Meeting, Engaging and Seducing non-ERE Allies: Carrot Vectors

[Jin+Guice]

Ok, so i think I get ERE2. If we are trying to build a community beyond just ERE members, how do we get them to help us/ help them?

I think there are a couple of problems.

First off, I think it's a mistake to be like "Orange is a solved problem, time to solve for Green!" While we want to try to appeal to Green folks more (does ERE1 for sure not do this tho?), it's an Orange society out there and, I don't know how to tell you guys this, but foresaking every economic, societal and culture goal that people have been trained to pursue since birth, while working for that same culture, eschewing its pleasures and investing in that culture, is not appealing to everyone, even if they are Orange level self-interested and Orange level want to get out of the cave.

So rather than split this down the Orange/ Green divide, can we split it down the ERE/ non-ERE divide or at least split it down the FIRE/ non-FIRE divide?

What I think is interesting is trying to find a bunch of people who have ERE skills that didn't come out of ERE so we can teach and learn from each other.

One super skill that ERE has is diversity of members. Maybe y'alls IRL reality is different that mine, but this crowd is actually really diverse in a way that most crowds aren't. Sure we have our unifiying nerd components, but there are like investor dudes and hippies and housewives and teachers and people who are really good at fixing shit and computer programmer/ engineers. Those groups don't usually intermingle, let alone comingle.

In creating a community of people who are interested in exiting Plato's cave who are also doing cool shit, how do we get these people to actually talk to each other in the way that we do here? Because that is already one of our coolest attributes.


Another issue I see is that we have a Freedom-To problem. I don't know how to tell you guys this, but FIRE is actually not that cool. The idea is ingenious, but like the cultural movement is/ already has been overtaken by a bunch of high-income tech breauxs. Imagine the news articles that are going to get written about this. Because that is how this is going to get bigger and I don't think the portrayal is going to be very glam.

As FIRE becomes more mainstream it will become less radical and more like the mainstream. The status quo is powerful and it fights back very effectively. That's the fate of most radical movements that make it out of being totally marginalized forever. FIRE is gaining mainstream traction these days, but exactly no one I know who is doing cool shit is even slightly interested in it when they hear about it.

But ERE is different because people here are doing cool shit. Like not that FIRE people aren't, but most discussions here aren't actually about personal finance, and even when we talk about it, it's way more interesting than when FIRE people talk about it (I think this is again because of the diversity of people here). FIRE is also shallow where ERE is deep. However, ERE is not gaining mainstream traction.

BUT what is our main thing? It's sparking the FIRE movement. We need an answer when people are like "what am I going to do when I retire?" Like when we were just trying to retire ourselves we could be like "oh well sucks to sucks loser" but if we want people who either don't get or aren't interested in FIRE to work with us, that's not going to work anymore. And we need an answer that sounds better than all of the consumer shit that is actually like pretty fun, in a sugar is pretty tasty kind of way, AND ingrained into people's psyche from birth.

I like coming here and talking with you guys about ideas, but I also like dropping acid and running around naked under a full moon. FIRE and for the most part ERE appeal to the nerdy intellectual side of me, but people like Boyle and Greenfield are appealing to the naked drug-moon side. Like "oh fuck, these dudes are doing it, but making it look good and doing cool shit." Like building a fucking cabin with your bare hands out of trees you found and writing your entire book using ink you made on paper that you made is fucking cool. And growing/ catching all of your food for a year (after you already mastered dumpster diving!) and living in a house you built/ got build by volunteers you persuaded that is built out of wood you found. Fucking cool. Saving a bunch of money to invest in index funds by comparison...

And I've been to Jacob's house. The motherfucker roasted coffee beans for me, then showed me the soap that he made (pre-pandemic) and then was like "here are all these wood working tools I came up with that don't use electricity." Like that shit is fucking cool. Now is the time of the DIY nerd because fuck consumerism (ok you have to call it capitalism tho).

But what is our unifying exciting freedom-to? Because I can just tell them about cool shit I'm doing or ask them about cool that they are doing that I want to do, which is what I already do, but it's not exactly unifying people into a community or getting them to talk to any of you guys.

I'm also not sure if part of the goal is helping other people out of the cave? Like a lot of the cool people are still partially in the cave of consumerism, because, to my knowledge, this is the only group who is defining that as the thing to get out of. Other groups will have other definitions of the cave. How dedicated are we to ours and helping them get out of our cave?

