The Education of Axel Heyst

Where are you and where are you going?
jacob
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Re: The Education of Axel Heyst

Post by jacob »

zbigi wrote:
Mon Jun 06, 2022 9:24 am
Not to my experience. In my whole career, I was practically never given much authority, but I was also never really held responsible for anything. I feel like the expectations of responsibility stopped at the level of my bosses, whose job was to utilize me and my peers wisely, and who were definitely held accountable by their higher-ups. In result, my SE jobs felt like being in a kindergarden. Me and my colleagues even jokingly called our managers kindergarden teachers.
Interesting! In my academic physics career, "publish or perish" made junior personnel responsible for carrying out most of the research (by meeting a certain publication count per year, typically 4 papers), whereas bosses had the authority to direct the research to meet the goals of their grants. With physics undergoing a loooong winter since the late 1970s also means that the field is not growing. New people are therefore stuck doing technical bench work (low capability demand) for 10ish years waiting for some old professor to retire until given more authority.

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Re: The Education of Axel Heyst

Post by zbigi »

jacob wrote:
Mon Jun 06, 2022 9:43 am
Interesting! In my academic physics career, "publish or perish" made junior personnel responsible for carrying out most of the research (by meeting a certain publication count per year, typically 4 papers), whereas bosses had the authority to direct the research to meet the goals of their grants. With physics undergoing a loooong winter since the late 1970s also means that the field is not growing. New people are therefore stuck doing technical bench work (low capability demand) for 10ish years waiting for some old professor to retire until given more authority.
Yeah I imagine that contemporary research environment is a pressure cooker. Meanwhile, we had a guy who just graduated from a top PhD program (with a paper and Nature and all) join our team and, after a couple of months, his shocked conclusion was that, in terms of effort required, "this job is a joke".
In reality, some people were still stressed out, but that's mostly because they're high achievers by nature and have set high standards for themselves. Not to mention that it's not really psychologically healthy for an adult to be treated like a six year old, with all the hand-holding, procedures and general disenfranchisement. I had literally one job which wasn't like that - I was the main engineer at a super-early stage startup, so was calling all the shot tech-wise, doing most of the work, and being responsible for the results. Looking back at my career, this was the one job that didn't really suck. It was early in my career, and I was quite shocked when I moved from there to a large multinational, where the job has all the things which make modern SE suck so badly. I wanted to scream at my fellow devs "don't you see how horrible it all is? why don't you complain?". Alas, they were already institutionalized and saw that way of developing software as the only valid option.

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Re: The Education of Axel Heyst

Post by AxelHeyst »

First two to three years of my career:
Here's some innovative engineering work for you to do that we mostly understand,. You're responsible for the whole thing. We don't have time to explain it well to you, but since we kinda invented it it's not like you can look it up anywhere. Well quickly glance at the drawings every once in a while. Good luck. Ps there's 23hrs left on the project budget.
High Responsibility And low to medium capability (would have been fine if anyone had told us htf to do the work)

The rest of my career:
We have no idea wtf you're doing but the client says we need to do it this way. You're our expert. All the trade mags say you're the future. Please don't fuck up. (PS someone else fucked this other project, could you maybe fix it please?)
High responsibility And high capability, but I was getting firehosed (that's how I got high capability quickly)

Hmm. Might explain my anxiety around project responsibility...

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Re: The Education of Axel Heyst

Post by mathiverse »

AxelHeyst wrote:
Mon Jun 06, 2022 2:21 pm
...
How much authority (in the sense jacob describes above) did you have in each situation? From your description, it sounds like you may not have had much. That is, it sounds like the work would be handed to you in whatever state and you would be expected to do it rather than you coming up with what work to do. Perhaps you had some room to push back on things that weren't realistic, but you weren't setting much of the high level direction. Is that right? Do you think the roles would have been better had you set more of the direction (choosing clients and projects and choosing the direction for future customers to get)?

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Re: The Education of Axel Heyst

Post by AxelHeyst »

That's right, I had no authority over what work was coming down the pipe. 'Choosing clients' sounds like a nice gig, hah. In AEC we call it 'winning work', and it's a more than full time occupation. That's what everyone who wasn't in the trenches with me was so busy doing; scrambling around for projects.

