@J&G,
I'm just catching up with your journal, and had a few thoughts.
We spend a lot of time and money traveling in cars, storing them, repairing them and maintaining road networks. What once enriched now impoverishes us. This is similar to Joseph Tainter's idea that societies eventually reach a point of complexity where all resources are spent on maintenance.
And, as I have pointed out elsewhere on the forum, this means that
depreciation rates really matter.
Culturally, the ratio of maintenance (effort, energy and expense) to replacement (effort, energy and expense) can be likened to friction in aerospace design. The higher the friction, the lower the top speed, shorter the flight, the more fuel burnt, more capacity dedicated to fuel storage, the less carrying capacity. IOW, this ratio firmly establishes an upper boundary to our cultural possibilities.
The small, personal scale of this principal is BIFL vs disposable consumer products. Households following each path will have entirely different upper boundaries based on the same resource base inputs.
Money is a technology of interdependence that has become locked-in. We are no longer trained to meet our needs in non-monetary ways. Local interdependent networks have disappeared, replaced by the vast global money network.
True. However, I would point out that new networks are easier to create/establish than ever before.
We no longer meet our needs by producing goods ourselves and by sharing things with a tight knit community of close relations.
GDP can be artificially inflated by taking cultures or goods/ services that used to exist in the non-monetary economy and adding them to the monetary economy
By the same token, we
could create networks that enabled local interdependence by removing goods and services from the monetary economy and providing them in a local non-monetary economy.
ERE is at a point now where some have hit the boundaries of what they can achieve as autonomous or household resilience units. Some projects simply require more man power. Different things emerge when groups of people get together. I think the challenge we face in building even a small ERE group is the challenge of local interdependence. We've figured out how to inspire personal "interdependence" (independence through self-reliance) but have yet to foster local interdependence among personally independent people. The hurdles to overcome are: 1) the general removal of examples of interdependence by the money system; 2) the inefficiency of local interdependence vs the locked-in globally interdependent monetary system and 3) the disincentive towards communal interdependence that will naturally arise from people who are strongly independent AND relative masters of the global interdependence network.
1) This is a real problem. I feel it is best addressed shotgun style. Many, small, varied, examples of different local interdependency networks. Compare to a rifled approach of one "right example".
2) So use both, to develop the first.
3) Seems like a better carrot would be helpful here.
This post is also inspired by the book "Temporary Autonomous Zone" (TAZ). The book I linked above describes TAZs but does not define them. The message of TAZs is building temporary anarchist zones, which by hook or crook are partially or fully beyond the reach of government control. Large scale attempts at revolution leave a power vacuum which more often than not leaves the door open for an even more oppressive governmental regime. Rather than wait for revolution, find ways to subvert the status quo. The impermanence of these solutions makes controlling them all the more difficult.
I
really dislike the temporary and conflict orientations of this statement.
The temporary orientation conflicts with my point about depreciation, above.
And as I have pointed out elsewhere, resources wasted on conflict are resources unavailable for creation. If one wishes for a different environment, creating it within the boundaries of normalcy is inherently conflicting with that normalcy. But there is
so much space outside these boundaries, and my culture contains scripts for experimentation outside these boundaries. If one wishes to hack culture, there are safe spaces to do that, but they aren't common, and they aren't where you are looking.
How do we temporarily build spaces that are beyond the all encompassing consumer praxis? What would that mean for us individually, in small groups and on the whole as a community?
Again, why temporary?
If they're not conducting nighttime raids on coastal village dumpsters while illegally downloading mp3s via a boosted wifi intercepting antennae with a solar-powered indoor growop belowdecks in a holistically integrated WOG-of-WOGs then I'm not interested. ERE pirate deckhand, not pirate larper deckhand.
+1! Though I'm likely to endorse the creation of reuse/recycling opportunities of intercepting industrial wasteflows (ie pick up a metal recycling contract from a shipyard) than raiding dumpsters.
I often wonder whether people who are almost exclusively into "popular topics" do it deliberately or whether they just lack imagination
Conversely, when my culture's "popular topics" are not present in an environment, I find there is far more creativity and imagination at play. Hence, the reason I play here.
