The Education of Axel Heyst

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jacob
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Re: The Education of Axel Heyst

Post by jacob »

OutOfTheBlue wrote:
Tue Jul 05, 2022 9:51 pm
Another book, that builds upon Abraham Maslow's work (which was v1.0's WL8 placeholder recommended reading) and could also be seen as "describing a framework that [...] integrates the individual with society over an entire lifetime" is Transcend: The New Science of Self-Actualization (2020), by Scott Barry Kaufman. I intended to create a thread on it later (as I haven't finished my Maslow readings yet), but here you go!
I've finished it and I have some opinions :geek: Waiting for the thread ...

AxelHeyst
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Re: The Education of Axel Heyst

Post by AxelHeyst »

The Renaissance Report: July 2022
I’m on a small permaculture project on the Island of Skye, Scotland. I’ve been here since the end of June, and am planning on being here through mid September or so.

Physiological
After having abandoned any kind of exercise or fitness routine since February due to the instability of travel, I've picked back up my bodyweight strength training and mobility routine again. It's a mix of reddit's /Bodyweightfitness Recommended Routine, E-Sizes, Natural Movement, and yoga. It requires no equipment (although I make good use of a stout tree branch for pullups) and I do it outside ANAP (As Naked As Possible) under the pines.

My diet is now much cleaner than it has been since I started traveling. We eat vegan and almost entirely whole foods here, and the Rock is straightedge so I haven't ingested any fun poisons (aka beer) since I got here. Most days I do intermittent fasting, only eating between 1p and 8p.

Intellectual
I read How to Take Smart Notes by Ahrens. Amazing. I use Obsidian as my zettlekasten platform, and thoroughly enjoy the process of taking notes now. The book is about much more than the mechanics of taking notes, and actually influenced some of the core ideas that went into episode 7 of my podcast. Very highly recommended. Here’s a line from it as a teaser:
Ahrens wrote:The ability to change the direction of our work opportunistically is a form of control that is completely different from the attempt to control the circumstances by clinging to a plan.
Emotional
I've been having a really rich time exploring Bill Plotkin's Wild Mind and Carolyn Elliott's Existential Kink, which complement each other really well for me. I never really understood shadow work - it was one of those things I sort of got at an intellectual level, but never found an explanation or a practice of shadow work that resonated. Existential Kink (EK) makes crystal clear sense to me and the practices have been nothing short of revelatory. I'm running out of space in my journal. Highly recommended.

Economic
Project TTM5K is headed in the right direction now. I spent $87 for all of July, which breaks down as:
  • $42 - Traveler’s Health Insurance
  • $34 - Books
  • $10 - website
Of course, I'm trading 20-25 hours of work per week for a caravan to sleep in and food to eat. But calling what I'm doing 'work' feels wrong: I mean, I spend my days felling trees, taking ducks for walks, and building an aquaponics system. I basically play in the forest all day, doing the sorts of things I'd want to be doing if I didn't have to worry about money. Which I don't. So... #winning?

Image

So Wait. Am I….FI?
Nah, probably not. But maybe? It's too early to tell where my cost of living is going to settle out over the next few years, so I'm not about to declare myself financially independent... but also I don't really care, because being technically FI or not wouldn't change how I'm living my life.

The retirement math is a side effect of my strategy, not a goal. I chose to accept the argument that after your basic needs are met, the things worth having in life don't cost anything. Sure enough, as my monthly expenses have been trending down, my overall psychological well-being has been trending up.

Who knew, huh? Every spiritual teacher and wise elder in the entire documented history of wise elders and spiritual teachers have had it right all along, and the bad-faith storytellers of consumer-capitalism are a bunch of thieving liars that keep us trapped in small lives of isolated, shameful misery for their own profit.

Ahem.


Social

I'm learning a form of intentional community social practices here on The Rock. We start every meal and every meeting with a simple gratitude ritual. We have daily check-in meetings, where we let others in on how we're doing physically and psychologically, if we want to,before talking about projects and logistics. We do sharing circles once every week or two. We practice deep listening, which mostly looks like not interrupting each other (even to excitedly agree or interject), and giving a few seconds of 'space' to everything anyone says. One of the functions of these practices is conflict avoidance, on the theory that an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure. We also have a conflict resolution process, which we haven't had to use since I've been here. I’ll write more about this soon as well.

