Terrible Communities

[peterlimberg]

Hey all,

This is Peter from The Stoa. I am popping my head in. I have not been here in a while and am getting a sense of what ERE2 is. It seems to be the seed Jacob planted in his second Stoa talk. I have been writing about "terrible communities" recently, which might relate to the ERE2 discussions. This particular entry might resonate: "Terrible Outcomes of Terrible Communities." Full entry: https://lessfoolish.substack.com/p/terr ... ommunities

Summary: All communities are terrible communities. Three main "change communities" exist—those changing the external world (activist groups), the internal world (spiritual groups), and the intersubjective word ("we-space" groups). Failure modes happen with each: the tyranny of structurelessness, cult states, and intimacy without friendships. The tyranny of structurelessness happens in groups with a pretense of structurelessness with an unethical secret power elite forming. Cult states happen when groups of people live together and where there is a central “spiritual” authority that can lead to genuine cults. Intimacy without friendships happens in groups committed to practicing heightening degrees of communal oneness in a way that is escapist and masturbatory.

My sense is this:

-Each change community has a piece that is needed; internal change, external change, intersubjective change, or I, IT, WE, to use Ken Wilber's phrasing,
-Each one of their failure modes needs to be addressed, and the holes need to be plugged for things to be whole.
-The "sociopath" problem needs to be addressed. Power literacy needs to be developed for this. See here: https://lessfoolish.substack.com/p/a-le ... r-literacy
-I am writing an entry for Thursday to propose an antidote for terrible communities: friendships of virtue.

This is Aristotle's term, which he contrasts to friends of utility (example: co-workers) and friends of pleasure (example: drinking buddies)—the rare kind of friendship orientated towards one's most virtuous self. I will argue that this relationship unit needs to be focused on before focusing on the community. If two people cannot cultivate a friendship of virtue, we will not cultivate communities of virtue, and communities will stay terrible.

I am curious about what you all think about these musings and how they relate to the conversations surrounding ERE2. Perhaps ERE2 is the fourth missing element amongst the change communities, aka the interobjective or ITS leg in Wilber's AQAL model, which demands having complexity literacy.

[peterlimberg]

Another thought...

Someone described ERE2 here as "It's what happens when some critical mass of people come together and individual WoGs interrelate with each other. You might think of it as a WoG of WoGs."

Has there been any discussion here about WoPs, aka "web of practices," or "ecology of practices" to use John Vervaeke's terminology? I am currently convinced by the argument that we are "practicing animals" (Sloterdijk) who are always in practice, and focusing on all our practices is the highest leverage thing for an individual to do. I argued for this robustly in the entry called "Monasticization of Daily Life." Full entry: https://lessfoolish.substack.com/p/mona ... daily-life

Some speculations/questions:

-Being considerate of one's WoG and WoP is both important.
-Friends of Virtue are particularly well-suited to help with this, regarding accountability
-How can WoG and WoP systems relate well with one another? They seem like different "muscles," I cannot remember if the ERE book made this distinction between practice and goals, or does WoG include both?

And apologies if these shares are obvious or already discussed; I love ERE and Jacob's stuff but am not super familiar with all the terms.

[Slevin]

Has there been any discussion here about WOPs, aka "web of practices," or "ecology of practices" to use John Vervaeke's terminology? I am currently convinced by the argument that we are "practicing animals" (Sloterdijk) who are always in practice, and focusing on all our practices is the highest leverage thing for an individual to do. I argued for this robustly in the entry called "Monasticization of Daily Life." Full entry: https://lessfoolish.substack.com/p/mona ... daily-life

Some speculations/questions:

-Being considerate of one's WOG and WOP is both important.
-Friends of Virtue are particularly well-suited to help with this, regarding accountability
-How can WOG and WOP systems relate well with one another? They seem like different "muscles," I cannot remember if the ERE book made this distinction between practice and goals, or does WOG include both?

Hi Peter; thanks for hosting the STOA. I've only watched a few dozen or so, but you've introduced me to some really interesting thinkers on there sometimes that I really wouldn't have ever heard of otherwise, and I really appreciate it.