Add to that, how dedicated are we at helping the disenfranchised, but currently just bitching people to see the exit to and leave the cave. A lot of those people are also not going to be seduced by FIRE. But if we had one or several catalyzing cool things that were going on...

[Slevin]

https://meaningness.com/geeks-mops-sociopaths .
Forced expansion of the subculture becomes the dilution of the subculture which then leads to the exploitative sociopaths who destroy it. ERE is an extreme ideology outside the Overton window that requires the extremeness by definition (as a postconsumer ideology, unlike mainstream FIRE), and the barriers to entry are what keep it full of cool people.

If you lower the barrier to entry, you will dilute the basket of goods, and this will become an asinine FIRE forum where every day is the same basic boring posts of "what SR % should I do?", "How could anyone be stupid enough to NOT invest in passive index funds", "housing is so expensive, you promised I could get it for cheap but I toured 17 luxury apartments and they all cost $4000 per month" or "How I bought a 52000 Tesla (but I promise I'm still frugal)". We've all seen them and been incredibly bored by them.

I like the idea of ERE2 insofar as it allows more people to understand the basket of goods of ERE (and gives more interesting pathways that can be easier CCCCC'ed by those less on the exploration frontier), but the subject matter should not itself be diluted to fit the "ERE-curious". Also of interest is the larger constructs you can make out of numerous ERE groups of people. Theoretically you could make really interesting post-consumer economies, etc, but first you need the critical mass, and after all the arguing so far, I'm not sure ERE is interesting enough to the average human for us to be able to achieve that (if a decade in you are less popular for even the engineers than the competition, you might have a very low ideological carrying capacity).

[jacob]

There seems to be a tendency to talk interchangeably about "Green ERE1" and "ERE2". These are not the same thing. ERE2 is not necessarily about building a community. It's about interacting mainly with other ERE1 (or similar) people as opposed to interacting mainly with the normal economy which is full of normal people who only know 1 or 2 things and work all day long.

ERE2 thus does not imply community and neither does community imply ERE2. For example, the Transition Town movement is not what I consider ERE2 as much as it was a bunch of concerned citizens organizing to become more "self-sufficient as a community".

It's hard to give examples without having that many. I consider the formation of the MMGs a good example of ERE2. This is more than one ERE1 (wannabe or not) interacting with other ERE1s. As such it's an emergence of the ERE ecology which is made out of the renaissance species.

An emergent factor of an Orange ecology is the creation of corporations, start-ups, ...
An emergent factor of a Green ecology is the creation of intentional communities, ...
An emergent factor of a Blue ecology would be a new church, ...
An emergent factor of a Yellow ecology would be creating NGOs and knowledge repositories, ...
An emergent factor of a Turquoise ecology would be meditation centers and institutes, ...

[jacob]

Getting back on course, aesthetics, which 7wb5 mentioned, is something I've hugely neglected. We've had various threads (figuratively and literally) over the years about the importance of appearances when it comes to attracting the mainstream. E.g. calling it "delicious homemade dahl" instead of "lentil soup" or NOT wearing a hockey shirt on national TV or yacht racing instead of arduino programming.

The thing is, though, that I'm personally not that interested in "looking good for the masses for the sake of looking good for the masses". I don't know, but I don't think Greenfield or Boyle deliberately appear awesome in the minds of the public. They just happen to be interested in a lifestyle that looks romantic to the public. Whereas I happen not to be. I mean, we all know that "reading all the books in the library" is nerds only territory. (FWIW, one of the librarians thinks I'm the coolest guy ever ... but the total librarian demographic is rather small ).

Now it is conceivable that some self-imposed constraints are in order for the sake of appearances. Everybody does this---for example, I put on pants before walking out of the house---but there are obviously degrees of that. The question then becomes to which degree is one willing to conform to the expectations of the public in terms of looking "awesome". I have not gone very far down that road, although I still upgraded my wardrobe after the hockey shirt incident. It may be possible to finagle some homeotelic goals along this line. For example, moving from the RV to the brick house did wonders for my middle-class street cred.

TL;DR - it's pretty hard for one person to be all things for all people.

[Jin+Guice]

@Slevin: I don't think we should lower the barrier to entry. But we are expanding the barrier to entry, because the express goal is to add people beyond ERE? It's also to put ERE1ish people together, which necessitates some expansion for the ish people.

