The ERE Wheaton Scale

[jacob]

@brute - Yes of course they're different in kind. And it's possible to have a scale of kinds if each kind builds on top of the previous rather than appear mid-air. If that appears to hold in general, it makes sense to speak of levels (a numbered list) rather than a loose set (a collection).

I'll add several other suggestions:

3) tables of levels aren't necessarily meant to be understood in a rigid context-free fashion.
4) tables need not have the same number in rows in each column to be proper tables
5) not all columns of a table are necessarily equally relevant, nor do they need to match 1-1 between rows for all samples (see 7)
6) a table can serve as a guideline rather than as a spreadsheet/tool of computation
7) a table might not be a complete description of the known universe and one should allow for exceptions to the rule
8) a table's primary function might be to indicate what's possible rather than what is (the map is not the terrain)

It's possible to increase levels by increasing granularity, but research into skill acquisition suggests that the jacob-table actually covers the FULL range of how humans think about a skill-domain meaning that the openness (Bateson) is just a theoretical possibility and not really of practical import. In any case, I haven't seen any indication of anyone knowing about levels above level 8.

@FBeyer - Yeah, point taken. I think the more pragmatic lesson is simply to accept such misunderstandings as the cost of doing business. There's just no known way to communicate in a way so that an idea (e.g. calculus or chess balance) will be understood the same way at all the learning levels (or modes, whatever, ...) of a global audience. Ironically, this was the very point of constructing the table in the first place.

[J_]

The wheaton levels of permaculture and now of personal finance are a great way to get grip on complex and difficult to grasp ideas. And, at the same time to have a tool for yourself how far you are in understanding and reaching goals in these complexes and, as a kind of bonus, to have a tool if and how you can communicate with others who are also interested in the topics of permaculture or personal finance.
Where permaculture makes you aware about how nature’s delicate systems work (and how fragile they are if man destroys) so that you can harvest food yourself to almost infinity, makes personal finance, extended with other ere- ideas, you aware how you can become more free and independent from (working for) money as society thinks how it works.

As I see it there are two other important fields where a wheaton scale would be useful. Both fields are regular focus points in our ere forums.

One is centered on the requirements to keep a healthy body: what is the best nourishment, and what is the best way to stay slender and fit. Yes I know there are different needs for different bodies but continuous study and the use of your body as your own laboratory can show your personal needs and borders.

And the other one is becoming/staying mental stable and robust, so that you can overcome the inevitable disasters in life.

Are there already such scales? And, if not, could such be developed here?

[FBeyer]

Am I reading it right: 2 levels above are supposed to be extreme? Would level 7 really be extreme to level 5. Maybe I'm just not getting why those two aren't just scaled versions of each other.

I think my main concern with the chart is that it somehow seems to imply certain attributes that will put one at a certain level, whereas like the chess example, you move from doing things differently to thinking differently, and the change of axes doesn't translate well to an enumerated list. The ERE scale should be mapped to a quarter turn on an alpha helix, not a step-by-step instruction on how to do ERE.

...which is probably why the last couple of levels look so similar to me, because I maybe don't know what truly separates them. Most of my behavior corresponds to level 7 but that doesn't seem right, so I should at most be at level 5 in order for the table to truly represent the dissonance between levels, but I AM applying systems thinking to almost everything I do from how I structure my workday to how, and under what circumstances, I bake bread.

My posting on these forums is probably the most singled minded thing I do all day...[1]

Did you by chance feel the need to make this ERE chart in the wake of the success of ERE in the Danish media? Do you think the time is ripe to introduce systems thinking to the needy masses?



[1] Curmudgeons might consider that to be the crust of my crummy contributions[2]
[2] Boy I DO love alliteration.

[jacob]

@FBeyer - I don't think there's a rigid law that says that the table has to be granularized to make it exactly 2 levels. Rather I'd say the fog-of-comprehension in this table is more around 2-4 levels. It's just a guideline. However the gap (of judgement) is fractal in nature. That fog-of-comprehension distance and its fractal nature is the true insight of the Wheaton scale, I think.

I also suspect that the exact "distance" depends on one's experience with similar models (e.g. another kind learning where one has progressed from beginner and all the way up to expert, e.g. physics, and appreciates (or deeply knows) that professors think differently from phd-students who think differently from undergrads who think differently from hs grads, etc. So there's a similar problem of teaching physics or any other kind. There was a clear example of that in the Gilbert's SWR plot thread. It also depends on one's experience with the particular domain (here personal finance).