I was actually internally infamous for being invited to give a presentation at the company leadership retreat on our Building Information Modeling (BIM) practice, and instead I gave a presentation on "Why I can't deliver successful BIM projects if you guys can't manage your way out of a brown paper sack. Seriously, you know there's, like, books and stuff out there, right?" Point is, winning work is so important in AEC for survival that many firms spend all their resources securing projects and don't have enough gas in the tank to establish or maintain good operations. The production crews are a couple folks who know what they're doing and are pretty bitter about it and then a rotating cast of young redshirt engineers who don't know they should be angry yet. It's sort of like senior project (because of lack of supervision, in contrast with zbigi's experience), only more meat grindery.

Uh, all that's to say, authority and responsibility was a tricky thing to allocate in that industry at the scale of projects we were doing. The only real winning move in that regard would be to quit and set up a tiny bespoke design studio doing mostly remodels and minor retrofits (easy and boring), or move to the mountains and become a bike mechanic/trimmer.

zbigi
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Re: The Education of Axel Heyst

Post by zbigi »

AxelHeyst wrote:
Mon Jun 06, 2022 2:44 pm

Software agencies work on pretty much the same basis, regardless of whether they're a 20 person shop or IBM. The best people are sent to woo the client before he signs the contract. After it's signed, these people are often never to be seen again, and the client watches in bewilderment as the lowely princesses he wanted to work with turn into frogs, i.e. juniors and third-rate talent. The princesses return only if the project is in shambles and there's no hope that the assigned team can handle it on their own.
I've worked in such company once and wil never repeat it. In-house projects (e.g. software people employed by a bank working on that bank's code) are completely different world (the kindergarden) and are much healthier. Is there no in-house work in your field?

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Re: The Education of Axel Heyst

Post by AnalyticalEngine »

@zbigi - Your metaphor of software development being a kindergarden is completely spot-on. I'm going to steal this metaphor next time I have to explain my job.

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Re: The Education of Axel Heyst

Post by AxelHeyst »

zbigi wrote:
Mon Jun 06, 2022 3:42 pm
Is there no in-house work in your field?
Basically no. Big enough orgs with global property management departments will have inhouse engineers and architects, but as far as I can figure their main job is to keep an eye on the outside firm's they employ to do the actual design work and keep them in line. Talking about design engineering here, there were in house positions for facilities engineering of course.

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Re: The Education of Axel Heyst

Post by AxelHeyst »

My current MMG project is designing an approach to 'skills-forward'ERE, Project Hypercompetence, etc. This past fortnight's goal was to make draft 1 of a doc laying out an approach to skill acquisition. Here it is.

# Active Projects
* **TakingNotes.** Learning a system for processing texts for maximum insight and retrievability.
*

### TOC
1. Summary
2. Structure of skills (the mind map)
3. Theory of skills (practical, social, soft, etc)
4. Theory of skill acquisition.
5. Approach to skill acquisition. Dos and don'ts.
6. Skill acquisition templates.
7. Appendix: List of skills and projects.

## Preface
The aim might be to fold stoke, peak experience, and flow into everything. Every expression of movement comes from this place of incredible focus and attention, a place where time falls away and the thing is being done for it's own sake. The true mastery is to do something that must be done for some extrinsic reason, but the core reason you do it is because you find it worth doing in its own right.

This is exemplified in Thich Nhat Han talking about doing the dishes, how it can become a meditation and this thing that is a simple expression of love to the universe. Master the ability to do this with everything, particularly all of one's projects, and you've unlocked a) a badass fucking life, and b) rapid skill acquisition and latticeweaving.

Yes: in a sense, this is about learning how to turn play into a way of life. And here's a thing. People that don't do shit they don't like to do, are really good at what they do. Because they only do things they're stoked to do. And so they spend more time in intrinsic motivation and flow.... so they get really fucking good at it.

This is a key point. Stop doing things you don't like, because you'll suck at them or at best be mediocre. Do shit you find intrinsic motivation for... and ride the flow state into mastery.

