classical_Liberal wrote: ↑Wed Dec 14, 2022 8:58 pm
This seems the fatal flaw of ERE 2. ERE 1 had the advantage of being new, sort of. I've posted books here that are 80 years old and have the same basic premise of ERE 1. It's not that the idea was new, but the medium and the "extremeness" of it kind-of was for modern audiences. This allowed ERE 1 to funnel humans in from multiple places. The last gen FI'ers, Green (traditional sense), Freegans, Permiculturists, Survivalists, and eventually the current gen of FI'ers who were looking to the next level (this was me). I'm sure others are missing.
ERE1 is fundamentally a new framework of very old ideas. Thoreau meets systems theory. Same premise. But new way of looking at it(*). IIRC, HenryJason once called me a neotranscendentalist. I had to look it up, but that was pretty astute and not far off the mark.
(*) Instead of copying Thoreau and moving into a cabin in the woods. (Maybe it wasn't about the cabin.)
Convincing people to look differently at the same things is difficult and almost impossible. The reason I'm not losing my mind over this [conflict] is that I've experienced it several times before. It was basically the same as when talking about "savings rates in excess of 50%" and how "spending less didn't automatically imply poverty or sacrifice" in the combined face of early-retirement.org, bogleheads, and pretty much the rest of the personal finance community with a handful of exceptions back in 2010.
As late as 2016 we had discussions on the forum about
the difference between ERE and FIRE and what systems theory actually is. (It's not a system for optimizing financial accounts as some insisted.) As late as 2020, until the COVID lockdowns, we still had debates about whether to "just make more money" or "build resilience with skills".
If you step much outside the ERE forums and the more hardcore parts of the personal finance + the permaculture adjacents, etc. sphere, it's not hard to find comments like "I have a degree in business and finance and ERE is the worst I've ever seen. It is totally useless and unnecessarily complicating basic finance. Instead I recommend 'A simple guide to getting rich with crypto' and 'How to stop spending money you don't have'."
On the other hand, ERE1 has also had a lot of influence as the ideas trickled down or out. Before ERE, people definitely did not think of FI as a matter of savings rates. Credit the popularity of that change to MMM's "Simple math" post. Keep in mind that he originally referred back to the diagrams from chapter 7 in the ERE book. It's my hope that ultimately, someone will write a "Simple WOGs of resilience" post.
I'm absolutely fine with me (some of us) just being the intellectual spearhead of new (ERE2) ideas. I'd rather run an ERE style space, which I think of as a grad school/research lab than an MMM, GRS, or reddit-type space. I'm more interested in making the trail longer and exploring the unknown than making it wider. Let others who are interested in that make the path more comfortable.
BTW, this is not about creating a moat, as some have thought, but more that creating quick reference guides or reminding people for the umptenth time what "yellow" or "INTJ" or "SWR" means just takes time and energy away from things that are more interesting to me. As Sclass noted, I'm not a jukebox that just plays the good old hits over and over.
classical_Liberal wrote: ↑Wed Dec 14, 2022 8:58 pm
Is ERE 1 the primary (only?) source of ERE 2? If ERE 2 requires a critical mass to accomplish anything, wouldn't its success be solely dependent on ERE 1 success given ERE 1's limited penetration? If so, shouldn't the primary question be how can ERE 2 promote success of ERE 1? Theories and models of its potential success aside, why bother if the critical mass has not yet been achieved?
Are you talking about people or ideas? I'm talking about ideas.
To compare and contrast.
An individual effort like ERE1 requires basically one person (that was me) to come up with a new way of organizing the existing knowledge. The ideas that formed ERE1 is something I've personally experimented with since 2000 trying out different things. Based on using my own life as a laboratory, I could formalize this into the ERE book and describe a systems theory framework for "lifestyle design".
Systems theory is not unique to ERE1. It is also found in other fields. I can walk into the biology or the philosophy departments or certain investment groups. And people will understand the way I'm thinking about things.(*) You'll also find a higher degree of systems thinkers on the ERE forums---because this is what ERE has attracted(**)---but not everybody here is a systems thinker.
(*) Note the kinds of podcasts I tend to appear on these years. They're mostly outside the FIRE/permaculture/survival spheres.
(**) Compared to the "analyze and optimize"-thinkers that dominate the rest of the FIRE sphere.