I think the implications from seeing the table very much depends on what kind of preconceptions one enters with. E.g. there are also Wheaton levels when it comes to interpreting tables. Clearly, for mass dissemination, one would need to present different graphical design according to how the recipient is likely to perceive the information. This table seems to need to go into the "instructor's manual" and used to gauge where the students are. It's clear that if the table was put in the intro of the textbook the table would be seen as the class curriculum

I can make a linear ordinal chess table simply by listing ELO Rankings in one of the columns.

Fish has grouped the levels into macro-levels a couple of times: In the first 3, one tends to think primarily in terms of stock and does so in increasingly advanced ways. From 4-6, one starts thinking about organizing these stocks in flows and does so in increasingly advanced ways. And 7-8 is thinking about organizing these flows into systems maybe level 8 ending with organizing the systems into a super-system. In each case, it's about organizing some foundation that one has previously built/understood in a new way.

The key to the table is to realize that learning is more or less a process or a journey.

As for motivations, I say again, for the fourth time in this thread that I made the table because I felt the need to make the table because it commonly happens that someone is either trying to get advice or give advice about personal finance to someone else not realizing that the gap (fog of comprehension) is too large for the communication to be useful. E.g. it happens depressingly often that someone gives the ERE book to someone who would be better off reading Dave Ramsey ... or that someone buys the ERE book thinking it's a quick lifehack to early retirement with lotsa monies.

[BRUTE]

As for motivations, I say again, for the fourth time in this thread that I made the table because I felt the need to make the table because..

inconceivable how anyone could have misunderstood that intent [1]

so it seems brute has understood jacob's intent with the table. while it's certainly possible to put any information into almost any format, and, with enough explanation, have others understand it, some forms of information display are more suited for conveying certain types of information.

brute is pretty convinced that a table is not a very good format in any phase of jacob's endeavor.

here are hypothetical steps in the course of "formalizing ERE" [2]:

1)collecting information
2)ordering and structuring information in a way that facilitates the goal ("give others targeted information")
3)get feedback and try it out
4)go to 2) a few times
5)polish & present information

tables are great for comparing a bunch of values, where one or more dimensions make sense to compare. year over year growth. net worth over time. performance over employees.

tables are tricky when it's actually important to know that some of the rows/columns are more important than others, or are sub-grouped (like Fish's subgrouping of rows by mindset)[3].

it seems to brute that a table is a suboptimal form of communication for any of the steps. collecting information is best done in a loose heap. unless a base structure is already clear, ordering/structuring information is best done in a very flexible format that allows easy addition/subtraction of new/old information, and moving it around until it feels right or works. getting feedback seems to be the phase jacob is in right now, and this is brute giving him feedback - seems while some can get their head around the table, it doesn't exactly excel at head-around-gettingness. presenting the information could be a polished blog post or even an infographic like on Wheaton's site.

brute really liked the free text information format in jacob's first post in this thread. he didn't start getting confused until the table showed up.


[1] brute dares any human to invoke the princess bride
[2] what's with the footnotes, by the way? these make sense in physical books with limited space. but in electronic format?
[3] go to *[1] [4]
[4] the * is dereferencing the footnote, i.e. go to the place the footnote reference appears in the text, not the footnote itself

[jacob]

here are hypothetical steps in the course of "formalizing ERE" [2]:

1)collecting information
2)ordering and structuring information in a way that facilitates the goal ("give others targeted information")
3)get feedback and try it out
4)go to 2) a few times
5)polish & present information

This step list approach makes no sense to me[1] I suggest presenting it in the form of a table instead[2]. I think tables are awesome![3]

[1] The practical use of GOTOs is inconceivable or at least NP-hard for all practical purposes when applied to the full statistical population of all 7+ billion hew-mons. Since when have they even converged on any one solution?
[2] Thus easily solvable for structure within one page of forum threads and solvable for content within two forum pages, which I et al did.
[3] Because I can remove your highly annoying step 4, which just leads to endless debates, even with a small sample size like in this thread ;-P

[FBeyer]

As for motivations, I say again, for the fourth time in this thread that I made the table because I felt the need to make the table because..

...brute is pretty convinced that a table is not a very good format in any phase of jacob's endeavor...

...
[2] what's with the footnotes, by the way? these make sense in physical books with limited space. but in electronic format?
...

I tend to agree. I have a somewhat unsubstantiated feeling that Jacob's inner thought universe doesn't translate too well into something that hits within two standard deviations of standard conversation. You're effectively talking to the one-tailed two-sigma segment of the population currently.

