Let's talk about how to avoid darknetting ERE

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Re: Let's talk about how to avoid darknetting ERE

Post by jacob »

ffj wrote:
Fri Nov 25, 2022 6:35 pm
What is your process for maintaining the critical number of people at each stage? Or does it naturally happen? Where is the biggest problem in this regard?
The main strategy is/was to maintain an ongoing conversation across the journals to connect people at different stages. The biggest problem in that regard is if this conversation dies out because a) journals no longer get updated; b) journals get deleted (there's still value for people reading the archives); or c) journals turn into summaries of discussion that has concluded elsewhere.

Add: Also, a historical problem has been that many kind of fade away from the forums once they hit FI. Maintaining journals post-FIRE also helps.

Support strategies to that effect was to maintain separate discussions that would keep the "old forumites" who have already gone through the process coming back and occasionally commenting on the journals. This used to be done via the political forum, but ultimately the polarization became too destructive when each political spat would cause 1-2 people to stop journaling and leave the forum. ERE2 and the fixit type logs kinda substitute in for that now but they don't attract as many old forumites as the politics used to do.

"Theory without practice is empty; practice without theory is blind."

The active process is to try to maintain some kind of coexistence between those who are interested in theory and those who are interested in practice. A lot of those who are interested in the theory have already gone through all the practice. For example, I have personally little interest in the journals that mainly cover technical details like budgets and savings rates. Been there done that. If that was all the forum did, I'd stop going here. Same reason I don't hang out on reddit on the MMM forums. I come here for the other stuff. Basically, the opposite of Scott2's comments.
jennypenny wrote:
Sat Nov 26, 2022 7:08 am
The past couple of years though, the forum is using a lot of shorthand that IMO doesn't directly relate to the ERE journey and it makes it really difficult to follow conversations. I am familiar with my own MBTI but not other types, or the car metaphor (I have read about them but not committed them to memory). Same with all the SD color-coding ... read about them but that's the extent of my interest. The shorthand is useful during discussions specifically of those topics, but now it's used all the time in other threads that have nothing to do with them. It's really pervasive and I have no interest in learning them or posting an SD color chart over my desk just to be able to understand ERE threads.
There has been a lot of talk about subjective and intersubjective/cultural understanding on the forum over the past few years. It doesn't really relate to the objective individual journey towards ERE which is mostly about learning varies techniques and tools. The "inner work" is important for what to do after FIRE or simply how to be at peace with oneself and the world in general. Previously many people we reach FIRE or ERE and proceed to not really know what to do with their lives. They'd spend a year in Europe only to return to their old career because that's the only life script they ever knew or ever could create. In terms of life scripts, the majority is still just Copying or Comparing from their parents, family, or maybe college/career. In that regard, it is also important for society's collective journey towards ERE... insofar the FIRE movement ever breaks beyond 0.5% of the population. Right now it appeals mostly to the culture of STEM professionals. It would be nice if we could figure out how to appeal to other people and not just software engineers.

All the typing vernacular is just learning new tools to map out this understanding or search. So learning SD colors is no different than learning the names and rudimentary cultures of different countries or parties when discussing politics. I find it useful because I prefer to take the 50000 feet. I know, from my maps, that those who lean more towards feelings and postmodernism would rather have a human2human conversation and connect on an emotional level. I'm basically using it to try to understand where other people are coming from and where they might go in the context of ERE. This is a fairly specialized objective ... many will only be interested in understanding themselves yet many will not find that all that relevant either ("Why do I need to psychoanalyze myself?!") or simply disagree with the methods.

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Re: Let's talk about how to avoid darknetting ERE

Post by Scott 2 »

@Jacob - what gives you confidence people have a shared understanding when using SD colors in conversation? I shy away from such frameworks, because I've found them to impair communication. Abstract language hides substantial assumptions by each party. In my experience, sorting those out is the most critical aspect of collaboration. The effective conversation reduces to simple terms anyways.

In the fields I do understand, I've also found there's a bell shaped expertise / complexity curve. A beginner content to chop wood / carry water, can have 95% of the benefit an expert finds. Complexity chasing in the intermediate stage tends to move one backwards, often offering little reward.


@JP - I find your posts valuable. A weakness of forums is the trend towards homogeneous makeup and perspective. Those with the wisdom to offer a contrasting perspective, can be driven away. I think that's a loss. You feeling discouraged to post is a good example.