## Introduction to Project Hypercomp
### Purpose
The aim of this project is to answer several questions:
1. If, by focusing all of one's efforts on developing an ecosystem of broad and deep flotilla-relevant skills, it's possible to generate sufficient income via activities that don't have remuneration as a zeroeth order goal.
2. Do interesting, emergent insights arise from a system of +1 skills, as opposed to +0 skills? (Jacob's between-the-gaps insights of his Stoa2 talk).
3. Can an intense self-directed program of skill development be approached with a sense of play and intrinsic motivation? Can peak experience be entered into regularly, and can the journey itself, the moments themselves, become a self-sustaining reason to do them?

Flotilla relevance is a key point. I want to avoid activities that dead end inside industrial consumer civilization (ICC). There's no simple way to define this. Learning combustion engine auto mechanics could be useful because it develops mechanical skills that can be used to build and maintain wind turbines and other simple electromechanical devices. But taking on a contract to do Revit work for retail space is not relevant, because I already have that skill and retail space is doomed.

By skills I don't mean only purely technical skills, like how to disassemble a motorcycle. I also mean skills like how to have a difficult conversation, how to dance, how to organize a project, how to perform a speech or give an impromptu speech, how to comfort a dying person, how to deeply listen...

### Context
I have enough cash to support me for 2-4 years. The rest of my NW is in retirement funds which I plan on leaving alone for a long time.

When I return from my travels, I have Serenity and my tiny studio on my parents land, and access to a professionally kitted out workshop.

### Overview of skill theory
Skill level can be
-1: Can't DIY it, have to pay someone else.
0: Can DIY it, but aren't good, fast, or cheap enough for anyone else to pay for it
+1: So good someone else would pay you to do it (or to teach them how to do it)

The object of this project is to attain +1 skill level in many fields (>6), with most other possible skills at at least a 0.

Learning a first skill to +1 is difficult. But many of the metaskills transfer to other domains, so the effort required to get skill #2 to +1 is smaller. Presumably by the time one is getting skill #12 to +1, the effort has reached a theoretical minimum.

Generally, most skills are best developed by doing the actual thing itself. In most cases it will be more productive to think in terms of completing projects rather than acquiring skills. The completed project functions as evidence of acquisition of the relevant skills.

Since the goal with most of these skills is +1 (someone will pay for it), validating skill acquisition is as black and white as getting someone to pay for it who is not related to me. Setting up the infrastructure to sell the products of my skills is in itself a skill to develop (entrepreneurship, sales, marketing, accounting, etc).

Many skills won't be the sort of thing that one pays for. Validation of +1 level will be treated on a case by case basis.


## Skill Acquisition
### Organization
I loosely intend to focus on one or maximum two primary skills at a time, with several secondary skills in a cruise / repetition / waiting for opportunity space.

After an initial mode of ramping a skill up into the steep part of the sigmoid, many skills just need lightweight repetition over time to lock in muscle memory, and to give it time to digest and assimilate with other skills and experiences, and allow space for novel insights to occur in the background. For example a month long focus on cooking skills can settle into just doing a good job cooking, with once a month special dinner hosting events.

And some projects will get held up by lack of materials, parts, or necessary personnel. They should be able to go on the shelf easily.

I tend to be most fresh in the morning, so my day will look something like:
0500 wake, coffee, write
0700 Focus block on main skill
0830 Take a break, go for a walk or a run, brew a fresh pot
0900 Focus block on main skill
1030 Work out
1130 First meal
Rest of day devoted to secondary projects, paid work (e.g. working on Dad's projects), work on ft dirtbag, etc.

### Skill selection
Not a lot of rigid planning is necessary here, but broadly strategic decisions is a good idea. If there are skills which I deem more likely to throw off incidental income quickly, might as well do those first in order to build the runway and make the system self-sustaining as quickly as possible. e.g. work on woodworking skills by producing something I decide people will likely pay for, and start cranking them out and generating income. Artisinal composting toilets. Fine hepa filter banks. Hideaway shelves. vanlife stuff. Truck bed drawers with skate bearings. Teardrop trailers. Modular kitchen units with foot pumps that people can drop into their rigs or cabins.