My question is, what do we think the parameters for ERE2 are? Like what is the minimum number of people working together that makes something ERE2? Is there a critical mass of either ERE1 or WL6+ people that are needed? What qualifies a nonERE1 person as being EREish enough that if I am collaborating with them (and however other many people), it's ERE2?

The last question is my focus.

I'm not asking so we can strictly define an exclusive club. I'm asking because, wtf are we trying to do?

If I want to do ERE2 tomorrow, adding that I want the least amount of ERE1 people possible (because they are rare and dispersed and also because this is a thought experiment to find a boundary) how do I do it?

As @Slevin says in the last paragraph, I also don't think ERE is likely to get big enough to include enough people to make ERE2 possible. We are letting nonERE people in right? What are the parameters of letting them in (not to the forum or ERE-only events, but to whatever the thing we are trying to build is)?

@jacob: Ok, the focus is not on Green. Got it. That's great! I was confused by all the talk of recruiting Greens and the Green carrot vector and WL threads.


The point of aesthetics isn't attracting the mainstream. Mainstream aesthetics suck. Or perhaps it's more accurate to say that mainstream aesthetic choices are rarely made. Aesthetics that blandly appeal to the masses in an intentionally boring and safe way (aka the purpose of most corporate aesthetics) are, like, definitionally terrible.

Aesthetics, even if they are purely practical, say something. Presumably you wore a hockey jersey because you had recently played hockey? The absence of aesthetic choice is an aesthetic choice.

Aesthetics are massively ignored in ERE. I'm not sure that's really our PR problem right now, though it would eventually become our PR problem. I think it's more of a problem because aesthetic knowledge is important. We have senses and how we appeal to them influences how we perceive things. And perception is reality. At least our version of it.

I'm not saying "let's increase our mainstream appeal." I'm saying the opposite. I don't think Boyle or Greenfield is trying to get mass appeal. They, particularly Greenfield, are less averse to calling "extremely practical nutrient mush" "Delicious and Colorful Dahl!" I don't think most people want to live in a cabin in the middle of nowhere without electricity. Or want to live in a shed in some Floridians backyard, growing their food on other people's lawns. The cool shit they do is inspirational. The cool shit of ERE is also inspirational. Inspirational shit is also divisive. If we lack inspirational spark, how do we plan to build a community beyond our members?

My initial point was, if we are trying to attract people who are doing postconsumerism, our highly novel approach is going to be a red flag to them. Fringe movements are VERY SENSITIVE to red flags. How do we convince the anarcho-communists, who are also doing cools shit that we can party too, even though we like stocks? What thing have we built that we can point at and be like "come work with us on post-consumerism" because, although I think ERE/ FIRE is the best practical method, it doesn't LOOK very post-consumery (also note the easy take over of FIRE by consumerism).


Another problem is cultural indicators or heuristics. You said that a lot of reviews of the book complain about lentils or handwashing laundry. Early Retirement Extreme is a philosophy and a lifestyle. There are a lot of bullshit lifestyle gurus and philosophers out there peddling their wears. Why am I listening to you? This is why presentation and aesthetics matter. Because when I'm separating signal from noise, I'm looking for reasons why stuff is noise, because 99% of stuff is noise. And I'm going to start out using heuristics to decide what to go further into. I'm not paying attention if you don't catch my attention. You'll never avoid alienating people who don't like some tiny facet of your lifestyle, mistaking that for your message or at least a necessary condition. As you said, it's hard to be everything to everyone. So, maybe who cares about the lentil people? But it's maybe why moving out of a trailer helped your street cred? "I'm a personal finance guru." ... "Don't you live in a trailer?"

[AxelHeyst]

My question is, what do we think the parameters for ERE2 are? Like what is the minimum number of people working together that makes something ERE2? Is there a critical mass of either ERE1 or WL6+ people that are needed? What qualifies a nonERE1 person as being EREish enough that if I am collaborating with them (and however other many people), it's ERE2?

The last question is my focus.

I'll take a stab. Jacob's recent comments have helped clarify my understanding which had some fuzziness to it (I realize belatedly).

Minimum number: two ERE1 people doing something/collaborating together is an example of something moving in the direction of ERE2. We might say with every extra ERE1 person joining the collaboration, it gets 'more ERE2'. This is the sense in which the MMGs are ERE2ish: it's >1 ERE1 person doing stuff together.

