The Education of Axel Heyst

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jacob
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Re: The Education of Axel Heyst

Post by jacob »

Also just to break the WLs a bit. DW was never nearly as interested in optimizing "advanced consumer" behavior (WL3, 4, 4/5) as she's been at "obtaining yields" for WL6 stuff. To abuse an idiom: The roads to Rome are not all the same. Maybe WLs can be skipped or at least circumvented. Also see recent developments viewtopic.php?p=238772#p238772

7Wannabe5
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Re: The Education of Axel Heyst

Post by 7Wannabe5 »

That sounds about right. The funny thing is that if an ENFP loves you, they will sometimes unconsciously assign you values you don’t hold or better motivations than you truly possess.

RoamingFrancis
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Re: The Education of Axel Heyst

Post by RoamingFrancis »

That certainly sounds like me. However, I'd echo what Jacob said about degrees of maturity within the personality type. A K3 ENFP might be very conformist and people pleasing, whereas a K4 ENFP could be more like what you describe—values first, then use the magical ENFP sparkle to connect with an "Us."

By the way, one of the "ENFP stereotypes" I really dislike is that gregariousness somehow excludes us from being real philosophers or intellectuals, pursuits best left to cerebral INTJs. Not accusing you of anything, just a sidenote :)

AxelHeyst
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Re: The Education of Axel Heyst

Post by AxelHeyst »

Note to self:
As Chris Martenson says, “Every older person will eventually be confronted by a younger person that will ask them Two Questions. When did you know? And… What did you do about it?”
https://darkgreenmountainsurvivalresear ... rvivalism/

7Wannabe5
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Re: The Education of Axel Heyst

Post by 7Wannabe5 »

Even though the behavior it recommends is roughly what I am attempting to do with myself in the “extra years”, I kind of hate that quote. It reeks of covert contract and does not reflect reality of anybody who has actually experienced being parent of truly adult children. It imagines the next generation as being perpetually locked in the vulnerability of age 4 or the resentful attitude of age 14. The truth is that you have very little control over your legacy, and you just need to do your weak best at what you believe to be the right thing, because to do otherwise simply isn’t “sporting.” Or fitb similar adjective.

AxelHeyst
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Re: The Education of Axel Heyst

Post by AxelHeyst »

Sure - I see that quote more as a parable than a specific prediction of a real conversation I'm going to have to have. Good points about infantilizing future generations, I've not really considered that in much depth. I do prefer to spend more time with the aspirational idea "be a good ancestor", but every once in a while that quote above gets to me.

That guy's blog, new to me, is an absolute romp. Not to everyone's taste, I imagine.

jacob
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Re: The Education of Axel Heyst

Post by jacob »

I suspect the covert contract here is the idea that next generations are supposed to be better or at least equally well off. The broken contract is that they won't be. The moral issue is that they won't be by our standards. The way out is that maybe they will be by their own standards. In practice, then, some will blame us. Thus, prepare to prepare an answer when talking to family/younglings who were "sold down the river" of irreversible time.

Add: I do think this might just be the current generations projecting expectations. In the past, people were so used to getting a shite-deal for getting born that dealing with it was just expected: The standard human condition. What we're dealing with currently is certainly an aberration.

7Wannabe5
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Re: The Education of Axel Heyst

Post by 7Wannabe5 »

I apologize for coming off a bit grouchy old lady. My youngest child is going to be thirty this year, so when I talk to them about this topic it is within the perspective that we are all first world adults who likely aren’t doing enough. How many people do any of us know who believe that they are doing enough?

The topic is taught in schools these days, so on some level children are more likely to “know” than their grandparents, but it is definitely not the case that they connect the dots to their own consumption provided through the support of their parents. The concept is complex enough that once any human reaches level of cognitive maturity necessary to comprehend it, they will also, most likely or hopefully, be at level of emotional maturity that would compel looking to ones own realm of responsibility and influence. IOW, in my opinion and limited experience, this is going to be more than a bit of a “Let thee not throw stone from thy own glass house” situation over multiple generations going forward within first world context. OTOH, you could imagine some kid in Africa right now asking you why you are dumping your shit in his cubic yardage of atmospheric dumpster space, but there are a number of other tough questions that kid could be asking, and the tougher question would be how motivational is it to think instead about an adult peer (potentially a good guy or an asshole, like any of us) in the developing world whose equitable division share of atmospheric dumpster yardage is currently being filled with the energy burn associated with our own excess spending? Then if we do choose to adopt a “good neighbor” as well as a “good ancestor” policy, what would be our expectations (overt or covert) for mutuality moving forward?