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Re: Let's talk about how to avoid darknetting ERE

Post by candide »

jennypenny wrote:
Sat Nov 26, 2022 7:08 am
From my perspective, it feels like the MMGs and heavy use of shorthand are all the same thing -- the forum's version of secret handshakes and sub-clubs that are meant to give other people the impression that they aren't welcome.
It seems that way to me as well. From the vantage point of someone who joined in April, the culture here in no way indicated that MMGs would be pleasant at all. I thought they would just be jargon and people competing to show off highly advanced projects that they pretended were noob level. I thought if I showed up at my real level, with nearly anything, I would be at worst laughed at, and at best my offerings would be met with awkward silence while everyone looks at the leader of the group to see if it is okay to acknowledge what just happened, usually met with a change of subject... This sketch is based on my interactions with cliques of all sorts, but that grammar of exclusion holds for ones made up of smart people as well.

The fact that people reported that the "darknets" adjacent to here are not like that was eye-opening to me... So we have one set of behavior in those places (more human, accepting) and another set of behavior here because "culture"? Does it bother anyone else that the places where the faces are dropped happens to be the ones that gobble up more bandwidth (therefore carbon)? The medium can be a big part of the message, but if someone knows how to show values over there, they should be able to show them on the forums.

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Re: Let's talk about how to avoid darknetting ERE

Post by jacob »

Scott 2 wrote:
Sat Nov 26, 2022 9:47 am
@Jacob - what gives you confidence people have a shared understanding when using SD colors in conversation? I shy away from such frameworks, because I've found them to impair communication. Abstract language hides substantial assumptions by each party. In my experience, sorting those out is the most critical aspect of collaboration. The effective conversation reduces to simple terms anyways.
I think it comes down to personal experience and some people being subjectively very different. I hear the same objections when it comes to MBTI. "I don't want to connect with your type. I want to connect with you. I don't want to know that Ann is an ENFP. I want to know who Ann is." However, just as the mapping introduces substantial assumptions, a theory of mind that relies on assuming that one can smoothly communicate with others also hide the assumption that this sometimes fail.

This is easiest to explain using an IQ Gaussian. (The argument gets stronger with personality typing.) Someone with an IQ of 100 connects about as many dots about as fast as 68% of the people he randomly runs into (people with an IQ between 85 and 115). Thus assuming that the person he talks to is about the same as himself will work in 2/3 of the cases. For the last 1/3, he can just move on to the next person. That's a pretty good operational method as far as social interactions go.

Someone with an IQ of 130 will only experience this connection success (similar size and speed of the mental juggling) in 15% of other people. In 4/5+ of the cases he will have to figure out how the other people are different from him. Or be constantly misunderstood. Or alone. If he's mentally juggling 10 balls and walk into a conversation with someone who only juggles 5 balls, he'll sound like a nerd. To avoid that he'll have to learn which 5 balls normal people juggle and learn how to juggle those. This is how mapping helps.

With personality types, this gets harder. INTJ is about 2% of the population and will generally relate easily to other NTs which in total is about 10-15% of the population. This is the same problem as the IQ problem except rare types are not necessarily smart enough to compensate. Being an INTJ (an introspective person who thinks in logical abstractions) in no way helps me when conversing with an ESFP (human-oriented person who focuses on how events makes them feel). The best I can do in that case is to have a map that indicates I'm practically talking to an alien species, relatively speaking.

As an outlier in so many ways, I've found that abstract mapping REVEALS a lot of substantial assumptions about other types and other languages. Many people are only aware of their own and just presume that everybody else is like them. This presumption works for those who are close to the norm. It does not work for those who are far away from the norm. To wit, T-F wise I personally prioritize emotions to such a small degree when it comes to my "executive functioning" that it's easy for me to forget that almost everybody are more influenced by their emotions than I am.

Spiral does the same for culture and politics. Instead of thinking of the other side as either evil or simply "misguided humans", I have a much better idea of the value set someone is operating from and WHY they believe what they believe.

In short, if I know that Ann is an ENFP, I might actually know more about Ann than she knows about herself, because I'm using the correct framework. Insofar Ann in not the introspective type, she might simply have copied her understanding of who she should be from friends and family and the society she's trying to fit into and adopted a few commercial slogans in the process. "I'm a fun-loving girl who likes long walks on the beach. Live, love, laugh!"

