The Education of Axel Heyst

[shaz]

Those graphs are a tad confusing, yes.

[AxelHeyst]

Does this help?

[mountainFrugal]

I suggest having a key that shows which line corresponds to each axis. Income and expenses on the left, Savings in Years on the right.

[AxelHeyst]

Thanks:



Oh I think if I made income and expenses different kinds of dashed lines, and savings a solid line, that would help group them too.

[mountainFrugal]

That reads better to me. You can also rotate the keys 90 degrees and it might look tidier and more like an axis label.

[AxelHeyst]

Oo, nice.

[AxelHeyst]

Relatedly, Tom Murphy of Do the Math is writing posts again and they are lit, as the kids say (right?). Here's a map to his stuff.

@theanimal tipped me off to Gail Tverberg's blog Our Finite World which (on quick glance) is a very detail oriented energy framework.

I suspect I'm going to be taking another deep pass at studying this sort of content (Tverberg, Tom Murphy and his recent reading list, all of Hagen's guests, etc) over the next couple months. I've gone through a couple similarly themed deep dives in the past -- approx. 2006/2007, 2011/2012, and maybe one more around 2016 but I might have more accurately skipped off the surface then, being pretty engrossed with my own navel and burnout by that point. Those previous dives really informed my thinking and actions over the past decade and a half but it hasn't been until very recently, due to ERE/postconsumer praxis, that I feel moderately equipped to action any takeaways I might derive from a fresh pass.

My early dives informed my career 2009-2021 which, RIP, didn't really work out. Learning ERE since 2020 has felt like a transition/phase change that was necessary to get me out of the mess I was in and to get my personal life in order. Taking a fresh and updated *unrushed* look into this stuff and integrating it with my experiences since 2009 seems really appropriate. I sense that a lot of my mental models are outdated. Before I get too far down any specific set of projects I ought to make sure I'm not operating with old/bad/creaky assumptions and frameworks.

Just noting this for posterity, I'm curious how I'll view 2023/2024 in another couple years.

[AxelHeyst]

A thought occurred to me, which isn't really a new thought but more like a more coherent/clear framing of an old abstract thought that has extruded itself out of my experiences this past month:

As preamble, the semiERE people figured out that if you develop other forms of capital you can shortcut the accumulate>FI step. You can't at all ignore economic capital, but going 'all the way' first isn't a strict requirement. One way to state semiERE is "Don't wait until FI to develop diverse capital. Moderate the typical focus on economic capital and increase attention spent on the other forms. By doing so you will reduce CoL enough and develop adequate alternative flows of resources so that tradFI might become irrelevant to your WoG."

I think that there's a similar-ish realization to be made with social capital, which is that if you can develop social capital early enough there are potentially steps that you can skip/shortcut (not quite the right words...)

An example is that I realized I might not need to DIY learn everything about botany, gardening, drylands permaculture, etc etc myself in order to get a food forest growing here. I might just need to attract someone else who already knows how to do those things, create a physical/social/psychological/aesthetic space that they'd be happy to spend time in, and they can not only do lots of the initial design work and rookie-mistake avoidance, they can likely teach me faster than I can absorb the information from books.

In other words, for my Desired Outcome="Grow a drylands appropriate food forest at Quail Haven" project, the first task might be "Build a comfortable and beautiful tinyhouse" with a parallel task of "start EREawaying and/or workawaying to develop skill, experience, and further infrastructure related to hosting medium to long term guests/residents at Quail Haven".

This approach might be overall more efficient and resilient. The end result is that a food forest, and much of the knowledge for designing and nurturing one, is loaded into my WoG, but so also are several other desirable nodes: more tinyhouses, more hours spend building alt structures, more hours spent with different kinds of interesting people, etc. And, potentially, someone else gets to spin up a food forest and tuck that into their life experiences belt which otherwise they wouldn't have been able to pull off. So my personal WoG is enrichening and playing to my strengths and so is theirs...

Another example of this goes back to Quadalupe's stay here. He's *very* good at listening to someone else's idea, asking strengthening questions, and then both poking holes at it and suggesting other ways of modifying the idea to be more bomber. We fell into a rhythm of this at Quail Haven where I'd spend the late morning working on my manuscript or some other writing project, and then we'd hang out on Serenity's back porch and I'd tell him what I'd been working on. He'd test it as I just described, which would trigger a wave of insights in my head, and I'd go back and type up my notes from our chat. So due to the social capital (is that even the right phrase?) of hosting Quadalupe I was receiving the yield of really high-quality intellectual conversation and workshopping of my ideas.

