Mastermind Group #2: Electric Boogaloo

[grundomatic]

We are looking to add a couple of people to our MMG. If you want in for our Oct 7 meeting, you'll need to read How Not to Die by Greger. We are potentially changing formats from doing just book clubs, so there is also that to consider--there may be months of experimentation while we try things out. Let me know if you want in or have any questions.

[grundomatic]

sodatrain has joined our group. Surprisingly, given previous interest, nobody else has reached out or responded about joining. We are going to try a new format where each member gets to have one meeting to use how they want. They can revisit anything we've done in the past like talking about their life and getting feedback or hosting a discussion about a specific topic or book. Or they can try something new, as they like. The idea is not to burn ourselves out with reading assignments and to give members a chance to get what they want out of our group.

Below are the notes from the meeting, taken by another member. A few things stood out to me. One was how our discussion about seeing people suffer, having a solution, but no good way to share it--it's hard to watch others self destruct. This discussion seemed to mirror the current forum discussion about talking to people about ERE. Second was that one member made an immediate change to their diet due to our reading. Last was contrasting the difference between the book, with it's scientific, evidence-based recommendations, and an opinion piece (blog post) suggesting that one can't impact their health through diet, calling it a new "religion". This I found quite ridiculous, given that 1/3 of the book was dedicated to citing studies on the impact of diet on health. I suppose this goes back to some confusing their right to their own opinion with the right to their own facts. "The anxiety around diet isn't worth it for me. I'd rather eat what I want and be happy." Fine. "Food doesn't come close to the highest thing on the list that will kill me." Hold on a second...

Notes from ERE Meeting October 8th, 2023

Specific activities we do to stay healthy - did book reinforce these activities or make you change your mind?

G - read china paper and started eating closer to vegetarian - healthier, cheaper. Meat was easy to give up, not so much with cheese. Is buying produce out of season worth it or not to keep eating produce or the 'superfoods'? Nuts and beans and brown rice...spending a bit more to get the healthy fats and protein.

A- spend money on food vs future medical bills. Buys organic when it matters, not when it doesn't. Tried vegan, but heavy focus on carbs made sick often. Needs to watch dairy intake. Is eating some meat, but about one chicken breast a day, the rest is vegetables.

G - article about "healthism". Comparing perspectives of looking for evidence to base decisions on vs genetic determinism and calling attempts at living healthier "trying to cheat death".

A - uses avocado oil for cooking.

J - cooking without oil is doable, partner does it quite regularly.

G - cooking with an Instant Pot makes it much easier cooking without oil.

J - getting weaker in midlife. Found out ways to get more energy - stop eating dairy products and meat. Tried it out and got vitality back.

G - likes that Greger gives permission to have unhealthy days. Pulled pork and mac & cheese dinner is hard to turn down.

A - recommended The Omnivore's Dilemma by Michael Pollan.

D - designing your life to make your goals easy. Living in Oldcity, walk to the grocery store, biking to see friends. Versus in Newcity,where you need a car to get around. Apply the same principle to food - make it easy to make the right choice. Ate mostly vegetarian, almost vegan with partner who couldn't eat dairy. found that when not eating any animal products at all wasn't feeling the best, but might have needed to supplement more.

Merit badges for ERE - my first lentil soup, I told someone about ERE

J - can be hard to change ingrained habits. Had a hard time not drinking wine at first, but after going a while without, realized that the negative effects of it were getting stronger and stronger.

G - stopped drinking because a friend of his was struggling with it, ending up not finding it very difficult. Struggles with getting rid of sugar though (C can relate)

A- not a big drinker, alcohol can be problematic if you have depressive tendencies. Alcohol can be part of your personality: "I like craft beer!" "Omg me too!"

Caffeine - who drinks it? G does, and caffeine hits hard because he doesn't drink it often. A drinks tea instead of coffee.

J- How do you deal with wanting to tell people that they can reverse their suffering/diseases?

G - some people are different and they don't care - you can't make any changes if someone doesn't want to.

