Western Red Cedar wrote: ↑Fri Dec 16, 2022 9:37 pm
I think a lot of the ERE2 discussion emerged when @Jacob expanded the WL Table. I think he may have also discussed ideas about integrating community-oriented approaches to the meta crisis on the Stoa interviews and other podcasts. In fact, IIRC this may have been a major motivator for his podcast circuit last year.
viewtopic.php?p=240072#p240072
I'll lead off of this, but this is an answer to everybody who wants a more complete history of how this "ERE2" stuff came about. This would roughly describe my perspective for the period of early-2021 to 2022-now. I hope it doesn't get lost in the stream.
It's important to realize that for my part several things are happening in several difference places often at the same time. I connect with people working on similar things outside of ERE/forum as well. The ERE forum does not exist in a vacuum. These ideas did not originate solely from the ERE forum or myself or a secret cabal.
Much of my motivation for venturing outside the ERE forums starting early 2021 was due to the account deletion debacle and the ongoing trickle of political rage-quitting. I thought I was building a community and a repository of knowledge on the forum and spent a lot of life energy reconciling angry arguments, connecting threads, answering questions... only to realize that many just treated the forum as a "free Q&A"-session, a place to hang out and vent, and a place to get support to become FIRE to be followed by "thank you, I'm off to sail into the sunset and if you could please delete my journal". Basically, that put me in a bad place and I decided to spend less energy on the forum. Moderation became more hamfisted (delete and lock w/o explanation) and my patience was reduced to a minimum.
Prior to that I had frequented the Deep Adaptation boards a bit and I became more active over there. Unlike the very individualistic "personal prepper" types we mostly have here (orange NTs), DA is very very community oriented (green NFs). This was interesting but also a strange culture shift. Whereas ERE folks presume that the best and often the only way to solve any problem is to learn the skill and do it yourself, emphasis on "yourself". DA often thinks the only solution to anything is to first form a community. Indeed, doing things yourself is considered selfish if not downright impossible without "the wisdom of the tribe". After all, before moving ahead on anything, it's important to consult everyone and listen to their feelings. Good point, but a common side-effect is that the green tribe often gets stuck in ever inclusive endless listening.
How very strange that humans can operate with such different values. Certainly I don't believe that "all humans are basically the same". I believe culture and temperament can make humans behave very differently. I thought I knew it all at least for practical purposes with MBTI, but MBTI is just temperament. There was clearly something more going in. For example, there were also green NTs. Of course at the time, I didn't know what green was. I just presumed my values and methods were universal because they were "reasonable". Is there any other metric? Oh yes! It turned out.
Around the same time I had been invited onto The Stoa to present a talk about ERE (like in the book). There were all these people talking about various colors and shadowplay and ego development and so on. I went to a few of their sessions but it was like visiting an alien world. I was a fish out of water. They kinda understood me, but I didn't understand them, not even theoretically. I joined a few times but then went back to lurking. However, I started reading up on the stuff. Spring/summer is probably when you'll notice me moving beyond MBTI and Kegan to Spiral, Wilber, and Cook-Greuter.
I was invited back to The Stoa in fall 2021. This time I talked about ERE1 and FIRE as a movement within the context of personal and cultural development. With this perspective, ERE1 can be seen as the "galaxy brain" intellectual (the nerds of
https://meaningness.com/geeks-mops-sociopaths or as I like to see it: the grad school of lifestyle design) with other and more relatable people, like MMM or JD Roth, popularizing it (the college and highschool of lifestyle design respectively).
Due to my activity in DA, I also saw that ERE to a large part attracted egocentric ("me and my family"-focused) people, whereas DA to a large part attracted sociocentric ("our community"-focused) people. The contrast was pretty strong.
Two observations. 1) DA, which is much smaller than FIRE and even smaller than ERE back then needed a different type of movement. 2) The two types of extreme foci (individual vs community) could learn a lot from each other.
A graph like this was included in the Stoa2 talk. I started the ERE2 subforum here:
jacob wrote: ↑Fri Sep 03, 2021 8:14 am
I created a new subforum for those who are interested in ERE beyond the[ir own] personal benefits. To describe it visually, this is for subjects that fall in the yellow zone.
