Rob is growing and foraging 100% of his food for a year

[daylen]

If I understand you correctly (big if!) then it could fit. Primary Fe would see and make sense of people stereo-typically by tracking a variety of social cues and categorizing. The hawt mess category would involve cues that imply incoherent or unstable values/interests. Ti attempting to make sense of any Te-Fi could be characterized by a series of "principle resolutions" and "shocks". Each Ti principle resolution reduces the Te with the aid of Fe cues and each shock is an updating of the Te with the aid of Fi guidance. In other words, Te objectives are continuously being updated in accordance with Fi interests, and Ti principles are reducing the Te-Fi procedure with superficial Fe interfacing. A bad Te-Fi system would likely be undetectable by Fe-Ti until it is too late.

That probably just confused things, but I would reckon that Ne-flavored Fe-Ti would be more apt at being categorized into the hawt mess category due to continuous verbalization of emulated interests.

[7Wannabe5]

I don’t know. Bridget Jones seems more like a hawt mess to me than Juno. I guess I think making decisions based on emotions is more lifestyle messy than seeking to rapidly accumulate new information. However, relative level of alcohol intake might be the determining factor.

[daylen]

I have observed that Fi-Ni is the most individualistic (this goes for gamma quadra as a whole) whereas Fe-Ne is the least (alpha quadra). At my family gatherings with majority alpha quadra, everyone interacts very harmoniously (hawt mess does not fit anyone really). Probably because no one has much of an ego to attack/defend.

[daylen]

So, hawt mess probably fits Fi-Ne better since that fiery core is burning to be expressed but cannot figure out how to do so consistently. NFP's can be quite volatile.

Then again, my ISFJ cousin is like the definition of a hawt mess because she mirrors emotions so strongly and is impressionable. Perhaps because she has not developed a coherent set of principles to follow.

[7Wannabe5]

Yes, I think both flavors of NFP might qualify. They both would be likely to be fostering 3 dogs or 5 cats, but the INFP would be more likely to get arrested for drunken angry performance art piece, whereas the ENFP would be more likely to drunk dial verbally abusive ex on Valentine’s Day. A female ENTP is like a machine compared to those types.

[Alphaville]

IOW, the median member of this forum actually has skills deficit in dealing with these sort of problems due to lack of experience.

experience, upbringing, temperament, etc

i grew up with a self-interested rationalist dad and a selfless caretaker self-effacing mom who made a second career out of volunteering after the kids flew the nest.

and i am temperamentally self-interested but grew up in more communitarian cultures than me.

then ended up settling in a place where the culture is more self-interested than me.

so i can still see both sides and understand their successes and failures at different things. and the need for interplay.

also, i was once kicked out of a socialist commune for being “selfish” (in my opinion i was just as selfish as everyone else i saw, just less hypocritical.)

I think this [indirect bottom up approach] really is the only effective way to go about it. It creates enlightened individuals who can serve as components or ingredients for a different future system. Once there is enough ingredients available, society can [spontaneously] change the recipe. The strategy here is to change the system by changing the behavior of its components. Compare to the top-down approach of trying to change the components by changing the system. This almost never works because systems inherently resist change/try to preserve homeostasis.

for reasons hinted at above, and to quote cervantes, i think it takes all kinds to make a world.

i’m not sure we could make a world of enlightened beggars a la rob, because dumpsters would not exist and they’d all starve.

it’s good to have gadflies though, even though they are often forced to drink hemlock. but their presence is more like a pharmaceutical in the social body than the whole body.

the reason top down is also necessary is because many people just want to get clear instructions and follow others. we can shake our fist at the cloud of lack of agency but that’s not going to change. herd behavior is hardwired.

we often talk of building passive barriers+incentives to influence our personal behavior (e.g., if you’re me, don’t keep cookies in the house, and have the exercise gear ready to go). same principle applies to the masses and i wouldn’t discount it.

eta: e.g. https://www.nber.org/programs/ag/rrc/04 ... nFinal.pdf
or, less formally: https://www.npr.org/2019/01/31/69046897 ... save-money

[daylen]

I think there is probably more agreement going on than it would appear. Both the "system" and the "components" can have multiple interpretations. I suppose I had in mind something more akin to individuals and small tribes whereby Fi corresponds to individual-interest and Fe to group-interest. Yet, I would tend to agree with Jacob that slightly tweaking a large system like the U.S. is unlikely to change the people in it.