### Balance of skills to spend time on.
Modes:
Core. Carefully chosen and planned. Only one Core skill at a time. Get 2-3 DW chunks a day, 3-6 hrs.
Repetition mode skills. These are skills I've already done a Core session with, they just need consistent mileage in order to seat in my brain. These get an hour or two a day.
Targets of opportunity. Projects that need some kind of serendipity - the right weather, right person, right bit of salvage to come in, etc.

Kind:
Core. Carefully selected. Totally on mission.
Pure stoke. I just want to do it, even though it might not fit the theory well, it makes me happy to do it.


## Philosophy of Skill Acquisition
Hypercompetence as practice of resistance and decolonialization. Dependent people need the system. The person with the most power in a relationship is the person who can walk away. If you are hyperspecialized, you can't walk away. You need the system. If you are broadly skilled, you need the system less. You can walk away for a time.

## Appendix
References:
Ultralearning, Scott Young
Deep Work, Cal Newport
The Rise of Superman, Steven Kotler
Rapid Learner, online course with scott young and cal newport
The Art of Learning, Josh Waitzkin
Tim Ferriss stuff.

Skill Acquisition Project Template
## Project Name

### What are you trying to learn?

### What is the desired outcome? To what depth are we trying to learn this thing?

### Why do you want to know the thing? How will it improve your life?

### How will you know when you are done?

### What Materials are you going to use to learn?

### How are you going to practice?

1. The Best practice activity:
2. Second best practice activity (don't use more than two to start with):

>Increase intensity, not volume.
Distribute practice (1hr/day for 5 days > 5hrs in one day)
Active recall should be >75% after initial information intake.
Prioritize the hard/important stuff. Struggling? Home in on that material.
Fix weak spots first, instead of repeatedly doing stuff you're bad okay at.
Aim for level-of-use, as close to the actual activity as possible. When that's not possible, use drills to get specific skills and then go up a level.

Methods:
1. 100 Pots
2. Bodge a prototype, then make something that doesn't suck.
3. Take it apart and put it back together.


### Deadlines and milestones, including end date

#### Week-by-week Plan

#### At the halfway point, do a broad-insight Feynman Technique. ID weaknesses.

#### Final Feynman, recorded on video.

________

### Log

20xx.xx.xx:

---------------------------------

shaz
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Re: The Education of Axel Heyst

Post by shaz »

Getting someone to pay you to do something is often more a test of your skill at marketing than your skill at actually doing the thing. Many times the prospective customer has no way to judge your skill level before they hire you, they just know how skillfully you say you can do it.

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Re: The Education of Axel Heyst

Post by AxelHeyst »

Yeah that's a good point. Might need to work on a better metric. The definition of done for each skill might just need to be custom defined.

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Re: The Education of Axel Heyst

Post by jacob »

My experience has been that the difference between 0 and +1 is a difference of time spent, customer connections, and sales. A dedicated amateur can do simple things as well or better than a professional. It may take a little longer. This is the 0 level.

The +1 level is more---waaaaaaay more---about being expedient, good at sales, and close to the money streams whether geographically or vocationally, so California, not Oklahoma, and lawyering, not science. Specifically, finding a good deal and flipping it is worth more money than any technical skill can value-add.

But!

There are more variables than money. Keep in mind that society in general still optimizes for just one variable and tries to control everything by that one variable. I personally prefer to be independent of it rather than being semi-independent of it. It's obviously a scale. Multiple scales. See?

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Re: The Education of Axel Heyst

Post by 7Wannabe5 »

I don't think achieving +1 status in 6 different fields is much of a challenge. There are more than 6 things that most of us could have done for money when we were 12 years old. If some metric reference to the market (which obviously requires gaining access to some market-such as putting cards advertising my availability for babysitting in all the mailboxes in the new subdivision when I was 12) is used to determine level of skill then something like the minimum wage for skilled labor should be used. Right now in the U.S., it would probably have to be at least $18/hr.

That said, I think there is still good possibility for emergent properties arising from combination of skills that are not highly $$marketable. For instance, custom carpentry, child care, data mining, and being a deckhand require very different skills which might combine into something unique.

Also, clearly, if intersection between "stoked to do it" and "pays some money" is where you are heading, then skills such as "can flip burgers" will likely not apply.

