Introducing a new forum

[daylen]

I would focus my efforts elsewhere.

At some point you must reconcile that there is no where else to go.

After ERE1, individual engineering and maintenance is accounted for in stable conditions.

[AxelHeyst]

The goal will be really hard if not impossible.

Welcome to the metacrisis. "Maybe impossible" is a defining feature of what ERE2 is grappling with.

It seems to me that the human thinking and social organization we see today happened by evolution, not design, so it will be impossible/ very difficult to change by design.

I think our culture is a result of evolution *and* design. There were a bunch of people in the Enlightenment who spilled a lot of ink saying, in effect, "Hey y'all, know what would be great? If we used Reason and this Science thing we're still sorting out to Dominate Nature [they actually used those two words together, like that] and master everything." Bacon comes to mind.

We didn't just accidentally invent the Myth of Progress. A number of folks did really big marketing push on it that's been going on for a Long time. Tracing the roots of it is the subject of volumes of text, but suffice to say our current "arrangement" was very much designed.

Anyway, I don't mean to discourage anyone from trying to solve these hard problems. It's interesting to me, just with my current thinking I think what y'all are trying to do is impossible, and I would focus my efforts elsewhere. Thanks for answering my questions as I try to figure out what exactly it is y'all are trying to do (still not sure I totally get it).

+1 what Daylen just said - "There is no elsewhere" - and also I recommend you check out Rowson's video and paper I linked in the "Tasting the Pickle" thread if you haven't already. It's helpful to begin framing the issue/dynamics, and to separate Symptoms (CC etc) from Cause (way of thinking, etc).

ETA: I think doing due diligence as to what these smart folks are talking about when they talk about the metacrisis is part of the intellectual work required to not try to do things that wind up becoming a further part of the problem. "It's very easy to propose solutions to problems you don't understand very well" is one of my favorite quotes, and it applies here. There is a very real danger of doing things that seem like a good idea, but turn out to have wicked consequences. (A simple example of unintended consequences would be providing food aid to an impoverished region, which collapses their struggling farming economy and induces an actual famine. We've done this enough times now that it's no longer okay to just go "oops, my bad".) Rowson speaks to this in his paper.

ETA2: It's also possible that my current obsession with the metacrisis is taking things a bit far / muddying the waters - as Jacob commented, the metacrisis wasn't part of his original Stoa2 talk. I'm happy to be corrected here if so, I'm not completely sure how productive you (Jacob) think incorporating the work of e.g. Rowsen into ERE2 is?

[7Wannabe5]

There is a very real danger of doing things that seem like a good idea, but turn out to have wicked consequences.

Are we still interested in discussing the "wicked consequences" feared by those in the Radical Optimism crowd? The notion that taking on a pessimistic perspective and/or degrowth practice will do more harm than good, because..."the only thing we have to fear is fear itself"... over-simplification being Human Economy trumps Global Ecology? Orange towards Yellow 'Omics vs. Green towards Yellow 'Ology. Or something like that. You know what I mean.

[boomly]

ERE2 is an adaptive attempt to avoid survival-mode.

Part of humanity's problem now, is we've always been in survival mode. We've convinced ourselves that all this production/consumption is necessary to survive.

Most consumers feel they are barely surviving. ERE1 is a solution of getting out of that mindset.

ERE2 might be the same, for a larger group. Kind of a "Wait a minute, we don't need to focus so much on surviving. We've accomplished that already."

[7Wannabe5]

@boomly:

Half the planetary population still gets by on around 1/2 jacob or less per capita year. Even in the U.S. the median worker with one non-working dependent is already getting by on around 2 jacobs per capita year (although they do otherwise benefit from overall publicly maintained infrastructure, but same holds for more affluent.)

One question that somewhat irks me is why fair distribution of atmospheric dumping space is calculated on global per capita basis when fair distribution of most everything else isn't? Why is atmosphere grab by most powerful and affluent any different than land grab in previous eras maintained in part by birth rights in current era?

[jacob]

JnG, it sounds like you're asking "How does ERE2 address the multiple crises?" when in fact it ERE2 is actually aimed at addressing "the metacrisis", which is a different thing (meta to the multiple crises).

In other words, it's maybe (?) not *quite* right to say that ERE2 is aimed at solving for global overshoot (climate change, peak oil, etc).

It might be more productive to say that ERE2 is aimed at solving for the kinds of thinking and social organization that got humanity into a circumstance of global overshoot.

Hence Jacob's Stoa2 talk: 1) The problem is specialization leading to silo-ization and an inability for deep fields to talk to each other productively, so 2) The (a) solution is transdisciplinarity.

--

And to the points about scale of community, ERE2 shouldn't be thought of as separate from ERE1. ERE1 covers individual through at least family scale, and arguably up to local community scale, or at least it can. ERE2 is aiming at global scale. And they overlap... or at least they can.

Also, the notion of emergence is key to "covering" multiple scales of people. The aim is a global impact, but that impact *emerges* from lower-scale action (transdisiplinarity), which percolates through multiple scales. The emphasis of "global" on the graph in OP is to indicate the ultimate aim of ERE2 practice, not the only domain in which ERE2 actions participate in.

Exactly!

ERE1 is about creating Ingredients (people who think in a certain way). ERE2 is about finding Recipes (combining those people to generate new ideas that are unpossible in the current noosphere).

