Early Retirement Extreme Forums

The current situation reminds me a bit of 2016 when the forum struggled to understand ERE1 as compared to FIRE. We hashed it out in this thread and later formalized it with the Wheaton levels. The mapping of the territory has inspired forumites to change their mindset and actions to align with higher-level ERE1 behavior. People here actually view WL6-7 as a destination that is the natural progression beyond mainstream FIRE.

Maybe arriving at a better common understanding of ERE2 would help in a similar way. Let's start by trying to answer the question: "What is ERE2?" (preferably without using any jargon). This is similar to the challenge in the Do you really understand ERE? thread except the objective is a clear explanation. We can presume a working understanding of ERE1. I'll go first since I can only contribute at the most basic level here.

Fish's impressions of ERE2, and some other related thoughts

For the uninitiated, I would simply describe ERE2 as ERE1+community. It's not a perfect description but seems less confusing and less prone to misinterpretation as the other more technical explanations provided thus far. This also lines up with the examples of ERE2 provided in another thread.

A common point of confusion that I observe is that some people imagine ERE2 as individual progression beyond WL7. That is, the Wheaton levels added in 2021. For me, it seems more accurate to think of the Wheaton levels 1-10 being a measure of ERE1 development. Another explanation: ERE2 is *not* a trait or attribute that an individual person can have. Instead, ERE2 is what results from the interaction of ERE1 individuals.

At this point it is helpful to clarify what is meant by an "ERE1 individual" in the context of ERE2. I would draw the line at "a systems thinker with a web of goals." This is an inclusive definition that 1) characterizes the WL6-7+ forumites leading this movement, 2) still manages to capture WL4-5 that is working with the framework of the ERE book, and 3) includes exceptional humans outside this community who we find inspirational. At the same time, it excludes the bulk of participants in mainstream FIRE. This is needed to distinguish ERE2 from the FIRE movement.

To date, ERE2 activity has been rather haphazard. The current efforts appear to me like networking for mutual benefit to individual WoGs. It will get more interesting when we get a critical mass of competent, well-resourced individuals who discover new goals that can be unlocked with coordinated action. We can't know what it's going to look like because ERE2 is an emergent property. One possibility is the building of structures that facilitate the progression to higher WL through real life changes as opposed to less tangible moral support and mindset shifts. For example, imagine setting up an ERE transition support service that helps aspiring WL6 attain the lifestyle immediately. The service would use its resources to buy the person's house, help them relocate to an ERE-friendly location, set them up with part-time employment to cover expenses... basically take away the friction of going from their current situation to an ERE lifestyle.

I expect there will be practical manifestations of ERE2 arriving in the future, that will be open to participation even to those not at a high WL or in the habit of discussing ERE2 in theoretical terms. Speaking of which, I see the abstract ERE2 discussions as part of an unfinished research activity. It doesn't have to be useful or actionable. ERE2 may never have a killer application like ERE1 did in FIRE. And some practical form of ERE2 will emerge even if we don't have a proper theoretical framework for it.

Aside: I posit the existence of ERE2 levels, which provide a qualitative characterization of the effects obtained. It might be based on the absolute number of ERE1 participants in a network (or percentage of ERE1 for large social structures integrated into society).

It's useful to remember that ERE2 stands for Emergent Renaissance Ecology. This means something literal.

Perhaps the initial confusion comes from not understanding what "emergence" really entails? It's not just a buzzword.

Lets say someone had invented a game called keepie-uppie that required juggling a football and keeping it in the air for as long as possible. Lets say that people begin to practice this on the internet sharing youtube videos of their various tricks and techniques. And lets also say that someone organizes this into a curriculum of which tricks are easiest to learn first and which tricks one must master to do combinations.

However, despite being a novel and obscure game that is only practiced by a few people who rarely meet, keepie-uppie is developed to a high level as people are able to practice on their own in their own backyards. Some can keep the ball in the air for hours using all parts of the body except the arms of course.

Twenty years pass and keepie-uppie is becoming popular.

(ERE1 is currently somewhere between the previous sentence and the next sentence.)

Keepie-uppie players meet in regularly in parks each bringing their own ball and keeping it up for hours.

