The Education of Axel Heyst

Where are you and where are you going?
jacob
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Re: The Education of Axel Heyst

Post by jacob »

IIRC, the 2052 (Randers), which is a World3 derivative and published in 2012, has collapse happening in 2050-60 and assumed something closer to CT (lots of alternative energy). I checked against data last year and alternative energy adoption was about half the rate assumed in 2012. Don't quote me on this.

Keep in mind that World3 does not model detailed technologies. It's variables are rather generic. For example, "pollution" includes CO2, ozone, carcinogenics, ... as a generic variable that affects longevity, reproduction, damage to infrastructure, capital investments, etc. The CT scenario would be something like "lets see what happens if the technological investment or implementation rate becomes xx% higher than historical rates", where xx is a fairly high number. The reason they're hard to tell apart is that it takes many years for technology to be introduced at scale even if it happens faster than usual for whatever reason (political foresight, heroic desperation, ...). Overall the scenario study goal was to bracket the parameter space around historical values and look at the potential outcomes dynamically. It's perhaps more interesting to look at which options have been closed off as opposed to which ones are still possible.

AxelHeyst
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Re: The Education of Axel Heyst

Post by AxelHeyst »

Just putting this gold nugget here (from 2b1s' journal). If I had a fridge, I'd print this out and tape it on the door.
Jin+Guice wrote:
Fri Jul 30, 2021 9:14 pm
Something subtle and weird happened to me when I got out of the church of indexing. I decided I couldn't count on my money growing and stopped treating it like a giant low interest savings account that would naturally grow at 3% a year. All of the sudden I went back to think of it as what I converted it back into, a bunch of money slowly losing value. But then an unexpected mentality shift happened. If my money is guaranteed producer of more money, then earning a bunch of it is sort of pointless. This is @AH's "planning beyond 10-20 years is kind of pointless" rephrased, but it really didn't hit me until I got out of the 3% savings account mentality. That 3% bar puts the goal at a convenient difficulty level. Work really hard and be a good for a long time and you can earn your freedom. You know I love to say that freedom is earned way before 33x expenses and that if you're surviving and thriving below poverty level in the first world, you are already free. But not counting on your money to automatically return 3% makes earning money for like 35 years from now really seem as weird as I think it actually it is. Like why am I doing this at all? I'm not trying to argue whether index investing is a good strategy or not. It's just that assuming your money returns x% automatically, which we all know is not true, otherwise why work a day extra ever or have golden handcuffs or get one more year syndrome, really highlights how weird it is to keep working past a certain point.

I want to double down on the failure of money to provide actual security. Since the start of the pandemic I've had a lot of break throughs not using money and just really fucking around. It's actually pretty easy and fun on this side, when you have a shit ton of money, especially if you haven't severed all ties to the money tap. There are a lot of bullshit artists out there pretending to do hippie shit, but actually backstopped by money. The real move is that the money is there to save you when you fuck up. It's like literally me and two other dudes just banging chicks, doing drugs, shredding guitar licks, throwing dinner parties, amateur farming and stealing trash to give to homeless people. It's like being a fucking pirate captain who only hangs out with other pirate captains. Building financial capital sucks. Building social and personal capital is pretty fun, if you can get over the existential crisis of being responsible for your own time/ direction. Eventually using money becomes the boring/ lame way to get anything done. You also realize how fucking fragile the house of cards is. Everything we've ever done relies on this insane web of interconnected global commerce. It's really almost beautiful until you see a grown man cry bc some poor vendor ran out of his favorite hot dog condiment. Anyway, money is just one way of getting stuff and if shit ever goes at all sideways, it's the most removed way of getting stuff. It's weird to think about, bc it is the best/ most accepted way now, but it really won't work if SHTF at all (kind of saw this during corona).

Working a job also limits future earning potential. It's weird to me that there is not an extremely successful FIRE entrepreneur. Maybe it's MMM? I'm surprised someone didn't free up all that time and have the major mindset shift to not want to work all the time, only to start a business doing something cool that they then figure out how to delegate. No one ever got really rich working for someone else. To me this is just one more reason why you should figure out how to do cool shit.
Forget dirtbagERE, sign me up for piratecaptainERE.