WOG vs. WOP should be understood as strategy versus tactics. Goals are achieved through strict practice over long periods of time, and sometimes this is built up linearly, sometimes exponentially, and sometimes in an emergent fashion (and there are probably more ways too). Depends on the slacking versus striving (see https://studio.ribbonfarm.com/p/guts-th ... -theory-of and https://open.substack.com/pub/uncorrela ... paign=post. Sometimes you have a more convergent goal, and the pathways there are simple and clear. Sometimes, the goal is clear but the pathway muddy, and so there is a lot of muddling through. Sometimes the goal is unclear, and so undirected exploration is really the only possible path.

When you have Goals, the goals must be aligned homeotelically, or else you end up with the problem that the web of practice moves towards some goals but away from others .

The web of practice also needs to have some built in slack, since there is only so much time in a day, and so building up some goals will cause other goals to atrophy. This happens when you just can't hit everything in a day (as you mention in your post), but it also happens when you need to put a skill down for a bit to focus on others. It's unavoidable that this will happen eventually, and so goals with very hungry and constant time demands (need to be fed everyday for multiple hours for extensive periods) should be kept to a minimum of one or two. My classic example here is the one arm handstand, which needs something like 1500-5000 hours of strict practice, with a max practice capacity of 1-2 hours per day, and the skills atrophy off very quickly, so you can't take months off ever. Obviously most aren't that extreme.

This starts hitting upon another fun feature of both WoG and WoP; they are dynamically evolving things that respond to sensemaking and understanding, and so as you move through the world and experience things through your WoP, the Goals will shift, and then your WoP will need to shift to move you more towards the new shifted WoG instead of the existing WoG.

Around here we use the CCCCC framework for talking about skill mastery (Copy, Compare,Compile, Coordinate, Create) to basically describe levels of mastery. These are described in section 4.3 of the ERE book (which I don't have handy and can't do it justice in a quick recall). As you move through the WoP, you should gain skill mastery over the things you are practicing (if you are practicing in the correct ways, etc, etc, lots of nuance here). This can be leveraged by working with others around your skill level, and / or having someone much higher up the skill level giving you mentorship, but that is much easier to achieve in some skill domains than others.

The ERE1 thread to this on the individual level (and credit to @jacob and @AH here I think) would be that you use the goal (ERE1's goal taken most literally is FIRE through post-consumer praxis) to make the most effective tactics (things to work on daily) and then practice them until you get good at them. The basic premise of these would be to remove yourself from the "consumer" definition label placed on the normal human interacting with society, and fulfill your basic needs efficiently where you need to use just money, and using other methodologies wherever and whenever you can. Then hopefully you move more things from the first category to the second category over time by developing skills and other types of capital, all while accumulating a very modest amount of monetary capital to cover all the things you can't cover with the skills and other types of capital.

The ERE2 thread to this is TBD (I don't trust my understanding enough to try and weave this tapestry).

[AxelHeyst]

Welcome back Peter. Your Terrible Community posts definitely caught my eye, it's great to see this thread!

I think adopting the ecology of practice (EoP?) phrase as a concept is a great complement to WOG thinking and helps bridge abstract to day-to-day. (I suggest we go along with ecology of practice rather than web of practice, because um.)

I think in our journals and especially in the MMG (mastermind group) I'm in, we spend a lot of time focused on the details of our ecologies of practices. We give updates to our evolving practices, tweaks and tunings. We'll go up a level and talk about how our WoG has shifted for any variety of reasons internal or external, and then we drop back down to how to cultivate our ecology of practice to best meet that shift in our WoG. (I'm echoing what @Slevin said above which was right on.)

It occurs to me that in the MMGs what is happening is that we're developing friendships of virtue. Our focus is supporting each other to become the best versions of ourselves possible, and yeah we're using the ERE/WOG/postconsumer praxis framework to think about what that looks like. 'Developing ERE friendships of virtue' might be a quite decent explanation of what the point of the MMGs are.