Then suddenly something weird happens. One ball flies loose, but another player catches it and keeps it up. Soon keepie-uppie players are passing balls between each other in one giant juggling act. A new game has emerged.

It doesn't take long before a variant is invented where the aim is to steal the ball from another player. This is tricky, so in a feat of momentuous inspiration, it is deigned worthwhile to relax the holy rule of never letting the ball touch the ground. Some complain about changing the game too much but after seeing the new rule working people quickly get over it as the newest game is much more exciting. However, there's a tendency for faster players to simply run away with the ball. Various things are attempted to resolve the situation.

Some day it occurs to the players that if they had a goal (like a flag in capture the flag), the "run away"-strategy would always return towards the goal.

Soccer has emerged or rather been developed by borrowing some concepts from other games. It was a good thing that at least one of the keepie-uppie players was also doing other sports!

As soccer gets standardized, it gets more exciting to play. It gets so exciting that it's fun to even just watch. This results in stadium being built, which in turn begets tournaments. And eventually the world cup.

Now, I'm not sure this is how soccer was actually invented, but it illustrates emergence.

There was basically no way for a keppie-uppie player to ever become a soccer player without meeting with other keppie-uppie players and coming up with a new game called soccer. As a result, keppie-uppie players learned new skills like passing, dribbling, and bending-like-Beckham that made no sense within the game of keppie-uppie.

This is what emergence is.

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Renaissance is easy. We all know what a renaissance person is (ERE1)---it is someone who is competent in a wide array of fields and able to combine ideas from different fields in a transdisciplinary way. But what is a renaissance group like? What's a renaissance business like? A renaissance community? A renaissance society? We don't really know. These constructs have not emerged yet, but they will eventually.

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Ecology is also easy. Ecology essentially deals with the relations between [different] organisms and their relations to the surrounding environment. A soccer game is a kind of ecology with different species, like goalies, strikers, midfielders, defense, referees, ... On a bigger scale, it involves audiences, stadiums, ... and franchises. And all these "species" relate to the environment of other players, turfs, etc. in different ways.

A robust ecology is rarely a monoculture of conformity. In fact conformity is stagnant. Stagnancy is suboptimal in the quickly changing environment of the 21st century. A soccer team made exclusively of defenders would also be boring indeed. When new species are added, more types of interactions become possible and interesting things happens. The audience might start singing soccer-songs. Invention happens at the edges when new environments are added, when the environment changes, or simply when the density of a species change.

Ecologies also provide scaffolding. Keepie-uppie is pretty difficult compared to soccer which is simpler to play. Soccer allows many more people to participate if nothing else passively (or semi-aggressively) in the audience. However, soccer would never be possible if the expert keepie-uppie players hadn't gotten together (essentially forming a progenitor ecology) and created the emergent game in the first place.

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And so this is basically what ERE2 is and what it is trying to do.

There's no "definition" and no "true scotsman tests". Asking for a definition is like asking the keepie-uppie players in the park who just recently figured out they could pass the ball to each other for a "definition" of soccer. No clue! We're still figuring it out. However, we're not completely blind either. We know that whatever we come up with will involve a ball and some kicking ... and probably the head too. So we're testing out what might work and what might not work.

To do so we've borrowed some terms from other games (bounce, spin, lines, header, knuckleball, ...). You certainly don't need to know them to learn keepie-uppie, but knowing them has made us better at our keepie-uppie game, so it's hard just to shut up about them or explain the tricks using the older and simpler terms.

But why even be interested in all this, jacob? Sticking with ERE1 is fine for me! In fact, I wanted ERE1 because I wanted to do my own thing which didn't fit in with corporate/career-life. And now you want me to fit into some new thing?! Sorry, that's not for me.

I have no problem with that. All I can say is that after 10+ years of ERE1 and doing my own thing, I have effectively done every single ERE1 activity an individual can in the current environment---sports, travel, new career, business, non-profit, volunteering, garden, woodworking, ...---and I eventually reached a point of diminishing returns.

What remains is to see a) what ERE1 individuals can do when they play together; and b) what may appear in the environment when that happens.

I can completely understand if people aren't interested or don't see the value of ERE2. These ideas weren't on my radar 5 years ago.

I summarized this from Jacob's response in the other thread. Is it accurate?