Imagine how much never-to-be-used human potential is sitting around in drawers and boxes gathering dust in Modern level corporate careers and Traditional level marriages. It's a de facto prison camp.
It is. And like a prison, Institutionalization prevents escape attempts.
Basically, you can't form a group (out of the general public) and get anything better out of it than you could from the top 1-2 members of the group alone.
Fixed that for you.
To complicate matters slightly, we can consider synergy effects, which is positive, and cost of organizing, which is negative.
Which is why the general public is such a difficult pool to work from. Creating synergies is simply easier with richer stock, and costs of organizing drop with goodwill directed toward the group, a trait that is rare, and must be searched for. Again, technology has made this easier.
Corporate careers are deliberately designed so that humans can be productive despite their general lack of skills / lack of general skills. Circling together is not a good structure. I'm not saying that corporate people don't have hidden talents. It's rather that the average number of talents is between 0 and 1 with the median a lot closer to 0. If there's serious weight to be pulled, the majority will not be able to pull their own and the group is better off without them. As such, creating interdepence requires some SERIOUS coordination skill of finding just the right person with the right knowledge for a particular problem. This is a lot harder to getting people together for something low-skilled like "having fun at a party" and [showing up on a particular date and time] is hard enough in and of itself.
In summary, there's no hidden untapped resource to be had simply by bringing random people together.
Yup.
But how does this summary change as you stop trying to use random people?
Doesn't that make it a different kind of problem? One of attracting both highly and generally skilled people, with the time and interest to dedicate to moving serious weight. A different kind of carrot seems appropriate, here.
The coordination problems are lessened by higher mean skill levels, and coordination systems can be non-local. Technology is way ahead of culture, here.
Perhaps such a resource could be built, but that is a far away from where we are now.
Really? How far away? What are the obstacles you see to creating such a resource?
Assuming that the 1 or 2 members of the group are the most skilled in all factors relevant to the problem at hand, and that they are aware of all factors that could be relevant to the problem at hand. For simplistic example, 1 human with level 10 engineering skills/level 0 marketing skills and 1 humans with level 9 gardening skills/level 2 marketing skills, might benefit enormously from the integration of 1 human with level 6 marketing skills. In more general terms, the Expert solution often fails to include enough factors in the model due to tunnel vision, whereas the Consensus solution often fails due to attempt to include too many factors in the model. Only wholly imaginary boundaries allow for excluding other humans as unimportant to a sustainable lifestyle model. Other humans are HUGE!
+1 to all that. At small scales, coordination problems are just easier. Unfortunately, anything that works in small scales, my culture tries to scale up, and that leads to the failures jacob outlines here:
People who love community often bring out a chart showing how 2 people have 1 connection, 3 people have 3 connections, 4 have 6 and so on ... and how fast the number of connections blows up. Just imagine all the conversations. The problem is 1) that a lot of these conversations are not worth anything (but people will be offended if pointing that out); and 2) that worthless conversations add noise rather than signal and that this gets worse and worse the more people are added. (Much like how a party gets louder and louder the more people there are.) This is why think tanks are not composed of thousands of people.
There is, therefore, an optimal number in any group (usually around 5-7 tops). This optimal number depends on the people in the group and what kind and how many skills they bring in. It gets more complicated because the number also depends on each individual. A multi-skilled individual is already a group of their own. As such, they have to compare whether adding people makes sense for them (perhaps, group members are willing to do grunt work, or they bring cookies, ...) or whether they are better off splitting away from the group.
Consider how relatively few opportunities my culture provides for this level of team forming, and how few of those allow real, meaningful, part time, distant contributions.
Since the gold lies in the combination of specific individuals, this makes achieving these combinations costly. They have to be found. They're not there for the taking.
I couldn't have said it better, myself. Once again, how does this change as the talent pool one is drawing from changes?
That's why it may be more "lucrative/affordable" to figure out how to "cook" with whatever human resources are on hand by being flexible in terms of "recipe/problem." There are many tasks I could assign to an average 6 year old as part of a Permaculture Project, but fewer as part of a Build Microwave Oven from Scratch Project.
One could choose the project to fit the people. And get results that will satisfy you, but they would not satisfy jacob.