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Re: The Education of Axel Heyst

Post by AxelHeyst »

Yes, thanks for all the input, 'definition of done' definitely needs more fleshing out.

.'How to market, sell, ship, account, and pay taxes on goods and services rendered' is one of the skills (or skill clusters) I want to build up to a level so that, when appropriate, I can deploy it on a variety of activities as appropriate.
.But, yes, "I can make money doing X" is just one dimension. I can see that being an appropriate or desirable goal/metric of success for some skills, but definitely not all of them. e.g. "I can make a profit growing kale in the middle of Jack Nowhere in the mojave desert" would be dumb. Also, "Someone, somewhere will pay me to square dance" - haha but no.
.So the definition of +1 has to be broadly "I'm good enough at this skill to produce an attractive yield/close a waste loop". That yield could be money, or food, or water (rainwater harvesting and/or moisture condensing with excess electrical energy), or energy (building a DIY wind turbine out of scrap), or relationships (become excellent at hosting dinner parties or dirtbag festivals), or positive social benefit (organizing ??' with ???).

Maybe the -1 0 +1 scale should be left to the dimension of money flow, and C^6 should be used for non$ skills? Maybe this whole line of thinking is too narrowly focused on granular activities in isolation, I shouldn't worry too much about Definition of Done, and I should just pursue skills/activities that I'm stoked on and meet some baseline for flotilla relevance, and do them as long as the stoke holds out?

I'll also note that my use of the words skills and activities has implicitly deemphasized more intellectual activities like studying basic sciences (I could stand to brush up on chemistry and actually have a go at biology and ecology, for example) and other standbys of classical education like history, law, art, literature, etc. I intend to spend effort on these dimensions as well, just haven't figured out how to articulate it.

--

I'm excited to recession-test my system as it stands right now. Both to see how it responds to the stress (inflation etc), and to see what lessons I learn/opportunities I might find. ERE is all fun and games when the environment is favorable, but the proof in the pudding is how it all holds up when things go sideways. I'm privileged to have a strong social safety net, so my worst case scenario is pretty much social shame if I exceed the limits of my self-sufficiency.

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Re: The Education of Axel Heyst

Post by AxelHeyst »

More thoughts on Workawaying:

I think there are two sweet spots: being fairly inexperienced in practical skills, or being very experienced in practical skills, relative to the host.

If you have minimal practical skills, workawaying for a host who has decent skills and has you working on a broad variety of things could be a great way of rapidly skilling up. Having a good time is contingent on the host being kind, empathic, the other workawayers not being lame, etc. You also need to have a good attitude, communicate well, have good chemistry with the host, etc. If you're a shirker, expect not to have a good time.

If you have considerable experience in practical skills relative to the host, I think you also can have a good time. You can feel like an expert, the host will be appreciative, you get to work on fun projects for free, etc. This is contingent on the host not thinking they know more than they do and attempting to micromanage you where they have no idea and should just let you do your thing.

If you are somewhere in the middle, I think it can be a struggle. You have some decent skills, but there are 'gaps' in it. So the host expects you to be pretty competent, but can't just totally let you run on your own because you have to go to them for filling in those gaps. Its a difficult situation to navigate elegantly.

At my first workaway, the host's skills were very high. He was a great tinkerer, designer, bodger, designer, etc. He recognized I had skills, but I wasn't at his level, so he couldn't just ignore me and let me run with things. Also there were 13 other people and he was super high energy and not organized, so it was like random micromanagement interspersed with being ignored. It was often frustrating for both of us I think.

At the workaway I'm just finishing up, my main project was to do the full electrics system for his van conversion. He recognized that I mostly knew what I was doing, and he didn't pretend that he did (even though he's quite knowledgeable about many other practical skills). So I was mostly left to do my thing on my own initiative, and I enjoyed it quite a lot, and the host is appreciative of my work. That aspect felt good.