1. Luring people to the community who have different values, cultures and temperaments by understanding them *at scale*.
2. Encouraging them to combine in ways that foster emergent properties.
3. Figuring out post-FIRE scripts for those who early retire.

Ego wrote: ↑

Mon Dec 05, 2022 9:59 am

I summarized this from Jacob's response in the other thread. Is it accurate?

1. Luring people to the community who have different values, cultures and temperaments by understanding them *at scale*.
2. Encouraging them to combine in ways that foster emergent properties.
3. Figuring out post-FIRE scripts for those who early retire.

It does not define what ERE2 is. Rather these are the unresolved questions that we're currently working on. They form the beginning of an unknown tech-tree in list form. Over time, the list will hopefully get longer as questions are answered and the tech-tree grows.

PS: "Luring" implies some form of deception which I would consider immoral. "Selling magic pills" is not a sustainable business model. The interest in looking at different values, culture, and temperaments comes from the realization that ERE1 has so far identified so much with the values of independence, rationalism, and self-sufficiency that we've basically presumed that this is obviously something everybody would want. As such those who value community, human connection, and being in touch with their emotions have been rather turned off. However, this is merely a question of finding a way to communicate the same thing in a different language than the one spoken mostly by anarcho-capitalist engineering-types as has been the case.

Add: Given that ERE2 is more inclusive of different values or indeed appears to require another set of values than the "independence, rationalism, and self-sufficiency"-tuple, this may also explain some of the friction as discussed in viewtopic.php?t=12595

Thinking about intermingling WOGs. Here is a made up example between @AxelHeyst and myself with as simple language as possible.

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I travel to fort dirtbag in my van. I have an abundance of time because of my own oxygen mask is sorted. @AxelHeyst same.

I have a few "goals" for the trip. I want to learn and practically apply low water use techniques for growing herbs in the desert. I know a little about this from other contexts (working on farms) and theory, but want to put it into action. @AxelHeyst has similar more practical recent knowledge, but from a very wet place (Scotland). We work on this project together. Maybe we eat some fresh herbs in a salad together at the end.

Another goal is to learn basics of Blender, the open source 3D program. @AxelHeyst is an expert. I understand the basics and I want to specifically learn to do 3D renders of characters that I can use as reference for comics, stories, and zines that I am working on independent of @AH. @AH can help me quickly get up to speed for the relatively simple things I want to get out of this program.

I have a lot of experience doing nature observation and tracking animals. @AH has recently learned many of the basics and practices after his trip to Scotland. We wonder around the desert and see what we can see together. I can apply my theory and limited time in the desert, he can apply is lifetime in the desert and maybe unlock something as seen by me through new eyes, but he is able to go deeper with the insight faster.

All these projects are going well. We drink some pints of homebrew one night and come up with an idea for some characters and a story. The character is a desert naturalist. @AH runs with this on his fiction writing goals. I render some 3D character turn arounds under different lighting conditions with my new Blender skills. We collaborate on a short comics story about this new character making deep observations in the Mojave desert that tries to generalize the findings to a broader anti-consumer society. We publish this on the forum. Much rejoicing. We sell the story for $5 online eventually. That small pool of funds then goes into funding other collaborative projects at Fort DB.

We bro hug and go our separate ways.

THE END.
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The commingling of individual goals is enhanced by the oxygen masks being figured out first. In the same way aligning goals in an individual WOG can create benefits (e.g. walking to grocery store with backpack for exercise, no fossil fuels, money saving etc.), what does that look like to commingle two different WOGS to create something greater? It could be that there is an expert to newb relationship between goals (Blender) or a newb-newb relationship (desert hydroponics and drip irrigation) that we can put our other skills together on.

jacob wrote: ↑

Mon Dec 05, 2022 9:38 am

What remains is to see a) what ERE1 individuals can do when they play together; and b) what may appear in the environment when that happens.

Does ERE2 need to be limited to when "ERE1" or "Highly Optimized Wheaton Level Individuals" (HOWLI) play together? This seems like a poor foundation for community development as the filtering affect with the wheaton levels indicates that there will be very few individuals to actually collaborate on ERE2. What about a HOWLI who inspires and collaborates with individuals at a variety of WLs?