Jacob is more specialty project focused, he isn't looking to keep people occupied/entertained while also engaging their talents. His focus is on pushing the edges of the noosphere, a place few people have enough skill/knowledge/talent to approach, with far fewer still being able to push hard enough to make any progress.
This seems to be the reason you two keep disagreeing. You both are using same words, but with very different ideas of what a team is doing.
For what it's worth, I'm in jacob's camp on this one. The projects come first, and the people fit the project, not the other way around. Where jacob and I differ, is he wants to use the tools he is trained in, tools developed over centuries, with actual results. Tools appropriate to the world of our youth.
I want new tools. Tools appropriate to the world we live in today. But culture is slow, fumbling, more tuned to error correction than creative generation. I can't wait for culture to provide to tools I want, I just won't live that long.
So I'm in jacob's camp, because I have similar, specific goals in mind, and keeping people busy/productive isn't among them.
If ERE City is decentralized, it will not have a screening process. Mental picture of poor Refrigiwear-clad Jacob and DW, whispering to one another while huddling in the cellar, pretending they are not home, as their groupie from hell who moved in RIGHT NEXT DOOR peers through the front window, wondering when he's coming out to lead the Tuesday afternoon skillzathon.
In other words, the group will need a black-ball function to keep out those who the group would be better off without.
Or, this function can be achieved with higher barriers to entry than simply moving next door. As would be appropriate if one was looking to develop a talent pool deeper than the general public.
The decentralized approach would work more like a club. I think the biggest risk of not having a screening process is moving to ERE City and finding out that either 1) Wow, all these other ERE people really suck in person; or 2) Wow, all these other ERE people really think I suck in person. This is also why a required condition is that people like to live in the place anyway even if the ERE thing doesn't pan out. It's a lot easier to stop seeing someone than to kick them out (or be kicked out).
It seems like having time to get to know and work with each other, many different small teams competing and coordinating with each other for people and resources, would give people low risk opportunities to search for the gold to be found in the right combinations. Once gold is found,
then join the club.
So, for instance, an alternative building club could create a camping club. People could come camp, and play with alternative building. The teams that form give the opportunity to work and collaborate together on projects of mutual interest. If the fit is bad, it's funny story about a weekend/week/month of adventure/misadventure. Join/form a new team, or move along and find a better fit, elsewhere. One is out time and pocket change.
But if gold is found, one can extend one's presence, either as a long term camper of some form, or as a resident of one of those alternative buildings, or in the distance over the internet, making intellectual contributions. Once gold is found, the next step is to preserve and use it.
The more flexibility each team member has, the more effectively they can contribute. The more flexibility the team/structure has, the more effectively that gold can be applied, while minimizing coordination losses.
With this in mind, perhaps consider in how many degrees of freedom my culture uses to reward those efforts at the edge of the noosphere. Consider this freedom package as a competing product. In which ways can an "ERE2 freedom package" compete favorably for the greatest talent pool?
You posted a nice graphic showing the overlap of Autistic/ADHD/Gifted traits in another thread. I believe that ALL of these people are downgraded by my culture, for the reasons you outlined with the coordination problems of corporate culture. Non-standard parts are far harder to use at scale. They are downgraded to at best, to their Brightness grade, though often lower, in a system that grades "nonstandard" and "defective" into the same bins.
But if we built the means for such people to be able to contribute to their passion projects, without the cultural drag of place and scale, we can experimentally, incrementally, develop the means of coordination and cooperation appropriate to our tech base, and talented people. Once culturally downgraded people see they have the opportunity to contribute their strengths, while minimizing their weaknesses, how will we keep them out? How will their levels of Creativity (as you use the term) compare to your projection of our norms?
Putting a bunch of highly functioning ERE people together seems redundant. I mean just two Thoreaus are a crowd, no? And what's going to happen, you get your costs down to $6,943.55 a year?
If all one has learned here is how to be frugal, I doubt more would be learned in a group.
For me, this forum is about surfing. Learning a sense of balance, to use the energies and flows of my culture to move freely, without the friction that the waders and swimmers (employed consumers) deal with. And ERE2 is about the differences between the efforts waders and swimmers can achieve together ("It is known"), vs the efforts surfers can achieve together (theoretical, because unknown).
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