Yet, a small-group focus can be and has been effective. Roughly, a band corresponds to a household, a family, or an extended family; a tribe corresponds to friends or acquaintances limited by Dunbar's number.

With these definitions, Fe-Ti can be effective at negotiating/setting boundaries/rules that supersede any individual interests within a band or tribe. Fe-Ti can also cross-fertilize with other such bands/tribes. Whereas Te-Fi can continue being effective at individual-to-individual transformation.

It is conceivable that the bottom-up approach would work by spreading far and wide (without much scaling initially) via long-distance communication until enough individuals can change the recipe at the state level(*). Combined with Fe-Ti, each such cluster could scale better to the band/tribe level. This marginal increase in scale could further lead to decoupling from global supply chains and partially adverting the energy crisis.

So, I think we are near agreement, but I would just add that developing relationships (i.e. social capital) in geographical proximity with the aid of Fe-Ti is an equally important part of the overall strategy because not everyone has the type of agency(**) required to follow this message directly. Even if everyone did then human population density would be only slightly higher than bears or tigers. At which point, we may as well just go extinct and let them take over.

Geographical proximity of tribes is quite important for this to work, and I am not sure how that can be reconciled with long-distance communication technology. Internet bubbles partially contribute to individuals/households/bands being modular cogs within corporate engines distributed across the globe via high-energy transportation networks connecting city hubs. Cities are essentially large negentropy machines that the biosphere cannot afford much longer.

Can't believe I am actually being more of a pessimistic than Jacob right now.

(*) I am not so sure how this is even possible given lack of state independence, marginal resource extraction, uneven resource distribution, required scale of industrial farms, and so forth. Even a dense distribution of ERE-like households is not enough.

(**) The other type of agency is equally important for social cohesion at the level of bands/tribes/chiefdoms required to roll-back state dependency.

[Alphaville]

Cities are essentially a large negentropy machines that the biosphere cannot afford much longer.

cities are much more energy efficient than the burbs

https://www.citylab.com/life/2012/04/wh ... eener/863/

https://www.mnn.com/earth-matters/trans ... -efficient

https://green.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/04 ... an-jungle/

let’s all please move into apartments and let nature take back sprawl

[daylen]

Cities are not closed systems, though. They co-exist with each other on energy-intensive transportation networks that require unsustainable population densities.

[Alphaville]

Cities are not closed systems, though. They co-exist with each other on energy-intensive transportation networks that require unsustainable population densities.

what is unsustainable is the population number, not the density

transportation networks into cities are also more efficient than the supply arteries that feed sprawl

[daylen]

Unless bikes and animals are used. Which require low population density.

[Alphaville]

Unless bikes and animals are used. Which require low population density.

animals create their own kind of pollution.

i was living in the sticks until last year and with much slower population density: my energy cost and carbon production was much higher than living in the city.

power lines, longer, heating cost was burning up the forest and polluting, longer water lines, electricity was coal produced.

the boonies still have a supermarket: 20 miles from home, reachable by dirt road. i needed a truck that had a v8 engine. any erran into town is 20 iles back and forth and people spend the days in their giant trucks. distribution center for the supermarkets was hundreds of miles away. my pricey internet was deployed by space rockets.

my current apartment is walkable to groceries, i got rid of the truck, the apartments heat each other up in winter like a pack of macaques on a frozen tree. distribution centers for stores are all nearby.

bicycle works with density, not without it. in the city i get everything within a few miles radius and it’s not even a very dense city. in a dense city everything would be available in the neighborhood. e.g., new york as a collection of neighborhoods.

power lines are shorter and more efficient. electric and wind solar purchase options are available.

also better environmental controls: required emissions inspections, barrel garbage burning is forbidden, construction codes are stricter which means no dumping broken drywall in the arroyo. there is more frequent garbage collection, recycling is available, sewage is treated. we can go on and on.