I could also go on at length on the topic of how I believe many energy decline scenarios undervalue cultural assets such as female literacy, but I won’t because I’ve already taken up too much cubic yardage of your journal thread :lol: :oops:

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Re: The Education of Axel Heyst

Post by AxelHeyst »

Mi casa es su casa 7, plenty of cubic yardage over here. :D
7Wannabe5 wrote:
Wed Mar 17, 2021 5:20 am
I could also go on at length on the topic of how I believe many energy decline scenarios undervalue cultural assets such as female literacy...
Actually, wait, I am interested in what you meant by that. Something like, many energy decline scenarios paint a gloomier view of the future in light of increasing female literacy rates and other cultural phenomena*? Related to the idea that the future won't look like today minus 100, or 300, or 500 years, because we've changed certain things culturally, so we make a mistake to copy/paste what life was like in 1750 or whatever on to our visions of the future?

*phenomenon? do dooo, de doo de do

ertyu
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Re: The Education of Axel Heyst

Post by ertyu »

The minute you educate women and give them a modicum of reproductive choice, children go from 9 with low investment per child to 2 with a high investment per child. You see it in every single country. It's one reason why even though China has removed the one child policy birth rates haven't exploded to anything even close to what was feared. Many collapse scenarios posit overpopulation in the developing world as incomes rise when, with the right policy effort, outcomes can be exactly the opposite.

7Wannabe5
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Re: The Education of Axel Heyst

Post by 7Wannabe5 »

@ertyu:

True, but not exactly what I was thinking about.

Obviously, we have invested a great deal of our one time boon of fossil fuels in plastic crap already filling landfills and extremely specialized advanced education which can quickly shift out of usefulness, but we have also invested some portion of this windfall in creating something like a global middle class. What books along the lines of "Rich Dad, Poor Dad" don't grok is that the main benefit of a basic 8th grade education or a wide liberal education beyond that level, however acquired (consider Abraham Lincoln) is not that it provides fast track to great wealth, but rather that it provides a buffer against falling back into "totally shite" lifestyle , because initial familial or community acquisition is much more difficult than maintenance.

I've read the memoirs of already literate American pioneer women starting otherwise from scratch economically and I compare/contrast with the situation of some of the children in 21st century America I attempted to teach to read even though nobody in their family has yet achieved functional literacy(for example, kids whose ancestors went up into the mountains illiterate and came down still illiterate.) There are factors such as death, mental illness or fetal alcohol syndrome that can cause literacy to be lost along maternal line of meme transmission, and there are even more factors that can cause it to be lost along paternal line, but if you consider, for example, the tragic fate of the European Jewish population during WW2 era, literacy was still passed along even to children who died of starvation. Children who are stuck at home during Covid with their literate mothers, rather than at school with their literate teachers, are still learning how to read. Some are likely learning more than they would at school, because of the improved literate adult to child ratio.

Nothing resembling an educated middle class existed in many other fallen civilizations, such as the Roman Empire, and there are other civilizations, such as the Persian, that have persisted in some form through great change for millennia because of existence and continued usefulness of educated middle class.

Therefore, although I do not share the optimism of the technophiles who simply adjust their equations with magical factor they call "innovation" to control the degree of future rosiness predicted, I do share the optimism of all the genteel impoverished groups of scrappy sisters often found in novels or memoirs of the 18th, 19th or early 20th century, such as "Little House on the Prairie" or "Little Women." Wherever there are women who know how to read, civilization will be maintained or recreated.

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Re: The Education of Axel Heyst

Post by white belt »

@7WB5

Interesting perspective. How valuable is literacy in a world where no one cracks open a book or writes anything down? I admit that this may be a fish in water scenario for me since I don’t know if I’ve ever encountered an illiterate person in my day to day life.