I doubt we know what the actual number of ERE1 people is required to qualify as Full-On ERE2. It's probably one of those we'll know it when we see it. A quantitative metric might be when the ERE1 people solve most of their problems via collaboration/engagement with the other ERE1 people, as opposed to mainstream world. A qualitative metric might be when weird/emergent/unexpected things start to happen. This is the sense in which the MMGs are clearly not full on ERE2: all of us spend most of our lives interacting and getting our needs met totally in the nonERE world.

What qualifies a nonERE1 person as being EREish enough that if I am collaborating with them (and however other many people), it's ERE2?

If they're WL6+, right? The definition of ERE2 is ERE1 people interacting.

I think a fuzzy question here is the question 'well what if someone is ERE1/WL6+ but they've never heard of the book/forum/etc?' What about 'naturals'?

So the question is: do naturals/ferals/wildcats count?

I think yes, but I'd feel better seeing a confirmation or correction to this.

A problem that makes us run in circles I think is people saying 'well this person or that person is wl7 but they've never read the book, they should count.' In my opinion, 9/10 of these examples are people who are very strong in a few dimensions of the Renaissance Ideal, typically Technical and/or Ecological, but not actually enough to qualify as Jacob's Renaissance Person / WL6+. Their WoGs are actually chains, or they've got big gaps, or some other issue.

I suspect this has something to do with how many of us have been competent for a long time at Economic, Intellectual, Physiological, and maybe one or two more. But many of us are either recently competent or still not very competent at Ecological, Spiritual, and Social (just for example). A lot of us are a bit lopsided, which is to be expected of any recovering specialist. I certainly am.

My point is that when we find people who've been *really* competent for a long time in dimensions we're still noobs at, it might overly impress us and we might mistake them for full on Renaissance People. We might not understand how much they suck at Economic, or Intellectual, or something else. Or they may totally lack the ability to employ systems thinking (Intellectual capital?), so what competencies they have are not at all tied together.

[mountainFrugal]

I think that it is actually way to early to tell or even be making these distinctions at this point. I realize that we want to go back and forth between theory and practice, but this seems like we need some real world data of all the combos above before we know what it is going to look like. This is fine IMO. We should be able to hold uncertainty in our minds, perhaps for years (speculation is fine of course). I for one am going to take these ideas and experiment with them by interacting with ERE folks (my definition is rather broad) and non-folks and see what shakes out and what we are able to create together. I will retroactively do an analysis and add nuance. Let's be on the lookout for various ways to interact with all groups and learn from one another. This is perhaps the green portion that is missing in the common orange way of interpreting ERE1? Cast a wide net and then gradually filter as necessary. Learn from other folk's strengths as well as their blindspots?

I am not trying to reinterpret what @AH is saying, just adding my perspective.

[AxelHeyst]

Well put, thanks mF. I've been feeling over the past 24hrs like I've been painting myself into a corner that vibes isolationist, and every time I post trying to get out of that vibe I make it slightly worse. So I think I need to just +1 what you said and pump the brakes with the words.

[guitarplayer]

Probably good to mention Goodhart's law at this point.

When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure.

Also, the meaningness author @Slevin linked to has written a lot about nebulosity, just pulled it from the website

Nebulosity is the insubstantiality, transience, boundarilessness, discontinuity, and ambiguity that (this book argues) are found in all phenomena.

I think this is maybe even more present in progressive ideas such as these discussed here. I see @mF wrote something I think similar in the first line of his last post.

I really like the garage band status of ERE (think @jennypenny first gave ERE the status), long may it continue As to ERE2, in my personal experience the last iteration of it was when @Slevin suggested I smash flax seeds between a rock and a hard place... literally. Still need to go to a nearby river to find a rock. But yeah, little things.

[7Wannabe5]

Let's say I was truly strongly convinced that the practice and ethics of polyamory could make a substantial positive change in the lives of individuals and society. I might suggest that because it entails strong female leadership/encompasses the ethics of third wave feminism/post-patriarchal structures, it would make human culture more peaceful, like bonobo culture. I might suggest that it would add resilience to the functional goal of maintaining five warm relationships, given that humans in our advanced cultures on average spend more than half of their adult lives single/living alone. I might suggest that it could even reduce resources consumption due to usually not necessarily having to buy a tool or have a baby to parent yourself if one of your three partners already has one. Leaving the "relationship escalator" behind is akin to leaving consumerism behind. Etc. etc. etc.