The currently available [non-renaissance] recipes are either symptom-treating point solutions with out-of-sight side-effects, which does nothing for the meta-crisis, or calling for some idealistic regression to an earlier recipe for society e.g. mystical/agrarian, spiritual/horticulture, or "500AD Roman fortified villa"-fiefs. All these lack the complexity (both internally and externally) to be viable on their own at this point as they all depend on importing e.g. guns, clothes, or medical services from elsewhere outside. But we're running out of elsewhere to support these dreams. Too many humans in a mined out environment. Up or out is the only way forward that doesn't involve natural [four horsemen] means.

[Hristo Botev]

or calling for some idealistic regression to an earlier recipe for society

I see this (upward arrow thing that I can't remember how to make) as being related to this (downward arrow thing) (from the darker reaches of the Internet):

So what then? We must rebuild from the ground up. We must forge new traditions - inspired by the past, perhaps, but grounded by new arguments. We must forge new shields to defend the beautiful, the good, and the true, and new weapons to assail those who proclaim the gospel of relativism, nihilism, and communism.

https://treeofwoe.substack.com/p/conservatism-is-dead

Basically, I'm seeing a lot of the same themes recently from my ERE/CC/etc. world, on the one hand, and my social/cultural trad-Catholic world, on the other. And those themes boil down to, mostly (apart from shared "the sky is falling!"sentiments): what is governance in the West going to look like once "we" finally are forced to realize that liberalism and the enlightenment (and its parallel over emphases on both the individual and the collective) are failed ventures. I mean, I'm seeing more and more arguments in even more mainstream media making the case for things like a return to monarchy, integralism, a properly-constrained leviathan state, etc., which is kinda nuts.

[AxelHeyst]

This made me think of an example of emergent design. John Todd, of The New Alchemists, famously remediated a pond of toxic goop into potable water. The simplified process was: 1) Get a bunch of clear-sided tanks and set the toxic water to pump through them in series 2) Dump buckets of water taken from a wide variety of water ecosystems: ponds, lakes, puddles, ditches, etc, to "seed" the tanks with critters. 3) Add a couple plants as well, I think, 4) Wait.

The ecosystems that emerged from each tank were unique, meaning, ecologists had never seen those particular species of critters organized in relationship in such a way before. The critters were known, but the system of critters were novel.

This is also an example of a non-binary relationship between design and evolution. Decades on, they still don't really understand how those critters are able to clean up the water to potable standards, and they couldn't have known which critters to add and which ones not to. They knew the desired end result, and successfully "designed" for it, but did not (and still don't) know how to design each single component if they had to.

Ingredients:
(1) Pond full of toxic goop
(12) Clear-sided polycarbonate tanks
(Many) buckets full of go-getter pond critters
Pump
Recipe:
Add buckets of pond critters in equal measure to tanks full of circulating toxic goop.
Tweak pump flowrate to taste.
Wait 10 days (hours?)

[AxelHeyst]

Are we still interested in discussing the "wicked consequences" feared by those in the Radical Optimism crowd?

Seems relevant to me. Was/is there a thread for it?

[jacob]

This made me think of an example of emergent design. John Todd, of The New Alchemists, famously remediated a pond of toxic goop into potable water. The simplified process was: 1) Get a bunch of clear-sided tanks and set the toxic water to pump through them in series 2) Dump buckets of water taken from a wide variety of water ecosystems: ponds, lakes, puddles, ditches, etc, to "seed" the tanks with critters. 3) Add a couple plants as well, I think, 4) Wait.

The ecosystems that emerged from each tank were unique, meaning, ecologists had never seen those particular species of critters organized in relationship in such a way before. The critters were known, but the system of critters were novel.

This is also an example of a non-binary relationship between design and evolution. Decades on, they still don't really understand how those critters are able to clean up the water to potable standards, and they couldn't have known which critters to add and which ones not to. They knew the desired end result, and successfully "designed" for it, but did not (and still don't) know how to design each single component if they had to.

Yes. The current problem is that the individual ERE1 critters are no close enough for meaningful interaction (beyond the interwebs, where it can be argued that it's not sufficiently meaningful). This is problem of space and time or space-time density.

To wit, there has been attempts at deliberate designs (ERE city, ERE learning tribe). The mastermind group(s) seem to be the closest/biggest/most complex that has been achieved. With more Ingredients it would definitely be possible to throw mud on the wall Monte Carlo style.

It may be that the key is to try to steer away from conventional designs instead of steering into them or leaving it to chance.

Anyway I think this is a great model/analogy for what ERE2 is trying to do.

[daylen]

This passage from Sex, Ecology, and Spirituality on the Ascent (many to one) and Descent (one to many) seems relevant to the general trend of the thread:

Or, in short: Return to One, embrace Many. The exuberant and loving and unconditional embrace of the Many is the fruition and consummation of the Perfection of the One, and without which the One remains dualistic, fractured, "envious".

This integration may be thought of (very crudely and, as always, somewhat misleadingly) as a Great Circle. The descending or manifesting or creative path moves from the top of the circle to the bottom, and the ascending or returning path from the bottom to the top - both arcs traversing the same dimensions - which is why, as we will see, "The way up is the way down".

Thus, Descent is not bad, unless taken in and by itself; on the contrary, it is the Creative Source and Matrix of all that is and the fruition of Perfection itself. Likewise, Ascent is not bad, unless taken in and by itself; on the contrary, it is the realization of the Summit and Goal of all that is. The point, we might say, is that the circle of Ascending and Descending energies must always be unbroken: "this world" and the "other world" united in one ongoing, everlasting, exuberant embrace.