AxelHeyst
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Re: The Education of Axel Heyst

Post by AxelHeyst »

jacob wrote:
Fri Jul 30, 2021 12:26 pm
The reason they're hard to tell apart is that it takes many years for technology to be introduced at scale even if it happens faster than usual for whatever reason (political foresight, heroic desperation, ...). Overall the scenario study goal was to bracket the parameter space around historical values and look at the potential outcomes dynamically. It's perhaps more interesting to look at which options have been closed off as opposed to which ones are still possible.
Point taken, but I think what I'm driving at is that if CT assumed we began xx% investments/innovations 20 years ago, and we've only been doing <<xx%, then CT might not be as within reach as the paper implies.

I found the full paper - earlier link was to a shorter stand-alone chapter for a journal. Here's the full version.

The qualitative answer to my question is in Appendix 2, pg 84: "This simulated world focusses on technological advancements to solve natural resources scarcity and pollution problems. Powerful technologies that abate pollution, increase land yields, counter land erosion, and boost resource conservation are assumed to take place. The technological innovation and implementation is assumed to involve financial costs, and the delay between discovery and full implementation of innovations is assumed to be 20 years. Technology does in face seem to avoid a decline as steep as in some other scenarios in CT, however, standards of living still show a moderate decline around 2030 as a result from the costs that the high rate of technological innovation requires."

And World-03 has the different actions beginning in 2002. So World3-03 CT scenario assumes the investment/innovation begins in 2002, and the effects aren't seen until ~next year, with some Tainter-esque cost-of-complexity declines happening a decade later.

I'm interested in if it's possible to look at the innovation/innovation investment curves for CT scenario vs. real-world data. So, this study was about comparing the outputs, and it piqued my interest in comparing the inputs, if that's at all possible, since there's a lag time. I do get that many of the parameters in World3 aren't mappable to actual real-world data.

ETA: Her conclusion is worth reading for anyone who wants to skip the graphs, pg. 78. She mentions that World3 doesn't model distribution and therefore inequality doesn't exist, and lofts the idea that CT will happen for the global rich and BAU2 will happen for the global poor.

It also occurred to me that the fact that SW and BAU are not good fits suggests that JMG's "Long Descent" rejection of both Pollyannas and the hardcore fast-collapse Doomers stands up to this study.

All right I'm done staring into the entrails of this doc for now...

zbigi
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Re: The Education of Axel Heyst

Post by zbigi »

AxelHeyst wrote:
Fri Jul 30, 2021 10:47 pm
(quote from J+G post)
Everything we've ever done relies on this insane web of interconnected global commerce.
Dirtbag living even more so depends on the global commerce and the incredible wealth America has to offer. For example, take eating other people's garbage as a way to not pay for food - if you lived in my city in Poland, there isn't that much edible food being thrown out, and you'd be competing for it with some pensioners who dumpster dive out of poverty (and not lifestyle choice).

More broadly, if the global economy takes a major dive (let's say, the American standard of living drops by two-thirds), I'm guessing it might be the salarymen who will be more resilient, not the dirtbags. Notice how dirtbagging and various forms of hippie life only became viable in the 60ties, where there was enough wealth created to enable people to live off society's crumbs. There were no alternative lifestyles in 1905 for example.

7Wannabe5
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Re: The Education of Axel Heyst

Post by 7Wannabe5 »

I wondered about the per capita distributions over population too. My intuition would be much in alignment with author’s suggestion of mixed outcomes. Open question might be whether this will manifest more or less in currently affluent realms such as the U.S?

@zbigi:

Yeah, I can also see that in compare/contrast between New Orleans vs Flint. The bohemian pirate (or bohemian courtesan) lifestyle is more likely to flourish in realms with high chaotic contrast/contact of international wealth and established underclass poverty. In realms such as Flint or your city in Poland, where the wealth is even just one order decreased or removed, the pickings become much slimmer. OTOH, rural realities or practices may better come into play as population declines. Also, I think Pickety noted that the particular species of salaryman who will relatively flourish in such an environment is the bureaucrat.

Jin+Guice
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Re: The Education of Axel Heyst

Post by Jin+Guice »

@zbigi: I agree that dumpster diving is not a reliable source if global supply chains break down. That's the impetus for still continuing to amateur farm, even if we are currently procuring more food than we could ever possibly eat by dumpster diving 1-2 times per week and having a community fridge on our property. I think it's a realization people like Mark Boyle and Rob Greenfield had and why they ultimately turned to agriculture after both were successful dumpster divers. I was also shocked that a high poverty area such as New Orleans doesn't have dumpsters which are picked clean. I think this is a reflection of the true wealth of America, where even the poorest have access to food that is less socially stigmatized than digging through the trash.