My point here being that convincing somebody who is ERE adjacent-yet-resistant to do ERE would be much like convincing the median member of this forum to take up the practice of polyamory. IOW, if you are currently Green-Eggs-and-Ham about polyamory then if you ask yourself how somebody who does "believe" in polyamory could convince you to take up the practice, then that would be the same means by which you could successfully convince somebody ERE-adjacent-yet-resistant to take up ERE.

Okay, it's not the greatest analogy, but it hold if you consider that one of the most common objections to both practices would be "Well, I could get down with that, but my SO...." . It also works if you consider how people who self-describe as polyamorous will usually have at least one partner who doesn't, because the vast majority of people don't. It also works if you consider some concepts in the modeling of value in co-operative games such as Last-On-the-Bus and Shapley Value ("The Model Thinker"-Scott Page). In a cooperative game, a player's "last on the bus value" (LOTB) equals the value she adds if she is the last to join the game. A player's Shapley Value equals her marginal contribution when she is added to a coalition averaged across all possible orderings which the coalition of everyone forms. The reason why these modeling concepts are highly relevant to ERE2 (and polyamory!) is made obvious in the question that Jean asked concerning why/how a highly competent person who has already solved most problems would benefit from forming a coalition AND the question about whether ERE somehow selects for humans who do tend to be lacking in some skill sets. For instance, maybe there is nobody on the forum who would rate themselves above a 5 on the skillset of PR, so the human who is a 10 in PR, but only a 5 in finance and a 2 in burpees, might add more value to the forum. However, this depends on the sort of complex projects, large problems, or creativel collaborations imagined. For instance, if the project is "chip in buy our own private island" then yet another collaborator who is above an 8 in finance might offer more value as LOTB than the PR guy.

[Jin+Guice]

Jin+Guice wrote: ↑Wed Jul 26, 2023 11:39 am
What qualifies a nonERE1 person as being EREish enough that if I am collaborating with them (and however other many people), it's ERE2?

If they're WL6+, right? The definition of ERE2 is ERE1 people interacting.

Wait, I thought we said in the "what is ERE2 thread" that this wasn't the case? I thought you didn't have to be ERE1 or a certain Wheaton level for it to be ERE2? I thought EREish was fine and any WL was ok?

I'm trying to figure this out because we are going to face different problems depending on what it is we are trying to do. If they must be ERE1, then we have a HUGE conversion problem, because there aren't enough ERE1 people to do this and probably never will be. Which means we either need to recruit people or we need to organize some sort of intentional community and have enough people from the forum move there.

If they don't need to be ERE1, which expands our numbers, then we need to figure out what qualities we are looking for. I don't think we know yet, but are we ready to start guessing?

A problem that makes us run in circles I think is people saying 'well this person or that person is wl7 but they've never read the book, they should count.' In my opinion, 9/10 of these examples are people who are very strong in a few dimensions of the Renaissance Ideal, typically Technical and/or Ecological, but not actually enough to qualify as Jacob's Renaissance Person / WL6+. Their WoGs are actually chains, or they've got big gaps, or some other issue.

This is also tough if we are allowing non-ERE people (if it is not obvious I think we should do this. I'm also going to just keep hanging out with people, but I want to know what you guys are trying to do so I know what to talk about on this subforum and also know what to say that might be helpful). ERE is VERY novel, it combines several things that usually don't go together.

Like in my mind, we're sort of rebuking the underlying principles of our own society. Shit that is so ingrained people don't see it (cue the fish/ water metaphor). And now we're trying to find other people to do it with us, but who are unfamiliar with our process. So it's unlikely we are going to find other WL6+ people, because they have to do several novel things they have been trained since birth by every person they've ever met not to do them.


Here are some important paradoxes:

1) Most people who are highly motivated, don't want to stop working and most people who want to stop working are not highly motivated. There are a few really motivated hippie/ hipster weirdos, which tend to be the type of people I would bring to the table. Dropouts who are doing shit. But these people don't tend to save a lot of money or necessarily be very anti-consumerist.

Also do we want to limit ourselves to them? A lot of people who are DOING SHIT are working, because people are motivated by rewards and rewards in our society are mostly levied to those who play the game of work well. If you want to DO SHIT, most people think of work.

2) Most people who want freedom from work don't work a bunch. Using work to stop working was a brilliant stroke of ERE genius. But like most people who are like "I don't want a job" aren't like "so I'll work A LOT for awhile and then totally stop."