The trick is to not go too far too fast with the social angle. I've experienced several situations where the people involved hadn't done enough development as individuals first and assumed that merely bringing people together would have the result they wanted. From my perspective erring on the side of too many people too fast is the worst mistake, because then you're not just wasting your own time you're wasting the potential of other people. Also, it's easier to dissolve single-player clusterfucks and try again than it is multiplayer clusterfucks. So I think it's more responsible to err slightly on the side of being too individually prepared rather than too underprepared. (This might have something to do with my mortal terror of wasting other people's time...)

On the other hand, if you way overshoot it you might start to habituate lone-wolf grooves and reach a point of no return when it comes to doing all the things yourself. Perhaps.

Of course 'too much' and 'too little' are entirely subjective, a matter of personal preference and capacity. Reflecting on my path, any earlier than nowish would have been too soon to attempt serious social capital building. I didn't have my shit together enough. But three years from now would be too late. It's time to start parallel pathing/weaving social capital into my WoG in a meaningful way *now*, and it's not too late and it's not too early. Or so I judge.

[Veronica]

Reflecting on my path, any earlier than nowish would have been too soon to attempt serious social capital building. I didn't have my shit together enough. But three years from now would be too late. It's time to start parallel pathing/weaving social capital into my WoG in a meaningful way *now*, and it's not too late and it's not too early. Or so I judge.

Thinking in terms of other types of capital is one of the true shortcuts to ERE. But don't forget that social isn't the only one: owning the means of production is another classic one, and it can be traded for the other types of capital. Owning the only snowblower in my neighborhood earned me some serious social credits come winter (and a delightful assortment of christmas candies from the sweet old lady down the street!), and I'm sure that the things you own or the things you can do for others can earn you the same. The way I see it, brownie points are every bit as real as dollar bills in a tight knit community.


Personally, I've found that there's no such thing as "too early" to build social capital; but I do think you can fall into a icarus flying too close to the sun situation if you shoot for too much too fast.
For example, I had someone approach me when I was around 20 to help him develop the software that would power his startup idea.
I ended up politely declining (which turned out to be the right choice), but still maintained relationship with him and helped him out in the smaller ways that I could realistically add value in an efficient way. We still talk today, and it's possible that I could have burned that relationship forever if i promised too much too fast and couldn't deliver up to their expectations. I think unmet expectations is the real cause of failures in the realm of social capital building.

[AxelHeyst]

I think unmet expectations is the real cause of failures in the realm of social capital building.

I agree with this so hard.

Personally, I've found that there's no such thing as "too early" to build social capital; but I do think you can fall into a icarus flying too close to the sun situation if you shoot for too much too fast.

Yes, I'm misusing the term social capital. I mean something more like 'social/group-oriented projects above a certain scale threshold'.

If I take on an ambitious technical project by myself in my basement and it turns into a disaster, no big deal. It's an educational success.

If I take on an ambitious social/group project that was over my head and I ought to have known it, that is a big deal, because I've just screwed with other people's lives. There's a level of social responsibility that goes along with attempting group projects.

What I'm noodling on here with my above post is

a) realizing and working with the power of other people such that I don't limit my/our influence to what only individuals can do, and
b) some conceptual guidelines to approach such power responsibly.

When you start working with people systems you get into the realm of mistakes that are very difficult to recover from. It takes a lifetime to build a reputation and a minute to ruin one, and all that.

[7Wannabe5]

An example is that I realized I might not need to DIY learn everything about botany, gardening, drylands permaculture, etc etc myself in order to get a food forest growing here. I might just need to attract someone else who already knows how to do those things, create a physical/social/psychological/aesthetic space that they'd be happy to spend time in, and they can not only do lots of the initial design work and rookie-mistake avoidance, they can likely teach me faster than I can absorb the information from books.

I generally agree with your observations about social capital, but I would like to emphasize that you don't have to learn everything before you start a permaculture project. Permaculture is probably the field in which I have experienced the most profound learning through the process of making rookie mistakes (and successes.) Although infrastructure is very important, it's not akin to building the foundation of a skyscraper. It's meant to be a cyclical reiterative process in alignment with the cycles of nature and your growing base of knowledge built on observation and experiment. So, for instance, you should almost count on the fact that you will have to rebuild some of your first attempts at major infrastructure, and count it as the cost of gaining intuition about the lay of the land in relationship to flows known known to unknown unknown.

Also, it has been my experience that utilizing or being utilized as social capital on a permaculture project (or similar) can be a tricky balance. There is a fair-minded tendency to eventually want to attach equity in relationship to labor provided beyond "fun thing to help with on a few random weekends." It might also be interesting or useful to note that only an individual(s) who is approximating some relatively high Wheaton/ERE/SD/Kegan level in their functioning would be truly free to exchange their time/skill/labor for free housing in a very rural area, no matter how aesthetic/appealing. For example, I could only afford to live/camp for free on the North Woods project I helped one of my partners with, because he also provided me with free housing in the city where I could intermittently work, so that I could maintain enough cash flow to pay my minimal overhead bills, not tap my savings.