Previous discussions on this are currently scattered in multiple places, but I'd like to gather them here.
Looking at that graph, ERE1 is the orange blob. DA is the green blob. ERE2 is the yellow blob. This color choice is not accidental
One thing I had noticed was that AH's MasterMind Group had been running really well. While I had noticed that some members had fallen off the radar, the group seemed to be speed-running through the ERE curriculum much faster than the traditional forum ways of loooooong threads that required a lot of repetitive input from me. AH's MMG seemed to figure it out without needing me which was a very welcome observation since I've been feeling stretched thin for years. The slight reduction in forum activity due to the MMG seemed well worth it in terms of building more understanding of ERE principles. So around that time, I also asked if I could join one of their sessions and try to understand how it worked. My takeaway was that synchronous conversation would solve some snags (misunderstanding theory, for example) faster than long forum threads that where participants might miss 1/3 of the posts or get stuck in rhetoric or defensive postures. When people met face to face, there would be more trust and accountability too.
Around the same time, someone who was part of the core group of DA happened to see the Stoa2 talk and asked if I was interested in joining a DA group working on a new digital space to replace their current space which aside from an active facebook group and regular zoom meetings was functionally dead(*). Hell yes! This was an opportunity to take everything I had experienced and learned over the past ~14 years from the start of the FIRE movement to its current size of ~0.5% of the population of the western world. I was basically 12 years ahead of these guys in terms of working with online groups at different scales.
(*) Note, there will be some upcoming irony here
However, as I mentioned, DA is very much "green NF" and didn't exactly operate in the way I was familiar with from research labs or corporate or anything at all really. I was not just a fish out of water, but a fish on the frying pan now. The group worked much like a therapy circle complete with a virtual talking stick and emotive check ins and check outs to ensure that everybody could share their perspectives and feels and that nobody got more time or words than others so as to avoid anyone with expertise dominating or oppressing people given how expertise and experience was seen as simply yet another opinion from one person in the circle. There was a strong belief in the innate wisdom of a community of humans and that work was best done together in a "co-creative" way. There were strong objections to anyone doing anything on their own. Over a period of about a month, I learned that this group (in various forms) had been at it for over a year---that is, trying to solve a problem that should only take 1-2 days to solve---and that innate ageless human wisdom somehow doesn't include any knowledge about website management, social media, or mass movements. After about a month of that I had reached my frustration tolerance of being told various forms of "I don't work with ideas or platforms. I work with persons" and my explanations and objections being met with shrug emojis. I bowed out.
However, I still felt that I owed the guy who initially invited me a proof that I actually had some good ideas in case they actually wanted a solution before funding was withdrawn.
So in December 2021, I wrote a 20 page white paper basically proposing an expanded version of the "movement system" I had discussed in my Stoa2 talk that would integrate the skill-oriented individualists (orange above) with the community-oriented people (green above) using a combination of public forums, small zoom groups like AH's MMG style but also DA's circle style, which eventually would get comfortable enough from existing in the same space that they would start to interact more---green circles meeting orange MMGs w/o losing their minds---and move into the yellow zone.
Add: This was NOT intended to be a merger between DA or ERE in any way. Rather it would be a way to increase understanding between all the different groups that work on 21st century type problems. They often have similar general aims using similar methods and perhaps because of that there's also much animosity and "not invented here" behavior due to people squabbling over what is mostly due to differences in "ego-style". IOW, the framework I created was rather generalized. E.g. usable for finding a way for e.g. hippies and survivalists coming together over what they had in common avoid the all too common outcome of squabbling over their differences instead.
My DA connection thought it sounded good and "why don't we try it out?" Since I had more or less burned my bridge with the DA circle, I figured we could try it out on the existing space of ERE and create more MMGs on ERE and get the resident individualists more comfortable meeting others face to face, at least virtually. So the
new subforum for MMGs started in Jan 2022. AH had written a "how to start an MMG post" which IIRC, I moved over from another subforum, but after that it pretty quickly took off with different people starting their own. I do remember pushing a bit for people to take initiative. There were lots of people interested in joining, but people didn't know how to start one or thought it was too complicated, so they had to be nudged. After a while that was no longer necessary and MMG kinda took on a life of their own. In terms of emergence, the seeds were already there (probably part due to the success of AH's MMG and part due to all the zooming people had been doing under covid), so it was only a matter of preparing the soil and adding a bit of water and people started sprouting on their own. I started a repair MMG. I also invited a few people from ERE and my contact invited a few people from DA and we started a DA+ERE MMG group to discuss cross-cultural pollination: "How to be a fish in other waters". Very meta.