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Re: Let's talk about how to avoid darknetting ERE

Post by daylen »

Scott 2 wrote:
Sat Nov 26, 2022 9:47 am
In the fields I do understand, I've also found there's a bell shaped expertise / complexity curve. A beginner content to chop wood / carry water, can have 95% of the benefit an expert finds. Complexity chasing in the intermediate stage tends to move one backwards, often offering little reward.
Yet, who is an expert of all human culture? Chopping wood and carrying water is one thing. A planet of choppers and carriers that get along for the most part and sustain the biosphere is quite another. Pretty sure no one is an expert on all that is required to reach this through simple emergent leadership. Perhaps the complexity is necessary before the development of humans that are experts on what is required? Who better to work on this than those who have somewhat decoupled from the traditional modern system?

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Re: Let's talk about how to avoid darknetting ERE

Post by avalok »

jennypenny wrote:
Sat Nov 26, 2022 7:08 am
From my perspective, it feels like the MMGs and heavy use of shorthand are all the same thing -- the forum's version of secret handshakes and sub-clubs that are meant to give other people the impression that they aren't welcome.
I've generally found domain-specific language important because it can, though not always, communicate concepts more effectively. I don't think this tendency is solely elitist: it is a side effect, and one that certainly should be acknowledged. The benefit of these models pervading into other discussions is that their usefulness can leak into other areas. I see it as another attempt at lateral thinking; who knows what might result? I am no expert of SD, but I increasingly find myself thinking from that lens because it is too useful to drop. Restricting the use of it and similar concepts for the sake of accessibility could negatively affect discussions elsewhere on the forum.

That all said, I cannot deny that such language is a barrier to entry. I have considered this a lot previously, mainly in relation to my work, and have never thought of a way to resolve this elegantly (i.e. keep the language, but facilitate discussion with those unfamiliar with it). That would be the holy grail, best of both worlds outcome.

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Re: Let's talk about how to avoid darknetting ERE

Post by ffj »

@Jacob

The main strategy is/was to maintain an ongoing conversation across the journals to connect people at different stages.


Do people know this? Maybe I've been clueless all of these years (a fair argument), but I've never known this before today. In fact, I've always thought that journals were a distraction, especially ones like mine that don't even address finances. Seriously, I've always assumed the journals were just perks. I remember 7 once declaring she treats the forum as her parlor, which I strongly associate with and now it's refreshing to know differently.

Personally, and the recent talk about in-house jargon* reinforces this belief, I think a stumbling block for new talent is the perceived entrance fee. And a non-clear mission statement, well, one at least that doesn't require you to read an entire book first. When I used to teach, I always showed students how something complicated worked first, and only after they had some competency in practice, did we delve into the weeds on why it worked. Now I know there are a certain quantity of people out there that cannot understand anything until the theory is mastered, but it's been my experience that most people understand things much quicker when they get their hands dirty. But it may be a blue-collar thing too.

My point is that maybe simplifying expectations for new folks would help? All this talk about members going into master groups exclusively misses the point that we are a very small group, and that maybe by expanding our base we won't have to worry if a few members choose to geek out in a sub-group. Because the main group will be large enough to handle fluctuations.


* all the talk about Wheaten levels and such is off-putting (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WswSdQoNKK4) :lol: to new people especially I believe. I'm not advocating people should stop but that maybe new people should be able to have their fears addressed in a friendly manner so they don't get scared away. This could be something as simple as a page directed at all new-comers with easy expectations as well as non-expectations.

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Re: Let's talk about how to avoid darknetting ERE

Post by AxelHeyst »

candide wrote:
Sat Nov 26, 2022 9:50 am
The fact that people reported that the "darknets" adjacent to here are not like that was eye-opening to me... So we have one set of behavior in those places (more human, accepting) and another set of behavior here because "culture"? Does it bother anyone else that the places where the faces are dropped happens to be the ones that gobble up more bandwidth (therefore carbon)? The medium can be a big part of the message, but if someone knows how to show values over there, they should be able to show them on the forums.
I agree, and I think that the medium (the technology of video chats and knowing real names) makes the MMGs more human and accepting by default, without any effort. Translating that effect to the forum in some degree is a matter of intent and social-agreed-upon structure, such as shifting our checkins to our journals. It won't happen by accident. And that's what this thread is about.

