think maybe the resolution lies in recognition that your skills are implanted in your body (Zone 00) In “A Pattern Language” (systems-like thinking applied to architecture, garden and urban design etc.) one suggestion is that every adult should have Settled Work that they can do in a Home Workshop which is somewhat open to a street and also part of The City as University. This book was written prior to the internet, so that adds another wrinkle.

Probably I’m once again not connecting dots very well, but if you think about the basic model of Gert actually drawn out and then try to add something like the internet connecting her to either something like blog income or investment income, it becomes clear that there is nothing moderating this dissonance/dichotomy. The model shoots right out from scale of her own small property to the entire planet (maybe even Mars!) with not very much in between. This concerns me because I always think of my personal experience with storing my own inventory vs having Amazon store my inventory and how it can seem the same when you are just looking at a spreadsheet, but in terms of concrete reality it is quite different.

xmj
Posts: 120
Joined: Tue Apr 14, 2020 6:26 am

Re: Systems!- Level 6 towards 7

Post by xmj »

Would it make sense to collate the relevant info on the Wiki? I've been trying to wade through the original Wheaton thread and like this one, it's full of detours that have exactly nothing to do with the topic at hand, so some condensation might be helpful.

7Wannabe5
Posts: 9372
Joined: Fri Oct 18, 2013 9:03 am

Re: Systems!- Level 6 towards 7

Post by 7Wannabe5 »

I am now wondering whether a fun challenge for something like Beginning Level 6 Quick Course/Review might be something like trying to achieve money making level mastery in 5 different (reasonably independent) realms as quickly as possible? It would be a good exercise for me, because it’s like I’ve already built the modules, but 2 need some repair, one rolled somewhere under the bed, the 4th is in a box in the basement of someplace I lived 3 years ago, and the 5th just needs 400 more hours of advanced practice.

Obviously, at Level 7 the flows of value might be other than money and system would be transcendent of 5 micro-career/hobby-businesses/lifestyle-gigs, but it still might be a fun exercise and money is an easier flow to measure than most others.

xmj
Posts: 120
Joined: Tue Apr 14, 2020 6:26 am

Re: Systems!- Level 6 towards 7

Post by xmj »

I say Do It. As an irrelevant aside, is one of those realms "making money by selling courses"? ;)

7Wannabe5
Posts: 9372
Joined: Fri Oct 18, 2013 9:03 am

Re: Systems!- Level 6 towards 7

Post by 7Wannabe5 »

@xmj:

I did include Community Education and Intellectual Property in my brain-stormed list of possible market places. IMO, it’s just as important to vary market places as skills/products. For instance, selling 5 different product lines on Amazon or teaching 5 different classes at the same Community Ed center is obviously not nearly as resilient as just selling one product line on Amazon and teaching one class at Community Education.

Market Places

1) Household/Family
2) Internet:Site such as Amazon, Etsy, EBay
3) Internet:Own site
4) Craigslist/Facebook Marketplace/Similar
5) Farmer’s Market/Consignment Shop/Book and Craft Fairs/Similar
6) Garage Sale/Garden Stand/Similar
7) Non-profit/Government
8) Import/Export
9) Standard Employment Market
10) Gig Market
11) Community Rec Ed/Tutoring
12) Black Market
13) Financial Markets
14) Intellectual Property Markets

So, then you just list your top 5 highest mastery skills and think about how you could turn them into service/product to be offered on any of these markets. Obviously, some will be hard fit such as trying to make money with Gardening skill on Financial Markets or Investing Skill on Garage Sale Market, but most people could probably mix/match up at least a couple dozen possibilities EVEN if #5 highest mastered skill is only something like Scavenger Walking.

Maybe initial goal might be something like at least 1 flow covering 100% expenses, 1 covering 50% expenses, 2 covering 25% expenses, and always a new one in development. IME, always a new one in development is critical because some hustles are always either going to die a natural death of profits or personal interest. Open question would be how much money to budget towards R&D of new gigs? This could obviously vary a great deal. For instance, 100% expenses from Passive Investing would require a lot more money but less hours worked and more location independence than, for instance, Teaching Belly Dancing at Community Rec/Ed, where start-up expense would only be maybe $200 for music and props if you had already mastered the skill to community teaching level.

jacob
Site Admin
Posts: 15907
Joined: Fri Jun 28, 2013 8:38 pm
Location: USA, Zone 5b, Koppen Dfa, Elev. 620ft, Walkscore 77
Contact:

Re: Systems!- Level 6 towards 7

Post by jacob »

https://www.amazon.com/Chessboard-Web-S ... 300215649/

seems like it might be useful for the WL6->7 transition. Networks are a fundamental part of systems thinking so a deeper understanding would facilitate getting out of the "chessboard"-mentality that characterizes WL5/6.