3) Most people who make/ save a bunch of money aren't anti-consumerist. Consumerism is the prize. We've convinced ourselves that consumption and happiness are the same thing to such a high degree that if you tell people you don't want to consume stuff, they think you are insane and miserable. This is why I don't talk about ERE! The few anti-consumerists out there usually just have shitty jobs that don't pay much, because why get money if you're not going to consume? They also tend to see money as evil. Which means they lack time and possibly skills.

4) Most people who are disenfranchised with the system don't blame consumerism. To me, being anti-consumerist is what unites ERE people. But most people blame it on a political thing (most people I talk to are communists, but I think this is true of right leaning groups too), instead of consumerism, which is apolitical. Like most people seem to think that if only XYZ group would stop being in power then them and all of their friends would get to consume MORE, because consumption=happiness. This is true even for groups who are against the myriad shitty things mass consumerism causes. Externalizing the blame also means they get to keep consuming, otherwise they have to give up happiness (in their minds).

So the problem is how do we deal with people who are EREish but 1) still tethered to a job and/ or 2) aren't anti-consumerist, even if they hold values that are in alignment with anti-consumerism?

[Jean]

being the self appointed ambassador of ERE into far right territory, i tried to sell the idea as "white strike", it kinda worked, but i think a lot of politicaly motivated people want to be a part of society and influence it, and having a successful career is a path toward that. Those who don't are often troubled.
Many people that are willing to become de facto outcast are not very balanced psychologically.
I often question my/our sanity.

[AxelHeyst]

Wait, I thought we said in the "what is ERE2 thread" that this wasn't the case? I thought you didn't have to be ERE1 or a certain Wheaton level for it to be ERE2? I thought EREish was fine and any WL was ok?

See: (bolding mine)

@WRC - Insofar it doesn't come down to splitting hairs, what distinguishes ERE2 from other efforts is that ERE2 aims to connect ERE1-type people (Heinlein's "competent man"-type character), whether physical or virtual to see what emerges when universally competent people interact with each other.

Whereas ERE1 is about what happens when a universally competent person interacts with the general mono-specialized society---essentially living off of the economy by finding clever solutions such as FIRE.

And whereas typical attempts at community uses community to compensate for a lack of personal competence.

IOW,

ERE2 = a bunch of ERE1 people interacting with each other in whichever way. (TBD, work in progress)
ERE1 = ERE1 individuals living in an environment of non-ERE1 people (typically careerists and consumers)
Typical communes = a bunch of non-ERE1 people interacting with each other in whichever way due to lack of self-reliance skills or assets
Consumers and careersts = non-ERE1 people living in an environment of other non-ERE1 people

As usual, this is not a black or white determination. There's a gradient or a scale; hence the Scotsman caveat. If there exists a community of universally skilled renaissance people already, developing ERE2 from [nearly] scratch is mostly a waste of time. It would be easier just to join or copy something that already works. I'm not aware of such a group or community though. Most intentional community efforts fall under the third category above. People joining together to compensate for lack of personal skills and assets.

I'm trying to figure this out because we are going to face different problems depending on what it is we are trying to do. If they must be ERE1, then we have a HUGE conversion problem, because there aren't enough ERE1 people to do this

Yes.

and probably never will be.

Definitely not with an attitude like that!

Which means we either need to recruit people or we need to organize some sort of intentional community and have enough people from the forum move there.

If they don't need to be ERE1, which expands our numbers, then we need to figure out what qualities we are looking for. I don't think we know yet, but are we ready to start guessing?

...ERE1-type people (Heinlein's "competent man"-type character)...

If you find some people who you think qualify as ERE1-type people, don't let any of us tell you they can't join the club.

This is also tough if we are allowing non-ERE people (if it is not obvious I think we should do this. I'm also going to just keep hanging out with people, but I want to know what you guys are trying to do so I know what to talk about on this subforum and also know what to say that might be helpful). ERE is VERY novel, it combines several things that usually don't go together.

Like in my mind, we're sort of rebuking the underlying principles of our own society. Shit that is so ingrained people don't see it (cue the fish/ water metaphor). And now we're trying to find other people to do it with us, but who are unfamiliar with our process. So it's unlikely we are going to find other WL6+ people, because they have to do several novel things they have been trained since birth by every person they've ever met not to do them.