A - doesn't try to change people. People can have their own issues that we can't see that change the choices they make. Past trauma, experience, genetics etc.

S - part of the culture we live in and the vicious cycle of overwork and eating poorly. Being immersed in a toxic culture makes it harder to make healthy changes.

D - lightbulb joke. Had a partner who was a therapist for a weight loss program. THe #1 factor in life changes was whether they wanted to change or not. Not therapy method or modality. Lead by example instead of trying to change someone who doesn't want to.

C - leading by example. No preaching unless people ask for it! Just do it - ride your bike, eat well, save money, and people will learn from you in small ways.

[J_]

To add @grundomatic, as member of MMG #2
The "How not to die" book of Greger is also a perfect start for knowledge if you have already a disease. He makes clear that many of our western diseases are reversible by changing nutrition. Such as depression or lung disease.
I had once asthma and had to use strong inhalers. After applying Greger's advise I completely recovered.

[mathiverse]

This is totally late, but I wanted to share that I joined this MMG, as a guest, for a meeting about two months ago on the book "In Over Our Heads." I didn't find the group was much different than the MMG I routinely attend besides these items:

Notable differences
* No structured check in at the beginning of the meeting. In contrast, the AxelHeyst group has a gratefulness check in and an ERE related update which I think keeps the fact we are all looking to progress on ERE at the forefront of the meetings.
* For their group, meetings happen even with only a few people (2 - 3 out of 5? 6?) versus our group generally cancelling a meeting if fewer than 5 - 6 people (out of 8) plan to show up
* grundomatic's really good discussion questions were helpful for keeping the meeting on interesting topics. AxelHeyst's group may want to do that when we have a book club meeting.

[grundomatic]

To add @grundomatic, as member of MMG #2
The "How not to die" book of Greger is also a perfect start for knowledge if you have already a disease. He makes clear that many of our western diseases are reversible by changing nutrition. Such as depression or lung disease.
I had once asthma and had to use strong inhalers. After applying Greger's advise I completely recovered.

Right! Like I used to tell the kids in my class, it's never too late to change your behavior!

Connecting this to another part of the discussion, it may be that "stories" might be more effective in communicating the healthy lifestyle than "facts", at least for many people. Probably not chance that he started the book with a story about the relative that reversed their...heart disease, I think?

Maybe it's a worthwhile endeavor to practice the art of telling stories, and perfect the story of how you overcame asthma. That way you can better share this information with people that aren't going to read a giant tome about health then hold a video meeting on a Sunday to talk about it.

[sodatrain]

Happy to be in the MMG! Thanks for having me!

Fwiw, I like the idea of an ERE related update (Assuming that's a 'how is each member doing in their ERE journey) and a little bit less but still like the idea of a Gratitude practice even if it sounds a little cheesy. I'm convinced it's a good thing - Especially after reading How to Be Happy With What You Have thanks to @theanimal for the tip!

[jacob]

Connecting this to another part of the discussion, it may be that "stories" might be more effective in communicating the healthy lifestyle than "facts", at least for many people. Probably not chance that he started the book with a story about the relative that reversed their...heart disease, I think?

There are very few popularized non-fiction books that do not use personalized stories/narratives. I presume this is for good reason (it works, most readers prefer it). The majority of humans are sociocentric and so strive to "be like others" or at least "fit in" even if they don't know the other person or even if the other person is fictional. The majority are also concrete thinkers albeit with the capacity to think analytically in familiar situations. Copying a concrete (believable) example [person] removes the need to understand/figure out the theory. Conversely, more advanced books will only include a few case studies but otherwise mostly focus on Compiling and Calculating.

[7Wannabe5]

@jacob:

Where would you place a book such as "Guns, Germs, and Steel" by Diamond or "Masculine Domination" by Bourdieu? I've recently noticed a sort of old-fashioned or post-post-modern tendency towards authors being more personally revelatory and/or casually chatty even in textbooks. Kind of along the lines of "Since I am pretty much the only human qualified to write a book on this topic, I will feel free to disclose my actual feelings about my wrong-minded colleague whom I was forced to share department space with in 1997" and/or "Normalizing a database at this level can actually be fucking fun."

