jacob wrote: ↑Mon Mar 04, 2024 3:06 pmI see the FIRE community as having the shared social characteristic that they're financially independent. They can talk about what they do all day when they no longer spend all day working for a living. They can get together and do it together instead of being off on their own. I see the ERE community as having the shared social characteristic of not depending on money and thus not depending on making it. They can talk about how they do that on their own (as we we here on the forum, an online community, in the form of international travel, hikes, appliance repairs, small builds). They can get together and do it together than maybe make something more incredible than what we currently spend our time on individually.
So ordered, because I happen to have been thinking about it in AQAL terms, which also happen explain the difference between ERE City and ERE Hostel Hubs.7Wannabe5 wrote: ↑Tue Mar 05, 2024 10:26 amI think you need to expand on this and share it on the ERE City thread. I was considering my answers to the survey, and happened to be re-reading "Getting Things Done", and Allen's observations on exploring "purpose" in project design struck me as highly relevant, because the survey at level "what?" seems to be putting the cart before the horse a bit with asking "where?" and "how?" prior to clearly answering "why?" One of the primary reasons humans generally group together socially (starting with the dyad) is to meet their more basic mammalian level needs (such as Jin+Guice discussed above.) Clearly, ERE city is not primarily imagined/visioned with primary purpose being something like providing forum members with all the hugs or other forms of warm communion they might need/want. My current understanding is that the primary "purpose" would be more like that of Bell Labs, a sort of human high-skill "factor"y towards 21st century resilience. IOW, the emphasis would be on creative work, but as with all things there would still be boring or annoying work such as "the dishes" and "fixing the printer" that would have to be addressed, and your concern is not that the creative work (writing/directing/costume-design/musically-arranging "Napoleon Fever") will largely fall to the more highly factored, but that they will also be on tap for much of the boring/annoying work (typing up "Napoleon Fever", filling out the associated worksheet.) If this is reflective of your concern/possible resentment-vortex, my response would be "Hello, welcome to the world of just about every high-factored female prior to approximately 1969."
Lemmesplain.
AQAL is a framework that distinguishes between the subjective, the objective, the intersubjective, and the interobjective. Philosophical nitpicking aside, subjective is what happens inside a person's head and objective is what happens outside that person's head. You can objectively see my balding head, but you can not subjectively see what I'm thinking right now.
The ERE blog writings and the ERE book was my subjective perspective on the objective and interobjective world we live in. What's the difference between objective and interobjective? If I'm kicking a ball, the ball is objectively kicked as you can see. What you can not see if how the kicking feels to my foot, because that's subjective to me alone. You can kick a ball objectively as well as I can see. However, it may be that I'm kicking one soccer ball and you're kicking a different soccer ball. These kicks are not objectively the same because each ball may have a different pressure in them. As such each of us is objectively doing something different. However, if we were to get together and kick the very same ball, THAT ball would be interobjective.
Why is this blabla-sounding distinction important? Because the interobjective perspective allows the creation of soccer. IOW, while kicking is an objective construct, soccer is an interobjective construct. Other interobjective constructs include things like the economy, the legal system, financial markets, clubs, games, war,... Interobjectivity transcends and includes the objective. It is bigger and it also contains the individual perspectives. Interobjective soccer has kicking and passing. Objective ball juggling just has kicking. There's no passing without kicking or some other interobjectively allowed objective move, like heading. In turn, intersubjective understanding of the interobjective makes a huge difference because it allows for strategy. A phalanx, which sees the same thing in the same way, easily defeats a hero, who see one thing in one way or even a bunch of heroes who sees the same thing but in different ways.
Intersubjectivity is what we have if we both see something the same way; we both have the same idea and we both effectively understand it in the same way. Basically we have a mutual understanding of what something is and means. For example, everybody who has learned basic math have the same intersubjective understanding of 2+2=4. Someone who has not learned math or thinks 2+2=5 is not part of this intersubjective perspective. They're part of another intersubjective perspective. Why is that blabla important?
The ERE WL table deliniates 10 different ways (perspectives) of looking at the same (inter)objective things. It turns out that people of the same WL share much of the same intersubjective perspective with each other whereas people who are 2+ WLs removed think that others are crazy/extreme/etc. and therefore not part of the intersubjective experience. We know this is true because of interobjective data (many hundreds of forum threads) that we can all see.