There are two other volunteers besides me at the moment, a young couple from England, and the host Ludwig. We've had more short term people come and go, and they've been almost entirely pleasant experiences.

Technical
Ecovillage Handyman
I've been able to deploy my handyman skills on fixing up various huts and caravans around the place. Some of them weren't built right to begin with years ago by others, and just need a bit of coaxing to get a few more years' good use out of them before they need to be decommissioned. I continue to improve my ability to build things out of random stuff that's lying around in the salvage yard, which was one of my main goals for my travels.

Aquaponics
My main focus at the moment is getting a reciprocating aquaponics system up and running. A previous resident had built it on a different site as part of his university studies. It was disassembled when it was moved here, and never reassembled. My task is to reassemble it and get it up and running again. I'll be posting more about that as the project comes along, as so far I've just been doing site prep for the growbed tanks.
Image

Cooking
We rotate cooking duties. I've been cooking dinner and lunch for 4-6 people two to three times a week, so I'm getting a lot of 'reps' in. When it's just me at home I tend to cook the same thing over and over again, but I feel bad doing that with other people, so I've been putting a fair amount of effort into learning new recipes and techniques.

Ecological
I've been diving into the world of nature observation with an initial emphasis on listening to, and attempting to understand, bird language. It's all based on the work of Jon Young, who as I understand it learned from Tom Brown Jr. I have a sit spot where I spend a fair amount of time every day, listening and watching what the birds are up to. I'm also working on conscious walking through the forest, in such a way that the birds aren't simply alarm calling about me as I move through the land.

I had no idea there was such richness in the forest, and I grew up in the forest (and desert). It is both very exciting and profoundly sad to me. Most of us modern people will shuffle out of our lives not even knowing that such richness existed all around us, because our culture deafens and blinds us to it.

At any rate, due in large part to how much amazing richness I’m now aware of in the natural environment, my cravings for most forms of electronic entertainment have vanished. I haven’t listened to digital music since I got here, haven’t watch a show, and only watch youtube videos when I need to figure out how to install a dektite stove jack boot or whatever. It’s not that I’ve set some constraint; I just don’t have any desire to consume that stuff. I’d much rather to to my sit spot and listen to the story of the forest.

ertyu
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Re: The Education of Axel Heyst

Post by ertyu »

I gave EK a read. Would be interested in a longer form post about your thoughts on it and which part connected and how. The main take-away for me was realizing that things arise in pairs. When one visualizes a yes of some sort, its obverse, the associated fears and insecurities, also arise. And when one introspects into negative emotion, the obverse is there, too. The concepts of resistance/secondary gain aren't exactly new to psychology but the awareness to always look for both, the thing *and* the other side of its coin, is valuable. I also found you can go back a full circle: desire - resistance - desire-under-the-resistance -- the coin flips many times.

Other parts, I had a hard time connecting with. The whole "kinking" bit, in particular.

One of the things I found particularly interesting and valuable was different people's descriptions of their meditations.

If you have more thoughts or are willing to share an experience, id be interested

AxelHeyst
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Re: The Education of Axel Heyst

Post by AxelHeyst »

The bits that resonated with me from EK:

* Our egos want to experience ourselves as separate entities, but the only way for an integrated being to do this is to identify with one pole and reject identity with the other. This 'other' is the shadow.
* Our godSelf wants to experience all things, though, including 'good' and 'bad' things. (God is in charge of everything. aaaaand the world's a horrorshow. Conclusion? God must like it this way, all of it, and is some kinda divine kinkstress. And since each of us are little pieces of the divine nature ourselves, WE must like it this way, too. Whether or not this statement is 'true' or not is immaterial: it's useful.)
* The ego's denial of these parts of who we are causes 'stuckness'. We're unable to move beyond certain repeating patterns because we don't allow our godSelves the satisfaction of fulfillment of the full range of our desires.
* So we set up this situation where our unconscious is deeply unsatisfied... and so we become obsessed in these 'turned off' negative states. [[your state is a feedback loop]] and so we just repeat these patterns: our unconscious calls in these fucked up situations, but our conscious ego denies it the satisfaction of fulfillment by denying that we actually want those feelings.
* The trick of EK is radical acceptance, but not just some peaceful blissedout style of friendly acceptance. By allowing ourselves to get off on, to enjoy, to find even sexual levels of pleasure in our previously denied emotional states, we "unstick" these desires and can move through it.
* Another way to think of it is that by converting being turned off to being turned on, we are able to spend more time in 'positive' turned on emotional states... which calls in more positive emotional states.
* This was profound for me: we are already completely fulfilled, we just don't realize it. The idea that we aren't yet fulfilled is a psychological illusion perpetrated on us by the separating influence of the ego. We actually have everything we want, but the trick is we have a lot of what our unconscious wants as well. EK is all about making the unconscious conscious and thus gaining agency over what we 'call in', manifest, etc.

An example will help. For my first basic EK meditation, I chose to work with the feelings of anxiety and fear that arise in me when I'm in a social circumstance that I don't have a good mental model for, that I feel unsafe in (even though I know I'm in little danger of actual harm). I wrote about this a bit earlier, and also here, but the details aren't important for this example.

I got relaxed, and brought up some memories of some recent situations I've been in where I had these negative feelings (for that that's wandering the medina in Tangier), and I really focused on feeling the feelings I had then. Clenching fear, but like pathetic little boy fear, and doubt, and racing mind, and etc.

It's important to note that I focused on the feelings that the situation caused to arise in me, not so much on the facts of the situation itself. The situation was just the vehicle that delivered those emotions to me. This is worth overemphasizing: the point isn't to try to force yourself to like fucked up situations. The point is to accept that there's some part of you that wants to feel the feelings that those kinds of situations bring up in you, and to allow that part of you to fully feel those feelings.

And then I reminded myself of the EK axiom "having is evidence of wanting". I repeated several times "I'm willing to stop pretending I don't enjoy those experiences immensely".

And then... I got really, *really* turned on. Another EK maxim is that the truth is sensational, meaning that when you come in contact with a statement that is true for you you'll likely feel it, have some kind of physiological sensation.

I'll spare you the details, but it became obvious that part of me is one sick little moo cow and I. Fucking. Love. feeling that fear and anxiety and sense of humiliation. I spent, I don't know, a good ten plus minutes just enjoyed the hell out of reliving those "negative" emotions. Since then, I've noticed the aversion to being in that kind of situation is much less intense.

I've done a number of focused EK meditations since, but I've also recognized that I can now "run" EK in realtime, when I catch myself worrying about fucking something up or if I see a classic repeating situation where some negative emotion might arise (like a conflict between two other people I'm near, say), I'm able to relax because I know some part of me is going to enjoy those feelings. I actually smile to myself, and that TOTALLY takes the wind out of the sails of my anxiety and clenching aversion. So I've already noticed a positive improvement in my ability to deal with the world, and in my positive mental state.

The basic idea of EK to me is that by facing and embracing our erotic level of desire for all this shit we thought we actually don't want, we are able to gain agency over those desires by making them conscious. It's the unconscious shit that exerts most control over our lives, and EK is simply a method to convert unconscious desires (experienced as conscious fear) into conscious desires, and to eliminate/reduce the amount of fear we experience.

It's actually almost like improving the circumstances of your life is a side effect of EK. The point of EK is to realize that you're actually already totally fulfilled, you just don't realize it because your ego is unwilling to accept your fucked up desire for 'bad' stuff. You unlock heaven by realizing that you literally have everything you already want (because you want fucked up shit and hey presto! fucked up shit everywhere) and allowing yourself to feel the pleasure of it. The fact that by doing this you tend to no longer need to manifest fucked up situations in your life and thus you tend to manifest positive synchronicities is, essentially, an incidental yield of the practice. If you go into this shit thinking 'right, I'm gonna do these weird exercises and then I'll get wealthy and hawt and all my problems will disappear', you're doing it wrong.