This whole workaway thing is something of a test drive of my 'wandering engineer' self-narrative vision for my life. My vision of the wandering engineer had him as an expert on stuff, who could come help people who were noobs at something, were stuck with some aspect of their physical life support systems. The balance of relevant knowledge and skills was in the engineers favor, and so people were largely appreciative, and TWE was able to solidify and repeat his skills, employ them in novel circumstances, etc. It wasn't about him learning from the people he was going and hanging out with, at least not for the things they hired him for.

In short,
..it feels good to have and deploy rare and valuable skills on cool projects.
..It feels another kind of good to feel like a valued apprentice or sorts receiving the patient wisdom and teaching of a mentor.
..It feels bad to feel like a dummy who doesn't know which end of the screwdriver to hold, and have someone staring at you wishing you sucked less.

Having a good time workawaying is the act of threading this needle. Either find hosts who are looking for someone with a particular skill set because they don't have it, or someone who is happy and good at teaching you skills you are interested to learn. Don't oversell your skills.

Longer term, thinking beyond the practice of workawaying and to my future career as The Wandering Engineer, the thing to do is to become appropriately expert at the rare and valuable skills I want to deploy. (And part of what makes them rare and valuable is the intersection/synthesis of skills. A real example of this is that I am competent at putting together a van electrical system _and_ making a good diagram of that system so that the handoff to the next person to work on it is smooth).

Hence, Project Hypercompetence.

And... theoretically, I'll get paid / generate yields by doing so, by acquiring rare and valuable skills, and skills that are only becoming more valuable as the world continues to burn. Workawayer now, eco-engineer / dirtbag design-builder tomorrow. That's the trajectory.

----

Tomorrow I'm headed for my next workaway on the Isle of Skye. I leave with one day's margin on my Shengen visa, and I've got to stay out until the end of August. I hope to stay at this next place for at least two months.

I also hope to be able to begin recording podcast episodes again. I find it impossible to record if I don't have audio privacy, a thing I haven't had since March. It looks like I'll have a private hut in the forest at my next place, so I ought to be able to begin recording again.

zbigi
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Re: The Education of Axel Heyst

Post by zbigi »

AxelHeyst wrote:
Sun Jun 19, 2022 4:53 am
..it feels good to have and deploy rare and valuable skills on cool projects.
Why would someone like that work for free though? (I'm assuming the workaways don't pay, beyond free lodging and food?).

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Re: The Education of Axel Heyst

Post by AxelHeyst »

Correct. If the project is a for-profit enterprise, the workaway host is required to pay you, but those are few (and you need appropriate visas etc to work in that country) so we can ignore those as edge cases. The simple answer is that workawaying is a way to gain access to experiences/yields you can't otherwise buy. Depending on the circumstance, the benefits are
.Access to high quality relationships (other workaway volunteers tend to be interesting people I'm very happy to spend time with, especially in contrast to the people you typically meet at hostels. Also the hosts tend to be interesting people with interesting stories)
.Low/no cost access to HCOL locations (or even moderate COL locations) for extended periods of time, a boon to the slowtravel approach. For example in the past two weeks I went on two backpacking trips in the Pyrenees for zero $. I borrowed gear, got a ride from my host, and took food from their pantry (at their encouragement).
.Broad exposure to different approaches to projects. For example, I can sample several permaculture projects and get a sense for how they're holding up, the pros and cons, in a way that I can't by reading books or blog articles.

If only one of those yields were present it might be a tough sell. But the aggregate of all of them is attractive to me. If none of those yields interest you, workawaying is a waste of time.

But also, a complete answer could be because it feels good to deploy rare and valuable skills on cool projects. Does doing stuff that feels good need further justification? Sort of the whole point of what I'm doing is to decentralize income generation from motivation.

Honestly my reading of the literature on intrinsic vs extrinsic motivation is bringing me to the opinion that income generation is the worst reason to deploy rare and valuable skills. [Edit: I'm not saying that one shouldn't deploy rare and valuable skills and get paid for it. I'm expressing concern about the relationship between external rewards and demotivation, as someone whose had activities I used to love be destroyed by external reward mechanisms. I'm exploring whether income can be generated incidentally, hence skirting the motivation-destroying effect of external rewards, or whether income and intrinsically enjoyable activities ought to be decoupled as much as possible. I see two viable paths: 1) figure out incidental income generation, or 2) Hammer out explicit income generation with as little damage done to enjoyable activities as possible, either by brevity of employment or by selection of an indifferent activity for remuneration)]
Last edited by AxelHeyst on Sun Jun 19, 2022 10:15 am, edited 1 time in total.

