Jim's Journal.

Where are you and where are you going?
Jim
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Jim's Journal.

Post by Jim »

I think Jacob wrote somehwere that FIRE, or some derivation of it, is the standard failure mode of ERE. I have a pretty radical and intense personality and like to participate by immersion. After reading ERE, would that I was single, I'd probably have moved into a tent on the streets of Seattle, but... it's been challenging to communicate some of these ideas with my wife and I think it's going to take time before we can arrive at our own special collective failure mode.

For me, financial independence and early retirement are a goal, but they aren't the central one. I don't think I would quit the workplace tomorrow if I won the lottery. By the most conservative estimate, I'll make 40k/year on my pension alone by the time I'm 47 (the latest I'll work), easily enough to sustain me in retirement. I'm relatively unlearned about investing and work needs to be done to make that a good secondary vehicle for sustaining income after leaving work. I want to learn more about it, and go through the recommended reading list here before I decide. I took an idea from iDave's journal and looked up our median household income and we're in the top 10%. That said, it's almost embarassing (to me) that we aren't ready to leave the workplace for good after 5 years of full time dual income employment.

This being the start of my journal, I guess I should make a list of short term goals, as they relate to this ERE business.

1. I'm going to fail ERE, so I plan to fail nontraditionally, intentionally and upward.

2. I plan to offset our housing costs by providing an affordable place for other people to live (maybe even contribute to their own ERE goals). I think this is a positive failure mode, at it's best maybe not even a failure mode. Our region is increasingly making permitting requirements easier for ADU's and it's worth exploring whether we can capitalize on that. I have the skills to build an detached sub 1000 sq foot dwelling on our property, to code, out of almost entirely recycled materials.

I like living in community in close proximity with others. I spent years lilving in a monastery (a level of independence and aescetecism and richness that seems to me like a proto-ERE2). I've lived in a thai boxing gym with other students for a similar period of time. I've always had roommates. Even when I lived with my parents, friends would stay for months or years at a time at our home. I work in a communal living environment, dormitory style, alongside 7 or 8 other firefighters for 24 hour shifts or longer. And of course with my family and kids when I'm home. There's a social fluency learned from living this way and there's an epidemic in the US of stagnating social graces because people's houses are macrocosimic versions of the insulating cubicles they inhabit at work.

3. We live on about 3/4 of an acre, and have been turning it into a native plant wildflower meadow/pollinator refuge/permaculture style food garden for the last year. I like the idea of caretaking the land and look forward to continuing this work. My neighbors are so apoplectic looking at our "weeds" they need to call the tru green guy over to blast their lawns with glyphosate to get their blood pressure down. They kill dandelions while staring me in the eye across the cul de sac with all the ill will of witches sticking pins in voodoo dolls. I plan to make more mason bee boxes, possibly get some honey bees (we already have the boxes) and provide lots of food for them. I plan to grow a ton more milkweed do. We've already started down this path, but we want to plant more from seeds and less from starts. The cost savings are big and it's a great learning experience. Growing native flowers (in lieue of vegetables) is a failure mode, but I think it's failing up. We also have chickens and I want to establish a better low cost chicken feeding situation.

4. Read books about investing. Develop entry level financial literacy.

AxelHeyst
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Re: Jim's Journal.

Post by AxelHeyst »

Following with great interest. I'd love to hear more about your time living and working communally and in the monastery. Running a household with a salvaged-materials ecoADU rental, community vibes, and permaculture operation sounds rich. Your ERE 'failure' mode sounds great!

avalok
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Re: Jim's Journal.

Post by avalok »

Relieved that the neighbours aren't putting you off the permaculture food garden. All the more power to you. Also really like the emphasis on failure modes; it's not something I think about as much as I should/could.

blink2ce
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Re: Jim's Journal.

Post by blink2ce »

This sounds great Jim. Looking forward to updates. I am in the process of purchasing a 1bed/1bath condo in a walkable area in a midwest city. My ERE path is quite a bit different than yours at the moment, and I could possibly see myself going in a direction like yours over time. Having some land to grow plants on is very good for the soul, I think.

Jim
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Re: Jim's Journal.

Post by Jim »

Here are some thoughts about strategic failure.

Some degree of failure is inevitable, on projects of any scale. Being aware of how and why we're failing is a pretty good way to prevent the most calamitous failures, the ones that jeopardize the totality of the result of the efforts.

Engineer for failure - I'm thinking about how the handle of a come-a-long fails before the the winch reaches it's rated capacity. Similarly, there is a pin in a high lift jack which will shear before you exceed the working limit of that device. The bean counters and insurance people and engineers must've had a great meeting of minds to protect the knuckle draggers from their own exuberance and bravado. Either of these devices failing is a setback to the project, but not so large a setback that the situation becomes dynamically dangerous. The device also still services as a progress capture, and allows us to continue the lift/pull from where we left off as soon as we can find another device (with a greater capacity) to continue the work.

Recognizing my inability to go full send on ERE, I need to engineer some principles into my own behavior to ensure that the failures I make aren't catastrophic and don't result in a major deviation from the ultimate goal. I decided to start with what I definitely can't do, and of course I immediately arrived at the two biggest ticket items, housing and transportation. A tertiary pitfall has to do with interpersonal relationships. Housing is really the biggest issue, though so I'll start there.

My wife is non-negotiable when it comes to relocating more than a few blocks from where we live now. It's an "impossibility" for her and I don't particularly want to go separate ways. We tried that, and ended up back together under the same roof after about a year. The mortgage is steep and the house is overvalued because we live in an insanely high cost of living area. The default failure mode here seems to be "house hacking," a term I can't say I'm enamoured with, but people do have lots of pragmatic ways to decrease their cost of living. Detached ADUs and tiny homes are common in this area, it's a pretty toothless compromise that allows the powers that be to say they're doing something about the homelessness crisis without actually rezoning anything which might piss off the single family homeowners who put them in office.