A collective effort like ERE2 requires several people to come up with a new way of organizing systems thinkers. That is, people with ideas. This is not something one person can do on their own with personal experiments. It requires collective experiments. Talking to other groups (outside the ERE forums) where systems thinking and questioning existing paradigms (the water the fish swim in) is common. Connecting people within the ERE forums beyond just writing walls of texts. Because there's already at least a handful of regular posters here who grok systems thinking, it was easy to start a subforum for ERE2 here. Some have suggested that I start a new blog on substack, but that would turn it back into a solo-project and it's basically impossible for a single person to come up with emergent patterns for a group.
Much of the discussion in ERE2 is paradigmatic in nature. In retrospect, it's not surprising that it rubs people the wrong way to suddenly find themselves assigned to this or that paradigm as an explanation of this or that. It's like telling someone who thinks they're a beautifully unique person that their trials and tribulations are 95% explained by the fact that they're an XYZ-type or ABC-color or worse that it's because they're suffering typical stage N problems with N being a small number. In defense of doing this, the enthusiasm was due to having discovered maps (theory) of the territory (practice), which lifted the fog on a lot of previously unresolved issues like "why do people return to work despite being FI". ERE1 has no answer for this, but more importantly no way of even asking the question. Whereas ERE2 does have a way of asking that question.
classical_Liberal wrote: ↑Wed Dec 14, 2022 8:58 pm
It's particularly disconcerting to see potential ERE 1 humans leaving this forum because of ERE 2 ideas. Seems like cutting off the hand that feeds. Speaking in ERE 1 terms, If you are already losing your core audience, WL5-7 people, ouch. Maybe I'm missing something?
TBH, it's not like we haven't been [in this conflict type] before. Perhaps it's more obvious the longer one has been on the forum. I've showed up here for more than 4000 days.
Some people are more into practice (applied theory) and some people are more into theory (abstracted practice). For my part, I don't really care all that much about what someone has been doing lately. I never ask [how are you doing? what are you up to?] and I rarely tell myself. So I simply skim through the posts where people describe their various projects, travels, babies, hobbies, deals, or changes in net worth. Conversely, I'm interested in theory. I'll make a point of looking up new terms and occasionally head to the library and come back with a stack of books to learn.
I believe these two preferences can co-exist simply by mostly ignoring stuff that they don't care about.
Clearly, though, there are recurring (again going all the way back to the beginning of the forum) complaints that the forum has become too much this or too much that. It's almost always formulated as a subtle demand that "if things don't change to my preferences, then I'm leaving". My response is generally that "the forum is whatever you make of it". The forum is not a supermarket with a customer complaints department. Nobody here is employed to make sure that consumers get what they want. If someone thinks there are too few travel pictures and too much spiral dynamics, the solution would be to start posting more travel pictures instead of complaining about spiral dynamics taking over and leaving/lurking when it doesn't happen autmagically. Because it won't.
classical_Liberal wrote: ↑Wed Dec 14, 2022 8:58 pm
As intriguing as this all is, if it's not possible without a critical mass of ERE 1, then whats the point? My question can be boiled down to... How will ERE 2 collaboration succeed unless it's primary focus is expanding ERE 1?
As far as I'm concerned, the collaboration is already underway. There was enough critical mass to get it started. I'm kinda happy with that so my interest is in the collaboration. People are free to join it. It's not a closed club. Anyone is also free to put their effort in expanding ERE1 if that's their interest. I've been expanding ERE1 for 15 years. I think I've served my time and ERE1 is at the point where I can focus on the next thing. Again, I'm not an ERE1 jukebox.
And so, this goes back to the point that the ERE complaints department makes on a semi-regular basis.
If you think it would be great to have a page that describes all the esoteric terminology, the answer is to make one and post it. (Note that when someone finally did it, it was up and running within 48 hours.)
If you want more ERE1 people, start helping out in the WL4-5 and WL5-6 groups.
If you want more projects, start posting pictures of your workshop or garden.
If you want more stories, start telling stories about the interesting people you met.
If you want more budgets, ...
classical_Liberal wrote: ↑Wed Dec 14, 2022 8:58 pm
I guess it has the potential of a philosophy, in the sense someone in 100 years might learn from the concepts when ERE 1 is more common due to necessity. I have no desire to be the Nietzsche of next century.
I do.
) in some specific way. When it actually happens.. it'll just be a thing.