I think it's important to note here that that *doesn't* look like pressure to conform to a certain specific 'ere lifestyle' that looks and acts a certain way. A lot of the effort that goes into our discussions is centered on helping each of us figure out how to employ the ERE principles to develop our own unique manifestation of a WoG. In the MMG I'm in we've got a pretty broad diversity of lifestyles and lifestyle aims.

MMGs aren't the only way to cultivate friendships of virtue, it's just one of the obvious ways we seem to be doing it.

The connection to ERE2 seems to follow straightforwardly from this: ERE1 individuals > development of friendships of virtue-class relationships between ERE1 individuals > critical masses of ERE1 individuals with friendship-of-virtue-class relationships > that's ERE2. What happens from there we don't know.

[Slevin]

Ok I’ve had some sleep and some pu’erh and so now I’m gonna take a crack at the ERE2 or communal aspect of this thing.

Jacob in his STOA talk argues that by mastering skills in multiple domains we breach “domain specificity” and are able to synthesize whole new fields and unique approaches. This would inherently come from having a WoG that is sufficiently stable enough that the daily WoP is fairly stable, and then over the course of some number of decades, you would be able to synthesize some really interesting new ideas. At scale, probably somebody is going to come up with really good stuff.

Gortz and Friis, on the other hand, argue that you need sufficient MHC (14, see https://metamoderna.org/what-is-the-mhc/ ) to be able to synthesize entire new fields. This is different than Jacob’s theory, but I don’t have a horse in this race. Certainly I find it useful to rip logic and patterns from one context and try to put them into other contexts to see how they perform, but I can’t argue that I’m near this high in mhc to actually be able to evaluate this.

Regardless, I think ERE2 would be enough humans engaging in WoP and WoG including post consumer praxis plus other skills to have contributed enough interesting new skills and ideas to be able to synthesize new paradigms and combinations of skills to shift the intersubjective understanding of a default human life into something more inline with the planet’s material boundaries, while also improving the index of human thriving.

As far as your monk statement goes, I think there are some important bits that should be included in that picture that you maybe haven’t considered. I’m taking this Rao’s 2x2 picture into account here as part of the argument context, so here it is for reference: .

Monks have some inherent qualities to them that allow for a deep WoP that is different than the average human, in addition to the actual separation. These qualities are ‘asceticism’ and either ‘patrons’ or ‘interdependent collective self sufficiency’. Often a mix of both. Asceticism is a sufficient post consumer practice, that when combined with one of the other two, it allows the material needs of the monks to be virtually non-existent or covered by an extremely small amount of resources. This allows them to engage in “Fat” activities, which is an important subset of activities not generally practiced by the general population, as there isn’t a clear “how to do it” and/or a clear goal on the frontier of understanding. Then these fat individuals can reap the benefits of an economy of variety , where they can spend time coming up with unique and novel understandings of their faith / the world / etc, or spend time helping to spiritually guide and/or give therapy to individuals who need help, etc.

So it may be that you need something a bit more than just a “WoP” to gain the highest leverage, as you also need to also be able to increase time / resource devotion to the WoP as the most important WoP practice, or you won’t ever be able to engage in the economy of variety that is what gives back the interesting results.

[peterlimberg]

Thanks, @Slevin and @AxelHeyst. Amazing replies.

Per @AxelHeyst suggestion, I'll be using the acronyms WoG and EoP (ecology of practices) henceforth, mainly to respect the historical use of the latter. Also, something conceptually significant with the "web" and "ecology" distinction might reveal itself as we continue this inquiry.

So, to summarize what I understood above from both of your shares: EoP is informed by WoG, and goals within a WoG are aligned ("homeotelic"). With EFE1, the WoG has what I'll call a "superordinate goal" ("FIRE through post-consumer praxis"), which is the goal that aligns all other goals and practices. Regarding friendships of virtue (FoV), they can be cultivated through MMG, but not only that. Let me know if I misunderstood something.

A few responses:

Regarding FoV, I found the two best activities to cultivate them are MMG and "philosophical fellowships," where philosophical inquiry is the core practice, not goal/practice accountability/calibrating. I have not seen any group that successfully combines both goal/practice accountability and philosophical inquiry. I have tried to do this at The Stoa a few times, and it's tricky to get right.