[grundomatic]

We will be adding bicycle7 and berrytwo to our group. I don't want want the group to wither away from attrition. A few members have stepped away from active participation, and then if just a couple people miss a meeting it gets very small in a hurry.

In our last meeting, we discussed travel. I'm feeling a little lazy to extract all the names and identifying details from the notes, but essentially there was a broad range of perspectives on travel.

One member thinks travel can be escapism, another indeed likes breaking up the routine.
One likes traveling to new places, another likes returning to the same places.
One mostly travels to visit people, another likes to do research for their hobby.
There seemed to be an agreement that living somewhere is very different than visiting somewhere.
There was discussion of reducing costs of travel--all the usual suspects came up: CC hacking, housesitting, using hobby for free travel, staying with people you know, and removing cheap flight notifications so one isn't tempted.
Unless I'm mistaken, everyone present actively travels, at least nobody said "I'm giving up on it. No value to me anymore."

[grundomatic]

Had our first meeting with our new members. I forgot to have someone take notes. We discussed different ways of making and thinking about money, using the 4 quadrants from the book as a guide. Maybe other members will share their biggest take-away here?

[J_]

Our group still exists, and we have monthly meetings on discord. @Grundomatic organizes it.
Today we discussed about ERE city/community. We searched what drives us to think about such a clustering. Of course the positive reactions of the recent erefest so well organized by @AxelHeyst are proof of the drive to meet each other in real live.
A conclusion was that the "filter" (that we all have internalized the ere-principles) works very positive. So we can easily concentrate the discussion within that frame. A further conclusion was that in real life most of us are bound with all kind of strings to their location or not willing to change location. Still for many it is a wish to live in walking distance to other forumites/ere-people.
It is great that forumites have the possibility to (temporarily) try out an ere location with the offers like @AxelHeyst, @Jean and @sodatrain. In three continents!

[sodatrain]

The MMG today was a great discussion. @J_ captured the essence of it. I am excited to have a few links/resources to check out from the core discussion and the 'after party'.

Great discussion around community/network/relationship building!

I'll share the resources here:

• Spiral Dynamics Green (I'm newbie level at SD still)
• Cal Newport Deep Life Stack in the context of learning/defining/articulating ones values
• Book: The Renaissance Soul by Margaret Lobenstine also in the context of values.
• F.O.R.D Model for reducing social anxiety while keeping a conversation going and perhaps re/directing it in a more preferable path
• A book mention that I didn't write down... I'll update the post after the title is shared! It's on Community building
• Perhaps less a resource for something specific, but this architect was mentioned which seems to have some cool stuff! Philippe Starck

[Cam]

My takeaway from the meeting was the importance of creating an environment where spontaneous connections and interactions can occur. @grundomatic asked the group when our social lives were richest - a lot of us said high school, college or grad school. Education is filled with places for those interactions to occur - mainly classes and transport to and from school. Higher quality interactions were mentioned during higher education, because of the different filters in place. One member said his social life was at its richest right now, so go him!!

There's an overlap between extroverts and introverts in having activities in common to talk about/do together. I mentioned my dislike of small talk (thanks @Sodatrain for the FORD model!) but how if I am working on something with someone e.g. bike repair, gardening or sewing it gives something easy and interesting to talk about.

Whereas for extroverts it's great because they think "damn I could use some socializing" and then they spot someone needing help in the garden. The introvert gets help, has an easy conversational topic, and the extrovert gets the socialization they need.

Finally, interactions that need to be planned out have a sizeable barrier to entry - at least for an introvert like me I love having fires in the backyard with my friends, but I will usually default to messing about in the garage, or reading. It's just easier. For me, it's the grown-up version of not wanting to attend my friend's birthday party as a kid. I'd always need to be pushed to actually attend, but then I'd have a great time. Though I do eventually hit a point where I think, "I should really contact my friends", that point lies higher for me than others.