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Re: The Education of Axel Heyst

Post by AxelHeyst »

I was rereading my notes on Jacob's Second Stoa talk, where he talks about ethical standards for emergent movement design. He says they shouldn't have a poison pill built in to the method, meaning, if someone else tries to implement the method and the half-ass it or make a mistake, they should fail gracefully. For example if you try to ERE but fail, you FIRE, or at least have a lower COL and higher NW than your peers.

I think what I'm trying to do fails the 'poison pill' criteria, at least the way the world currently works. If someone tried to copy me in a deemphasis on FI but sort of half-assed the skill development and radical frugality, they'd fail as an indifferently skilled individual with poor earning potential and a chip on their shoulder about doing anything for external rewards, like money. I mean, it's not like the failure mode is destitution, but it's quite conceivable that the failure mode is being in a hole vs. an average peer who stuck with a boring job and an employer match 401k.

In my defense I'm not necessarily trying to build an emergent movement. I consider myself to be in experimentation mode, and it just so happens that really safe experiments fail to get me out of bed in the morning.

On the other hand, it's arguable that my recommended approach is "Get halfway to FI, then dip before you burnout and hammer the radical frugality and #skillz in a very serious way in order to avoid the failure mode of being FIRE but unsuited for the future you're actually going to have to live through". It's that 'get halfway to FI' bit that might take the edge off the poison pill... I'm not sure.

AnalyticalEngine
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Joined: Sun Sep 02, 2018 11:57 am

Re: The Education of Axel Heyst

Post by AnalyticalEngine »

AxelHeyst wrote:
Sun Jun 19, 2022 9:47 am
But also, a complete answer could be because it feels good to deploy rare and valuable skills on cool projects. Does doing stuff that feels good need further justification? Sort of the whole point of what I'm doing is to decentralize income generation from motivation.
This is an element of lifestyle design that I've been running into with my ERE plans as well. Once you remove social structures like paid employment, the question quickly becomes "what should I do with my life?" The typical western leisure activities, including social ones (ie go to the bar), are designed for people who work full-time, and they quickly become unfulfilling when they're your entire life. I think there's an important life satisfaction aspect to engaging in skilled work, especially skilled work that involves other people. In my experience, doing projects at home is interesting, but doing projects with other people is important to feeling connected.

Unfortunately, most of "skilled work with other people" involves paid employment, so I think finding alternative structures to that is very important. The workaways sound like an interesting alternative.

Tangent warning: I've found volunteering in my local community to be hit or miss because most volunteer positions are for extremely basic tasks that require no skill (picking up trash, setting up tents, whatever). Volunteering to do something that anyone can do is something I've found to be unfulfilling because you aren't learning anything and you aren't contributing at your highest level.

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Slevin
Posts: 626
Joined: Tue Sep 01, 2015 7:44 pm
Location: Sonoma County

Re: The Education of Axel Heyst

Post by Slevin »

Robin Hobb wrote: Don’t do what you can’t undo, until you’ve considered what you can’t do once you’ve done it.
I think I think the “poison pill” is roughly the same idea of path dependence (past choices constrain future choices) and absorbing barriers (don’t choose paths with chances of ruin), and we have to consider the risk tolerances of the pathee. I.e. I think a more risk averse person (me in my thought experiment) would be concerned with finding simple paths back to “normalcy” if in the end they really didn’t enjoy / couldn’t handle the AxelERE path. Which is why some of us like ERE / FI more than semiERE (bigger cushions for issues that don’t have a non-monetary solution, etc). SemiERE variants will always be less flexible that way, just due to their inherent difference in accumulation style.

So I think your “just get more money first” is correct to solve for the inherent weakness of semiERE. The question then is just due to tendencies of market accumulation (exponential growth), since the second half is much much easier than the first, so why not just finish the path to ERE/ FI? Obviously if you hate your job, that would be a reason not to. And if you don’t want to contribute more to bad systems, that is probably another.

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