Regarding "fat" practices/goals, I'll add having "fuck you money" to your list of conditions that allow for them (asceticism, patrons, etc). A prime example is Bryan Johnson and his wild practice regime (the guy that reversed his aging). We spoke to Bryan at The Stoa about his EoP. See here: https://youtu.be/uxaKj8ZAktA

Regarding Venkat's excellent graphic, I am reminded of this wayfinding taxonomy map:



I view "existential wayfinding" as akin to wisdom. I wrote about that here: https://lessfoolish.substack.com/p/exis ... wayfinding

A few thoughts:

We might need to level-set what we mean by "goals" and "practices." In a presentation at The Stoa on "the practice problem," I defined practice as "a recurring action that shapes one's capacity." I baked unconscious practices (aka habits) into this definition. See: https://youtu.be/H13wAlXqOO4?t=781 (13 mins in). Practices are regular behaviors that may or may not work toward an outcome that may or may not be concretely measured. In contrast, goals seem to be outcomes that can be concretely measurable.

It seems that prioritizing goals over practices or WoG informing EoP is biasing for practices to be outcome-orientated and measurable. If something genuinely emergent is desired, aka unknown thanks to our bounded rationality, aka ERE2, I sense that this needs to be flipped: EoP informs WoG, which is the spirit of the argument I outlined in the "Monasticization of Daily Life" piece linked above.

It seems like ERE1 is about escaping from something, aka "terrible communities," via the post-consumer praxis, and ERE2 is about midwifing something new. It makes sense to me that a goal disposition is needed for the former, and a practice disposition is needed for the latter.

If there is truth here, a question arises: If there is a superordinate goal for a WoG, does there also need to be a superordinate practice for a EoP? If so, my intuitive guess: the practice of being a friend of virtue.

[AxelHeyst]

So, to summarize what I understood above from both of your shares: EoP is informed by WoG, and goals within a WoG are aligned ("homeotelic"). With EFE1, the WoG has what I'll call a "superordinate goal" ("FIRE through post-consumer praxis"), which is the goal that aligns all other goals and practices. Regarding friendships of virtue (FoV), they can be cultivated through MMG, but not only that. Let me know if I misunderstood something.

Just a clarification: 'FIRE through post-consumer praxis' is the superordinate goal for many ERE1 folk, but not necessarily *the* superordinate goal. Two other common examples include:

• An ecological footprint that is at or below global sustainable/equitable levels via post-consumer praxis (ecoERE?) (see Jim Merkel's Voluntary Simplicity for the best expression of this).
• Resilience / preparedness in the face of various scales of social/infrastructural collapse via postconsumer praxis (prepperERE?)

If FIRE is not the superordinate goal, it is often considered a likely side-effect of post-consumer praxis, or a goal/effect in service of the actual superordinate goal.

That said, I think that your overall observation that ERE1 (or how individuals approach ERE1) is goal-oriented is probably right.

It seems like ERE1 is about escaping from something, aka "terrible communities," via the post-consumer praxis, and ERE2 is about midwifing something new. It makes sense to me that a goal disposition is needed for the former, and a practice disposition is needed for the latter.

We talk about 'escaping from Plato's cave' of consumerism and specialization all the time around here, so I'd say you're right on with that.

I will also add that what we call ERE2 is not the *only* thing we image doing after having left the cave/aka achieved ERE1. I just want to make clear, particularly for others reading this, that ERE2 is an idea for one kind of game people could try to play after having left the cave. There are lots of games people could play -- that's sort of the whole point of leaving the cave, you're on the surface and you can wander wherever you like. ERE2 does not point at the entire landscape of choice, it is pointing at one specific genre of thing that could happen on the surface/outside the Cave.

We do talk a fair amount about process vs goal orientation even in pursuit of ERE1. This might be a quibble. Speaking for myself, I often feel like I'm fall into the trap of being process-oriented because I've become convinced that it's the best way to accomplish my goals, which is maybe missing the point of process orientation. Sort of like looking near a dim star in order to be able to see it. But if the goal is to see *new* stars, then I'm not quite doing it right, am I?