Brute:
The freedom of the electronic medium gives one the ability to invoke it to (somewhat) comedic effect. One might use footnotes where they are clearly inappropriate in the sense of preserving space, but one can also go the route of using footnotes as their original intent, which is to convey tangential information to the topic at hand. A personal favorite of mine is regarding the absurdity of using footnotes as a means of preserving space is to combine them with exorbitant use of space, again for somewhat comedic effect. Observe[1]!!!

I also promise not to do this again in (overly) public topics and do restrain most of this bad behavior to place where appropriate. The example was given merely because a question was asked.

Enjoy!







































































































































































































































































































































































































































































































































































































































[1]Penis

[7Wannabe5]

This thread caused me to suffer a loss in social capital because I was pondering so hard and absent-minded about why I am such an outlier, I almost knocked over a table laden with glassware in a restaurant full of hipsters. And, it is less easy to find other people who believe it is in their self-interest to pay for your dinner companionship at hipster restaurants, if/when the adjective "clumsy" is attached to your being

I decided to rewind the tape back to earliest influences, and the first I came up with was that when I was 8 or 9 years old, one of my gifts from Santa was the slip-cased first 3 volumes of the Foxfire series. Why my epitome of citified salary-man father and epitome of suburban shop-a-holic mother believed a collection of books with chapters on the topics of how to slaughter a hog or make moonshine was an appropriate choice for their young daughter's library will forever remain a mystery, but it offered my a completely different alternative strategy to the one in which I was being raised.

When I was 21, I lived in a student co-op with about 30 or 40 other people, including the young man who is now the CEO of Craigslist. I didn't hang out with him very often, but I remember a conversation I had with him in which he informed me that he was only going to move out of the co-op if/when he located an apartment available for less than $X (ridiculously low figure)/month. If I had to name the one other person I've met who reminds me the most of Jacob, it would be him. Living in the co-op was so inexpensive that I was able to save enough money from my own part-time job to take off several months from working during a semester when I was also not taking any classes. Everybody in the co-op had a work assignment, and mine was cooking. So, once a week I cooked dinner for around 35 people. All the other housework was done by other people as their assignment. It was the most fun!

Then I got knocked up and reverted to more conventional pattern due to anxiety and/or lack of more creative strategy to deal with unexpected demands of new situation. I must have read both "Your Money or Your Life" and "The Tightwad Gazette" in the early 90s. Since I already had two young children, my frugality practice became some morph of these practices, combined with my co-op experience, and my long-held conviction that in theory, although lacking any practice towards skills, I could slaughter a hog if necessary. However, instead of following "YMOYL" practice with end-game of financial independence, I followed it with endgame of "somehow afford to purchase big, old house like Amy Dacyczyn in which to raise my kids" even though I chose not to have a job outside the home, and my ex-husband was not likely to earn very much money (I think he was maybe pulling down $22,000 at the time?) Due to the fact that I also read several books on how to get a mortgage through unconventional means, and I am not very risk-averse, I succeeded at this goal in less than two years. I don't say "we succeeded", because my ex's take on financial decisions was "Don't bother me. You figure it out." Since, he also had zero-percent interest in acquiring anything resembling handyman skills, my rookie-error decision to purchase a 2800 square ft, 135 year old house in poor repair proved near catastrophic, and I was eventually forced to acquire a full-time conventional job in order to cope with the fallout. Then I became obsessed with gardening, so I figured out how to become self-employed, so I could quit my job and be with my kids and garden. I loved being self-employed, but I was desperate to get out of my marriage, so then I issued ultimatum of "Either we start having sex on a regular basis, weekly date night and work on projects together or we are through!" , and then he left (which I expected) and totally stopped helping support the system (which I didn't expect), and I couldn't support the house, the garden and the kids just being self-employed, so I sent the kids to college and gave up the house and the garden. Then I became obsessed with sex and dating for a number of years, and ended up as kept woman in an Islamic marriage contract. Then I read "ERE" right after I read "The Art of Non-Conformity" and re-read "The Renaissance Soul" and many books on the topic of perma-culture. Then I joined this forum.

Anyways, after reading this thread, I went back and looked at my lifetime earnings on my social security statement, and since 1982, I have only earned $231,000 over the table. However, my current focus is clearly Level 7. The best I can come up with is that there is Stuff, Skills and Strategies and money is probably the best Stuff, but Skills trump Stuff, and Strategies trump Skills, when it comes to resilience. My sister and I love the series "Shameless" because it features a family of 6 poor, scrappy kids with an alcoholic father and absentee mother who are clever and shameless in coming up with strategies to solve their problems. The middle-class suffers from a paucity of strategies due to limitations imposed through shame.