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In regards to the original question, I've internalized ERE2 as the point when an individual begins to focus more on community systems than internal or individual systems. This is a natural progression after one solves all of their individual and familial needs.

Western Red Cedar wrote: ↑

Mon Dec 05, 2022 4:17 pm

Does ERE2 need to be limited to when "ERE1" or "Highly Optimized Wheaton Level Individuals" (HOWLI) play together? This seems like a poor foundation for community development as the filtering affect with the wheaton levels indicates that there will be very few individuals to actually collaborate on ERE2. What about a HOWLI who inspires and collaborates with individuals at a variety of WLs?

It's just two different worlds. An existing one and a potential one.

One is ERE1 individuals living in today's environment that's dominated by consumerism, specialized education, 9-5 jobs, TV, hobbies, and old-age retirement and its associated methods and possibilities. That would be keepie-uppie players who show others at various athletic levels how to play keepie-uppie and occasionally perform keepie-uppie on TV. However, this does not generate any emergence. It's just one person inspiring others to play more keepie-uppie. Kinda like what I've been doing with ERE1.

The other one is an emerging ERE2 environment that's dominated by .... TBD ... and its associated methods and possibilities with would be different than keepie-uppie. The soccer metaphor.

Does inventing a previously nonexisting game that will eventually be called soccer need to be filtered for people who can manipulate a ball with their feet? Yes, for the most part. That doesn't mean that there will be a keepie-uppie entrance test for future soccer players ... but the required talents will be somewhat aligned. A certain dexterity and athleticism.

Is it possible that this strong resistance to theory happening on the forum is an example of emergence?

It is happening within the mothership among those prone to agree. Imagine the emergence that will happen outside the mothership, among the touchy-feelies.

https://youtu.be/UxqVFmig5AA

I'm coming around to the idea that the resistance to the theory among the OGs here is a feature, not a bug. It's a good thing. Helps to ensure no one gets too far off the ground for too long without making sure the theory is tied to concrete stuff, tested with real world practice, etc. Checks and balances. Diversity.

Maybe this little 'crisis' was a perfectly timed boot in the ass some people needed to Try Some Things (me), or at least start figuring out how to prep for actually Doing Something.

I doubt anyone thinks that taking ERE2 theory outside of the mothership is a good idea at any point. The point of theory is to point to proper action. Once the action is figured and sorted, tested, confirmed, the theory is not needed, or recedes into the woodwork, becomes implicit in the paradigm. Going to the Streets with the Good Message that "Right, all you Green bastards gotta FeTi up and adopt an Upper Left Quadrant perspective while we Orange/Yellow INXL's mastermind the loosely coupled Jungian dreamscape" is, um. Obviously a bad idea.

Lets say over the next few years the theory gets hashed out a bit more and we try a few different ERE2 projects - actual, real-world, practical projects, whatever those look like. In a few years, when people talk about ERE2, instead of pointing to a list of frameworks and abbreviations on a wiki, they point to Ft. Dirtbag, the ChiEREgo Hood Project, that One Thing that Happened in Portland That One Time, and the Dutch Emergent Bicycle Cooperative.

Real places, real people, real stories, in the same way that we now talk about Riparian, MikeBOS, Ego, mooretrees, theanimal, JnG, people doing interesting ERE1 implementations at various levels of depth. No one talks about ERE2 theory except on on subforum of an obscure website that no one gets pointed to unless they're found to say things of their own accord like "yknow this place reminds of me something I once read in a book about metamodernism", and then that person is taken aside and pointed to the forum because maybe they'd like it but if not that's cool too.

Everyone else is too busy cooking dope food and playing guitar and intermingling their WoGs even though they don't call it that.

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Sort of like the difference between scientists and engineers. Scientists argue endlessly about gluons or whatever, using lots of squiggly lines that apparently mean something mathematical, and engineers just shrug and say "Lemme know when you nerds are done and have a formula I can use to build this thing, till then I'm out".

You know what ERE2 reminds me of? Crypto.

@AxelHeyst: I get the (perhaps mistaken) feeling you do not think that ERE2 exists anywhere despite people (Bonde and me) having pointed you to someone who is actually quite close to getting something ERE2 off the ground (especially compared to any official EREx people). ERE2 is already underway being created by people who has spent no time on any of the postmodern theory that is in vogue here.

