A Jacob Mention

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7Wannabe5
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Re: A Jacob Mention

Post by 7Wannabe5 »

@jacob:

Yes, I read “In Over Our Heads”, and I know the thesis was as made clear in the title; our cognitive and moral development may not be adequate to all manner of complex problems we are now facing, but I do not recall that he directly tied this to energy availability within the system? However, it is an obvious thought if you have also read Smil, Hall, etc.

The ancients who wanted a room of their own had a much better selection of vacant caves in moderate climes and blessed absence of code inspectors ;)
On the flip side, those presently pursuing these ideas will likely be dead or close to dead by 2050ish. Present systems thus serve as the foundation of future systems but not as future systems themselves.
True. That’s why I amuse myself “in the meanwhile” by doing things like teaching archaic nursery rhymes in English to classrooms full of very young immigrants. Perhaps “I’m a Little Teapot” will still be performed and transmitted by children in post-apocalyptic village in which teapots no longer exist. Even today, there are already native born ragamuffin children growing up in the rust belt salvage lands of the U.S. who only possess one word in their vocabulary to describe any sort of cooking vessel.

My general point being that the consolidated transfer of wealth and other cultural/human assets to relatively very few children of this post-Zoomer generation and the next is almost certainly going to accelerate the general collapse. They grow up quick!

EdithKeeler
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Re: A Jacob Mention

Post by EdithKeeler »

Wow... this thread took a turn.

I haven't been reading the boards as much lately, but it's interesting that some other conversations are referred to here. I'm not all that into the whole--I'm going to call it the "Uber-philosophy" behind ERE, although I find much of it interesting and some of it more over-thinky than I want/need to get into, and it's not that it's inaccessible to me based on my IQ and education, it's just that it's not sometimes that INTERESTING to me. But I get that for others it is and it's fun to pop in now and then and read the thoughts and arguments and references re. the Uber-Philosophy, and some of those references I do seek out and read. I've learned A LOT by coming here, about a lot of things.

But I love to see what others are doing and how they are applying some of the principles--or their understanding of the principles--to their lives. I love the permaculture projects and the fixing up of old houses and the van-dwelling stories and the "I only spent twenty five cents last month" stories. I want to meet you all someday in person!! My level of ERE is "make as much money as I possibly can so I can quit when I'm ready and still live in a decent house, go out to dinner occasionally, and I'm happy to raise a garden and buy clothes used on e-Bay but I do love my new car." I suppose that's Wheaton Level 2.1 or so and I'm OK with that.

It just bugs me that Richard Quinn took a crap on ERE, and invoked Jacob as part of that, because I like Jacob's blog (I still read old entries), I like his book, and I really like this forum.

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Re: A Jacob Mention

Post by jacob »

Gilberto de Piento wrote:
Thu Jun 10, 2021 7:01 am
More global comment not to Alpha: I'm not so sure "ERE as a movement," ERE is going to change the world, Wheaton levels are a thing to ascend, you're doing it wrong if you want to stop at the MMM level, is the right way to go. Let people use the ERE ideas as a toolbox, dont make it a movement or religion. If that is the right path, I suggest that Jacob is a deep thinker and not a popularizer. He doesn't seem interested in that role and isn't the right personality or skill set (that's ok, one person doesn't need to be everything). If he was going to try to make it blow up he would have by now. He made a choice not to, there's even a post where he passes the mantle to MMM (who did all the right marketing moves to make a different, related, bigger, simpler, more accessible, cooler sounding, watered down, more enabling, commercialized version - there's a separate thread here). I could be wrong, just random thoughts.
I see ERE as the spearhead of a movement that might change the world (although I fear it's too little, too late---still it will definitely change some individuals, so that's good.)

However, ERE is not the whole of the movement. It is one of the intellectual tips but there are many tips. There's no central organization. There's no official goal. The aim is rather to educate individuals in the hope that they might influence others and facilitate change that way from the bottom and up.

It became clear early on (2009+) that there was a recruitment chain in which readers moved on after they had learned everything they could at the previous stage. Much like people move through the school system. They would tell me that they used to read X-blog but no longer learned anything, so they came here instead because they were ready.