[BRUTE]

well, one thing 7Wannabe5 can't complain about is a boring life.

maybe the outliers thing is just that. on the bell curve of humans who're interested in ERE, 7Wannabe5 is probably on one of the sides. 95% are within whatever, and a few lie out(side).

brute thinks there's a positive feedback loop to being an outsider. certain factors make one different, and being different causes one to seek out other such factors.

[BRUTE]

having the feeling that jacob would dislike more abuse of the quote function, brute will abstain from quoting FBeyer's post in its entirety. but not for lack of want.

[7Wannabe5]

BRUTE said: well, one thing 7Wannabe5 can't complain about is a boring life.

True, but I still do whenever it happens again IMO, this forum is full of very intelligent people who do not want to have a boring or non-fulfilling life, but they have different strategies or sets of strategies for achieving that end. In "Refuse to Choose!: Use All of Your Interests, Passions and Hobbies to Create the Life and Career of Your Dreams", she calls people who get bored with conventional lifestyle "scanners", and she divides the scanners up into different, yet overlapping categories. I think an INTJ, or most members of this forum, would most often fall into the category she calls the "Serial Master", but I fall more into the categories "Jack of all Trades", "Wanderer" and/or "Plate Spinner." Since I was experiencing a bit of a crisis of confidence about my inability to reach completion on a number of my projects, I thought it would be a good idea to associate with some Serial Masters, but there is a level on which I still don't grok it. The ENTP and the INTJ share the trait of curiosity, but it's like the INTJ wants to keep climbing straight up a mountain until he sees something new, but the ENTP only wants to go far enough up the mountain to find what you can find on a mountain and then mix it up in a pot with something from the city and something from the ocean to make something new.

Being bored is the worst. Yesterday was a fun day for me because I had to unexpectedly portage a canoe, because my DBF and I were the first people on the water that morning and there was a storm the night before and a huge tree fell and was blocking the entire river. There were dense thorny shrubs covering the right bank, and the left bank was a bit of a cliff, and the canoe was old-school large and heavy. Luckily, I usually plan ahead for such random eventualities by forming social relationships with people better able to haul heavy objects, so through combination of mostly my brains and mostly his brawn, and no money required or able to serve, we solved the problem. Then a bald eagle flew right over our canoe to offer his congratulations. Yay!!!

[GandK]

Being bored is the worst.

What is this boredom of which you speak? I'm only half joking. I frequently envy various members of this forum for your pursuits, your interests, your skill sets, etc. But I simply do not get bored, and I continue to be confused when other people claim to be and point to that as a reason behind their super-cool activities. I think I will never fully understand either boredom or those who spend their time running from this invisible-to-me demon.

I agree with BRUTE that outliers (like the millionaires I referred to in an earlier post in this thread) probably don't need to be accounted for. The odds of running into one of these characters and him asking one of us for financial advice is pretty much zero.

[BRUTE]

she calls people who get bored with conventional lifestyle "scanners", and she divides the scanners up into different, yet overlapping categories. I think an INTJ, or most members of this forum, would most often fall into the category she calls the "Serial Master", but I fall more into the categories "Jack of all Trades", "Wanderer" and/or "Plate Spinner."

brute is the cyclical scanner type. is that plate spinner?

I think I will never fully understand either boredom or those who spend their time running from this invisible-to-me demon.

interesting. it would be accurate to describe boredom as the dominant force in brute's so-called life.

brute thinks that at heart lies the realization that life consists of finding ways to waste time until death has finally arrived. boredom, or the lack of such distractions, brings the realization closer.

[FBeyer]

@Brute:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multipotentiality
Google: Barbara Sher and associated publications
Also check out puttylike.com

[jennypenny]

I would describe it as feeling 'unchallenged' as opposed to 'bored' but I'm probably splitting hairs. I can be almost painful sometimes.

I'm not sure what the cure is. Ego drops himself into unexpected situations, forcing himself to solve unplanned problems. Others, like myself, burn through project after project solving mostly predictable problems. Sometimes it does seem pointless. Sure, we're all trying to become smarter and hone our sys 2 thinking skills, but for what exactly? Does Kasparov even like chess anymore?

[7Wannabe5]

Gandk said: I think I will never fully understand either boredom or those who spend their time running from this invisible-to-me demon.