It is eye opening to me that the MMGs were perceived as closed-off subcliques of elites! If I'd known that I would have done something to dispel that illusion earlier. The entire reason I wanted to form an MMG was to have a space where we forumites could connect in a more human-natural way without being worried about privacy concerns, so it never occurred to me there could be an elite-clique perception. I'm glad I know it exists, though, as something to watch out for and/or manage expectations around.

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Re: Let's talk about how to avoid darknetting ERE

Post by Scott 2 »

@Jacob - I understand and agree with the value a framework can offer.

My question is simpler. How do you know my claim to be an INTJ is valid? Even if we assume a perfect objective framework, what gives you confidence I understand it? There's a huge gap between knowing and understanding.

I've brought assumptions and bias to the conversation. But now, those are also hidden behind my choice of the "right" shared terms. The low fidelity of a text medium further obscures.

I've also found most fail to recognize the heuristic nature of frameworks. They aren't perfectly objective. This leads to hammer/nail scenarios. From my admittedly naive perspective, I see it happening on the forum. As an outsider, that's my immediate cue to nope out. I don't have the energy for what looks like a pseudo-intellectual conversation.


@Daylen - There is a place for complexity. But it is not the terminal state. It needs to be siloed within communication about a framework. When testing framework validity, a key aspect is translation back into common language. During application, it's best if the concepts can live there. Otherwise the fuzzy communication creates too much noise.

Creating a shared understanding has to be the top priority. Distilling the ideas forces clarity.

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Re: Let's talk about how to avoid darknetting ERE

Post by daylen »

Part of this, I think, involves loosening some boundaries and tightening others. Though, this will inevitably turn back around into a privacy problem. This is a challenge as privacy and inclusion are often conflicted. On one hand we can include more people into a more constrained public conversation (i.e. the forum) and on the other hand we can offer exclusion barriers that protect personal details to various degrees when exploring fringe conversational topics. Though, this can be reframed as an exclusion of conversations in the public eye along side an inclusion of conversations at various degrees of privacy.

It all more or less ends up at a similar place. The tensions being a sign of the overall culture simultaneously adapting to its surroundings and defending its legacy code.
Last edited by daylen on Sat Nov 26, 2022 11:36 am, edited 2 times in total.

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Re: Let's talk about how to avoid darknetting ERE

Post by AxelHeyst »

ffj wrote:
Sat Nov 26, 2022 10:58 am
Personally, and the recent talk about in-house jargon* reinforces this belief, I think a stumbling block for new talent is the perceived entrance fee. And a non-clear mission statement, well, one at least that doesn't require you to read an entire book first.
Well, Jacob has a mission statement for why the board exists and that guides his actions here, but I think it doesn't require all members to share or even be aware of that same mission. In fact, maybe it's best if that mission isn't necessarily made super obvious, as it could lead to a homogenization of the forum. Diversity is good as it leads to surprising non-designable things to happen. Most people who join do so for their own personal mission of exiting Plato's cave (achieving FI, attaining semiERE status, however they conceive of it).

When I joined, I'm not sure if reading some mission statement about different strata of forumites being connected in some such and such way would have helped at all. I wanted to be here for my reasons, and I'm not sure how much I would have tolerated something like that if it felt like a directive. Ideally I would have just shrugged and ignored it. I might have gotten a weird social experiment vibe and avoided the forum as some strange INTJ social control experiment.

And... I always felt that reading a book is the informal entrance fee for this forum. The ERE book. It's fine if people get excited about the blog and things they read here and start engaging... but everyone who posts here should read the book sometime very close to the beginning of their relationship with this community.

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Re: Let's talk about how to avoid darknetting ERE

Post by avalok »

AxelHeyst wrote:
Sat Nov 26, 2022 11:35 am
When I joined, I'm not sure if reading some mission statement about different strata of forumites being connected in some such and such way would have helped at all. I wanted to be here for my reasons, and I'm not sure how much I would have tolerated something like that if it felt like a directive. Ideally I would have just shrugged and ignored it.
I think it would be difficult to not make it feel imposed, and making the mission statement explicit, codifying the pathway(s) and language could take away the fact that ERE is a very open framework. An underlying implicit tenet is that we're each to find our own way, as evidenced by the variety seen in the journals (AH, I think you are yourself a perfect example of this). It could squash the nonorganized nature of the discussions here and/or make people feel as though there are a set of particulars they're supposed to do to qualify. It feels incongruous.