Elliot goes into some depth to explain that her axioms and the EK method should not be taken to mean that people are to blame for bad shit that happens to them, that people are not at fault or responsible for abuse and other bad shit that bad people do to other people.

AnalyticalEngine
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Re: The Education of Axel Heyst

Post by AnalyticalEngine »

Interesting stuff, AH, thanks for typing that up. If I had to hazard a guess, the reason this works is because anxiety/fear/etc and sexual arousal are all arousal states in the brain. That is, these are all sympathetic nervous system states, so activating one has a tendency to hijack other states at the same time because the underlying mechanism is similar. This is why so many people develop sexual responses when exposed to fear/anxiety/etc, and also why it can be so jarring when you start to "enjoy" something that might cause pain.

When something traumatic happens, your brain basically malfunctions to get stuck in the stress response of the past, even when the present is safe. Because fight-or-flight is also a sympathetic nervous system response, and because trauma activates fight-or-flight in the present, EK is essentially trying to rewrite the brain to feel pleasure in this instead of fear.

I would also imagine this method works far better for things that are arousal states (fear, anxiety, panic) than responses that aren't arousal states (depression, freeze/dissociation, etc).

This method does seem to run the risk of associating something you find fearful with the sexual arousal response, thereby potentially giving someone new sexual fetishes, so buyer beware at least for that.

7Wannabe5
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Re: The Education of Axel Heyst

Post by 7Wannabe5 »

One of the upsides of experimenting with kink is it gives you practice at controlling the flow of your emotional responses to anxiety provoking situations. Also offers access to Wonderland perspective of "this one makes me little" and "this one makes me big." , which like Plotkin-type rough nature provoked experiences*, can allow you to acknowledge or gain access to your inner archtypes which are representative of "big you" or "little you" etc. etc. Our culture does not promote gaining strength in the submissive posture- letting the big Universe flow through the little you- but it is a source of often-dangerous-feeling pleasure, the erotic drop or sub-space. Those who are most wound up in responsbility even greater than held tight authority in real life (locked in Loyal Soldier for example) are often most likely to crave the release in play space.

*Sacred or Transcendent Sex oriented practices are sort of a mix of kink practices and Plotkin nature type experiences. For instance, imagining your sexual partner as an element of nature representative of feminine or masculine flow of energy. It's sort of a functional opposite of limerence, the "in love" chemical state of the brain,because limerence convinces you of the exquisite uniqueness of a particular partner (the way he wears his hat), whereas transcendent sex recognizes universal qualities within a partner (how he is like a river or a wolf) towards maximizing conduit.

mooretrees
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Re: The Education of Axel Heyst

Post by mooretrees »

axel, just a wonderful update. I'm going to try and read EK and appreciate the write up. This workaway seems like a perfect match, I'm so glad you found it!

@shaz posted this, did you see it?: Public library. The Broward County, FL library offers a free library card to anyone in the US.

AxelHeyst
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Re: The Education of Axel Heyst

Post by AxelHeyst »

AnalyticalEngine wrote:
Wed Aug 03, 2022 10:12 am
I would also imagine this method works far better for things that are arousal states (fear, anxiety, panic) than responses that aren't arousal states (depression, freeze/dissociation, etc).
I think you're right about that. Also she says you don't really want to run an EK meditation if you can't muster even a smidge of mirth/sense of play at that moment. You need at least some 'spark' to work with. If you're totally down, best to do something else to work with coming up out of that state.
AnalyticalEngine wrote:
Wed Aug 03, 2022 10:12 am
This method does seem to run the risk of associating something you find fearful with the sexual arousal response, thereby potentially giving someone new sexual fetishes, so buyer beware at least for that.
Probably true. Generally speaking, the idea is to run EK on existing repeating patterns in your life that bring about certain emotions. She gives an example that she was always in shitty relationships that involved lots of anger and things being thrown at each other. I think she would argue that she already had a deep desire for those feelings, which is why she kept being in those situations. It's just that that desire was unconscious. By running EK on it, she allowed herself to get a sense of fulfillment and closure with that desire, and then the specific circumstances that her unconscious used to call in to provide those emotions lost all interest for her, and she was able to break the pattern of being with shitty partners. In other words, done right, EK allows you to let go of sexual fetishes you didn't realize you had, rather than adopt new ones. But best to exercise caution if you notice conscious desire *for fucked up circumstances* to be on the increase.