So an ADU is the first tier solution to our financial problem, it will offset probably half our housing expenses, with the caveat is that it can be expensive to build something like this. The static costs are permitting and architect fees, but everything else is flexible. I won't pay for labor, I'm excited to see how little I can spend in materials (I'm already dreaming of cannibalizing our shitty deck for lumber.

Best practice would be to not start any new project that costs money. Optimal failure mode for this entails:

-using as few new materials as possible. I think concrete might be hard to source. Drywall and insulation are definitely challenges as well. Lumber, roofing, siding, wiring flooring and appliances will probably be easy to come by used

-spending as little money on used materials as possible. My wife and I are very good in this arena. Once we have a materials list it will be like an adult cheapskate scavenger hunt. The nice thing about being in a high cost of living area is people give away nice shit at the time.

-spending the minimum on design/permitting/inspections. I can probably do alright here, the permitting/inspection fees might be expensive though, and I'm not sure of the best way to shop around.

-spending zero on labor. Easiest part of the whole thing. Only exception might be the concrete pour, if necessary. If we can use sono tubes for concrete footings that problem is solved.

This failure project moves me towards a few separate individual goals, despite being inherently less efficient and disciplined than a successfully streamlined ERE playbook. I'll keep myself engaged and fulfilled with the physical work. I'll create something that offsets our housing expenses dramatically. I'll cut my teeth on the beaurocratic aspects of building, something that's been a goal of mine for a while.

In a less mundane way, I'll be progressing towards other, more abstract goals, more ERE2 than 1. We will be repurposing our property to be a communal, rather than private, space. We will be repurposing materials from the consumer waste stream. We will be providing another person, or people, with an affordable, efficient living space in an environment with a high barrier to entry. We will be diversifying the affluent homogeneous community in which we live.

Having an altruistic bent to the process embues the whole thing with meaning, and a holistic arc to that bent makes the work transcendental. It's not zen, but it ain't the worst samsara has to offer either.

Jim
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Re: Jim's Journal.

Post by Jim »

I'm going to list some reasons that I choose to remain at my job for the foreseeable future. Maybe posting content of this nature appears anathema to the spirit of this forum, but I believe otherwise and I'll try to explain why, at least in my case.

-I work 7.6 regularly scheduled days per month. That's about 91 days per year after using my paid vacation, assuming I don't use any sick leave. The working hours and flexibility are unparalleled. I work shifts, 24, 48 or even 72 hours at a time. I have lots of flexibility to trade shifts to work outside my normal schedule. That also gives me the opportunity to create long stretches of time away from work, literally months at a time if I want. The number of hours and days worked will decrease as I accrue seniority and longevity. I am allowed to sleep at work, between the hours of 9pm and 7am, as long as we aren't on a call or a specific assignment. I'm encouraged to exercise at work and have access to a gym with plenty of equipment. There is often a lot of downtime available, depending on the station I choose to work from, because a big part of the work is being available to respond to calls. I prefer to be situated in busier locales because I like to remain engaged with other people, train during the day and run calls. I am able to engage in many educational pursuits and hobbies outside of work, and don't feel that my obligation of time and energy to my employment impacts my individual enthusiasm or saps my freedom to pursue other endeavors.

-I believe in public service, and emergency services are among the most crucial of public services, which makes the work meaningful and rewarding. There is an altruistic bent to my work which benefits the people who need emergency sevices, the community at large, and myself as a responder. There is always room for improvement, but the existence of the system itself is inherently critical to a healthy society and participating in that system is thereby wholesome.

-The privelige to render aid to people in need; to be given the opportunity to prevent the loss of human life, is a deeply humbling and transformative experience. To witness the inevitability and often unpredictabilty of death on a regularl basis is a powerful reminder of my own mortality and the value of my own life and the lives of those close to me. You hear a lot about PTSD, but there is as much an opportunity for what is called post traumatic growth if we are able to process and embue meaning to our own traumatic experiences or the witnessed traumatic experiences of others. These experiences, when channelled in the correct way, can become a force multiplier for a persons capacity to hold and express compassion. The opportunity to bear witness to these experiences is beyond value to me in spite of the obvious challenges.

-The work is inherently multifaceted, and requires a basic education in medicine, hdyraulics, systems of mechanics advantage, rigging and ropes, building construction, customer service, physicalf fitness, chemistry, situational awareness, etc. This list goes on and on, which makes it a great fit for a Renaissance person.

There's more, and of course there are drawbacks to the work, but I feel that the benefits far outweigh them (for me).

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Re: Jim's Journal.

Post by mountainFrugal »

It sounds like you have found a really great job for your varied interests. I think that @ffj was also a firefighter if I remember correctly. You might check out his journal for all the interesting projects/builds he has been up to recently including mushroom production.

viewtopic.php?p=270790#p270790

I look forward to following along.

Jim
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Re: Jim's Journal.

Post by Jim »

FFJ has got some fine looking Hiricium! I'll definitely be following his journal. I worked at an organic mushroom farm for a few months before developing a nasty allergic respiratory reaction to oyster mushroom spores, so we have more in common than just firefighting. Thank you for the recommendation.

MF, I listened to your interview with AH on his podcast. It was part of the reason I felt inspired to write my last journal entry about the value I find in my own employment, and my choice to continue thst work. Thank you for that perspective. Contributing to a system on your own terms, after decoupling with your dependence on that system, is a powerful way to bring change. ERE at it's best is like the final illustration of the 10 Bulls of Zen.