-

not to mention increased productivity and creativity from city network effects.which means we can do more with less.

[daylen]

Animals create waste that can be recycled via ecological mechanisms that are much more intricate than anything humans are likely to build any time soon.

Yeah, there are economies with scale, but I do not think that any scaling above about the chiefdom level is going to last much longer. This is a complex topic so we may be able to pick it up again in another thread. There are many scattered somewhere around here about this, ha.

[Alphaville]

i like going for a horseback ride in the ranch but it’s no longer the preferred mode of transportation for a reason

https://www.mentalfloss.com/article/187 ... al-problem

https://cityroom.blogs.nytimes.com/2008 ... th-hazard/

https://www.npr.org/2015/03/12/39233243 ... mous-filth

https://econlife.com/2012/12/19th-centu ... pollution/

or i should say “a PILE of reasons” xD

[Alphaville]

@bigato you live in a village, then?

in my rural place we could not even get mail delivery. you had to drive a car to the post office! which was not at walkable distance unless you wanted to spend the day just walking.

i don’t know how your neighborhood works, but in the united states everything *outside* cities has been developed around the car.

even newer cities that grew in the post-war: they aren’t real cities, they’re just vast suburbs made for cars cars cars cars cars.

cities (real cities, densely packed) favor smaller vehicles, walking, bicycling and mass transit.

—

eta: i am trying to make a distinction between “the suburbs” and “the downtown” here.

please see infographic with canadian data:

https://www.moneysense.ca/wp-content/up ... ic1000.jpg

or see: https://www.moneysense.ca/spend/real-es ... s-vs-city/

eta: for me in that article that’s not even the centre because they all have to drive, just some drive *less*. i prefer not having to drive at all.

-

more: https://mitpress.mit.edu/books/environm ... ges-cities

[jacob]

@alphaville - Change certainly takes all kinds. However, a top-down visionary is not going to change the system very much if the ingredients in his recipe are comprised of salarymen who depend on the current system for their lives and livelihood. Renaissancemen are closer to being "universal ingredients" who can serve in multiple different kinds of systems. That is why a better strategy is to work on creating more of those first. Otherwise, systemic change remains a "talk-only" issue---it turns in the kind of politics where 1) the visionaries are trying to get everybody on the same page; 2) ???; 3) Live happily ever after. Little thought is given to practical matters. Renaissance type people would at least be flexible in terms of dealing with whatever comes up during step (2).

As for the city vs country being more efficient, it does not really matter as both are currently highly interdependent as well as being in a state of overshoot. They are both too much on their own and nothing without each other. During a social/civilized collapse, people tend to move into cities because they are safer. Yet many visionaries (salarymen of the above variety) move into the countryside where they try to grow a tomato plant or two while living $40k/year lifestyles from their day jobs as online doomers, associate professors, or semi-professional complainers about corporations et al. They're looking the problem and the end-point while ignoring the practical transition. Ultimately bio-intensive countryside areas will be the long-term winners, but not when going through the bottleneck.

[Alphaville]

@bigato

the available in between is the real environmental nightmare though. everyone wanting a little piece of the country and paving over everything to get there is what’s killing us.

and alaska requires a lot of airplanes and mail subsidies to exist at its level. people use it to fly coca-cola!

https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics ... story.html

—

will take a little longer to reply to @jacob. about to go to work on my garden.

[7Wannabe5]

In the U.S. the countryside is just as industrialized as the cities. That's why you can encounter all sorts of odd conjunctions like living within a few miles of a major tofu factory, surrounded by nearby fields of soybeans, in a county where maybe only 10 people eat tofu.