Efforts at popularizing were abandoned in 2011. I had two reasons for that.

Dumbing down the message led to mainstreamers projecting the wrong message (lentil soup, $7000, sacrifice, ...) exactly as illustrated by the OP link. Recall, it was an entirely different and much more prejudicial world than it is now. Only way to "win" that one would be to make the presentation instagram friendly and hide all the challenging work. But fooling people into believing that they understand something when they don't isn't winning.

Turning it into a quick&easy scheme would have been immoral. Even if it could have made me rich it would not have changed the world. There were and are plenty of operators who sold "buy my $479 course and you can have the same success as me after one single weekend". It would be immoral because it is damaging to those individuals who get excited and fall for it. That's even worse.

Either way... going wide that way would have led to ERE being largely forgotten.

So instead the focus became similar to the educational system. Professors don't waste time fielding homework questions for 5th graders. They teach high school teachers who in turn teach students who become middle school teachers.

Teaching-the-teachers is a way to leverage influence and spread the message wider than what's possible by one person operating in a single layer. This leverage increases the further out the curve one is, the more points of leverage there are, so it becomes a power function.

And it works pretty well too.

Much of the mainstream FIRE has been influenced by ideas that started at ERE w/o most realizing it.

ERE might not be famous in the mainstream public but most professionals/bloggers have heard about it and any interested in FIRE will eventually hear about it.

So there's a movement, but not an official or organized one, as such.

I have no intention of becoming Dave Ramsey, Suze Orman, or even MMM even though the money sounds nice. I aim to go deep and permanent rather than wide. Even if the wide-money is much better, wide-influence is fleeting because it's easy to replace. In any case Dave Ramsey is better at being Dave Ramsey than I am.

ERE was way ahead of its time in 2010 and it still is today. Strategically it therefore makes more sense to
leverage my time and energy to teach-the-potential-teachers and mainly focus on those who already have the required background to understand the lessons rather trying to bring people up to speed from scratch when there are dozens or hundreds or even thousands of other people could easily do, e.g. teaching budgets101, indexinvesting201, or lifestyleoptimization301.

Insofar the recruitment chain, as described above, works, it also avoids those who would see ERE as a religion or some kind of guru-thing or a quick&easy solution to their debt- or didn't-save-for-retirement problems. Fortunately, people who don't feel like putting in the effort usually buy those $479 weekend courses mentioned above instead.

This is why "Chesterton's fence" is the way it is. It is the reason the system with the concept, the blog, the book, facebook/twitter, the forum, and my occasional guest-post or interview is the way it is---slightly hard to find and understand. It's why it's been building in that direction for almost 10 years.

And failing to consider Chesterton's fence is why revolutionary "race car on a train"-suggestions or questions seeking to reform ERE usually fall very flat however well-intended they are.

https://fs.blog/2020/03/chestertons-fence/
https://www.explainxkcd.com/wiki/index. ... olutionary

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Lemur
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Re: A Jacob Mention

Post by Lemur »

Referring to Alphaville's post on page one about ERE being anti-capitalist...To some extent, I also believed that the logical conclusion of ERE would be anti-capitalist. So I thought - okay socialism it is then and I started diving in to some material. I watched lectures from Michael Parenti/Richard Wolff and read some books from these authors. These guys were more about critiquing capitalism so I went straight to the source and started reading Das Kapital. I wanted to understand the economic system.

Interestingly enough, I really thought this made sense (ERE = anti-capitalist) because capitalism is about this never ending growth and profit motive that is partly responsible for today's climate woes - something ERE attempts to fix through a bottom-up approach (world governments haven't done a great job on this regardless of economic system). Though it would make more sense if we had economic planning to quantify the exact number of stuff that is needed. Additionally, if socialist governments controlled the means of production - would they've had the foresight to listen to the climate experts and not keep plowing CO2 into the air back when the industrial revolution began? Scientists have been warning about this since the late 1800s.