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Re: Jim's Journal.

Post by mountainFrugal »

After all energy is exhausted chasing, catching, taming, becoming one with the bull... the bull also does not matter in the end. Chop wood, carry water.

Jim
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Re: Jim's Journal.

Post by Jim »

I just finished listening to Don Beck's Spiral Dynamics Integral. I got it from the library. It's caused me to reflect on the way we frame these subjective world view compartamentalizing techniques.

There's definitly some insight to be had from these lectures. I loved the idea that we need to be open minded and meet people where they're at, but I can't get behind the idea that the phases individual cultures go through are predefined, hierarchical and sequential. He makes a point that Graves came to his conclusion by interpreting research, rather than positing a theory, but I don't see any reason that should lead us to believe the conclusion he arrived at is entirely accurate.

Maybe it's because I'm making a foray into spiral dynamics with an eye on the MBTI, but I found myself repeatedly thinking back to Jung and his book "Psychological Types;" the result of Jung trying to reconcile the seemingly incongruous works of Freud and Adler and the precursosr to Meyers-Briggs. Content aside, the meta situation here is what I'm hooked on. The idea is more of a rebuttal of the short sighted methodologies than it is an assertation of a single, unified theory. Jung isn't saying "this is how the world is." Instead he's saying (in his own words), "The two theories of neurosis are not universal theories: They are caustic remedies to be applied, as it were, locally." He's not dismissing them out of hand for being wrong, he's asserting that they're both insightful, poignant ideas, but to fixate upon any one obfuscates the complexity of the entire picture.

The only logical arrival is a Lao-tse type, "once you grab onto an idea you're basically fucked" attitude. I think this is also what Jung was so damn good at. He didn't get bogged down with the details of the argument, because he was so exceptionally adept at not becoming attached. In the conventional sense, he probably didn't "believe" in anything.

The assertion that the system can only be one certan way is painful. I won't let it detract from some of the very thoughtful observations made by Beck or Graves, but their big picture paints itself into a corner. The yellow meme could be summed up as someone who is thoughtful, respectful, pragmatic, self assured, compassionate and attentive. These are timeless character traits, and I can't abide the idea that it took the entirety of human history to arrive at that level of individual maturity, especially when we've had countless sagacious voices throughout history with their fingers pointed directly at these behaviors. Holding paradoxical ideas in our mind without allowing them to be at odds with each other is a good place to be at. It's challenging, to be sure, but it's nothing new.

As a caveat, something that I found myself thinking about was the imperfect conclusions of inexact sciences. I think somewhere I heard Jacob use the term "physics envy" to describe data science, which I adore. Where I'm arriving, after thinking about this system of classifying value memes, is that all sciences are beholden to this principle of inexactitude. Take phsyics itself as an example. The classical version is at odds with the modern, and both of them don't paint a perfectly accurate picture of reality. You could say physics sciences suffer from "reality envy".

There's no harm in using the tools of the system to navigate the world, with the understanding that system is utilitarian only within narrow parameters and is dysfunctional outside of them. If you lose track of that (or never realize it) than your dogma is going to stop you from making the advancement from classical to modern phsyics or from Adlerian/Freuding psychology to Jungian. Knowing where lies that line is critical, and more critical is the persistent and constant awareness that you are viewing things in the context of a system and not as they actually are.

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Slevin
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Re: Jim's Journal.

Post by Slevin »

Jim wrote:
Tue May 23, 2023 11:35 pm

As a caveat, something that I found myself thinking about was the imperfect conclusions of inexact sciences. I think somewhere I heard Jacob use the term "physics envy" to describe data science, which I adore. Where I'm arriving, after thinking about this system of classifying value memes, is that all sciences are beholden to this principle of inexactitude. Take phsyics itself as an example. The classical version is at odds with the modern, and both of them don't paint a perfectly accurate picture of reality. You could say physics sciences suffer from "reality envy".

There's no harm in using the tools of the system to navigate the world, with the understanding that system is utilitarian only within narrow parameters and is dysfunctional outside of them. If you lose track of that (or never realize it) than your dogma is going to stop you from making the advancement from classical to modern phsyics or from Adlerian/Freuding psychology to Jungian. Knowing where lies that line is critical, and more critical is the persistent and constant awareness that you are viewing things in the context of a system and not as they actually are.
Yeah, models are built in a context window, to make a physics reference, they are sort of “linearized” locally where we assume if we take a small enough localization it doesn’t matter that we have linearized, and that can teach us things about actual reality. But reality isn’t actually really nicely linearizable, and so humans can’t just “interpret” based on the learned characteristics of the local models without seeing the edges and knowing where to stop thinking the model is valid (which is what you are pointing at in your posts I think).

And physicists (or at least the ones I know well) often suffer from a “physics bias” where they want reality to fit a nice cohesive formulae with n variables that operates in a nice repeatable and predictable manner when subject to a forcing function, and get upset when that doesn’t happen.

For myself, I felt exceptionally freed when I realized that reality will always exceed my capabilities of sense-making. When you realize you have been trying to grasp sand in your fingers, you should laugh at the absurdity of the task you were trying to accomplish, and the naïve arrogance of the self believing you could grasp it the whole time you were trying to.

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Re: Jim's Journal.