The book is written with a global security perspective (social capital with an adverse dimension) but that should not prevent you from applying the principles more widely.

Jin+Guice
Posts: 1280
Joined: Sat Jun 30, 2018 8:15 am

Re: Systems!- Level 6 towards 7

Post by Jin+Guice »

Before getting to WL7 one first has to acquire a bunch of skills to systematize. I'm in the process of skill acquisition, but it seems like it will take years? I'm fine with this, it's worthwhile to me, even if it takes a long time.

Any ideas for what skills to focus on, a system for building them and how to build skills in a way that lends itself to creating a system?

AxelHeyst
Posts: 2118
Joined: Thu Jan 09, 2020 4:55 pm
Contact:

Re: Systems!- Level 6 towards 7

Post by AxelHeyst »

@JnG, this is how I'm starting to think about skill acquisition, specifically *what* skills to focus on. It starts at the beginning, so just skip forward until it become relevant.

Phase 0: Essentials
Step1: Stop doing anything you don't need to. Address the big 3, do a minimalism purge, do a #buynothing, do the "stop all the things" practices to pare your life down to basics.
Step 2: Identify the Essential Activities in your life, the stuff basically everyone has to do. Food, shelter, transportation, your body, your mind, your social world. So the Activities are grocery shop and cook food; keep up the house/apt/van; maintain the car/bicycle; exercise - mobility, strength training, cardio; introspection/reflection, therapy, cognitive functions and emotional health; social skills; personal finance.
Step 3: Deliberately seek to level up in all of the Essential Life Skills until all of them are "pretty good" to "above average". Any deficiency in The Essentials is going to be a weakest link / Liebig's Law of the Minimum constraint. Learn to cook well, maintain your bicycle, stay fit without a gym membership, deepen relationships, start to heal old emotional baggage and improve cognitive function, read good books, etc.

Phase 1: Delight-Led Skill Broadening
Start in a domain in your life that already has some yield generation and stoke, and investigate laterally. The interactive banner at the top of this website is sort of how I think about this - pick an x,y seed spot, and the spot maybe doesn't super matter, and use delight as a compass to explore peripherally from there. But unlike the interactive banner, the idea isn't to pick just one x,y spot, it's to pick several and then cultivate connections.

Choosing an x,y spot: list out your areas of specialty and stoke, and cluster them as much as you can. I think at this point, the "best" process is to pick a skill that you already generate a yield with (money, food, shelter, etc), and then see what other skills you can connect to it. If another yield-generating skill can be connected, fine. But the idea I have is that if you can connect a skill that isn't currently generating a yield to one that is, that can be a way to "pull" the non-yield generating skill up into yield-generating territory. And since they're connected, you've just established a relationship between those two things.

Example: my "digital art" skill is currently yield-generating (money), and my "dirtbag design/build" skill is yielding cheap shelter (and with a little effort, it would probably also yield money). My writing and photography skills are not currently generating any yields. I'm working on improving the connection between digital art and dirtbag design/build (by taking the time to make good digital art of my builds), and then connecting those to writing and photography (writing/telling the story of my builds and lifestyle, and taking photographs of builds and lifestyle). Since I'm using writing to "boost" my yield on digital art, I'm motivated to actually invest time in writing consistently and better. As I do so, I'm starting to notice other ways I might be stoked to employ writing that don't have anything to do with digital art. But "connecting" writing to digital art is how I engaged with it enough to notice other possible connections.

The point I'm trying to illustrate is that I identified a cluster of skills with obvious-to-me potential connections, anchored on a yield-generating skill, that are all mutually reinforcing. After some level of maturity, I see this as a supercluster of skills that leads to a system where there isn't much of a distinction between the various skills or yields: I might write about my digital art, or do digital art about my builds, or take photographs to illustrate a bit of non-fiction I submit to a publication, and it's all sort of on-theme to the kind of projects I want to be spending my time on. The writing connects me to interesting people who might invite me to come build something cool for them, yielding money, shelter, and/or food, and I'll take photographs and write about that experience, which just continues to mature the supercluster.

I think the "yield-generating supercluster" approach is the most structured method I can think of. Other x,y points and connections might be pure delight-led, as in "I want to learn to garden and I like to smoke spliffs once a month, so I'm going to try growing a tobacco and a pot plant and then learn to trim/dry and roll my own... and hell, I'll throw some tomato seeds in the dirt too". In five years maybe I'll be a master gardener (or a brain-fried emphysemic, watch out for those negative second-order effects...), or maybe I'll have started writing about my garden with nice pictures, and selling those articles, and incorporated a more "organic" aesthetic into my digital art and builds and I become known as "the dirtbag Gaudi" ....