[AxelHeyst]

Thanks @7. Becoming comfortable with / habituating the practice of cyclical design is something I really only understand abstractly, although I've got some initial glimmers of experience. Everything I designed at work was literally bolted on to or encased in concrete and steel, so the cost of imperfect was measured in $millions and # of lawsuits. It paid to iterate *the design* over and over and only after exhaustive analysis hand it over to the builders. That logic no longer applies to much of what I'm doing but old habits die hard. I'm going to print out your comment and put it on my fridge.

Your second paragraph points at one reason why I'm so stoked to engage with ERE people IRL. MMGs, Quadalupe's stay here, and erefest have given me a taste for what it's like to interact with people whose average [wheaton/ERE/kegan/sd/emotional] level of function is high. It's... really nice. I'm not about to abandon all nonERE relationships or pursuits, but damn is it nice to spend time with such a diverse *and* high-functioning pool of people.

[AxelHeyst]

Speaking of Quadalupe, his month-long stay here was awesome. Another experiment that was a home run. He helped me build the shade structure, helped pull Fest off, and then we went and climbed for a week. The only negative of the experience is that he's set the bar super high for the next person to stay here. I have more good things to say about the experience (and also to perhaps document best practices/reflections for anyone else up for trying an EREaway/residence deal) but I'm still backlogged processing all my experiences from the past month, so for now I'll just post about our climbing trip.

The Thursday after fest I arranged to borrow my parent's extra vehicle (we're working out a vehicle-share deal, since their two vehicles are underutilized) and Quadalupe and I went up the Eastside of the Sierras. We climbed the Alabama Hills, ORG outside of Bishop, and capped it off with the southeast buttress of Cathedral Peak in Tuolumne, a super classic 5.6 six pitch. It was Quadalupe's first day in Yosemite... very, *very* few people have had such an epic first day in Yosemite. We then spent a couple days soaking in the Valley with a hike to Vernal Falls and the El Cap Lieback.

Quadalupe was a natural dirtbagger. We ate cold-soak food, rinsed off in creeks, boondocked in epic beautiful spots, and hunted down free wifi every few days so he could maintain his side hustle. He had positive attitude (yet good Dutch bluntness) the entire time. I'd dirtbag again with him anytime. His mental duct tape never showed signs of coming off, *and* he was clear about his needs and wants. He's a good man to do hard things with.


We woke at 0415 to get to the base of Cathedral just as the sun hit it, as it's one of the most popular climbs in NA. We were the first roped team to the summit block, although half a dozen soloists passed us as per usual.




Summit view. Half dome in the distance




A regular boondocking spot outside Bishop.


The view from our boondock spot outside Tuolumne

--

It was my first time climbing anything since January 2021, and it was really affirming. I intend to work climbing back into my WoG over the next year.

[Western Red Cedar]

Looks like an amazing trip. I always get excited when I talk to foreigners getting off the beaten path in their travels to the states. We have some amazing cities and those make for great stops, but the grandeur of our public lands is on another level. It sounds like @Quadalupe had a particularly unique American experience that wouldn't have been possible without the ERE community.

[jacob]

This approach might be overall more efficient and resilient. The end result is that a food forest, and much of the knowledge for designing and nurturing one, is loaded into my WoG, but so also are several other desirable nodes: more tinyhouses, more hours spend building alt structures, more hours spent with different kinds of interesting people, etc. And, potentially, someone else gets to spin up a food forest and tuck that into their life experiences belt which otherwise they wouldn't have been able to pull off. So my personal WoG is enrichening and playing to my strengths and so is theirs...

It kinda sounds like a rephrashing "comparative advantage" although maybe I misunderstood what you were saying. There are two ways this could play out: one good and one bad (I think).

I think it's potentially/eventually bad if WOGs are meshed on an individual level in the sense that each individual seeks to interface in a way that is good for them personally. Lets call this the transactional approach. This would be something along the lines of "I give you housing" and in return "You teach me gardening". It will technically work, but it risks creating a kind of interdependency with unspoken contracts + such WOGs risk "growing apart". Whereas the normal way of using money to keep the transaction instantaneous and at arms-length avoids hard feelings or wrong expectations.

I think the potentially good way is if each WOG is homeotelic with each other. IOW, both (or everybody) is working towards the same overall goal. The only difference is that each person is bringing something different to the table. E.g. one may bring the land, the other brings the plants.