Unfortunately - this ran counter to another belief of mine that capitalism is really good at being price efficient (supply/demand, etc. "Invisible Hand."). Perhaps there is some idea to "free-market socialism." Right now capitalism tries to make up for its sins through green marketing. I'm not optimistic on this. But this makes for good hopium? --> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ITER

Anyhow - maybe its not that ERE is anti-capitalist but that ERE doesn't endorse any economic system; rather, it tells one how to live/operate regardless of what government decides to do. Hence, why some might conclude ERE as a libertarian idea but that wouldn't be right either :). It’s almost like this capitalist/socialist debate towards climate change is a never ending loop.

Perhaps a change of thinking. Instead of climate change impacts on economic systems, we focus on economic systems impact on climate change. I think this could potentially result in a change where we can have all the benefits of capitalism (namely private property, wealth accumulation, efficient market pricing) with the worker protections, policies / economic planning that may come from socialism with the main focus being to support planetary systems first and gdp second. A recycling economy as opposed to a growth economy.

ertyu
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Re: A Jacob Mention

Post by ertyu »

Das Kapital is also a critique of capitalism. Despite being such a boogeyman for most Americans, "communism" and "socialism" have never actually been properly defined (which is what makes them such good boogeyman/propaganda terms, but I digress). The Soviets themselves didn't know what communism was and were making it up as they went along. They even admitted to it: they would posit communism as an idealized end state they were supposedly striving for, and defined socialism as the process of striving for that end state, recognizing that because socialism is a work in progress, it will necessarily fall short from the ideal.

The equation of planning with socialism/communism is also a red herring. Any large organization - say a multinational corporation or the US Military - employ central planning within the organization itself. One of the "planning economists" I believe was a Soviet guy who defected and applied his soviet work on input output matrices to the US Military and its internal planning (my brain is cottage cheese, so details are slipping). The tl;dr: is, I guess, that central planning is very much alive and well at the heart of capitalism.

Richard Wolff has some early work where he and another guy at UMass redefined communism, capitalism, etc. as the various answers to the question, "how is surplus labor extracted and appropriated." I put myself to work, reap the benefits of my own work, and decide how to deploy them? - self-employment. I put you to work and pay you a wage, appropriating any value you have produced above and beyond that wage? - capitalism. A group of people democratically decide how the work will be done and what happens to the profits? - communism. And so forth. I like this take because it shows that "capitalism" isn't a system, it's a process - a capitalist process of surplus labor extraction vs. "capitalism" - and it can coexist with other processes in the same system. It also allows for how a single person can occupy multiple "sites" within the same economy: e.g. I can be self-employed in relation to myself and also hire workers, or I can be self-employed and also be subject to capitalist exploitation as is the case when I work for someone else and also have a side gig.

This was all to say that I think the entire debate of capitalism/socialism and climate change is a red herring. It is based on constructs - communism, capitalism - which have no pure definition. We are much better off ditching the overarching construct and studying any given economic system as it is, observing which processes take place at which sites. We will then have a much better idea of how incentives are actually structured for various groups and we will be able to intervene most appropriately.

ERE also fits in this sites/processes framework. It looks at communist/capitalist/self-employed processes of extraction of surplus labor not as ends in themselves but as something one can choose to engage in or not, mix and match in the pursuit of higher goals. In general, imo it is best to view the entire capitalism/socialism/communism debate as propaganda various politicians employ in order to rile up various easily angered subsets of their constituents rather than as a worthy endeavor in and of itself.

** The above framework is from Knowledge and Class: a Marxian Critique of Political Economy by stephen resnick and richard wolff. I see more books have come out in the meantime but can't vouch for what's in those; knowledge and class is where i think the core of their way of thinking was developed so even though it's an older book, that's where i'd send anyone wanting to understand this analytical framework.

7Wannabe5
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Re: A Jacob Mention

Post by 7Wannabe5 »

In the real world, at the most micro size of business, “capitalist” micro-business owners do not plan that way. Labor is an input they purchase on the open market in competition with other employers and opportunities for potential employees just like other inputs. When you are an owner/operator or general working partner of a micro-business, determining what part of your draw is your own wage vs your share of business profit can only be backwards calculated by considering your own labor value if otherwise offered up on the open market plus your value as entrepreneur. And, your own value as entrepreneur is kind of like a magical input factor like “innovation.” Which is why if you ever take grad classes in economics after you have already run a small business yourself, it’s pretty easy to see how much bullshit there is in the math vs reality on the ground, but still free trade does work even if the science describing it is quite flawed.