Post by jacob »

Jim wrote:
Tue May 23, 2023 11:35 pm
The assertion that the system can only be one certan way is painful. I won't let it detract from some of the very thoughtful observations made by Beck or Graves, but their big picture paints itself into a corner. The yellow meme could be summed up as someone who is thoughtful, respectful, pragmatic, self assured, compassionate and attentive. These are timeless character traits, and I can't abide the idea that it took the entirety of human history to arrive at that level of individual maturity, especially when we've had countless sagacious voices throughout history with their fingers pointed directly at these behaviors. Holding paradoxical ideas in our mind without allowing them to be at odds with each other is a good place to be at. It's challenging, to be sure, but it's nothing new.
This argument comes up in some form or another in every SD discussion we've had. I think it's due to confusing or freely using vMemes to describe both psychological behaviors and societal behavior and presuming that they follow the same dynamic. There's a difference between a person or a small number of persons holding certain values; and ditto if the number of persons connect to form a subculture or a political party; and ditto again if those values become dominant in a society.

Two things here:

An individual DOES NOT develop through the vMemes sequentially. If they did, Tier1 individuals at the "higher" vMemes would not be so disagreeable towards the "lower" vMemes, because they at least remember what it was like. This is why it drives me up the wall when someone says "I guess I'm N, so I need to develop into N+1 now". Rather, a person's personality (which is in part developed by the soup of vMemes they grew up on and currently find themselves in) may influence what kind of vMeme they adopt. Keep in mind that a majority of people adopt values based on what values the people around them hold---they are very "mentally flexible" that way.

The Beck & Graves assertion is that entire societies DO develop through the vMemes sequentially. This basically creates a hierarchy of increasing complexity of societal habits, traditions, rules, principles, ideas,... Compare to the Maslow pyramid. It starts with food and shelter, then security, then love, then meaning. This parallels the vMemes. Basically, what they imply is that increasing vMemes get increasingly towards the world-centric and kosmo-centric as basic needs get "automagically" taken care of. What they're saying is that a society is not going to be able to support complexity like e.g. an "technological information welfare state" unless it's "materially rich". And it's not going to be "materially rich" unless "people follow rules for law and order and show up for work even if they already have food and shelter" .... and they're not going to have food and shelter unless there's "organized security delivered by tribal gang" ... and that gang is not going to hold together unless there are "traditions and loyalty". The pragmatic insight to SD in terms of "fast-forwarding" society is that one can not enter a tribal society (complete with blood feuds) and set up a few coffee machines and internet servers and expect them to resolve the feuds via conversations. And yet ... this is basically what Tier1 countries (all of them) do in some form or the other all the time, saying "Our values are the best, so therefore we must share them with everybody else or alternatives have a conflict until they come around to our point of view."

Resolving this apparent snag comes down to realizing that while individuals throughout times have reached widely different stages of personal maturity, it has taken thousands and thousands of years for entire societies to reach their respective levels of "societal maturity". And this is where SD gets interesting, because now you can ask: What's the societal maturity of a given country? A given political party? A belief-system? A subculture? And once you know that ... you will at least have some idea of what likely comes next based on previous examples. It's obviously not an exact science, but it is an alternative to imposing Tier1 ideologies (everybody should be like us) which has been and is the typical approach. This avoids making mistakes like trying to feed a hungry person with a book to edify their mind on a societal (or subcultural) scale.

Add: ----
The AQAL model of integral theory ties it together. This map be helpful http://www.thegreatstory.org/charts/spiral-color.pdf However, please don't treat it as a cheat sheet. The point I'm trying to make above is that it's possible to have a subjective (UL) level of development that is different from the objective (UR) behavior one demonstrates on the job or a home, etc. ... which again may not match the dominant intersubjective (LR) "code of behavior" that governs society or the dominant (nationstate) or local (church community or family) that concern the things "we" are supposed to believe.

HOWEVER, each quadrant does to influence a person by osmosis. What does that mean? Start with the Jungian cognitive functions. In AQAL, these are arranged as a hierarchy of development where "iNtuition" is at the top, followed by "Thinking" and "Feeling", followed by "Sensing". This parallels Piaget and pretty much any other model of child or adult development. Insofar one is subjectively focused on intuition, it makes the post-postmodern world-centric perspectives are more appealing ... because they're a better match for one's mind(set). Insofar one is focused on the judging functions, then the logical modernism or its feely postmodernism, which are sociocentric, have more appeal. Whereas concrete-thinkers are well-served by the permanency of the rule-based sociocentric world order found in traditionalism. Those whose "preference is to go with their gut reactions" favor even earlier ego-centric stages.

Nature and nurture are two different things but they still influence the objective outcome, that is, what a person with a given subjective preference end up as a result of their environment. Lets take a person with an "act first, think later"-temperament (MBTI: SP). Such a person would thrive in a Red warrior type environment. The only remnant of that we have now is gang-culture. However, we do have some Red/Blue in the military and competitively-focused (not participatively-focused) sports. Otherwise the only alternative post-conventional societies have for egocentric people who act before they think is essentially prison. That temperament simply doesn't work very well in interobjective societies with complex consequences or intersubjective societies that don't allow for a "fuck your feelings/I do what I want"-attitude before social sanctions kick in.

More interestingly. Because of the hierarchical build of complexity at the societal level, people who are naturally inclined towards the more complexity-friendly iNtuitive Jungian cognitive functions subjectively, will do better in post-conventional societies like Orange and Green. They will be relatively free to think or feel in a way that constructs and reconstructs both the interobjective and intersubjective world-systems. This is something that Blue would consider borderline heresy ... and so such a person would find themselves "constrained" to think their complex thoughts within the existing world order rather than question it; think Teilhard de Chardin or Aquinas.