From what I understand, ERE2 is partially meant to get away from the idea of "official EREx people". There is no credential certificate waiting to show off to your friends. Rather, ERE2 is a communal phenomenon that is occurring in the context of this forum.

There is no postmodern theory without postmodern practice. Just as there is no modern or premodern theory without practice. If the practice of modernism is expand, expand, expand, sell, buy, sell, expand.. then that doesn't sound very "ERE2", does it? What comes after that?.. this would be "post"-modernism. Before modernism, there was something that looked like it could be "ERE2" in the form of familiar bonds often tied to resilient homesteads. Though, these strong ties would also often lead to "us vs them" conflict that eventually gave way to "modernism".

Premodernism, modernism, postmodernism are what makes culture culture. Choose any X you want such that pre-X -> X -> post-X. Any X you choose has a bias and will anger some people.

I feel like this debate is getting unnecessarily moralized. It's fine if the philosophy is not for everyone and people would prefer it stay inside of this sub-forum. It is annoying when topics you aren't interested in leak and appear to take over the forum. But the way this thread veers on ad hominem against anyone who does want to talk about these things makes participation on the forum off putting.

rref wrote: ↑

Tue Dec 06, 2022 1:41 pm

@AxelHeyst: I get the (perhaps mistaken) feeling you do not think that ERE2 exists anywhere despite people (Bonde and me) having pointed you to someone who is actually quite close to getting something ERE2 off the ground (especially compared to any official EREx people). ERE2 is already underway being created by people who has spent no time on any of the postmodern theory that is in vogue here.

There has been tonnes of people working on "this" for a good 40-50 years already, if not 170 years or more depending on when the count starts. Back to the land, neohomesteaders, Appropriate technology, Preppers, permaculture, Simple living, YMOYL, ERE1, urban homesteading, transition towns, FIRE movement, lowtech, minimalism, Game B, Metacrisis, Perspectivaa, Deep Adaptation, Stoa,... I probably forgot several. The problem is that the small fraction of humanity who see the writing on the wall has been throwing mud on that wall for half a century already.

Major paradigm shifts are few: Traditionalism, modernism, postmodernism, and then what? Some bridgehead that hasn't been quite established yet. Post-post-something.

Bridge-heading paradigm shifting currently appear every 30-50 years at this point in human development. How to establish the next one remains unresolved. Buying the facilities or gathering facilities is within the reach of a lot of these approaches already. (I mean, I could have paid for the Grobund installation out of my own personal pocket, but I would not have been able to get 100+ people commit to the same goal, so I'd be left with a bunch of empty factory buildings. Conversely, ... ) Making the 21st century work is not about lacking either people or financial capital. It's something unknown.

Jacob, would you define ERE2 then as a counterculture paradigm or as a main culture paradigm? ERE works because it takes advantage of the gaps in normative culture, as do all countercultures. Would you see ERE2 being that way, aka never mainstream because the mainstream paradigm enables it, or as a new mainstream paradigm?

AnalyticalEngine wrote: ↑

Tue Dec 06, 2022 3:14 pm

Jacob, would you define ERE2 then as a counterculture paradigm or as a main culture paradigm? ERE works because it takes advantage of the gaps in normative culture, as do all countercultures. Would you see ERE2 being that way, aka never mainstream because the mainstream paradigm enables it, or as a new mainstream paradigm?

Getting closer.

ERE1 works because it takes advantages of the gaps in normative culture. It is a counterculture paradigm to green/orange/blue.
ERE2 is what may become the new culture once those gaps are filled. It is a potential new paradigm, likely yellow/green.

(Since it's kosher to talk jargon in this particular subforum, I see ERE2 as yellow going mainstream. More specifically, the translation of theory into practice which for the most part has been lacking/assumed to happen automagically by previous attempts once they've "raised awareness". I think humanity needs a little more than just being aware.)

rref wrote: ↑

Tue Dec 06, 2022 1:41 pm

@AxelHeyst: I get the (perhaps mistaken) feeling you do not think that ERE2 exists anywhere despite people (Bonde and me) having pointed you to someone who is actually quite close to getting something ERE2 off the ground (especially compared to any official EREx people). ERE2 is already underway being created by people who has spent no time on any of the postmodern theory that is in vogue here.