I disagree about the resilience of the salaryman. They have only one mode of resource acquisition, and once that mode is gone, they are in trouble. A dirtbag/ hippie who dumpster dives everything also only has one mode of resource acquisition, which is very close to that of the salaryman. However, someone who has multiple forms of resource acquisition and/ or produces some things themselves, will be more resilient. So it's really the ERE part making someone resilient and not the dirtbag/ salaryman choice. I think ERE allows a combination of both lifestyles, which is what builds resilience. It's the dirtbag who embraces the efficiency of paid work and the salaryman who embraces the resilience of financially inefficient work who build resilience.

AxelHeyst
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Re: The Education of Axel Heyst

Post by AxelHeyst »

zbigi wrote:
Sat Jul 31, 2021 2:53 am
Dirtbag living even more so depends on the global commerce and the incredible wealth America has to offer. For example, take eating other people's garbage as a way to not pay for food - if you lived in my city in Poland, there isn't that much edible food being thrown out, and you'd be competing for it with some pensioners who dumpster dive out of poverty (and not lifestyle choice).
Yeah I don't know or care if dirtbagging is more or less resilient than salarymanning, they both seem a half-step from misery to me. DirtbagERE is more resilient than either, because of the whole ERE bit. JnG as an example: for the moment he digs through trash for food, but he's also sitting on a big stash of FU/FI money, and is farming, and has extensive networks, and has multiple skills he can barter for food and stuff, and and and...

...and per my definition of dirtbagERE, there's nothing in there that implies any more reliance on industrial waste streams than tradERE. It just indicates an attitude of indifference to first-world standards of living/status displays, a well defined freedom-to motivation (stoke), and likely but not necessarily a slower path to FI-level stash because you're taking a semiERE approach to getting $.
zbigi wrote:
Sat Jul 31, 2021 2:53 am
There were no alternative lifestyles in 1905 for example.
Balderdash. :) I mean, the commodification and marketing of lifestyle consumption hadn't become a thing yet because Capitalism had bigger fish to fry at the time, so there were probably fewer people doing "alt lifestyles" in the same way you can now walk down the street and spot crustpunks, dirtbags, hippies, punks, etc.

But in 1905 you had hardcore anarchists, hardcore communists, you did have people living in communes (more I think in the 19th century), bohemians, people really into living in the woods, inventors and tinkerers, occultists.... I think there's an argument to be made that in 1900 there were more *true* alternative lifestyles going around, because most alt lifestyles today are just different flavors of consumerism. Most "hippies" buy as much stuff as the next person. Most "dirtbags" only do it for a few years, possibly because jobs are scarce so they don't have anything better to do, and they eat at Little Ceasars all the time.

I think you're right that the wealth of industrial civilization has created opportunities that there weren't before, I just think we need to add some more definitions/categorizations. It was certainly more difficult to live of waste streams in 1905 because society didn't waste as much stuff; agreed. I just disagree that that implies there weren't "alternative" lifestyles.

(It also occurs to me that there might have been more alt people in America than Poland, and when I think of 1905 I think of my great-and great-great ancestors, who were wandering around the mountains of Idaho and Montana doing Idaho/Montana person stuff. I mean, the US was kind of one big pot of alternative lifestylers since we started it, and we've been trending towards less weird/more common over time, largely as a result of normalizing American behavior/lifestyle...)
Last edited by AxelHeyst on Sat Jul 31, 2021 11:32 am, edited 1 time in total.

Qazwer
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Re: The Education of Axel Heyst

Post by Qazwer »

How many forms of income is one form of resilience. But the other question is how strong each of those forms are and how interconnected. Farming might require paying taxes on the land. Conversely salaryman bureaucrats might fall out of favor. A common refrain is the military is always paid. But US history is full of riots and near revolutions of veterans not getting paid which goes all the way back to the founding of the nation. Multiple skills and flexibility to whatever reality is key, but then again is luck. Tourist and trade towns will always have excess waste. Less prosperous towns less so. But there are plenty of third world mega cities where people from rural areas migrate to pick trash (better life than the farm) IOW particulars matter and your mileage will vary.