(As always keep in mind that when colors or types or stages are used to describe something, they denote the mode or weight of a distribution, that is, the most dominant or primary mode of being. It is not the only mode of being. There's something called "labeling theory" that seems to pervade much of the humanities which essentially posits that "labeling people => people become their labels". This is not how it works though! "The signifier is not the signified" and vice versa. Indeed, believing that a label is kind of curse is akin believing that words have magical powers (an idea that's prevalent in preconventional vMemes). Also, when it comes to physicists ... I would say that "belief" does exist at the undergraduate level where the weight of thinking is still along the lines of "the answer is given by the following equation" (iow, the map is the territory). Later this is replaced by so-called "physical intuition" where people look at the data or behavior and pattern-recognizes (intuits) a model based on the most important variables. IOW, there comes a point where the physicist will be able to "see" which variables are more important than others and which can be left out in order to achieve a desired accuracy of understanding. Result: Not just a construct-aware but also construct-creative.)

So there's a lot more to the yellow vMeme (or any vMeme) than being "thoughtful, respectful, ...." which are purely subjective (UL). (Also, "thoughtful, etc." are found in all vMemes ... they just mean different things within each vMeme). Each vMeme has a complete four quadrant description of "the way I am, the way I behave, our unspoken contracts, and our official contracts". In that regard, someone can be UL yellow, UR orange, LL green, and LR orange, for example. As a fun exercise (not a cheat sheet diagnostics tool), see https://spiraldynamicsintegral.nl/en/green/ (manually edit the url with the other colors, navigation is borked) ... note what different people value. Insofar you wander into a group or an organization with a different color than your own, you'll find that they prioritize things that likely have little value to you. Unless of course you found your tribe. And this is why SD is useful for ERE2; because e.g. while Orange might find the whole "financial independence idea through capitalism" to be a clever way to "win over the system", Green considers that idea to be selfish if not evil.

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Re: Jim's Journal.

Post by Henry »

Slevin wrote:
Thu May 25, 2023 1:40 am
And physicists (or at least the ones I know well) often suffer from a “physics bias” where they want reality to fit a nice cohesive formulae with n variables that operates in a nice repeatable and predictable manner when subject to a forcing function, and get upset when that doesn’t happen.
That which my net cannot catch is not fish.

Physicists and the like may not claim comprehensive knowledge but they presume it exists. Without the presumption, they couldn't exist as scientists or as people.

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Re: Jim's Journal.

Post by Jim »

Slevin wrote:
Thu May 25, 2023 1:40 am
Yeah, models are built in a context window, to make a physics reference, they are sort of “linearized” locally where we assume if we take a small enough localization it doesn’t matter that we have linearized, and that can teach us things about actual reality. But reality isn’t actually really nicely linearizable, and so humans can’t just “interpret” based on the learned characteristics of the local models without seeing the edges and knowing where to stop thinking the model is valid (which is what you are pointing at in your posts I think).
This is an elegant way of saying what I was trying to point at. In the trades, especially machining, we call these tolerances. When a part is manufactured, it will serve it's intended purpose as long as it conforms to within specific measurements. In some applications, an assembled product made of machined parts needs to have the entirety of the tolerances for all the parts considered, so that they don't stack upon each other and render the product dysfunctional. You could similarly imagine a series of rounding errors in math, when calculating the weight of an object, and then failing to be able to lift the object with a piece of machinery. You can also imagine what a series of assumptions in a social science could lead to.
Slevin wrote:
Thu May 25, 2023 1:40 am
For myself, I felt exceptionally freed when I realized that reality will always exceed my capabilities of sense-making. When you realize you have been trying to grasp sand in your fingers, you should laugh at the absurdity of the task you were trying to accomplish, and the naïve arrogance of the self believing you could grasp it the whole time you were trying to.
This is what I like to think of as the "coach built" mentality; recognizing that design, engineering and machine assembly aren't ever up to the task of matching the product perfectly to reality, at least at the most gross level. Generally it's about recognizing that the planning phase is going to fail to encapsulate all of the nuances of reality. Coach building can be the "architectural mayonaise" phase that involves blending, polishing and painting. It can be the softening of the imperfect edges to present a finished product, or it can be the whole process of hand forging , taking a whole project on, on it's own terms, from a much earlier point.

I worked for a guy who used to be a construction superintendent. He told me a story of being on a construction site and getting a new set of plans from an enginner. After showing the plans to the construction workers, one of the veteran framers became irate and started screaming, demanding the engineer come directly to the job site. Since the guy who had drafted the plans happened to still be on site after dropping off the plans, they had him come over and talk to the pissed off framer. Instead of saying anything, the framer pointed to a plans where was drawn a nail pattern for hanging a sheet of OSB or plywood. The framer proceeded to nail the sheet onto the framing, following the appropriate nailing pattern as per the drawing. After the sheet was hung, the framer pushed on the center and with little effort it completely separated from the nailed perimiter and fell off the wall. The engineer had added far too many nails and destroyed the integrity of the material.

In any work we start at design, and go to production but need to end at coach built. It adds humlity, like you alluded to, but it also expands our opportunity to claw after the next, more nuanced, revelation about what's affecting our work. That hangup could be at an earlier stage in our own process or an environmental factor that we failed to consider the implications of. EIther way the process of following the process past the point of functionality into nuance will lead us to that next uncovering. It's also likely to point to something that is out of the specific purview of our role, not just deepening the scope of our own practice, but broadening our perspective to include the work and knowledge of other people and fields.

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Slevin
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Re: Jim's Journal.

Post by Slevin »

@Jim love the story and the iterative approach at building solutions, and I generally agree with the method. I would also add in that the correct number of mistakes along the way when building anything complicated or complex is probably not zero, unless you are trying to build a human rated spacecraft that gets launched into space and can't be edited or fixed later (however we still realized we would make mistakes and thus built triple redundancy into every life support system, etc).