What I do know is that the majority of females (and males) don’t read books after high school/college and even in school rarely read the required curriculum. The majority of reading is consuming short social media posts and messages from friends. The rest of the time is spent consuming other content that requires no reading (streaming platforms, etc). I think part of your argument is that with literacy one can easily find work, which is true except for the fact that our current petrochemical economy is so saturated with useless paper pushing jobs that I think will disappear in a low energy intensity future, so hard skills might be more valuable.

My other issue with the female education as solution to climate change narrative is that any gains can easily disappear within a few years in times of crisis. See the lot of women in various middle eastern countries after religious extremism took hold following bloody conflict (Afghanistan, Iran after the revolution, countless other examples). In fact the same education disruption applies to males as well, it just happens that many religious extremists still educate their males in some way once stability returns.

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Re: The Education of Axel Heyst

Post by jacob »

The question is whether fertility is proportional to the relative status gap between men and women or inversely proportional to the absolute education level of women. Could be both. A collapse could quickly revert the former whereas the latter should last until the current generations die. It's not like people outright forget everything they've learned when the pressure is on. It takes at least a generation.

Integrated models will often be fitted to historic data which has the latter inverse relationship. Collapse will show fertility shooting up right after the famine induced die-off. However, this mathematical relationship neglects cultural inertia. People tend to delay pregnancies when the pressure is on---then make up for it (baby boom) when it goes away.

Non-integrated models like the demographic transition model just assume everybody goes the way of the OECD. That is not necessarily the case. See e.g. sub-Saharan Africa.

---

Anyway, functional literacy is of much of the so-called literate population is not impressive to say the least. See literacy tables in https://nces.ed.gov/pubs2014/2014008.pdf To see how this works in practice, try writing an email asking some random person to do two different things with a contingent dependence and see if they actually figure it out. Commercially published mainstream books are edited down to a sixth grade reading level.

There's a quote attributed to Mark Twain which can be paraphrased that someone who doesn't read is functionally no different from someone who can't. About 5% of Americans read some 95% of the books read. The Pareto is very strong. Similar to gun ownership, most of them are held and used by a small fraction of the population.

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Re: The Education of Axel Heyst

Post by ertyu »

@wb: Education shouldn't be reduced to literacy or "book learning". A simple exposure to science and scientific thinking, for instance, will go a long way towards improving hygiene conditions in the home and reduce infant mortality (we've got studies). In addition, parents who are more educated usually place greater importance on their offspring being more educated. They will be more involved in their children's education. And when a child sees that their results in school matter to their parents, they will apply themselves more.

The issue of education in the developing world has been studied extensively in development economics. Educating your girls has a higher marginal benefit to society than educating boys. This effect is mostly due to women being more involved in child rearing and family maintenance in the developing world and extends beyond education. E.g. multiple studies show that micro credit/micro lending schemes work better when the beneficiaries are women. To simplify, you give her money, she spends it on the family. You give him money, he goes off and drinks and gambles it (obviously the "not all, but many enough" disclaimer applies here).
Last edited by ertyu on Fri Mar 19, 2021 11:45 am, edited 1 time in total.

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Re: The Education of Axel Heyst

Post by Alphaville »

ertyu wrote:
Fri Mar 19, 2021 9:23 am
To simplify, you give her money, she spends it on the family. You give him money, he goes off and drinks and gambles it (obviously the "not all, but many enough" disclaimer applies here).
have witnessed, will testify :lol:

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Re: The Education of Axel Heyst

Post by AxelHeyst »

Thanks for the thoughts 7. It's good timing to integrate with some other stuff I'm had rattling around in my brain. I've been reading that Dark Green Mountain Survival Research Center blog from the beginning. One of his main themes is that for middle classes, "global civilization collapse" looks like "becoming poorer every year, sometime slower, sometimes faster". He's a Slow Crash / Long Descent guy, and spends a lot of time ridiculing the "bourgeois" (my word) prepper community that thinks it's going to be able to maintain middle class lifestyles through collapse by virtue of how much ammo they have stockpiled. And that what many preppers (and many other communities) are actually scared of boils down to just "being poor".