You are mistaken.

The stuff you and Bonde linked to looks very interesting. I haven't had a chance to translate and dig in to it yet, but I will be doing so.

Lots of very cool community based stuff exists out there. I spent six months this year checking some of them out. Many people build very cool things without spending any time with theory. I admire people like that. My brain isn't wired that way. My brain is wired to function only in a recursive loop between theory and practice, and it's not clear to me if the purpose of the practice is to enrich my theory or if the purpose of my theory is to enrich my practice. I view both theory and practice as different levels of symbolic representation of reality, or rather, that's my experience of the world. If I spend all my time in practice, I lose sight of the forest, lose the plot, and fall into ennui. If I spend all my time in theory, I... also fall into ennui. I need both, in a dynamic balance particular to my internal wiring.

How 'examples' fit into this, for me, is that in order to 'understand' something someone else has done (like Grobund), I have to decompose it in my mind into its conceptual building blocks. Bits of theory, if you will. That takes time and effort, which I'm happy to do, but I can't just read a webpage about Grobund and 'get' it. It'll be some time before I'm able to form an opinion for myself on how relevant Grobund is to the ERE2 project, because my brain is a bit of a mule like that.

(This is why I was so attracted to ERE, incidentally. A book full of theory and conceptual frameworks. I didn't have to decompose anything. Jacob had spread all the theoretical bits out on the table and showed which ones connected to which. Amazing! It was immediately obvious to me how I could begin to assemble the conceptual pieces and apply them to the practice of my own particular lifestyle. For my personality/brain, that style of exposition works really well.)

jacob wrote: ↑

Mon Dec 05, 2022 9:38 am

What remains is to see a) what ERE1 individuals can do when they play together; and b) what may appear in the environment when that happens.

Based on that explanation, "multiplayer ERE" is one way to characterize ERE2. However, the multiplayer concept seems limiting because ERE1 doesn't have a fixed objective like a game. Because objectives vary between individuals, it may be more useful to think of ERE1 as an operating system that supports a wide variety of software. (ERE1's web of goals also allows for efficient multitasking.)

Extending this metaphor, ERE2 is the connection of various ERE1 computers to a common network. The current stage is like a local network consisting of a few computers in a basement. It's like a LAN party in that the connections are sporadic, require lots of coordination, and focus on a single objective. If the ERE2 network grows into something like the internet, then connections between ERE1 can be formed on demand with much less effort. Even when participants don't share a common goal, the interactions can still be mutually beneficial. (To illustrate this point with a computer example, e-commerce on the internet connects buyers and sellers with different goals.)

Somewhat related, compare the size of a community to the goal complexity of a representative member. I made this graph for illustrative purposes, using personal finance examples since this is a PF forum. While "mainstream PF" and "FIRE movement" are composed of a number of individual communities, they are grouped as such because the aggregate size of these movements is also the effective network size. Their members' goals and values wrt PF are similar/compatible, and the communities are aware of each other.



Although it has been stated that ERE2 doesn't have a specific goal, I can't help but imagine that ERE2 aspires to operate at a larger scale and/or at a higher average complexity than existing structures. Because it's not worth the extra effort to connect with other ERE1 when the existing structure satisfies the need.

Another question: Do we consider the FIRE movement as falling under the ERE2 umbrella? While I can see the parallels between ERE1/FIRE movement and the "keepie-uppie"/soccer example of emergence, I have two arguments against classifying FIRE movement as ERE2.

1. Using the ERE2 computer/network analogy, the "operating system" of ERE1 individuals is not usually compatible with that of mainstream FIRE. If you put an ERE1 and FIRE on the same network, a connection between the two is much less likely than ERE1-ERE1 or FIRE-FIRE. It's a difference in kind; a typical ERE1 feels out of place in FIRE-land and vice-versa.

2. The FIRE movement would have eventually happened given that the E-R forums already had a critical mass, with FIRECalc providing the numerical solution to the FIRE problem. While the FIRE movement would have looked a lot different without ERE providing the mathematical innovation, it is dubious to say that the FIRE movement originated from ERE. Nevertheless, the development and promotion of the "shockingly simple math" undoubtedly accelerated the movement's growth and introduced savings rate as the critical parameter for FIRE.