Are you pulling the term coach-built as in the method of aftermarket body construction of cars? Can you thread the needle of those groups of thought for me, is there a collective story of recognizing that the aftermarket construction of these auto bodies could be designed, but then they would always come up with issues, or is it coming from a different place?

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Re: Jim's Journal.

Post by Jim »

Slevin wrote:
Tue May 30, 2023 11:38 am
I would also add in that the correct number of mistakes along the way when building anything complicated or complex is probably not zero, unless you are trying to build a human rated spacecraft that gets launched into space and can't be edited or fixed later (however we still realized we would make mistakes and thus built triple redundancy into every life support system, etc).
After all the redundancies, we also find astronauts who are able to respond dynamically to complex problems under pressure. https://radiolab.org/podcast/dark-side-earth

Slevin wrote:
Tue May 30, 2023 11:38 am
Are you pulling the term coach-built as in the method of aftermarket body construction of cars? Can you thread the needle of those groups of thought for me, is there a collective story of recognizing that the aftermarket construction of these auto bodies could be designed, but then they would always come up with issues, or is it coming from a different place?
That's where I'm getting the term, but not the place that I was coming from. We're obviously pretty good at manufacturing the whole shooting match at this point in the game. I'm using the term coach built because there was a time in history where we weren't (or didn't care to). If you wanted a car, you bought a chassis with a motor and hired a coach builder. As long as there are objects which we seek to use in novel ways, or are otherwise imperfect, we will always be smearing architectural mayonnaise. That could be tastefully spackling drywall on unsquare framing or hacking the injection timing in your diesel one ton pickup with your laptop to get around emissions parameters so you can roll coal when you feel threatened by the middle aged woman in a second hand nissan leaf.

For what it's worth, I think high end manufacturers like Maserati and Ferrari actually still coach build a lot of their vehicle bodies, which ushers in another thought about the coach built mentality; production divorces artistry and individual insight from the process and usually generates a more lackluster product than one that's individually curated. If you've ever used a hand made knife forged by a decent blacksmith you can probably appreciate this. A production knife (even something high end from a manufacturer like benchmade) is middling in quality compared to a hand worked piece made by someone with an individual process, knowledge base and live attention to detail. They aren't operating in the world of tolerances, they're operating in the world of "How good can I possibly make this?"

Engineering is a way of designing a thing to fulfill a certain function, and good engineering designs for failure modes and diverse considerations like shear or snow load or the coriolis effect. Good engineering gives us panic hardware and levers that break before you kill yourself by overtaxing a jackstand. Production is about generating that thing functionally by compartmentalizing and systematizing. Alternately, Craft is the process of bringing that object into existence in the closest semblance to it's platonistic ideal. You couldn't remake the eiffel tower out of hot rolled steel, apparently it's constructed enitrely of flattened beams of "puddled iron."

This perspective is really important to me, because it showcases the value of widening understanding and skill both internally and externally, theoretically and functionally. I grew up with a parent who was an engineer and realized by the time I turned 18 that while he was able to tell me how I should fix my car or construct a building, I was able to actually execute the task faster on account of being aware of all the things that actually would go wrong or needed to happen in order for the task to get done. Whose picture of reality is clearer/more true? The guy who knows the spans and centers required for a given measure of dimensional lumber as a floor joist or the kid who understands the importance of not wearing his tennis shoes in the metal shop? I once witnessed a computer engineer, infintely smarter than I, going on about the deficits of flathead screws and their lack of contactable surface area when compared to phillips or torx. This diatribe went on for minutes as he sat there turning the fucking screw the wrong direction. What's more real, the platonistic ideal or the thing itself? It's the harmonious combination of these two things that get us going in the right direction. Both these caricatures are limited without their ability to assimilate some degree of the abilities of their counterpart.

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Re: Jim's Journal.

Post by Jim »

The garden is coming along well. It's full of all kind of interesting pollinating bugs and butterflies. I was trying to grow some grapevines on a huge trellis my wife made of recycled trampoline frames, but got impatient and planted hops instead. Of interest is a mini wheat field that growing from a bunch of wheat kernels I found in the yard last year and planted. I have no idea where they came from, but they seem very happy. It will be fun to mill some flour with the kids and make something. I've had freshly milled flour made into noodles, without any extra processing, and it completely redefined my concept of what that food actually tastes likes before it's refined and fortified. I also dedicated a circle, about 10' in diameter, to a late blooming wildflower mix. I spent yesterday thinning and transplanting the milkweed starts I planted last year. We've been snacking on snap peas from the garden. We've got some smaller rain barrels set up which we plan to use for drip irrigation. I'm considering finding some kind of water pump that generate a little the pressure so and run it all through a sprinkler instead. I'll probably just let gravity do the work though. We applied for a county program that provides larger rain catchment barrells, I think on the order of 500-1000 gallons, but they basically said it was someones pet project and they were a few years out from actually providing anything, but we were some of the first people to apply. I think it also entails them doing some of the irrigation work and plumbing, which I'd be just as happy to do myself.

I am considering building a system to refine waste vegetable oil, which I can then use as fuel in my truck. I don't think it will be hard to source, as there doesn't seem to be a craze of people making home biodiesel. The vehicle is already outfitted with a few extra fuel tanks and a system of valves and coolant pipes run to preheat waste oil (the previous owner was a cattle farmer who ran the truck almost exclusively on waste oil from his burger restaurant), so most of the heavy lifting is really done, I just need a system to make the waste oil.