These are some things that I personally am interested in and am actively doing in my IRL life:
1) Meeting interesting people and do interesting things with them. I pinky swear I don't calculate people's WL's when I meet them in real life, I don't care. If they're interesting (and everyone is interesting, some just take more work to excavate their interestingness), and they're down to play with me, I wanna play.
2) Live my life in such a way that those who might be interested in ERE have a chance to come in contact with it. That looks like not acting more mainstream than I am, being welcoming and not condescending when people ask me questions about my lifestyle design, and also boosting ERE via my blog, podcast, the internets, etc.
3) Keeping an eye out for opportunities to collaborate/group up with/etc ERE1-type people, whether they read the book or not.

To put the above three things more succinctly, I:
1) Hang out with people who don't suck
2) Preach the good word when appropriate (convert the willing in an ethical way)
3) Try to do ERE2 stuff with groups of ERE1-type people.

Maybe some of your confusion with 'what we're trying to do here' is because you're trying to combine 2 and 3? They're not the same activity, although obviously they're related.

eta: And maybe you aren't interested in participating *at all* in ERE1-type only groups at all, because you only want to participate in groups that have a mix of ERE1 and totally nonERE1 people in it. That's totally fine, that describes what basically all of us are doing right now, right? ERE2 is a specific thing that we can play with if we want to. Or not.

Maybe you'd like to start/cultivate some groups that are half ERE1-types and half not. That'd be cool! I think definitionally it wouldn't be ERE2... but maybe it'd be 'unstable' in such a way that it'd collapse into ERE2 because all the universally competent people would sort of cluster up and the non-universally-competent people would kick them out. Who knows?

I will point out, though, that you are in at least one group of ERE1-type-only people at this very moment.

Anyways, the title of your thread is 'How to seduce people into ERE'. This is that type 2 thing from above. It is a worthy endeavor in and of itself, and if successful it would also generate a greater population of ERE1-types who would theoretically at some point bump into each other and bam ERE2 shenanigans would start happening, perhaps emergently.

[7Wannabe5]

Color me confused, but if ERE2 is just defined as creating a society of "the competent man", how does this differ from the plot of "Atlas Shrugged"? I mean, for me there is a reason why I counter-balance hanging out on this forum and dating mostly grouchy old engineers with also hanging out with artsy-Bohemian types and teaching the disadvantaged kids, etc. etc.

The other day I was hanging out on the playground with some other female teachers around my age. They were all huddled over their phones, sharing tips on bargains they were acquiring on Amazon Prime Days. For a moment, I was semi-appalled by the blatant consumerism, but as I listened further, I realized that they were mostly stocking up on goods to share with others. For instance, one woman mentioned buying 70 cases of diapers at deep discount the previous year. IOW, they were just doing the human archtypical Grandmother thing in modern form.

[jacob]

I'm not sure whether this thread is on "how to attract green, blue, ... or polkadot types to ERE" or ERE2. Given all the confusion and requests for "exact" definitions and intentions of ERE2, I suggest reading this again: viewtopic.php?p=265845#p265845 and maybe continue ERE2 related discussions in that thread.

[candide]

Color me confused, but if ERE2 is just defined as creating a society of "the competent man", how does this differ from the plot of "Atlas Shrugged"?

In decreasing levels of snark:
More jargon? No perpetual motion machine? Businessmen are too specialized to play [1]? This response has no snark: spiritually grooving with nature keeps showing up (ah... emerging) as a theme here.

My thing with ERE2 defined so narrowly is that for any arbitrary project X anyone wants to do (including my perennial favorite: have a good time) there is such a small sample of ERE1 to draw from, and just huge sets of ... every other combination of person or group. "The field" always has an advantage on team-ERE2 (enough groups with a small chance really starts chipping into your equity).


===

[1] upthread I was going to inquire why this wouldn't look like Mensa (just solve puzzles) or the Harvard Alumni Association. But then I realized that those successful in the system do so with specialization and paying others to do everyone else for them. What Jacob called in the Stoa talk effectiveness versus efficiency (I prefer the term impact versus efficiency, but the point stands). Rand may think these people universally competent, and many of them certainly think they are, but they would have to retire for a while and work on individual-efficiency projects for a while to make the cut. (Anyone else see how laughable that would be? More likely, if some centi-millionaire or up came to us, they would just splash money around, and do what capitalist always do: running bait-and-switch).