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Re: Let's talk about how to avoid darknetting ERE

Post by jacob »

Scott 2 wrote:
Sat Nov 26, 2022 9:47 am
In the fields I do understand, I've also found there's a bell shaped expertise / complexity curve. A beginner content to chop wood / carry water, can have 95% of the benefit an expert finds. Complexity chasing in the intermediate stage tends to move one backwards, often offering little reward.
Complexity does have a cost, but once the cost is paid and internalized, it opens the possibility of seeing connections and creating solutions that beginners remain oblivious to.

I agree that beginners and experts have 95% of same benefit, but---and this is probably not what you meant---I also know that experts have access to many other benefits that the beginner does not have.

For example, ERE HQ looks 95% the same compared to the house next door. The 5% appear as a bunch of strange details to the beginner. Homebuilt contraptions. What looks like a project. Experts recognize it for it is. It takes one to know one.

However, I'm an expert anticonsumer and my neighbors are not. Even we both have middle class lives, ERE HQ spends $14,000/year when neighbor spends $50,000 on the same standard of living.

I could go on and on with this and I will ;-)

Sometimes I have people over because they heard handtool woodworking is fun. So I usually let them "square a board" which means making sure all angles are 90 degrees. A beginner will typically spend 60 minutes on a single board (and enjoying it all the way). I can do it in 10-15 minutes. In terms of exercise (planing is physical work) we get the same out of it. We also get the same out of it in terms of the finished board(*). The reason I can do it so much faster is that I see a lot more variables and connections in terms of how I push the plane. A beginner will have a simpler approach: Plane a bit, check. Overcorrect planing too much on the other side. Repeat ... until they luck out on a solution. I'll get it right the first time with minimal waste.

(*) As a compounded effect, I can make 4 boards the same size. A beginner will have a much harder time with consistent results. This means that I can build a box. The beginner can not (or will take even longer doing so).

Same deal with sailing. A beginner will have a rule of thumb for where the boom goes. An intermediate trimmer will look at twist, belly, gusts, and how the jib and main work together. The more expert will go that much faster even if the work is the same.

I've yet to figure out the magic words that allows a beginner to see what they haven't learned how to see yet. I heard a Shaolin monk describe it as something like "distant student". Techniques often fail or succeed based on a difference of centimeters or degrees of difference. It's impossible to see this difference from a distance. One guy seems really powerful compared to the other but they look the same from over here? What's the difference?

It's somewhat the same with ERE communicating. People looking for quick&easy tricks thing ERE (jacob) is overcomplicating what should be a very simple message of "spend less than you make". But no, there's a lot more to it than that. "Spend less than you make" is what it appears like ... but that doesn't say much about how it's done. Understanding this requires diving into the complexity of all the efficiency gains.

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Re: Let's talk about how to avoid darknetting ERE

Post by daylen »

Scott 2 wrote:
Sat Nov 26, 2022 11:32 am
Creating a shared understanding has to be the top priority. Distilling the ideas forces clarity.
I am willing to distill such topics with anyone (actually I have been waiting :) ). All that is required is engagement (and probably more learning on my part about who is engaging me). There is a lot of room for clarity and uncertainty to coexist in the mind. I think this is essential to wrestling with topics as complex as multi-agent dynamics. Noise is just noise until you try to label and track it relative to signal.

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Re: Let's talk about how to avoid darknetting ERE

Post by jacob »

Scott 2 wrote:
Sat Nov 26, 2022 11:32 am
@Jacob - I understand and agree with the value a framework can offer.

My question is simpler. How do you know my claim to be an INTJ is valid? Even if we assume a perfect objective framework, what gives you confidence I understand it? There's a huge gap between knowing and understanding.

I've brought assumptions and bias to the conversation. But now, those are also hidden behind my choice of the "right" shared terms. The low fidelity of a text medium further obscures.

I've also found most fail to recognize the heuristic nature of frameworks. They aren't perfectly objective. This leads to hammer/nail scenarios. From my admittedly naive perspective, I see it happening on the forum. As an outsider, that's my immediate cue to nope out. I don't have the energy for what looks like a pseudo-intellectual conversation.
I see our disagreement to be between "the map is not the territory; the territory is not the map, but maps are still useful" and "maps are useless". I don't see that many people holding onto the third combination of "the map is the territory", so I don't see that as a problem.