AxelHeyst
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Re: The Education of Axel Heyst

Post by AxelHeyst »

Was updating some of my graphs. One of them is 'instantaneous runway', meaning, how many years of expenses do I have saved up based purely on how much I spent last month?
Image
I'm at 157x guys :lol:

I have no intention of living this particular lifestyle indefinitely. But it's cool to be living a lifestyle that by no means sucks, that I could fall back on at any time (assuming my health is fine) and have money be a solved problem. There's at least a slight change in the back of my mind to know that I've now got one more 'backup' mode in case other plans fall through.

@mooretrees the broward county library card thing worked! Thanks for the tipoff. You just halved my monthly expenses - I'm at 300x now. 8-)
Last edited by AxelHeyst on Tue Aug 09, 2022 9:21 am, edited 2 times in total.

guitarplayer
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Re: The Education of Axel Heyst

Post by guitarplayer »

I am happy for you that you came to this conclusion @AlexHeyst. I had the same revelation after doing workawaying for several months some years back. Also did other experiments, like hitchhiking to a music festival with no money and a guitar and returning several days later with some money in my pocket that I got while busking.

Some of the people I did these experiments with seem to have forgotten about them and are now well into a conventional lifestyle. I am not sure whether they would be able to get back to that lifestyle. I think there is huge merit and art in not forgetting these experiences and I even almost want to say scheduling them every now and again. Like @Ego has this schedule of going for a 1-year wander every so often. Now I am kind of in a conventional situation (DW and I employed full time), but we make sure to go wild camping several times a year, or we spent one of our holidays doing a workaway at a banana farm in Portugal some time back.

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mountainFrugal
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Re: The Education of Axel Heyst

Post by mountainFrugal »

AxelHeyst wrote:
Tue Aug 09, 2022 9:02 am
Was updating some of my graphs. One of them is 'instantaneous runway', meaning, how many years of expenses do I have saved up based purely on how much I spent last month?
UP and to the right.

AxelHeyst
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Re: The Education of Axel Heyst

Post by AxelHeyst »

Don't mind me, just pulling some quotes in here for rumination on my own system.
jacob wrote:
Wed Aug 24, 2022 12:18 pm
I think pre-ERE was also "simple" or "obvious", see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cynefin_framework ... and as such there wasn't much to focus on. This was a good thing because it made it possible to be quite effective: "You had one job!" I think consumer/career-humanity mainly live in the obvious and complicated quadrants where answers are given and easy.

ERE lives in the complex quadrant where everything is connected to everything. Outcomes are emergent and comes from proper systems management. I suspect that fear that FI will decouple ambition from survival is that that connection (work or starve) is after all pretty simple. You stay rooted if you need 4 hours of work per day for "bread labor". Less rooted if resources just "arrive" due to decisions and tweaks made years ago. Pre-ERE one lives in a world where action is strongly coupled to effect in a local sense. Post-ERE this becomes decoupled and global.

It can be hard to communicate the difference. "What are you working on?" and "What do you do for a living?" are both sense-making questions that presume that the answer is obvious. Clearly, with ERE, if you're "working" on something, it means you screwed up your systems design somewhere, because work is only required to overcome friction from bad design. And the point is as "you" don't "do" anything for a living since meaning-making is not based on survival.
This point of having the yields decoupled from related effort by (potentially) significant chunks of time, aka resources arriving due to decisions and tweaks made years ago, is timely for me. I think I haven't quite internalized the mindset of decision-making at the system level but am somewhere near the cusp of it. I have some more work to do to stabilize my lifestyle and my resource flows before I'll be able to do that. It feels like you need your near-horizon set/handled in some basic or simple way in order to elevate your attention to the system-horizon level. Hard to play the long game if your short game is still demanding significant chunks of your attention.