My wife proposed the idea of raising a yurt on our property to rent out, which I think is a really good viable alternative to constructing the ADU I was planning before. You can find used yurts relatively inexpensively and they aren't difficult to erect or transport (I have a 27 foot utility trailer I fabricated from the old frame of a gutted travel trailer I bought for $400). We could build a base out of recycled materials. The most challenging part will be figuring out a toilet situation. The rest of the amenities will be electric and it is a simple thing to run water out from the house. I think this is our Plan A for a rental right now. Plan B is the construction of a large prefab metal workshop and covertly building a living space into it. Building codes being what they are where we live, the yurt idea will save us tremendously on headaches and permitting costs.

I'm not really thinking about money very much these days, but this morning I did my best to calculate my savings rate for May and my ballpark estimate is about 58%, which isn't bad considering I did almost nothing to change my spending habits throughout the month. This is the first time I've made this calculation and have discovered it's a good metric to reinforce savings behavior.

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Re: Jim's Journal.

Post by Jim »

So we've finally broke ground on building an additional living space on our property. My wife ended up buying a vintage travel trailer from a coworker in lieu of a yurt. It's old and will need a fair amount of work before we can have someone live in it, but it cost very little. We've parked it on the side of our house, in a nicely fenced-in area. I'm renovating the nearest room into a bathroom and have added an exterior door adjacent to where the trailer sits. We've gotten our building materials free, or at a steep discount, almost all used with the exception of several sheets of drywall and hardie backer. Living in an affluent area almost pays off when it comes to procuring high-quality used items and materials.

I don't think there's anything magical about living in communities. Humans have been doing it for as long as we've been around with varying degrees of success. I think that the current cultural norm in the USA (and probably much more of the western world) of living totally insulated from community is an unfortunate way of living, a major downside of a society with a lot of orange. Not unlike our infatuation with consumerism, our highly specialized jobs and our addiction to technology. I don't really believe that there isn't a blueprint for doing it well, the same way there isn't a blueprint for raising healthy smart children. It seems intentional communities let the perfect be the enemy of the good, (so green) like some version of being one's own helicopter parent. I spent several years living in a very small temple in China. Even after the trauma of the cultural revolution there still remains a system of living in small self reliant communities. Each individual monastic community has a way to structure itself and ideally adds value to the larger secular society. If it finds partronage, it's on account of it's value to the secular community, which ideally isn't a function of an obligation or commitment. People extra-monastery become interested in the monastic community and derive benefit from it without necessarily joining the clergy. This could be mean providing philsophical insight to visiting business people or politicians trying to calibrate their moral compass, or housing young people for a short duration to gain exposure to the value of simple living and hard work, or performing some funerary service for the families of the deceased. If these activities remain natural and avoid becoming contractual than they don't affect the bottom line. It's pretty ERE1. Taoism also prides itself on having ownership of a fat plethora of skills which positions them well to valuable contributors to a larger body.

I like the idea of transforming our property/home into a space that is accessible and collectively appreciated and improved. I like the idea of a place that has resources for people to live and learn and develop. I spent so much of my life living in places like this, and very much took it for granted, but now I am transitioning from being an inhabitant to a provider of this type of place. One thing that I learned from my parents (who always had extra people living in our house growing up) was to give without the expectation that people would necessarily appreciate what you provide.

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Re: Jim's Journal.

Post by Jim »

I've been digging through old and new discussions across the forum to try and clarify for myself some of the perspectives/objective of individuals here and the ERE forumites at large. I have been thinking of the ERE WL's chart, which I had looked at before, but now having read more commentary on the forums, I think I have a better opportunity to grok. I've made an exercise of trying to see where I exist in this model, which has produced some valuable insight for me. Most of what I've written pretty boring, but I think the conclusion is important.

Household spending: Historically descending from 8 to 5.
I have never had a household budget much above 24k. Most of my adult life my annual income has been less than 24k. Early on it was because I worked enough to live and didn't work for money beyond that. Because I grew up with such a good introduction to blue collar work and had the social connections to sustain it, I never had a hard time finding work. I would work for as much money as I needed, as often as I liked. I'd frequently stop working or take time off to pursue other interests. I have spent most of my adult life "couch surfing" or living with friends or as a part of an established community.

I moved in with my now wife about 6 years ago. I had zero dollars in savings. She had a mortgage on a 170K property with a project house. We lived in a trailer for the first months I lived there. The house that was on the property was about 100 years old, with foot thick concrete walls. The inside of the house had been lost in a fire, but the walls still stood. The previous owner had done some work framing the house and put a roof on it before he sold it. We did all of the rest of the work ourselves, with the exception of some tilework that we hired our neighbor for. We sold it at the peak of covid for over 500k. We spent a year separated after selling the house. She used the money to buy a truck and put a downpayment on an even more expensive house in a small town, and I moved back in with her after that year. One of the things we've done since getting back together is keeping our finances separate, and contribute to communal expenses out of our own pocket. This allows me to be ultra frugal, without upsetting or becoming upset with her spending habits. The expenses which I now have on account of our less than ideal living situation are a compromise I'm happy to make in service of our relationship. My wife is frugal in her own way, and as time goes on she comes to appreciate more and more of my perspective on frugality. Yearly spending right now is slightly over 24k and will become less as we house hack or way back to communal living. I look forward to being on the otherside of the arrangement I benefitted from as a young adult.

Absent any context, if you took my household spending it would be in the area of WL 7-8 for most of my adulthood, and have dropped to around WL 5. This descent coincides with an enormous increase in income, (savings rate) so lifestyle inflation has certainly played a role.

Retirement Goal: ???
I did not give any thought to financially planning for retirement until I had kids 5 years ago, incidentally around the time I found full time employment in a field with a great pension. My retirement goals prior kids and career had been either
1. Become a renunciant and "retire" to a monastery,
or
2. Own and manage a collective maker space and possibly a collective living space,
both still completely viable options.