Anyways, city vs. rural is a false dichotomy. All humans at minimum need to eat, poop, drink water, and breathe. So, we need some solar acreage and water flow devoted to horticulture/agriculture/permaculture/livestock grazing/etc. and some solar acreage and water flow devoted to wilderness functions eco-services such as cleaning the air and water of our toxic waste products and preserving bio-diversity. A human can't grow all her own food or process all her own waste products in the confines of a small city apartment, so she is effectively attached to the acreage that is devoted to providing these products and services. Is industrial agriculture and waste management combined with just-in-time long-distance transportation services the most efficient way to do this? Likely yes, given the existing infrastructure, but maintenance of the existing infrastructure is a good deal of the cost of city life, often reflected in HCOL/property taxes. Also city life often requires more "busyness" at the margin, so less fuel spent on automobile travel is usually compensated for with more fuel spent on your share of maintaining subway system combined with international air travel.

The plan/map of most cities prior to the advent of the automobile consisted of concentric circles of decreasingly intensive production of food and other materials. Intensive production means more human hours worked per acre. Extensive production means less human hours worked per acre. So, for instance, small dairy farms would be close to the city, and large grazing areas for beef cattle would be far away from the city center and wilderness foraging and seasonal hunting area would be even further away. Therefore, a functional modern low energy model would also tend towards this design, but could be rendered even more functional with thoughtful design towards increasing fractal dimension so that, for instance, narrow tips of wilderness zones gracefully dip into city park structure. Even dense city dwellers could take on the most intensive production tasks at small scale; such as cooking, processing, growing and sprouting greens,small scale composting, micro-orchards, etc. Suburban size plots could be converted to micro-farms specializing in horticulture as opposed to agriculture and capable of producing large percentage of food for small family as measured by weight/mineral nutrient content. Much of high caloric production such as grains and seed oil would still have to take place in more rural outer ring setting, but could be well integrated at boundary of wilderness through zone of permaculture and tree crops.

I do this sort of back of the envelope calculation all the time, and update as I receive new information. My current take is that current population is supportable at non-planet-frying level of energy usage, if each human is willing to devote approximately 2 hours/day towards thoughtful (as closed loop as possible)production of personal food supply, as appropriate from wherever they find themselves now. Am I currently achieving this metric myself? No.

My extended family often jokes that they are relying on me to save them post-apocalypse. Are they likely to even read the copies of "The Knowledge" that I gave them prior to the apocalypse? Doubtful.

[Jin+Guice]

There's been a ton of discussion since my last post a few days ago. Thanks to @alphavillle and @jacob for the thoughtful responses about the homogeneity of voices in the FIRE movement and lack of people of color and discussion of privilege in particular. Jacob's description of how privilege organically manifests in a community was very interesting and thought provoking.



An issue that was touched upon in the top down v bottom discussion is that many people are doing nothing and complaining, waiting for "them" to solve the problem. A lot of people do this for valuing signaling. However, I think a lot of people who are actually want change fail to do anything or misdirect their efforts because they believe that they have no personal control over the problem. They believe that the only possible solution is convincing "them" to change the structure of the system. There is a bit of ego protection and self-preservation in this attitude. If one is not part of the problem or part of it only in a way that can change if everyone else changes first, it saves them the time and effort of introspection, analyzing the problem and acting. However, we have been taught since birth that we are effectively helpless in the face of the monolith of culture and that focusing on harnessing (and possibly expanding) our own locus of control or sphere of influence is a good way to unlearn this.

This is not to say that changing social structures or top down change is not important. It's still possible to focus on your own sphere of influence most of the time and attend events that influence public policy, or attempt to work a job that influences public policy, or attend policy meetings as a concerned citizen or simply vote. The issue is people outsource all of their agency for change hoping that the people/ institutions that they think are harmful will voluntarily change, often against those peoples/ institutions self-interest. I think this attitude leads individuals to cling to their own ideology, as those asking for change never really have to deal with the details of enacting the change or the consequences of that change.