I predict, because making predictions is fun, that I'm going to get my short game/near horizon systems 'stabilized' within six to twelve months, and around the autumn 2023 mark my focus will be emergently rising to longer term system tweaks. Right now I've got some weeds to drop n chop and some rabbit fences to build. In a year I anticipate making tweaks to soil micronutrients by figuring out how to attract the kind of bird species that poop that kind of nutrient, or whatever. (My power of metaphor might have abandoned me on that one.)
jacob wrote:
Thu Aug 25, 2022 9:18 am
Absolutism makes any solution much harder. I'm reminded of a comment in Country Living (Carla Emery) that the main thing that makes homesteading economically hard is not feeding yourself but making enough from selling produce to pay for the few things one has to or can't make oneself. What kills farming as a strategy is not having a cash reserve or any other source of income. Mortgages are even worse.

Insisting on "living without money/investments" or insisting on "living without self-reliant skills" makes everything much harder than it needs to be. Ditto when insisting that everything either needs to be a 100% individual solution (you'll never finish) or a 100% collective solution (you'll never get started).

So yeah, there are solutions, but why blank out rows and columns in the skill/capital matrix to deliberately make it harder for yourself than it has to be?
aka to hell with purity.

AxelHeyst
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Re: The Education of Axel Heyst

Post by AxelHeyst »

guitarplayer wrote:
Tue Aug 09, 2022 9:13 am
I am happy for you that you came to this conclusion @AlexHeyst. I had the same revelation after doing workawaying for several months some years back. Also did other experiments, like hitchhiking to a music festival with no money and a guitar and returning several days later with some money in my pocket that I got while busking.

Some of the people I did these experiments with seem to have forgotten about them and are now well into a conventional lifestyle. I am not sure whether they would be able to get back to that lifestyle. I think there is huge merit and art in not forgetting these experiences and I even almost want to say scheduling them every now and again. Like @Ego has this schedule of going for a 1-year wander every so often. Now I am kind of in a conventional situation (DW and I employed full time), but we make sure to go wild camping several times a year, or we spent one of our holidays doing a workaway at a banana farm in Portugal some time back.
I remember towards the second half of my career becoming petrified that I might lose by ability to dirtbag, or get too comfortable, and that I ought to do something radical just for the sake of not sinking into my groove so far that I could no longer see over the edges. These lifestyle experiments help to see and experience the world fresh...

(...and are well aligned with a Boydian framework of the conceptual spiral / tempo of conceptual creation and destruction in order to keep a tight update loop on orientation! :P )

zbigi
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Re: The Education of Axel Heyst

Post by zbigi »

guitarplayer wrote:
Tue Aug 09, 2022 9:13 am

Some of the people I did these experiments with seem to have forgotten about them and are now well into a conventional lifestyle. I am not sure whether they would be able to get back to that lifestyle. I think there is huge merit and art in not forgetting these experiences and I even almost want to say scheduling them every now and again. Like @Ego has this schedule of going for a 1-year wander every so often. Now I am kind of in a conventional situation (DW and I employed full time), but we make sure to go wild camping several times a year, or we spent one of our holidays doing a workaway at a banana farm in Portugal some time back.
I believe that Seneca, who was one of the wealthiest people on Earth at the time, had a ritual to fast and live in squalor for a month every year. Then, he returned to his mansions and wrote about it on one of his 56 mahogany desks :)

Also: TIL there are banana farms in Europe.

guitarplayer
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Re: The Education of Axel Heyst

Post by guitarplayer »

@AH totally, I think I had a pretty deep experience of overcoming getting too comfortable just today actually. Getting to know the Boydian framework at this very moment.

@zbigi, administratively Europe encompasses some pretty geographically distant islands! That being said, iirc in recent years Sepp Holzer set to grow bananas in Austria. ETA: I never knew about this habit of Seneca!

AxelHeyst
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Re: The Education of Axel Heyst

Post by AxelHeyst »

jacob wrote:
Sun Jul 24, 2022 8:41 am
ERE (WL7) has a different perspective on money than FIRE. In ERE, money is the lubrication of the engine rather than the gas that fuels it. If the engine is well constructed with little friction, doubling the amount of motor oil is not going to make it run better. It might even gunk up the works.

