ffj wrote: ↑Fri Dec 15, 2017 12:10 pm
@7
Do you feel that one has to have an above average intelligence to FOLLOW the principle of ERE? Does one have to be intelligent to realize that certain behaviors will lead to poor outcomes even if they don't necessarily understand the long game? What if there were more Jacobs out there preaching the good word and a ground swell occurred? Do you think that every person that decided to follow Jacob's principles of freedom would understand everything about it or do you feel that they would want to become part of a movement with tangible results whether they understood everything or not?
I have a more generic opinion on that. I don't think one has to be 100+ to
follow the ERE principles because, after all, there's not much practical difference between ERE and the multi-skilled and self-reliant lifestyles of everybody 3-4 generations ago.
The issue is that there are too few personal/relateable examples to follow. Going on one's own, one does have to be 100+ as well as of a rather independent and thick-headed mind to break the mold and go against all the values that one's environment is continually reinforcing. If such an environment is extremely volatile (lets say, e.g. one's home proceeds from one crisis to the next), it's very hard to make the connection between action and outcome---one will easily draw the conclusion that there's no connection. In economic terms, one's planning-horizon or future discount rate becomes extremely low (hours instead of decades) and very high, respectively. I've read (unfortunately I don't have a reference) that the average INTJ future planning horizon is 33 years
... I can easily show you a bunch of other people (ISFP, say) whose horizon is on the order of half an hour.
It's one thing to be part of a movement online ... it's another to find role models IRL. We're currently at a point where IRL---and that's probably just because I associate with an overrepresented sample of people in IT (so upper-income, college educated)---people have asked me whether I've heard about that MMM-guy when prompted by my comment that "I write and run a website about financial independence amongst other things" when they ask "what I do 'for a living'". So in terms of penetration of the TE-dimension of STEM, we're currently at a point where at least a few have heard of the most famous concurrent example of smart choices.
Things have changed a lot over the past decade. In my local socioeconomic domain, my writing has gone from being seen as subversive (it actually created a minor family crisis back then when some family member started reading my blog) to being seen overall as a really good/wise idea even if a bit hardcore. I do attribute that partially to the groundswell effect and partially by how "we" turned out 10 years later---something which is now concretely manifest.
Most people, by far, only have the intelligence or rather wisdom (or in Cippola-terms) the capacity for not being helpless via copying someone else. If they have conflicting behaviors to copy from, then they have to "compare" and make choices based on intelligent-theory ... "Compiling" multiple examples and making a choice requires a focused effort. That, in my experience, is only found
voluntarily in a small fraction of people. Being self-motivated to improve oneself seems rather rare. In my entire family, I see only two people who are deliberately and independently breaking the mold and not making choices in accordance with their socioeconomic locality. The rest are copying/emulating the behavioral patterns of their immediate surroundings.