(To use the friendship analogy, the bad mesh is friends-of-utility. The good mesh is not friends-of-virtue as much as it is friends-on-the-same-mission. It is the mission that binds people together.)

In terms of metaphors, I see the social aspect of ERE2 much like the German general staff saw Blitz Krieg. Boyd probably had some refinements to this. The point was that blitzkrieg was too fast for a top-down command chain (Orange)---obviously it's also too fast and too wide for the (Green) consensus method---so instead each local commander would both have an idea of the strategic goals as well as the liberty to take initiative and pursue those locally as he saw fit. In order to do this, all commanders would need to be generally educated---and it so happened that they were. As such the relevant meso-strategies would emerge regionally depending on how things evolved.

Technically, this is Yellow type leadership. What it requires is a unifying vision of something the group wants to do as well as individuals who can all contribute [their own mission] towards this vision in their own way. Usually this unifying vision is supplied by one person (the most visionary) rather than created by the group. Basically, supplying the vision is just a skill like any other and it's done by the one who does it best/takes the initiative to do so. For example, EREfest was a vision by one person. So was the MMGs, the meetups, and the forum.

Maybe this deserves its own thread.

[AxelHeyst]

It kinda sounds like a rephrashing "comparative advantage" although maybe I misunderstood what you were saying. There are two ways this could play out: one good and one bad (I think). ...

Agreed on all of that. 'Why learn/do it myself if I can pay for it?' and 'Why learn/do it myself if I can get someone else to do it?' are structurally the same perspective, just using different forms of capital. The latter isn't what I had in mind but would be easy to fall in to.

What I'm interested in building here might be described as somewhere in between an ecovillage and a hackerbase with 'artist-in-residence' vibes. Polymath residencies?

A lot of the ecovillages and workaways I've looked at and resided at have either:
1) Needy vibes. ('OMG we need someone who knows how to build stuff that won't fall down and kill us / wire up a PV system that won't electrocute us/start a fire PLEASE HALP US')
2) Money stressed vibes.
3) Competent, but micromanagey and controlling about precisely what projects to do and how to do them, and often walk around pissed off all the time about how the 23yo volunteers can't magically build flying suits of armor in a cave like iron man or read their minds.

I'm 100% not into any of that. I want to build a place that is attractive, and I want to build relationships with interesting people, and I want it to be known that there is space here that the interesting people are welcome to come stay at and do interesting things. Doesn't have to be 'my' projects, although if they want to work on Quail Haven specific projects that's cool.

Definitely more New Alchemy Institute vibes, where the overall vision was research and development of ecotech and socialtech appropriate to a low-fossil fuel world. But not dependent on grant money or donations to keep the thing running.

[jacob]

I want to build a place that is attractive, and I want to build relationships with interesting people, and I want it to be known that there is space here that the interesting people are welcome to come stay at and do interesting things. Doesn't have to be 'my' projects, although if they want to work on Quail Haven specific projects that's cool.

It kinda sounds like an IRL version of the ERE forum (or the MMGs) One of the advantages of the internet is that it reduces travel/relocation cost to zero. Previous attempts at "relocalization" have not worked because as independent as EREmites purport to be most still want to stay close to family and existing friends. Yet, perhaps now is the time as it may becoming more obvious that IRL connections with other EREmites is pretty nice.

PS: Once a space grows big enough, "social" problems will eventually appear. The only potential choice in the matter is which form they take.

[AxelHeyst]

Hah, yes, exactly. I hesitate to say it out loud but I guess one shorthand way to say it is I want to build a Yellow IRL space.

And - I see no need for 'relocalization' to be part of it, at least not anytime soon. People have seasons to their homebase system, or where they live sucks during summer or during winter, or they're on holiday for a few months or years. Way more people might be into stopping by for a few weeks or months and that sounds great. I'm certainly not prepared for anyone to PM me and say 'Right, I'm ready to move in forever' (although DO PM me if interested in buying the 60 acres of undeveloped land next door or up the street...)

I could be wrong about that, though? Things could happen faster than I anticipate? I'm open to that as well.

Design for having the less-undesirable social problems is of interest to me.

I'm also interested in a Yellow leadership thread, Appreciation+Leadership vs. Command+Control etc.

[rref]

What you describe sounds a lot like what Project Kamp is doing in Portugal.

[berrytwo]

Sounds like a really fun project! I think the setup you are talking about could allow for mutual support of web of goals for both you and whoever comes to stay.

I think your shorter-term idea stays would be a great starting point. With each person that comes you can learn more about what works (or doesn't) and adjust.

As for conflict in communities... my anecdotal experience is that while yes each new person exponentially adds new (potentially negative) relationships to the community, it can add balance, skill, and perspective.