[berrytwo]

[*]A book mention that I didn't write down... I'll update the post after the title is shared! It's on Community building

The book is called Creating Community Anywhere by Shaffer & Anundsen. I found it a couple years ago on the book shelf in my intentional community. Looking back through it now, I wonder if it may be a little too broad for what you are looking for, but could be wrong! It is a good 101 book and talks about some of the shadow sides + the great parts of living in community.


This topic is a rich one for me, and I thoroughly enjoyed chatting about ERE city/ community. One thing that I thought was interesting was someone asked about diversity (pros and cons) in Intentional communities. We went down a few rabbit holes with age and MBTI.

[Bicycle7]

Finally, interactions that need to be planned out have a sizeable barrier to entry - at least for an introvert like me I love having fires in the backyard with my friends, but I will usually default to messing about in the garage, or reading. It's just easier. For me, it's the grown-up version of not wanting to attend my friend's birthday party as a kid. I'd always need to be pushed to actually attend, but then I'd have a great time. Though I do eventually hit a point where I think, "I should really contact my friends", that point lies higher for me than others.

Part of my friend group in high school was composed of fellow introverts and opposing perceivers. So me as the infj with Fe was tasked with a lot of the social planning. I didn't really mind it because I could coerce my friends on going for a hike or bike ride instead of going to a restaurant.

But yeah, when I'm the one planning instead of an extrovert, a lot less seems to happen! I appreciate spontaneity structured around activities as well. For extroverts, it certainly seems like the main goal can be just connecting and conversation. I appreciate some of this (secondary Fe), the problem is, my social battery has delayed feedback. I won't always catch how depleted I am of social energy until it's way too late and I become super grumpy and have no energy left for anything besides reading a book in a dimly lit, quiet room.

[sodatrain]

@berrytwo - thanks a bunch for posting the title! I'll check out out for sure.

I'm feeling like I need to increase my MBTI awareness beyond the most basic. You seem super into it (as does @Bicycle7!)... any suggestions for where to get started? I guess I should also ask, has it been as an important and helpful of a tool for you (both) as it seems?

[dustBowl]

A topic that came up in our conversation was the value of diversity vs certain types of similarity in the context of connecting to people / creating community. One member brought up the example of their time in grad school and how the graduate admissions process acted as a type of filter that ensured everyone who made it through had a shared interest in a specific niche topic. That shared interest then made connecting with the other grad students easy. They compared that time to subsequent life periods when attempts to connect involved a greater sense of masking / self-translation.

It got me thinking about whether a shared interest in ERE would provide enough common ground to be an effective foundation for an IRL community (clearly it's been enough to sustain this forum for a decade and half, but that's mostly online and asynchronous). My experience at EREfest makes me want to say yes, but that event only lasted for a few days, so it's not necessarily generalizable to a longer time period. Probably it depends a lot on what we mean when we say 'community', since there's a huge range of potential configurations that could fall under the umbrella definition of 'community'.

...

At a high level, it seems like would-be community designers might want to answer the question: along which axes do you want to select for similarity vs diversity vs don't care?

[jacob]

I'm feeling like I need to increase my MBTI awareness beyond the most basic. You seem super into it (as does @Bicycle7!)... any suggestions for where to get started? I guess I should also ask, has it been as an important and helpful of a tool for you (both) as it seems?

https://www.amazon.com/Please-Understan ... 960695400/ is the seminal foundation for how people are currently talking about it with NF, NT, SP, and SJ.

https://www.amazon.com/Gifts-Differing- ... 89106074X/ is the original. I would always recommend starting with the original except the split back then was NF, NT, SF, ST, which might be confusing to modern readers, since nobody uses this anymore.

[sodatrain]

Thanks, Jacob. So it's more than just taking an online quiz, eh?

Is this one of those things where getting the book is handy if you really want to embrace it?

[daylen]

Books and other materials help with defining and contextualizing the system. Note that there are really several related systems that roughly all point in the same direction. Some having more moving parts than others. To really embrace these systems, try to imagine yourself as an anthropologist in everyday life attempting to understand the human condition. What are all these humans up to anyway? What makes them tick? How are they different than you? How are they similar?