ETA: IOW, in my opinion and experience, it’s the dehumanizing application of efficiency that is exploitative of workers, and that is why when I was an employer or manager I endeavored to be like Fezziwig rather than Scrooge.

IOW, applying mid-functional frugality to humans other than yourself without honoring their natural and differing preferences is why frugality often gets mixed up with mean-spiritedness. For simple instance, it’s a known thing that the cubicle dungeon design of many workplaces is psychologically damaging to humans, guinea pig cages are more thoughtfully designed, but the negotiation takes place at the level of how many $$$ to take this psychological damage.
Last edited by 7Wannabe5 on Fri Jun 11, 2021 6:24 am, edited 4 times in total.

IlliniDave
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Re: A Jacob Mention

Post by IlliniDave »

7Wannabe5 wrote:
Thu Jun 10, 2021 8:26 am
Speaking of holons, one of my ongoing confusions is the artificial boundary between individual, household, tribe, community, country when it comes to influence over spending/energy usage. For instance, I will pick on IlliniDave because I know he is a sturdy indestructible good sport, and note that I could couch surf on his lifestyle with very little additional spending or energy usage. The problem would be the reduction in our autonomy. As noted in “ERE”, “Retrosuburbia “, and “The Permaculture Handbook”, learning to live with other people and share space and tools is pretty much #1 with a bullet when it comes to reducing expense/energy usage, but the practice of measuring in terms of autonomous economic decision makers, or head of household level of influence, seems contrary to this.
I appreciate the kind words, but as usual I am mentally a step too slow to connect all the dots--the hazards of being the kind of person who, when he feels like picking up a book, is much more likely to pick up a Peterson's Field Guide than some weighty philosophical tome.

From a hack evolutionary biology perspective I represent a genetic recipe that is probably doomed to be weeded out of the human population. Even in my own downstream lineage, 80% of my grandchildren have no genetic connection to me. I suppose it is some deep prescience in nature that anticipates a future inflection point where humans will have to live like ants or not at all. One of the bits of fiction that I found the creepiest was in Star Trek Next Generation when Picard was assimilated by the Borg. Maybe you could say I'm fleeing the Borg.

That there is an inherent potential conflict in autonomy versus per capita efficiency is an apt observation. Introversion shouldn't be discounted either. Being a cranky Zoomer makes one disinclined to voluntarily be sent to one's room (i.e., punished) to gain an environment suitable for recharge/restoration.

It sort of sucks to by nature be the sort of being that is most threatening to the aspects of the world I value, but here I am.

Regarding the OP-referenced link, it was indeed a shallow article, but we lose agility with age and the guy spent 50 years operating in a construct and now that it's over he seems to be defensive about it.

For my part as an outlier hereabouts, I've expended likely north of 2/3 of my life being a square peg in a round hole and hope to spend the evening and twilight seeing where deference to my nature leads me. Ere, or maybe more so the site, is intriguing because it brings together an eclectic palette of ideas, some of which seem to validate my instinctual skepticism of elements of the party line. Complexity, or maybe "the complicated" conflicts with contentedness when it passes through my wiring. Intuitively I see some overlap between my pursuit of simple* tranquility and a save-the-planet-inspired economy. Doing the right thing, or at least doing somewhat better, for the wrong reason is not meritorious. So I've been clear to point out I never claimed that.

*That in my desire to cover too many bases I've arranged an initial leg of the retirement journey which adds complication is not lost on me. With luck, no longer sinking a major slug of my energy into monetized work will make it temporarily bearable, and the destined winnowing is part of the journey. Maybe the point of it.

7Wannabe5
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Re: A Jacob Mention

Post by 7Wannabe5 »

@IlliniDave:

I thought your note on possibly feeling punished if your room was only possible escape to solitude was interesting. Don’t feel bad about being a bear vs a bunny vs an ant. My recent reading has been much focused on how intelligent design can provide for human psychological needs such as solitude with minimum resource usage.