However, this did not go down exactly the way as described in the white paper. Instead it began to generate some of the very problems described in the white paper.. And now comes the irony. The white paper did identify the problem of the mostly defunct DA forums due to being siloed up in tiny circles each with their own slack or discord channels. I refer to this as the "German problem", because I once heard someone mention that "whenever 2 Germans get together, they start 4 clubs". What DA had (and likely still have) were almost as many separately isolated groups as they had "active creators" by the 90-9-1 rule.
What subsequently happened as an emergent effect of promoting the idea of MMGs on the ERE forum was that rather than each person joining one MMG each and maintaining connections with the public forum (to help newcomers and people outside the groups) as I expected, many started joining multiple MMGs, and slowed down or stopped participating on the public forum because they were too busy typing out things in the respective slack or discord silos that almost every MMG created. Just goes to show that emergence works in unexpected ways and just how hard it is to deal with complex environments. Since the effect came slowly, I didn't realize it at first but the more popular the MMGs became, the more the public forum was getting darknetted and ironically converging on the same heat death as the DA eco system. While not obvious to the individual "active creator" who was as busy as ever, it was very clear to lurkers and those who were only on the forum and didn't join the MMG fest.
And this basically brings us up to the point of a few weeks ago when this was publicly recognized and discussed in the darknetting thread.
Incidentally, since that thread made people aware of the problem forum activity has roughly increased by 150%. This is wild!!!
Turns out that I was somewhat wrong about too many forumites only caring about their own problems ... and that many in fact do care about the ERE community.
What we've actually experienced here and are experiencing is/was a clash between two cultures, the previous one and the new one. Lets call them the OG-culture and the MMG-culture, respectively. Now that the air is in the process of getting cleared, I very much hope that making the effort to make them understand each other and the water they swim in will result in the formation of a joint culture of sorts or at least some cultural understanding.
With the *strong disclaimer* that I think this point is better made in overly honest or cynical terms and includes some stereotyping, I think the OG culture has or had the expectation of the forum being a free resource for themselves; a place where they can go and hang out; a place where they could vent and argue and expect jacob to clear things up when the discussion got too heated; a place with smart people that would freely answer questions that would otherwise cost $150 in consulting fees; and that one would not necessarily have to pay it forward by helping other people; sometimes even deleting journals or swisscheesing debate threads.
And that is basically how it used to be. It was nice but it was also bad in some ways since the cost was born asymmetrically.
And the MMG culture has or had the expectation that the forum would keep going even if they stopped participating after joining an MMG; after all, "if I only write 1-2 posts per week, it shouldn't matter if I stop", except of course it does matter if 20 other people think the same way. Taking for granted the mutual trust that exists due to public forum participation in order to keep joining new MMGs to enjoy not only "free answers" albeit from a smaller group of smart people but "also privacy"(*). Only, it eventually regressed to a point where the social capital was used up and for the first time someone wanting to join an MMG was told: "Sorry, we don't know you. You have not posted on the forum enough."
(*) This in turn caused the OG culture to complain that all the smart people were disappearing along with their free answers. And yes, indeed they did. Because why bother spending time on detailed answers on the forum if the value is in someway not paid forward or worse the thread later is rendered unreadable because some deleted all their entries. At least that's how I increasingly felt.
Either way, in both cases, there was an inability (a dispreference) too see the second order consequences of personal behavior while seeing the current system or ecology as a static situation that is independent of personal behavior. This is the biggest lesson that I hope people would learn from this. There's no magic emergence. Emergence is a pattern that originates in human
action. People doing nothing or waiting for someone else do not generate emergence. This is also why there's a lot more emergent patterns in a tiny group of active entrepreneurial people, especially if they come from different backgrounds ... than there is in a large group of people where most passively wait for someone else to take initiative or just copy the behavior of each other.