Yeah, different people have different demons. I don't suffer too much from angst or direct-form anxiety. Of course, fear of boredom is a form of anxiety. My mother says that it was impossible to get me to take a nap when I was very young because I was afraid I would miss out on something while I was sleeping. In adulthood it manifest more like I will be sitting in a bookstore cafe studying mathematics, and I will feel an irresistible draw towards the display of knitting magazines. Then I will be halfway through a knitting project, and I will feel an irresistible urge to plan a bike-camping trip. The interesting thing is that becoming self-aware enough to not allow myself to feel guilty about not completing projects in a completely straight-forward fashion has allowed me to better achieve mastery and completion. Subtle difference between feeling happy, excited and full of anticipation because I have a collection of a million fun and interesting things I could do vs. having a long list of things I told myself I was going to do, but then didn't. Now, I only feel guilty when I overly involve other people in my enthusiasms, like with my recent interest in polyamory, which obviously temporarily irresistibly distracted me from focusing my energies on my stated primary goals of completing my permaculture project and achieving financial independence by Harvest 2022 (sigh.)

I agree with BRUTE that outliers (like the millionaires I referred to in an earlier post in this thread) probably don't need to be accounted for. The odds of running into one of these characters and him asking one of us for financial advice is pretty much zero.

The funny thing is that I am currently frequently double-decker couch-surf mooching off of an individual whose financial situation places him somewhere in the realm of net worth $50,000,000 or one of the 10,000 wealthiest people in the U.S. My BF became friends with him when they were both living in some terrible dive Frat house in Detroit when my BF was in his 20s and his uber-wealthy friend was in his 40s. My BF occupies a room in his friend's very modest, cluttered house when he isn't working out of the country or using his hotel points with me. His friend certainly does not ask me for financial advice. He did ask my opinion about whether it was likely that a marriage would succeed if the bride-to-be insisted on spending $5000 on engraved glass invitations and the groom-to-be was working 70 hours/week to provide funds. He was not entirely happy with my answer which was that the marriage was likely to fail, but it would be as much the groom's fault as the bride's. What he should ask my opinion on is the ghastly-on-multiple-counts state of his bathroom wallpaper. He is 76, still runs his business, does push-ups, head-stands and runs up and down a running path my BF made for him in his yard, and mostly eats bowls full of fruit. He teases my BF that he is only making money on the stocks he told him to buy, but that's all the insider information I have been able to garner. I also know that he told my BF that he should not let me get away

brute is the cyclical scanner type. is that plate spinner?

The 3 cyclical types are the Plate Spinner, Double Agent and the Sybil. I don't have the book readily at hand, but the names are fairly self-explanatory. I don't think personal finance is something that starts like a trunk and then branches into life-style design. I think personal finance is more like one of the roots that nourishes lifestyle design. So that's why a person can exhibit Level 7 thinking even if they aren't very strong in personal finance and why a person who is excellent at personal finance can be extremely weak at home-making or social-relationships or the arts or even science and technology or physical fitness and vice-versa.

[stand@desk]

An example of The Highest Level? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_QKbIb8wcz0 Seems like level 8-9s become nomadic..

1:17:54 to 1:25:00

[Dragline]

well, one thing 7Wannabe5 can't complain about is a boring life.

maybe the outliers thing is just that. on the bell curve of humans who're interested in ERE, 7Wannabe5 is probably on one of the sides. 95% are within whatever, and a few lie out(side).

brute thinks there's a positive feedback loop to being an outsider. certain factors make one different, and being different causes one to seek out other such factors.

Interesting -- I don't thing the distribution looks like a bell curve. One of the reasons is does not is for the reason you suggest -- while negative feedback loops ("peer pressure") might push most people back towards the center or common area, the outlier feedback loop would tend to create a "fat tail" or multi-humped distribution as you went further out.

It would be interesting to guesstimate a curve where increasing ERE-wheaton scales are on the x-axis and the number of adherents is on the y.

[BRUTE]

@Brute:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multipotentiality
Google: Barbara Sher and associated publications
Also check out puttylike.com

thanks, but brute has read the book. he just forgot the name she gave to the cyclical scanner.

[BRUTE]

Interesting -- I don't thing the distribution looks like a bell curve. One of the reasons is does not is for the reason you suggest -- while negative feedback loops ("peer pressure") might push most people back towards the center or common area, the outlier feedback loop would tend to create a "fat tail" or multi-humped distribution as you went further out.

to be honest, brute hasn't really thought about it - but while the feedback loops would keep humans at the extreme out of the middle, it wouldn't necessarily create more extreme humans, would it?