I was just picking on you because your lifestyle much resembles that of many of the moderately frugal old men with whom I associate IRL, but the readers here “know” you, so maybe they could picture me in my minimalist mode pulling into your driveway with my personal belongings all fitting into my Smart car, so easily integrated in Russian nesting doll fashion. The general point I was attempting to make follows from the fact that chipping in 50% to split your lifestyle expense with you vs. paying you free market rate as tenant on your lifestyle vs paying me free market rate as part-time domestic assistant vs. just couch-surf/mooching off of you, changes the financial flows without altering the additional energy drain or throughput my presence would add to your domain by one iota. And, this equally applies to the holon like structures we all occupy through our employment, community membership, national citizenship etc. For instance, I have no clue what my fair share of public roadway depreciation would be, but I know it is more than that of some kid walking a dirt path to school in Quatemala.

Anyways, I’m not even connecting the dots very well for myself, and I’m not trying to be contentious, but I am wondering about the infrastructure necessary to grow the level of thinkers who can do Level 7 ERE or permaculture. The best I can come up with would be some sort of semi-monastic practice involving X hours of manual labor towards food production in the morning and Y hours of disciplined study in the afternoon.

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Lemur
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Re: A Jacob Mention

Post by Lemur »

@ertyu

I like this perspective. Thanks for sharing. I think you finished connecting the dots for me in regards to my last paragraph - I was heading that way at least. I wish our education system growing up taught all economic systems more in depth - in America, one only learns and ingrains one system. Regardless, it is better to see things as they are as opposed to merely theory - the former allows better decision making irl anyway.

I do find it interesting there is at least some evidence of rising worker co-ops in the United States. This shows it is at least possible to enable different processes if one / group chooses to do so.

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Re: A Jacob Mention

Post by jacob »

7Wannabe5 wrote:
Fri Jun 11, 2021 6:50 am
Anyways, I’m not even connecting the dots very well for myself, and I’m not trying to be contentious, but I am wondering about the infrastructure necessary to grow the level of thinkers who can do Level 7 ERE or permaculture. The best I can come up with would be some sort of semi-monastic practice involving X hours of manual labor towards food production in the morning and Y hours of disciplined study in the afternoon.
I sincerely don't think ERE is hard in itself. What's hard is the deprogramming of previous practices and frameworks because you can't convince someone of something when their salary depends on them not understanding it.

The same goes for their entire lifestyle including valuememes, habits, routines, goals, and for many more importantly their disagreeing friends and family. So it's natural to try to survive this onslaught of self-questioning by trying to box ERE into something familiar so it can be classified and dealt with that way (poverty, anarcho-capitalism, metamodernism, poverty, insanity, ...), but whichever framework or box people choose is usually highly subjective and so reveals more about the person than it does about ERE. That is why I think it's futile to ask whether ERE is this or that. Doing so is more like a Rorschach test.

However, if people grew up in a way where solutions weren't always in the form of "going to the store", personal values wasn't seen in degrees and titles, capability wasn't measured in dollars, and seeing the world wasn't sorted into specialized isms. Then I think ERE would be quite easy to grok. I notice that people mostly level up only when they're forced to gore some sacred cow---a dearly held perspective. But then afterwards, it's usually a situation "why didn't I do/see this years ago."

TL;DR - ERE is complex but it's not super complicated. Humans are good at complex UNLESS they're trying to make it complicated. As such what people really "need" is more a kind of therapy than an education. The bigger challenge for adults is unlearning, not learning.

Add: In terms of 2050, we'll have a huge problem if/when the adult humans have to unlearn really fast (to track the decline of the natural world) because we chose to pursue the present course for too long. Children born then will be fucked if they have to invent from scratch if there are no capable adults around to instruct them. It would be a developmental trap similar to what it seen in countries where lifespans are so short that e.g. the Kegan ratios are much different, e.g. a majority of 2s with some 3s => constant tribal conflict.