It seems that prioritizing goals over practices or WoG informing EoP is biasing for practices to be outcome-orientated and measurable. If something genuinely emergent is desired, aka unknown thanks to our bounded rationality, aka ERE2, I sense that this needs to be flipped: EoP informs WoG, which is the spirit of the argument I outlined in the "Monasticization of Daily Life" piece linked above.

The model that as one 'achieves' ERE1 aka exits the cave, there is or should be a natural transition from goal orientation to practice orientation, might be a useful explanation for some of the dynamics we observe in ERE journals. There's often a rough patch when the milestones start being reached, a sense of 'what's next?'. WoG informing EoP and then flipping at a certain transition point. Interesting.

If there is truth here, a question arises: If there is a superordinate goal for a WoG, does there also need to be a superordinate practice for a EoP? If so, my intuitive guess: the practice of being a friend of virtue.

>The superordinate practice for an ERE2 EoP is the practice of being a friend of virtue.< I like how that thought feels in my brain. Will sit with it for a bit.

[jennypenny]

It feels like ‘friends[hips]’ and ‘communities’ are being used interchangeably. Is that the intention? Friendship=community?

[daylen]

From Peter above:

I will argue that this relationship unit needs to be focused on before focusing on the community. If two people cannot cultivate a friendship of virtue, we will not cultivate communities of virtue, and communities will stay terrible.

A given community of size n thus has n choose 2 or n! / 2*(n-2)! possible virtuous friendships.

[jacob]

Some quick comments before I head back to the tent ...

Whether it's webs of goals or webs of practice, they're just the inversion of each other. If you invert the goal perspective, you get the practice perspective. If you invert the practice perspective, you get the goal perspective. If you tell me what someones practice is, I'll tell you their likely goal outcomes. (Refer to the comments on ergodicity.). Conversely, if you tell me what someone's goals are, I'll tell you their likely practices.

Another analogy may be the stock-flow model. Aside from a few technical details, if you know the entire flow of a system (the practice), you know where the stock (goals) are building up and drawing down. Conversely, if you know how the stocks are changing (goals are being met), you can infer (invert) how the flows (practice) is.

You can use either perspective. Some might find one easier than the other.

---

There are many kinds of communities and they can be formed over any kind of commonality. This commonality can be an interest in living together, like a hippie farm or a senior home. It can also be in having a common purpose (e.g. change-making). It could be people virtuously bound by friendship or people built by DNA relationships or marriage.

The commonality in ERE2 is literally in the second letter. It's a body of persons with Renaissance or transdisciplinary capacity. The best comparison I can think of in the international community of academics. They are neither friends or family, nor do they live together. They don't even necessarily have the same purpose (you could say they have an ecology of practice in terms of publish or perish). What unifies them is their specialized education as academics: They have a certain way of thinking in common with each other.

A certain way of thinking is not enough to create a community. I'm not sure there's an international community of woodworkers even if woodworkers also have a certain way of thinking in common with each other. Maybe I'm wrong here ...

In terms of emergence (see the keepie-uppie/soccer analogy), the international community of academcis is ahead of ERE2 and the woodworkers. They have universities. They go to conferences. They collaborate with others. Most have a career spanning several different universities, not just one. In other words, there's an ecology. We don't even talk about emergence and the reason we don't is that the international community of academics is at the climax stage of its evolution.

However, before all that there were "natual philosophers"; self-taught intellectuals working in their shops solving the longitude problem; people wandering the streets debating whoever was interested... At that point it was impossible to foresee the exact form and function of the academic community.

This is where ERE2 is now.

I don't think we need to be friends or get married or live together or have the same purpose for ERE2 to come about. We do need to connect though; otherwise it's just the single-player mode of ERE1. I don't know what the best or only practice is for that. The MMGs/friends of virtue seem to be working well for many people. However, being less people-oriented, checking in on people on a regular basis is too much upkeep for me personally. I don't need to have a history with someone to connect. I just need to recognize someone who thinks in the same way. The internet and especially forums have served as catalyst for that kind of recognition.