The ERE forum is an intersubjective experience. People feel like they've found their tribe because they can [maybe for the first time in their life] express their subjective perspective and have it intersubjectively understood by others. Don't take this for granted. Remember how it was before you found this or a similar tribe. I posit that humans very much desire this intersubjectivity. Imagine, if you can, a world of the year 2007, when this intersubjective experience was undiscoverable and all you had was old books that a few other people had written many years ago.
The ERE forum is, however, not an interobjective experience. We each sit and klack at our own personally objective keyboards. But, we each live our own objective life in an interobjective world we share with working stiff consumers. The only difference between them and us is that they intersubjectively believe in "work=passion or work=getting ahead with the goal of success=stuff" whereas we intersubjectively believe in "3-4% rules and success=FI". But we share the same interobjective world.
Some in the FIRE/ERE/alt-living movement are actually just fine with that. They've carved out their niche and thrive. They often worry that if FIRE becomes too popular, they will no longer be able to enjoy the interobjective world as it currently is because that world would change. Maybe the government will start taxing capital. Maybe consumers will stop the free flow of goods from the back alley. They're happy where they are, interobjectively speaking, and don't have an incentive to change themselves or change others.
When it comes to complex systems, I'm a firm believer in never making [big] irreversible changes or ignoring that "you can never do just one thing". Pursuing multiple reversible strategies is more resilient.
The way I see it, the AQAL framework illustrates the key difference between "ERE City" and "ERE Hostels". Perhaps this resolves/explains the different preferences.
Here's how I see the difference.
"ERE Hostels" or "ERE Meetups" are a way for traveling visitors to experience that intersubjective "wow, I don't have to hide who I am or explain or always dumb down what I'm thinking" for a few hours or days or the duration of the stay. We'll get together and for a short time experience the strongest vibing we've ever experienced. "Damn, where have you people been all my life." It's kinda like Woodstock. People briefly coming together in conventional ways to experience intersubjective communion. Spouses and +1s comment how "you were an entirely different person for a few hours/days there". Basically, you travel to get seen, Maybe for the first time, and perhaps that's good enough. The interobjective experience will be one of travel, hanging out, seminars, and talks around the camp fire before it's onto the next place. Good experiences.
"ERE City" takes the intersubjective for granted---it's no longer a novelty---and the focus moves on expanding the interobjective possibilities. Again, many (semiERE?) will be happy engaging with the interobjective part-time experience of those who otherwise hold full-time jobs. In less technical terms, they're good with training for 1 hour 5 days a week because that's all that even the most extreme of working stiffs can afford. But what if you could train for 12 hours a day every day of the week. This kind of configuration is interobjectively not available except for a very limited range of mostly solo-pursuits. I see ERE City as a solution for those who aren't satisfied with getting their interobjective fix on a part-time/hobby time-schedule as set by the rest of the world.
The challenge of "interobjective ERE" is that it requires EREmites to get together on a frequent basis in order to figuratively "play with the same ball". Intersubjective ERE is easier. You get it in small doses participating on the forum. (Lurkers only enjoy it vicariously.) You get bigger doses with MMGs. You get the biggest doses during meetups. Still, none of those makes an interobjective difference as far as I know of?
I'll note that one likely requires the intersubjective experience---perhaps to the point where it becomes same-old-same-old---before even beginning to consider the possibility of the interobjective experience. Inverting this, it may also be that it's folly to talk about interobjective ERE City before intersubjective relations are SOLID.
) was he would just hang out at a cool coffee shop near the university campus and directly approach people, "Is this chair taken? Java, huh?" Unfortunately, because Feynman was one of his role models, he also chose to hang out at the strip club quite frequently. I didn't mind the strippers doing their laundry at the house, and I liked the highly intelligent Girlfriend Experience Escort who rented one of the other rooms in the house, but I didn't like the fact that the rough boyfriends of the strippers would also sometimes show up at the house, so I felt compelled to leave what was otherwise an amiable house-share situation with him. An example of a tech project he helped invent/patent while I was living with him was a strip that creates a fairly clear heat image on your skin of whatever is in front of you when you stick it to your forehead. I helped him test it by wandering around the backyard with my eyes shut, with these blurred red images of trees somehow being transferred to my visual cortex. 