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Re: A Jacob Mention

Post by IlliniDave »

7Wb5, I did not feel picked on at all. I did sort of miss the point I think. I was not thinking at all of financial flows, just the shallower observation that my desire for convenient quasi-isolation is expensive. "Leveling up" beyond ereWL2 or ereWL3 is something I can't speak to at all. On a number of levels I'm among the forsaken who doesn't get it.

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Re: A Jacob Mention

Post by 7Wannabe5 »

@jacob:

I am 100% on the same page with you in terms of comprehending the problem and hoping that ERE or ERE along with other spear-heading solutions can offer solution. Yet, I myself, can’t consistently bring my expenses (or rough energy flow equivalent) down to 1 Jacob or less. Maybe the general problem is that “therapy” is just as expensive as “education”?I am well known for being somebody who has difficulty in expressing problems in most practical terms, but my current particular problem in the moment is that I can’t find any safe, independent form of housing that would allow me to function within 1 Jacob budget, so I am basically forced to build it from scratch for myself, which is NOT an easy task. Ergo, level 7 ERE does not seem particularly easy to me. I should further note that I don’t see the 1 Jacob spending level in terms of a frugality competition (although that just seems like harmless fun);I see it as being roughly equivalent to “doing no harm” level of environmental impact. Perhaps I think too highly of myself and many of the other members of this forum, but if we can’t do “do no harm”, then who can?

Further ironic or humorous note would be that due to the fact that I am already blowing my deductible for needful minor surgery this year, I am currently doing short therapy to process my trauma from caretaking too many relatives suffering from severe mental illness, and in my first session my therapist reflected back that I seem like a very optimistic, ambitious person, and my immediate thought was “If you think I am ambitious, you should see the other members of this forum I visit!”

Also, in more general terms, I was reflecting on how in all the memoirs of permaculture projects I have read, the ultimate limiting factor has been human labor and intelligent design. IOW, yield of closed loop quality of living produced per acre is directly related to density of human brain folds per acre, but at some point strictly limited by privacy/autonomy needs.

@IlliniDave:

Yup, my desire for monkey princess who will do what she wants independent functioning is also quite expensive, and not getting any cheaper as I age, so I am trying to think outside of the box and determine something like minimal environmental requirements to meet these sort of very real, although almost certainly somewhat culturally adapted, psychological needs.

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Re: A Jacob Mention

Post by Alphaville »

Gilberto de Piento wrote:
Thu Jun 10, 2021 7:01 am
I'm not here for Jacob. I like his ideas but the forum on the whole is interesting to me and a place for me to get a kind of socializing I dont get anywhere else. I haven't put him on a pedestal. Some of your early posts (from what I remember, I didn't go digging through what you've written) make me think maybe you did put him and ERE on a pedestal.

I won't say dont go, you should do what is right for you, but I think maybe you could let this cool down a bit before doing the "I'm done here and I'm never coming back" thing (it happens every six months on average with someone). You've contributed a lot and helped people in significant ways. Don't be offended that someone isn't taking your advice even if that person is the guru.
thanks, i appreciate your words, because yes, i've tried to be helpful, so it feels good to hear i've been able to do that.

i enjoyed many aspects of the community here and like you used this as a space for social interaction with people with similar goals and interests. it was often great.

but just to clarify, i'm not leaving because my advice was rejected. i'm leaving because of the condescension and dismissal directed at me, which i find both toxic and antisocial. i don't tolerate abuse.

also this is not the first time, and it's not just with me/about me, so this is not a hotheaded moment, but a reasoned conclusion on my part once my patience ran out.

if not assenting to everything the guru says makes me suze orman, lol, whatever.

ultimately i cannot participate in a social enterprise that is organized around the principle of exclusion rather than inclusion, and obscurity rather than clarity. whatever the strategic reasons for it may be, i find that aspect repellent.

yes, i'm going to miss a lot of people, and that's going to suck for me, but maybe we'll meet again in other places. thanks so much for the conversation, and good bicycle advice. and btw if i end up buying or kludging a yak bike trailer i'll thank you in my mind. so--thanks in advance. :D
ertyu wrote:
Fri Jun 11, 2021 12:38 am
In general, imo it is best to view the entire capitalism/socialism/communism debate as propaganda various politicians employ in order to rile up various easily angered subsets of their constituents rather than as a worthy endeavor in and of itself.
i rejected the communist label, but suggested perhaps anarchism might describe better. inasmuch as i see a rehashing and elaboration of thoreau in ere ideas, i see a strong link with american individualist anarchism. that aspect is probably what attracts the libertarians.