[jacob]

Whereas we may seem few now, keep in mind that once upon a time, there was just 1 of us.

The potential for emergence goes with N^x, where N is the number of eremites and x>1 (probably less than 2). This means that even the difference between N=10 and N=100 is much larger.

Current examples of emergence include the forum with people commenting on each others journals. Later the MMGs. None of these are possible to execute in isolation. It also requires interacting with people "who know". Your journals or MMGs would likely not be as insightful/fasttracked if non-ERE1 peeps dominated the participation.

Contrast that with the ERE blog which really was one person creating a carrot for orange via FIRE. Also note that it wasn't until 2018ish that forumites really began to grok WL6+ (I consider WL1-5 to be standard FIRE, WL6-10 to be ERE1. A green WL table would look different for green WL1-5 but similar/identical for WL6-10.

To attract Green to ERE, it may require another 10 year process before enough grok [ERE] to have useful input and it may happen by just 1 person pushing it for years until it "clicks" in enough people. Ten years is not a long time. OTOH---which is more my strategy---is to connect existing ERE1s in groups with other groups ala viewtopic.php?p=277182#p277182 which is currently starting intra-ERE. The thing with Green is that group-think is very convincing, so if Green sees an entire group doing X, they're much more driving to adopt it (to fit in) than an Orange argument which would "extract" people from the Matrix one by one using the money argument.

[7Wannabe5]

To attract Green people to ERE2, we have to include some "incompetent" people or a plan for caring for the "incompetent" people. IOW, take the actions equivalent to how The Scientist's direction of growth is towards The Leader and The Leader's direction of growth is towards The Helper.

[candide]

Current examples of emergence include the forum with people commenting on each others journals. Later the MMGs. None of these are possible to execute in isolation. It also requires interacting with people "who know". Your journals or MMGs would likely not be as insightful/fasttracked if non-ERE1 peeps dominated the participation.

All that is true, and shows why both have provided value, and will continue to add value, perhaps in increasingly meaningful and complex ways.

But all that good will still be worth it even if it ERE2 doesn't figure out a way to out-Effect systems designed (eh, evolved) around maximizing Effect. (Consumerism is evil, but my god does it have an Impact).

The answer to the question, "what good can a collection of ERE1 people do?" might just be a monastery: an oasis, and landing point, what-have-you where there is an interplay of "monks" going out to do good, but come back, or others come in "on retreat," figure some stuff out, and leave back to engage the world.

The most awesome things I've done [1] since being a forumite were done with other people, but I took knowledge and inspiration from ERE which helped me to do better.

[1] ETA "like a hotdog" or not.

[Jin+Guice]

I'm not sure whether this thread is on "how to attract green, blue, ... or polkadot types to ERE" or ERE2. Given all the confusion and requests for "exact" definitions and intentions of ERE2, I suggest reading this again

I think this is my fault. I'm looking for some approximation of a definition because it effects what we are doing and also how I will contribute to that. I *thought* we settled it in the "What is ERE2" thread, but it turns out I misunderstood the answer.

Posting the keepie-uppie thing is still confusing. What if a bunch of other people are playing similar games that are distinctly not keepie-uppie but still involve skills that could eventually become soccer? In the original story soccer naturally emerges out of keepie-uppie, but does it? Would it not help if we also talked to people playing hockey, as hockey (to me) looks a lot more like soccer than keepie-uppie? Or maybe hockey doesn't exist yet, but someone is at least using a goal. Do we really develop the goal on our own out of necessity or are we more likely to figure it out sooner if we look at other people doing things similar to us?

In intentionally trying to form our keepie-uppie group to see what emerges, are we including people who play similar games that are not keepie-uppie or only those who play keepie-uppie?

This is the metaphorical question I am asking.

Directly I am asking, are non-ERE1 people allowed in ERE2 groups. Again, asking this because the answer will obviously influence strategy.



The answer I am understanding right now is "ERE2 is what emerges when groups of ERE1 people meet. It does not include non-ERE1 people."




That's fine! I'm going to tell you my opinion about that answer and it will change how much I want to participate. But both of those are also fine. If there is a definition, I don't expect it to be changed because I wish it were something else. I'm also not going to stop doing what I'm doing with the ERE1ish people that I meet, I just won't invite them to ERE2 events and I won't talk about them on this subforum, except as they relate to the actual established thing that we are doing.