The difference in perspective is between optimizing one lever, money (WL5), having more levers (WL6), and optimizing how those levers work together (WL7). Thus, at WL7 money is not a powerful lever; more like a tweak.

The goal [in ERE] is not to dial fuel usage up and down according to how limiting it is but to keep the engine going. An engine designed for a $7k/year spend will not run well on a $15k/year input. It would require a redesign to run efficiently at $15k/year, basically building a different engine.

The next set of constraints tend to be skill-constraints. Not knowing how to do something or not knowing what one doesn't know, e.g. that something could easily be done. One of the reasons I really can't go higher in my spending even if my SWR is ~ 0.66% is that I don't know how to build a bigger machine than a super-efficiently running middle-class household. That is, I can build a $60,000 lifestyle for $15,000 ... and presumably similar [systems theory] methods could build a $200k project for what we could actually afford. I just have no idea of what that would be. I don't think(*) it's an upper-upper-middle class lifestyle because the difference between that and the median is primarily waste, i.e., more expensive versions of more or less the same thing, which is contradictory to my methods.

(*) I've only seen/visited such but never lived it, so this statement is based on observations only. In any case, I don't see "home making" as my primary goal; just a base to support other goals that are more important to me.
I dig the metaphor of levers. Also, one idea for a kind of machine to build that might require more than household level of $flow is that of a community project of some sort - a Wheaton labs or permaculture project or off-grid fablab or etc. Something that involves other people by design, has some kind of aim or purpose (unifying narrative/vision that inspires people to become involved), and that involves multiple flows of resources.

All of the places I've visited on my travels could have done with some ERE style strategic thinking without any corruption of their values or principles. They all exhibited at least some attributes of ERE thinking - frugality and DIY ethic being obvious ones - but none had what I'd consider a really robust level of strategic thinking. The last place I was at was by far the closest, and no surprise that it was based on permaculture design thinking.

I've no inclination to start up a larger scoped project in the very near future, I've got to get my own household machine running smoothly first, but at some point in the future...

Add: for example, I have access to rural land, and am interested in drylands ecological engineering design and building methods (direct solar, radical water frugality, the actual limits of appropriate carrying capacity in such a climate...). The most likely more-than-household machine I'd be interested in building would be a Mojave version of something like the New Alchemy Institute.

Im not sure if thats such a different machine than a household that it's more strategic to begin building that first, instead of 'wasting' time building a household machine first. It occurs to me that 'my' household machine would require some disassembly for integration into the larger machine. Hmm.

But probably the best path is to learn how to build a household machine first, and then with that experience turn my attention to building a larger machine kid it's still what I want to do.

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Re: The Education of Axel Heyst

Post by jacob »

AxelHeyst wrote:
Thu Sep 01, 2022 3:12 am
I dig the metaphor of levers. Also, one idea for a kind of machine to build that might require more than household level of $flow is that of a community project of some sort - a Wheaton labs or permaculture project or off-grid fablab or etc. Something that involves other people by design, has some kind of aim or purpose (unifying narrative/vision that inspires people to become involved), and that involves multiple flows of resources.
It wouldn't necessarily have to be a community project. It could also be an individual project. Projects abound with different spiral colors. I've found Green to be tricky to navigate coming in with renaissance skills. Strategic input and insight gets overridden by the groupthink process because the big picture is too subtle for the voting or conversation process. This can be highly frustrating unless one is into the process itself.

O - Everybody is given equal time, so informed insight goes undertapped. Uninformed noise and pet causes get added.
O - Conversation is an awful method for establishing the big picture.
D - Connective information is lost again as decisions get chopped into itemized lists. Voting is slow; much time will be spent on the phrasing of the ballot items.
A - To everybody's non-surprise 90% of community members mainly showed up for the conversation and don't actually have the time to do anything, but they'd be happy to advise.

I think a lot of it has to do with "what scale" one is trained [like a monkey] to operate on. For example, in my case of theoretical research, it's almost always a solo-operation using pencil and paper or a computer. One could in principle solve the greatest questions in the universe with those resources. That doesn't cost much. It seems like people with engineering backgrounds have a [much] better understanding of projects at a range of scales: From building a box to building a bridge. For example, a $100,000 project might simply be to build a super car from scratch. However, such a [super car] goal is much farther away from where I'm standing than from where you're standing.