RoamingFrancis
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Re: The Education of Axel Heyst

Post by RoamingFrancis »

Henry David Thoreau and Ralph Bosordi could be starting points for investigating 19th century versions of ERE

Jin+Guice
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Re: The Education of Axel Heyst

Post by Jin+Guice »

@Qazwer: I agree that economic resilience is based on the correlation of methods of economic acquisition. To me, this is even more of a reason to do weird shit though.



Are the dumpsters of Flint and Poland empty? I'm not there so I don't know. Those are certainly poor areas compared to most of the U.S. or Western Europe and a lot of wealth/ people certainly flow through New Orleans, though it too is a poor city for residents. But I'm not dumpster diving shipyards and produce shipping facilities. I'm hitting local grocery stores, many of which are in poorer sections of town, and the waste at these places is fucking staggering. The main impediment to dumpster diving I experience is never lack of waste or competition, but the compactor, which requires higher investment than a dumpster and is more prevalent at fancier grocery stores. Based on limited experience alone, I would imagine the limits to dumpster diving would be: lack of population density (fewer stores, so less chance of finding one w/o a compactor), a lack of industrialization (less waste) and extreme poverty (lack of stigmatization around dumpster diving for survival reasons, leading to high competition).

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Re: The Education of Axel Heyst

Post by 7Wannabe5 »

I’ve only dumpster dived for cardboard on Flint, but the major impediment to any form of scavenger or foraging activity for me would be how scary is my competition. I am not afraid of competition in the form of other scruffy rare book dealers at library discard sales, and I am not afraid of the ancient Asian grandmothers of graduate students who might pick up beer cans tossed about by frat boys on frisbee golf course at park before me in realms such as Ann Arbor. I am afraid of some of the dirty tattooed drug addicted carnival worker types I encounter wandering around Flint. A field or cozy kitchen mouse can’t directly compete with a street rat.

Qazwer
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Re: The Education of Axel Heyst

Post by Qazwer »

@jin+juice I keep seeing your response of weird stuff as the psychology study bias term ‘Western Educated Industrialized Rich and Democratic’ - my only point is that the weird stuff you do seems to have a correlation of the society you live in
Especially add in that you live in an area which has a large tourist drive indirectly on the economy. The resilience of those activities are correlated.
From my salary man perspective, the stuff you do is weird and freaking awesome. It seems different and resilient to collapse on first look. But my salary man perspective is biased by living in the US and my interaction with people of multiple SES, world views and occupations but all living in the society. This board is ‘WEIRD’ and I cannot predict the future.

Jin+Guice
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Re: The Education of Axel Heyst

Post by Jin+Guice »

@Qazwer: I think we largely agree and I'm not sure if I'm missing some point of conflict? I agree that the things I do are not global solutions, they are local solutions, localized to me. An old Bengali man or a young American teenager in a Christian Cult is not going to be able to pull off what I do and may rightly say "fuck this J+G guy and his bragging about his life that is so easy," and they are right. Living in America/ Western Europe puts all of this stuff on easy mode. But the majority of this board lives in these places and that still makes up something like 5-10% of the world's population, so I don't think what I'm doing is totally ungeneralizeable. Saying the stuff is only weird from the perspective of the society/ social class/ location I was raised in sort of proves my point, I think. By just being a little bit weird by the standards of the exact society I am from, I'm able to reap massive benefits.

I also don't think I've brilliantly solved a resiliency problem. None of the stuff I'm doing makes me resilient to the myriad of catastrophic events that could be on the horizon as a result of massive environmental disruption or just stuff that recurs throughout post-agricultural human history. It does however make me more resilient to stuff like economic downturns and small disruptions, like a global pandemic for instance. So there is still some localized resiliency gained, but I haven't become resilient enough to withstand the end of industrialized society as we know it or any other unknown apocalypse.

So again, not sure if we are actually agreeing with each other or I'm missing something?

Qazwer
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Re: The Education of Axel Heyst

Post by Qazwer »

Re-reading it - I think we agree - I have been reading a bunch of comparative anthropology recently and using our discussion to work out some ideas to make sure that I understand them - writing them down helps me work them through
If you asked me a couple of years ago, I would have thought your lifestyle resilient to basically anything. I think my old definition of anything was faulty. I am trying to figure out the limits of my own model (related to whatever comes next) and seeing the edges of others stability is helpful.
Every model has a domain where it makes sense. The pandemic, recent natural disasters, politics etc etc have made me question my belief in my ability to predict future domains. My current solution is an intellectual one of scenario planning. I think the world is changing but I am not sure how.