Now that I've begun to think more conventionally about how money relates to retirement, I understand the ideas and math behind SWR. But I still don't think about them because my 457, HRA, and personal brokerage account is play money on top of the pension, which is play money if I can't find a way to make my life valuable post "retirement." I'm also unconcerned with this because I like going to work, and I'm not tightly coupled to it; if I quit today I could have a new job tomorrow.

Vacation and Experiences: 5-7
I moved to Asia when I was 21, with money I had saved from a really cool fabrication job. I lived in my boss's house rent free for the 6 months it took me to save the money to go to Asia for a year. I repeated that cycle for a few years until I was able to financially sustain my travelling lifestyle without returning to the US. I did this by learning Chinese and working as an interpreter, and coaching and working at a gym in Thailand. By the end of the 7 years I spent in Asia, I could've maintained that lifestyle without returning to the US.

In the years before moving to Asia I was really into learning wilderness survival skills, so I spent probalby half my time in the woods camping and the other half of the time or so working.

This looks a lot like a conglomeration of the descriptions on the WL chart of levels 4-8, mostly trending towards the higher end. I have a sharp distinction between work and leisure because I have a job and an employer and a schedule however the distinction between work and play is not well defined emotionally to me, because I take pleasure in the work and find it rewarding. I chose the career I did because I wanted to opportunity to learn and do that kind of work, not because I needed/wanted a paycheck. I'd rather do my job for 20 years than work behind a desk at a job I didn't love for 5 years retire.

Focus: 4-6?
I'm not even sure where I place myself here. I have only recently begun to think of my lifestyle a funciton of money, so I feel like I'm again working backwards to some extent. I definitely don't have a systems theory approach to how this works, but I do have a realtive disinterest for money, because I don't really consider it a chief element in how I calculate the value of my personhood, I think of it more as a result of my personhood and agency.

Conclusion:
The ERE WL's chart is intended to describe the nominal passage of a person with no financial competency AND no renaissance capacity (what I think of as "agency"). My life has been characterized by high agency and low to no financial capital. Because of my value of agency, when I began to accrue money, I decided I'd best figure out what the I ought to be doing with it, which led me, circuitously to discover the ERE book. I can't be unique in this regard.

Probably this has been discussed before, but my insight is that we have an "all roads lead to Rome" scenario, where the higher ERE WL's are the inevitable destination of a person with high agency, a person committed to the renaissance ideal: the student of life. The ERE WL chart is the progress of a person embarking upon the journey from the standpoint of financial independence/Early Retiremoent, and that is the langauge that the chart is written in. It seems logical that a person is at least as likely (if not more) to arrive at the higher levels by being a committed renaissance person, because money, as ubiquitous as it is, will eventually come into the focus of someone who has high agency, Agency being, in other words, interest and involvement in learning about the diverse functions of the different aspects of one's environment. This is how I've arrived here anyhow and I think it's a pretty damn good way to get here.

It would be interesting to create a Renaissance WL's chart, absent of the retirement benchmarks/scaling that are found in the ERE chart.

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Re: Jim's Journal.

Post by jacob »

Jim wrote:
Sun Aug 20, 2023 4:15 pm
It would be interesting to create a Renaissance WL's chart, absent of the retirement benchmarks/scaling that are found in the ERE chart.
The ERE WLs map fairly well to various models of adult ego development. The [ego development models] also map to each other with the general difference only being one of range (some stop early) and differentiation. I think Torbert's action-logic framework the one that closest match the ERE WLs. Interestingly, I was not aware of these models when v1.0 of the ERE WLs were made and yet they fit. Imagine that.

Random overview: https://bhavanalearning.com/wp-content/ ... Logics.pdf (warning: somewhat corporate-y for direct translation)

What the ERE WLs describe is really an evolution of how someone thinks. As thinking evolves, people tend to incorporate ever more perspectives on the subject. Insofar one is frugal, the ability to see more and more perspectives means the ability to generate more solutions for less money. This is why spending goes down w/o reducing quality of life. As noted in the table, spending (or recreation for that matter) is not the key to the table. Obviously a 17yo living rent-free at home is not WL10 just because they hardly spend any money. Low WLs + low money = sacrifice whereas High WLs + low money = interesting if quirky adventures.

The ERE WLs can be translated into Torbert's action-logics, roughly like this:

ERE WL 1 : Torbert Opportunist
ERE WL 2: Torbert Diplomat
ERE WL 3-4: Torbert Expert (this level and the next is the norm/goal for an adult in western society)
ERE WL 5: Torbert Achiever
========================
ERE WL 6: Torbert Individualist
ERE WL7: Torbert Strategist

The bar represents a huge break in the kind of thinking where the person for the first time begins to question and manipulate the rules that they previously just tried to follow. Using a game analogy, WL1-5 seeks to become better and better at playing the game. WL6 begins to question the game and WL7 begins to redesign the game.

Torbert only goes so high. Cook-Greuter goes higher and unlike ERE WL1.0, ERE WL2.0 is actually inspired by CG and others.

PS: The "Green table" attempts in the ERE2 forum is an attempt to create a new table without the finance focus. I posit that the same evolution in thinking-modes hold but that the specifics will manifest differently for those who e.g. prioritize social capital over financial capital. Ultimately I agree that all roads lead to Rome. It's basically like a pyramid or a cone: You can climb up from any side but all sides lead to the same top and the closer you get, the more in common you have with "thinkers" at the same level. What makes communication hard tends not to be the difference in domain but how people think about it.

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