this is not a single-point reductionism (suze hi!), but an attempt at finding conceptual scope and clarity, and linkages to preceding and known ideas, in the ongoing ere discourse.

but if ere is going from "complexity" to being posited as an enlightenment beyond discursiveness and conceptualization... then i already have found kinder spiritual teachers at the local zendo.

you'll be one of the people here i'll miss the most btw. i appreciate your combination of intelligence, erudition, clarity and sensibility. here's hoping we can eventually get on with that kelton reading some day. 🖖
Last edited by Alphaville on Fri Jun 11, 2021 9:33 am, edited 1 time in total.

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Re: A Jacob Mention

Post by Dream of Freedom »

@jacob

People can learn to live well on less, but the whole renaissance man thing is a strategy for high intelligence individuals. You aren't going to get someone with an IQ of 85 to play accountant one day and refrigerator repair man the next.

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Re: A Jacob Mention

Post by Seppia »

Sorry for the the tangent but I’d disagree.

Being an 85 and thinking you’re an 80 has more chance of success in anything in life (including understanding ere) than being a 150 and thinking you’re a 180.

The latter are the ones that always end up self destructing/shooting themselves in the foot.

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Re: A Jacob Mention

Post by Dream of Freedom »

@Seppia

The dunning kruger effect runs the opposite direction. Dumb people think they are smart and smart people think they are normal.

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Re: A Jacob Mention

Post by Seppia »

Can’t remember where I read this, but IIRC statistically the worst investors are lawyers and doctors.
Because they’re very smart people that can’t accept they aren’t educated about a subject.

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Re: A Jacob Mention

Post by 7Wannabe5 »

@Alphaville:

Don’t leave angry. Everybody can come off in a manner they don’t intend on the internet. For instance, I was flaming mad at you for a hot minute, because I initially “heard” your comments to me on ella’s thread as variety of slut-shaming, but then I realized that it was likely miscommunication or missed communication.

@Dream of Freedom:

As a generalist’s generalist who has also ran a kindergarten classroom or three, I would note that the ability to wear many different fun costumes and play at wide variety of interest centers is innate to humans of all IQ levels. It’s the level of mastery of complex roles/challenges that may not be achievable. However, it is also true that in our “professionalized” society, less than masterful attempts at meeting basic needs may be deemed inadequate or even illegal. For instance, there is less homelessness in Iranian cities than in American cities, because residents are allowed to construct their own shabby forms of housing. It doesn’t take an 140 IQ to build a shack out of empty cans, sand, and a tarp.

white belt
Posts: 1452
Joined: Sat May 21, 2011 12:15 am

Re: A Jacob Mention

Post by white belt »

Dream of Freedom wrote:
Fri Jun 11, 2021 9:32 am
People can learn to live well on less, but the whole renaissance man thing is a strategy for high intelligence individuals. You aren't going to get someone with an IQ of 85 to play accountant one day and refrigerator repair man the next.
The renaissance man ideology is only necessary because of the consumerist culture we live in today (for unlearning in terms Jacob outlined above). During other times in human history, the norm has been to manage your own money, manage your own food preservation, and so on. I mean this was the norm in the USA up until the 1950s or so. Most people just copy what those around them are doing, which is possible even with a lower IQ. If you don’t know how to do something, chances are your neighbor or another community member might.

ducknald_don
Posts: 322
Joined: Thu Dec 17, 2020 12:31 pm
Location: Oxford, UK

Re: A Jacob Mention

Post by ducknald_don »

Seppia wrote:
Fri Jun 11, 2021 9:53 am
Can’t remember where I read this, but IIRC statistically the worst investors are lawyers and doctors.
Because they’re very smart people that can’t accept they aren’t educated about a subject.
I've read that fraudsters like to target doctors for that reason.

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