But I really think "delight-led" is a key here. I think it's easy to read the book and think "right! gotta skill up!" and get a list of skillz from somewhere and get started in alphabetical order, but then it's like whoa I actually have zero stoke for learning how to sew my own mukluks, and you stagnate.

Somewhat related:
David Epstein in Range wrote:When I was a college runner, I had teammates whose drive and determination seemed almost boundless on the track, and nearly absent in the classroom, and vice versa. Instead of asking whether someone is gritty, we should ask when they are. “If you get someone into a context that suits them,” Ogas said, “they’ll more likely work hard and it will look like grit from the outside."
tl;dr-- apply some "is this useful?" heuristics, but in general follow your stoke or you're probably wasting your time.

RoamingFrancis
Posts: 593
Joined: Wed Oct 30, 2019 11:43 am

Re: Systems!- Level 6 towards 7

Post by RoamingFrancis »

“If you get someone into a context that suits them,” Ogas said, “they’ll more likely work hard and it will look like grit from the outside."

This quote is super relevant to my life right now, and part of the reason I'm not going back to college. Delight-led learning is where it's at!

This is a great framework for skilling up, and great point about Liebig's Law of the Minimum applying to the basic ERE skills. That's also relevant to me *wistfully gazes out window at rusty bicycle*

ertyu
Posts: 2893
Joined: Sun Nov 13, 2016 2:31 am

Re: Systems!- Level 6 towards 7

Post by ertyu »

RoamingFrancis wrote:
Tue May 11, 2021 5:40 pm

This quote is super relevant to my life right now, and part of the reason I'm not going back to college. Delight-led learning is where it's at!
I agree, but I also keep finding myself in situations where I have the skill but can't monetize it because doing so requires some sort of diploma or degree :/ Am aware most on this forum would say I probably just don't hustle hard enough, but then eliminating the need to constantly hustle and strive and try and make effort is why I'm doing this ERE thing to start with

7Wannabe5
Posts: 9372
Joined: Fri Oct 18, 2013 9:03 am

Re: Systems!- Level 6 towards 7

Post by 7Wannabe5 »

I am reading "The Permaculture Handbook: Garden Farming for Town and Country" by Peter Bane. The first excellent thing about this book is that the author is a fan of Ivan Illich and Christopher Alexander, etc. , so he went to the trouble of creating a large collection of patterns for permaculture that actually mesh with the building/architecture patterns in "A Pattern Language." For example, Pattern 28: Branching Cart Paths and Lanes, Pattern 34: Water Gardens and Fish Crop, and Pattern 68: Fruit Stand.

The second excellent thing about this book is the section on integrating two types of analysis with ultimate vision for lifestyle/project. The two types of analysis which permaculture adopted/amended from ecological systems analysis are Needs and Yields Analysis and Zone and Sector Analysis. I've read many other books on permaculture, but Bane's take provided me with a bit of an "ah ha" moment which I believe may also be relevant to this thread topic. It seems to me that a common difficulty from moving from Yields and Flows towards Systems may arise because the focus is too much on Yields of Activities/Elements/Sub-Systems and Needs of Me/Human/Individual rather than Needs of Activities/Elements/Sub-Systems. I believe that AxelHeyst was getting at this with his consideration of "delight" and "stoke." It becomes increasingly clear to anyone who is no longer devoting majority of waking hours to full-time job/career and basic maintenance activities such as grocery shopping and laundry that our culture uses Time as shorthand for a variety of factors as much as Money. Okay, sure, Skill is relevant, but still that's you on the clock/calendar. This might sound semi-ridiculous, but it might help to consider how far you can go in designing your life-style/environment to function without you in the mix. Like if your consciousness was going to be transported to Planet Z for the next year, how could you draw a design (as opposed to a schedule or set of instructions) for your lifestyle vision that would best allow it to be inhabited/fulfilled by any other(s.) For instance, I can look at Peter Bane's Bubble Diagram of his Vision for his Suburban Farm Lifestyle and easily see how the flows into and out of all the elements of his design, such as Build Community, Creative Self-Expression, Home-Based Livelihood, and Shrink Carbon Footprint create a functional mutually reinforcing system, so even if I was lacking skill or motivation for any/all of his lifestyle elements, if it was my job to maintain/fulfill his lifestyle for a year while he was on Planet Z, possessing this systems level diagram would make my job much easier and comprehensible and make it more likely that I would be successful at it; just like it would be helpful to possess a systems level diagram of a permaculture project.

Post Reply