I got the feeling that many feel that Greenfield is this naive hippie. No one directly said this and maybe it's not what anyone meant; however, it was the impression that I got from reading the thread so I wanted to address it. I think he is doing an extremely public journaling process as he attempts to live in alignment with his beliefs. He details his years long process of going from living in an apartment to a tiny house to raising his own food. He does do this with a series of "stunts" (or you could call them experiments) that get him a certain amount of publicity and highlight issues that he cares about. He's a highly skilled individual who's built a strong social network. It's obvious that if he were ever really in trouble someone from his social network would step up and bail him out of whatever trouble he was in. I realize this is 1) related to the privilege we were discussing earlier and 2) would make him a less-perfect whatever-he-is-trying-to-be; however, it is a viable form of insurance that he does have. I think it's a mistake to ask anyone who asks for change/ does some sort of lifestyle blogging to be 100% perfect. The more in alignment with their own advice, the more trustworthy they are, but it's a misstep to throw out someone's whole body of work because of some small flaw.

It's the social equivalent to "get rich"-schemes of the 1) Have an amazing idea. 2) ??? 3) Profit. In this case, the plan boils down to 1) Organize community. 2) ??? 3) Live happily ever after. What happens in practice is that things get stuck in the organizing stage one where people get together, talk, and plan to have a plan, but almost nobody wants or is capable of doing any actual (technical) implementation work. There's little to no concern for the "here to there"-problem.

I'm semi-actively proselytizing in another "change the world/the world is changing"-group in which the members predominantly think "it's the corporations' fault" (they even have a list) and that "community is the solution". Any suggestions on my part about personal agency, individual skill building, and reducing consumption of said corporations' products as solution mostly fall on deaf ears with few exceptions.

This is actually why I think Greenfield's work is so inspiring/ important. When I found ERE I was uncomfortable with the beneficial parts of capitalism and its effects on the environment and other people living in the system. It was a relief to realize that there was a way to enjoy the benefits of money/ exchange while both being a more responsible citizen and leading a (much) better life. Greenfield does this for me with community/ "communism." Taleb talks about having different political affiliations at different levels of scale of human interaction. I still think that community building and social networks are very important to better both our own lives and those around us at the small scale. The problem is there is so much hippie bullshit and people talking about "community is the answer" (wtf does that even mean?). Greenfield has practical, social and community organizing skills and is journaling his experience combining them. This is why I'm pushing back against the idea that he is some naive hippie. He didn't just move out of his apartment and start homesteading or insist that "community is the answer" or "other people should do this." Instead he is leading by example and detailing his experience trying out different ways of living which he feels help himself and those around him.

I watched the video daylen posted and wish I hadn't. Some of his reasoning wrt taxes, SSA, etc is a little shaky. He means well.

It's perplexing whenever I hear someone from the community/social quadrant talk. They generally believe that rebuilding society and social connections is the way forward, but then usually opt out of most aspects of life that are common ground.

I agree that opting out of social security, taxes and health care is not a generalizable solution available to everyone. My interpretation of what he's doing is that he thinks certain aspects of our society are broken and he is protesting them by opting out. I didn't get the impression that he thought taxes, SS or health insurance were inherently evil ideas, just that he was personally protesting how they were implemented currently because he feels they are harmful and also because he has the option to do so. I don't think he's trying to shame anyone who doesn't opt out or relies on this infrastructure.

I agree that Greenfield's solution aren't right for everybody. I appreciate that Jacob (and to a lesser extent, the other FIRE heavy weights) were able to create a generalizable system that benefits both the individual and the larger community as a whole (a major difficulty being, as Jacob mentioned, that FIRE/ ERE is much more difficult to implement if you are financially responsible for more people than just yourself). ERE is both top down and bottom up and is easy to implement in a bottom up way that doesn't require a shift in the top down structure. This is a brilliant and difficult way to try to enact change, but it's not the only way. Just because everyone can't survive in a society of dumpster divers doesn't mean it's not a good choice for you to dumpster dive today. I agree that not everyone can copy Greenfield. That's not the point. The point is to think about what he's doing and why he's doing it and integrate it into your own life.

[ertyu]

There is a bit of ego protection and self-preservation in this attitude.

I don't think it's ego protection and self-preservation, I think it's learned helplessness and poverty-PTSD. Watching myself pull both of these as we speak. Terrified something will happen, the money will be over, I am somehow a step away from being destitute even though I have saved 25x JAFI. Not seeing any viable options for action and change even though techincally, they're there. Even if I see them, something will surely happen and I won't be able to pursue them. Etcetera.