The ERE strategy, of course, is to get really good at "being poor", so that you have a great life while spending below the FPL. Of course the ideal EREr won't be facing the same circumstances as people in actual poverty, because they'll have slack and skills and all sort of things. The point is, their lifestyles are resilient to many scenarios where huge numbers of people fall out of the bottom of the middle class.

Throw in a dash of your point about female literacy. So imagine a world poorer, but *better* at being poor because of factors like increased female literacy. To the extent that societies can hang on to this trend and not lose it (per Jacob, wb, and ertyus points), a "poor" society where everyone actually reads is going to be less shitty than a poor society where people don't read.

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Re: The Education of Axel Heyst

Post by 7Wannabe5 »

a "poor" society where everyone actually reads is going to be less shitty than a poor society where people don't read.
Exactly my point. And even if only 5% of 85% of peak global population actually bothers to make use of the skill of reading, that’s a lot of people. And every refugee status little girl from rural village in Yemen who checks out a small pile of books from the school library becomes somebody I will likely enjoy chatting with while tapping my maple trees in the hopes of baking something resembling cookies and grinding chicory to have something resembling coffee while I enjoy an afternoon read in 2051.

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Re: The Education of Axel Heyst

Post by Western Red Cedar »

I'm a little late to the party but also wanted to give you props for the serenity video. Very impressive. For some reason I just imagined you had a futon mattress, a couple bags of clothes, and some climbing gear back in there :lol: . I also really enjoyed your video on visualization. I've observed the same deficiency in a variety of professions, including my own. I've made an effort to incorporate high quality photos and graphics into my presentations as much as possible to make them more appealing. It's one of my favorite creative outlets at work and it encourages me to regularly think about my environment as I'm going about my daily business, and grabbing shots that I can use at work.
jacob wrote:
Thu Mar 11, 2021 4:24 pm
The roads to Rome are not all the same. Maybe WLs can be skipped or at least circumvented. Also see recent developments viewtopic.php?p=238772#p238772
Ahh..very interesting. I've been wondering about skipping WLs for a while now. I sometimes think about getting stuck at a certain level because the environment isn't conducive to building skills or pursuing other opportunities. This line of thinking is probably just an excuse to play on easy mode, but it seems like I could dramatically reduce expenses and develop other skills by giving up a dedicated apartment and volunteer on the road.

AxelHeyst
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Re: The Education of Axel Heyst

Post by AxelHeyst »

Western Red Cedar wrote:
Fri Mar 19, 2021 5:24 pm
Ha! I went on a couple trips before Serenity was done and did the futon + bags of gear thing. It was way roomier, that's for sure.

Are you on to Edward Tufte?

Container Build Update
Today is a good day. I finished building and installing the window!

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Lest you all start to think I'm now living in the lap of dirtbag luxury, this is a shot of the whole dumpster fire:
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Yes, that is a stick holding my ceiling up. There's a dent in the metal roof, so when I glued the stiff insulation up a couple boards only had maybe two dots of glue contact. The expansion/contraction eventually did 'em in, and so only the housewrap is holding them up. And that stick. Once the internal framing and paneling goes in all the insulation will be supported - the glue was only intended to hold the insulation in place long enough to frame it out.

The picture makes me feel like a hoarder, but then I realize that, well, that is almost all of my stuff, and almost all of the gf's stuff, and a couple of my roommates things to boot (a piano, couch, dresser, and that pile of wood).

ETA: oh, right, the kicker here is that my roommate decided it'd be all-around better if instead of me building this thing on my own dime, and then we have this kinda weird situation where he owns the container but I own the stuff in it, *he* should pay for the materials and my time, and I'll just pay rent. So I've basically been building this thing as a paid gig, covering well in excess of my rent I didn't know I had. All the capx I've been accounting for over the past few months are actually reimbursables, and I have an amount in my Accounts Receivable line now. My current sources of income are up to three this year, and I'm working on a fourth. semiERE AF.

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Re: The Education of Axel Heyst

Post by theanimal »

Great progress! I'd imagine a container's worth of stuff probably ranks somewhere in the lower 10% of the US in terms of material possession quantity.

What are your friends end goals? Does he want to eventually move into the container himself? I know you have Serenity but do you have any concerns about losing your spot in the container?

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