Jin+Guice
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Re: The Education of Axel Heyst

Post by Jin+Guice »

What kind of anthropology you reading :geek: ?
Qazwer wrote:
Mon Aug 02, 2021 7:25 am
If you asked me a couple of years ago, I would have thought your lifestyle resilient to basically anything.
ERE moves the goalposts on resilience. I had a discussion w/ @c_L a few years ago when I was trying to convince him to semi-ERE. A lot of people start ERE/ FIRE with like -$5,000 to $5,000 in NW, previously having thought they were doing pretty well. 4 years later they're talking about how they "need to" stay in their job because they "only" have 23x expenses saved up.

It's really hard to prepare for future disasters bc they are almost always unexpected. I don't think it's a bad plan to assume that tomorrow will look a lot like yesterday, while looking out for ways in which it might not. To me, ERE makes the solution to current problems also build resilience to future disasters.

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Re: The Education of Axel Heyst

Post by AxelHeyst »

A way I've been thinking of the moving goalposts of resilience is as a phased approach.

So the earliest phases being the "low-hanging fruit" that build resilience to the most immediate, likely, foreseeable events, like job loss, economic kerfuffles, health issue, etc. These phases look like basic frugality/CoL reduction, conventional investing knowledge, getting a few buckets of wheat and lentils stashed in the pantry, etc.

Mid-range phases might look like dumpster diving, industrial-society waste-stream diversion (e.g. thrifting, finding affluent people offloading valuable stuff for a steal, dusting it off and reselling it, etc), building stuff out of salvaged materials, building a rainwater catchment system, building solid relations with your neighbors, etc. These phases solve for personal and local-scale perturbations.

The more advanced phases might look like growing most of your own food and medicine, figuring out how to minimize/eliminate head taxes, learning skills that would make you a super-valuable member of any society at any level of 'regression', etc. These phases aim to make you able to live a flourishing life almost no matter what's happening out in the world.

In general the phases lead in a logical progression to higher phases, there are prerequisites in some areas, but not absolutely (e.g. no reason not to start growing a garden now even if you still have some student debt...), there's lots of options for parallel development.

Each phase has a sigmoid curve to it. I think a big error is to focus on just one phase and continue dumping a ton of energy and effort into it even after you've gotten to the diminishing-returns level of the sigmoid curve. That's getting stuck.

From this framework, I see JnG (since we're already picking on him) as having the early phase stuff pretty well nailed down, and he's currently focused on mid-range phase stuff. Attaining unconscious competence at dumpster diving/waste stream diversion and urban squat farming and all the other stuff he's into at the moment is serving a few functions:
1) It's enabling him to live a dope-ass life right now that he's stoked on that's appropriate to his location, time, and temperament (e.g. it sounds like he's just having a fucking blast doing piratecaptainERE, as in the experience of diving all this amazing food and everything else is inherently fun for him)
2) It's supporting/strengthening his early-phase stuff even more, because e.g. since he can dive most of his food and his housing is free his financial investments are free to grow without any drawdown, and
3) It seems to me that he's experientially learning a lot doing the mid-range stuff that will feed into the advanced level phases. From learning industrial society waste-stream diversion firsthand, he's learning how to see everything as a flow and nothing as waste, and how to hook this output up to that system's input over there, and etc. I might be talking out of my ass here, but it just seems that his weird activities are exactly the sort of things that a WL6 aspiring to WL7 ought to be doing. I don't mean anyone else needs to do the specific, exact things he's doing, but the basic level of progression is the right idea I think.

tl;dr: I see thinking about the relationship of activities to one's personal development/timeline as an important factor. "Is X the right thing to do to maximize resilience?" is an incomplete question. It depends on one's trajectory among other things.

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Re: The Education of Axel Heyst

Post by 7Wannabe5 »

There is no great level of resilience that can be achieved absent reference to the overall system. “No matter what happens.” can never preclude “What is happening ?”

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Re: The Education of Axel Heyst

Post by AxelHeyst »

Ego wrote:
Wed Jun 30, 2021 7:25 pm
Security is like heroin. Once addicted you have to have it. Tolerance and sensitization means you always need more to get the same effect. One-more-year-syndrome. And when you suddenly get a half dose, the world flips upside down. Contemplating the fact that it might go away entirely is, well, unthinkable.