ERE is at heart a kind of project management that's based on systems theory. Conversely, engineering is a kind of project management that's built on optimization and outsourcing (WL5, basically). Using systems-theory generally requires familiarity with all the ingredients. It's feasible to learn all the ingredients for household home economics and most everybody has some idea of what goes into that since they live in a home (not a hotel). To apply ERE for a super car project would only be available to auto mechanics. Without an automotive knowledge base, "build a super car" would get stuck in analysis-paralysis trying to coordinate and create a bunch of unknown-knowns. The ERE recipe goes nowhere fast without the ingredients.

PS: I think this is where paying for instruction and basically learning at a lower stage of the CCCCCC-ladder is a more effective way of progressing.

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Re: The Education of Axel Heyst

Post by 7Wannabe5 »

The counter-example to failure of the collective that I often ponder is the magical ease with which I've sometimes worked with a group (most often my extended family) to create an event like a 4 day wedding extravaganza or the elementary school talent show. In my experience, what works is trusting that everybody has something to offer under guidelines of loose delegation. For instance, "We need some kind of whimsical centerpiece for that table." vs. "Here is the exact optimized protocol for loading the dishwasher."

Maybe what I am suggesting is that the solution for getting bogged down in Green is to nudge everyone towards being a Yellow idea contributor(or content provider - lol.) Most people enjoy making their own ideas manifest more than making somebody else's ideas manifest.

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Re: The Education of Axel Heyst

Post by AxelHeyst »

Indeed, community projects are but one type of project I/anyone could desire to build. I didn't mean to imply that the options were either household or community based. But projects involving more than just myself might serve to generate several yields that I happen to desire / aka function stack. (One of them being the seed of desire to develop experience and skill mentoring people in the direction of becoming "useful ingredients")

Also, consensus and conversation based community projects are but one form of organizing community projects. The host of my last spot, the permaculture community, had a very dim view of consensus processes. ("They don't work.") He gave the example of how insane it is to equally weight the opinion of an established ex-chef vs. a tv dinner noob on how much salt should go in the food. The amount of time we spent discussing projects and every other logistics related to the community was about 15min/day.

Also: The idea of bringing more people on in a serious way to my projects is something that I would approach with great caution and an abundance of abort procedures. A year from now would be the bare earliest I'd want to begin to think semi seriously about it. Much fun solo projects to engage in before then.

Eta: also, most people who "do" consensus aren't even doing it right. They just know the dictionary definition of consensus and invent something based on that, with the result of endless meetings and the ability for a lone wingnut to derail the whole thing. Proper consensus based decision making processes aren't blind to this and are designed in such a way to be actually functional. But also: there are a lot of ways for groups to make decisions and execute projects.

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Re: The Education of Axel Heyst

Post by jacob »

It seems to me (analysis) that a required condition for a consensus framework to work is that everybody in the process is a stakeholder in the outcome AND that everybody is about equally qualified/informed. It works well for e.g. hunter/gatherer tribes or party planning, because all participants have some idea + something to contribute + an interest in the outcome.

Navigating this in practice definitely requires experience. Maybe consider it part of the renaissance skill set for dealing with consensus-oriented group settings. The polymath will likely, without sounding too conceited, be relatively overqualified. The consensus-oriented members will likely be quite invested in the consensus-process; the ideology will be along the lines that everybody's input is equally valid due to inherent human wisdom and that truth is established through dialogue. (This is objectively valid in some cases, but not all by far. However, it will be force-used everywhere.)

This is the people-oriented vs results-oriented problem in practice. It's not something I've been able to resolve beyond being faster to recognize it when it occurs. Usually leads to pulling out my stake.

Anyhoo ... apologize for the highjack. The point I was trying to make was actually that projects can have multiple colors and exist on several scales. Yet we're often only familiar with one color and one scale, albeit we might find another color/scale interesting. E.g. I'm familiar with yellow household but is interested in green resilient community although it's increasingly clear that I'm completely underqualified for this. So I wanted to highlight that there's a map.

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