I agree that frameworks aren't perfectly objective. On the other hand, MBTI, Spiral, Kegan, Cook-Greater, ... is something people have thought about a lot. Some experts have talked to a lot of people and found that certain people more often than not have certain things in common. From that they've created maps of commonalities. These maps actually interobjective in the sense that we can use the same maps if we know the maps. Even if they are only 70-80% accurate, they're better than presuming that "others are like me" because that presumption has 1% accuracy for some people and 60% for others.

From the perspective of "jacob" (if you want to know "jacob") my sole focus is on mapping the territory (not mapping other maps) in as many different ways I can think of. I'm pursuing the lattice work of mental models. The process of using it is also called vision-logic. It's not just a hammer. It's a toolbox. In my case, this has proven an effective way of navigating life. I'm confident that this is the best method for me to understand you even if you don't have confidence in using e.g. MBTI in understanding yourself. See what I mean?

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Re: Let's talk about how to avoid darknetting ERE

Post by Scott 2 »

jacob wrote:
Sat Nov 26, 2022 11:55 am
I've yet to figure out the magic words that allows a beginner to see what they haven't learned how to see yet.
A person has to try the thing. Learn in stages. Get their hands dirty. No amount of jargon makes up for squaring boards together.

I put a lot of effort into finding expert yoga teachers. One of the most experienced - her instructions were simply "make this shape". At one point, when I was failing to make the shape - she walked over and dug her nails into my shoulders. Immediate correction. The marks were there for hours.

I'd been through hours of instruction on the shape. I'd read dozens of pages. But, language has inherit limitations. Adding complexity didn't bridge them. The frameworks made communication more difficult. A few seconds hands on was what it took. She learned in the same way, from a man who was ESL.

Often people here are trying to think their way through, when they have to learn via experience. I also think it puts off the people who have already learned via experience, but didn't go down the framework rabbit hole. A framework may be useful for contextualizing after the fact, but it's not a map.

Edit since posts are overlapping - When looking towards engagement of a broader community, it might be more accurate to say - the framework cannot be followed as a map.
Last edited by Scott 2 on Sat Nov 26, 2022 12:52 pm, edited 1 time in total.

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Re: Let's talk about how to avoid darknetting ERE

Post by daylen »

Trying the thing in social science is conversation about the thing no one else is talking about yet. :lol:

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Re: Let's talk about how to avoid darknetting ERE

Post by jacob »

On the subject of jargon:

I'd like to think I can elaborate on any statement I make or position I take, but my responses come with a trilemma: (short, complete, plain). Pick any two, but only two!

short & complete responses will contain jargon
short & plain responses will leave out important parts
complete & plain responses will make them extraordinarily long

Due to the nature of the beast someone's preferences will always be excluded.

Without jargon, replies become either long or incomplete.
Without length, replies become either incomplete or full of jargon.
Without (over)simplification, replies become long or full of jargon.

Pick your poison. There's just no quick and easy solution to complexity no matter how much anyone or a certain philosophy wants a short-cut in order to feel included.

We don't use jargon to exclude people. It's not a secret vocabulary. Links are frequently provided. It's easily googled. It's a way to increase the efficiency of our communication. But it does take some effort to learn. For beginners who just wanna be included without doing any homework... sorry, but you'll have to hope that someone will continue to take the effort to provide you with a simplified long-form explanation every single time. That's not me though.

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Re: Let's talk about how to avoid darknetting ERE

Post by AxelHeyst »

Scott2, what does "make this shape" look like here? Is it not the 21 day makeover, the tactical portions of the book, certain journals, and various practical focused threads? Don't we already have plentiful non-theoretical material for those for whom it is appropriate?

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Re: Let's talk about how to avoid darknetting ERE

Post by Scott 2 »

@Jacob - I'm clear on and respect your perspective. I simply doubt the escalating complexity successfully creates a community, unless there is ongoing distillation. MMG related dark netting is symptomatic of a broader challenge, IMO. The MMG individuals would be best at bridging the gap you want to hold. I suppose it's a form of succession planning.

@AxelHeyst - I think that's a good list. Lately, I've noticed a trend away from that activity and/or threads diverging.

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