Right now you are super insecurity-tolerant. It would be a shame if you were to lose that.

That is what I meant when I said above that I wouldn't like the person I'd become if I were to spend a lot of time becoming an expert investor. I believe there is a goldilocks amount of security. Too little and well-being is impossible. Too much and well-being becomes fragile and requires extreme effort to maintain. Security, for many, becomes purpose and meaning.
@Ego, it's taken me this long to sort out my thoughts enough to respond to this part. On the one hand, I resisted what you said because "security is like heroin" doesn't resonate with me on a personal level. I was more secure before I started rock climbing and riding a motorcycle, but both of those experiences have aided my flourishing and perspective on the world. I know many people for whom I would say "risk is like heroin" more properly describes their life path.

But taking a step back, the game of rock climbing is risk management. Balancing competence vs. error, mental fortitude vs objective hazards, and all that - it's exhilarating, and to me that's the *point* of rock climbing (if I just want to be outdoors and get exercise I'll go for a hike. If I want to dig around inside my soul and learn about who I really am, I'll rope up). My time spent climbing has deepened my relationship with risk management and has made my life *less* secure, but *more* rich.

The flip side is that in contrast the game of investing is, or is for me, security. The point of it is to not lose. And the deeper one gets into becoming masterful at the game of not losing... I can see how that could be a dangerous road to travel. If rock climbing got me deeper into the world of risk management, I can see how filling my thoughts and attitudes with "do not lose" could overtake my natural inclinations to live well. So I think I get what you're saying.

That said, to counter where I was going with that, could investing not be thought of as risk management just as much as rock climbing? Can my investing strategy not indeed be informed by the rich world of risk management I've gleaned from climbing? If security is what I'm after, then I'll just put everything in TIPS and I-Bonds and FDIC insured savings accounts and keep working until my NW is 80xCoL, and then work a little more to roll the dice on something actually risky like a stock fund or two.

Grist:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e3EsCIjvrSw

So I don't know if security is like heroin. To me, the activity of risk management is the nectar of the gods. Investing in my own education, training, and competence, and then putting myself in a situation that could go well or could go poorly but how "good" I am is going to make a difference, and importantly knowing how good I am in relation to the risk environment I am in is going to make the greatest difference. Playing with that margin of perceived delta between competence and hazard, chance of error and consequence for failure, and amount of time spent at risk of objective hazard (e.g. traversing under a serac), that shit gives me the shivers in a good way, in many domains: duh climbing, but also career/work, relationships, writing, art...

I guess another domain where I'm doing the same thing at a meta level is this: I think that my general relationship with risk and security is such that I can get deep into investing and *not* become insecurity-tolerant, so I'm estimating that the risk of exposing myself to playing a "security" game won't change me for the worse. We'll see.

(assuming I stick with it deep enough to become anything other than a mediocre investor...)

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mountainFrugal
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Re: The Education of Axel Heyst

Post by mountainFrugal »

To add to this idea... with investing and with climbing you are trying to minimize catastrophic risk while also pushing localized growth. With both you are going to get burned (or take a whipper in climbing terms) every once in a while to find that edge of risk/reward. From my perspective with climbing and with investing is to be able to come back, perhaps a little shaken, and not completely loose everything. Trying to reduce risk of ruin, while still being able to play everywhere in between. Through skill acquisition as part of the ERE philosophy you will need less and less of an investment portfolio safety net if you can replicate things on your own without the market place. Your risk of ruin should be shrinking over time with skill acquisition.

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Re: The Education of Axel Heyst

Post by AxelHeyst »

Heh I thought I'd lure you in here with that.
mountainFrugal wrote:
Fri Aug 06, 2021 5:30 pm
Your risk of ruin should be shrinking over time with skill acquisition.
I like that. "Your risk of ruin should be shrinking over time, and your range of comfortable agency should be expanding over time."

I used to climb with just one ATC. Then I was climbing in red rocks and a party above us were freaking out because they'd dropped their atc. After that, I carried a backup for a while, but that's extra weight, and the heavier you are the slower you are, and speed=safety. So I learned how to use a normal biner as a belay device, now I'm gonna hafta drop a *lot* of hardware before I'm stumped.

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