The last 15 years has been spent on "making" people who think in a certain way. The goal is now to figure out how to actually connect them or the silos they sit in.

---

By virtue (ha!) of being or attempting to be transdisciplinary (or is that "integrated), ERE1 is technically in all of AQAL. There's a strong interest in 21st century praxis, but I don't think that's exclusively interobjective. It also needs the whys and whats and whos that can only only be answered by the left hand side.

----

In terms of Slevin's Rao diagram, I keep resisting demands for a precise definition of ERE2 like "Just tell me in 50 words or less what EXACTLY we're trying to do here", because ERE2 is not a lower-left project "project" situation.

I see ERE2 a lot more as a case of "Muddling Through". The 21st praxis and the predicament is how I "know why". Note that "Play" is actually the initial stage of "Muddling Through". "Muddling through" just sees farther than play.

For example, play in the Infinite Game sense is completely open-ended. But being that process-oriented is very local in time and orientation. (Some people prefer that ... and we had a great kerfuffle between them and those who prefer a more global orientation.) However, reality has closed down a lot of these path-ways and so ERE1 was very much about picking not only the good pathways (like financial independence) but also the necessary ones (resilience, adaption, assets).

[peterlimberg]

It feels like ‘friends[hips]’ and ‘communities’ are being used interchangeably. Is that the intention? Friendship=community?

When I write about friendships of virtue, I am actually thinking of a dyad. So, I am currently seeing friends of virtue as the relational atom of a community of virtue.

[peterlimberg]

Whether it's webs of goals or webs of practice, they're just the inversion of each other. If you invert the goal perspective, you get the practice perspective. If you invert the practice perspective, you get the goal perspective. If you tell me what someones practice is, I'll tell you their likely goal outcomes. (Refer to the comments on ergodicity.). Conversely, if you tell me what someone's goals are, I'll tell you their likely practices.

I like this inversion point. However, I think one can get overconfident in assuming they can deduce a goal from a practice, especially if the goals need to be emergent. I am thinking of goal here as a specific knowable outcome. The term "attractor" feels more attractive to use here, aka Game B, wisdom commons, etc.

I don't think we need to be friends or get married or live together or have the same purpose for ERE2 to come about.

Hm. I want to flag this for further consideration. My sense is if we want something truly wise to emerge rather than just something new, there needs to be a certain intensity of relational commitment.

[daylen]

@peter

Say a community is a graph with nodes being people. A fully connected graph indicating that all n choose 2 friendships are established as edges.

Now say there are layers of these graphs corresponding to different communal scopes or scales from n=2 up to the human population. We can perhaps assume most people have an attractor point on the surface of earth called home where they tend to develop a density of friendships. As the territory of the community increases, the graph tends to become sparser of friendships.

For each person there might be a friendship limit around 100 let's say. So, maybe someone has a few connections at the family scope, a few more in the extended family, a few more in an online group, a few more in the local community, a few more in the regional, a few more at the global totaling 100. The center of density across scale can vary quite a bit from person to person.

How many layers might a game B world have relative to a game A world? How might the sparsity of graphs at each layer differ between a game A world and a game B world? Would a game B world have more or less migration and travel? Does a game B world require stable electrical grids and high resolution, high bandwidth virtualization capacity (i.e. live video or VR across the world) ?

It seems to me that the most likely path to a game B world involves going through a partial deglobalization shock before perhaps a gradual reintegration of more inclusive scopes. Though, perhaps not so gradual given the persistence and momentum of the cultural evolution leading up to now.

[peterlimberg]

It seems to me that the most likely path to a game B world involves going through a partial deglobalization shock before perhaps a gradual reintegration of more inclusive scopes. Though, perhaps not so gradual given the persistence and momentum of the cultural evolution leading up to now.

I do not know. All above my pay grade. One distinction emerged when reading though: "being a friend of virtue" versus "the capacity to be a friend of virtue." The former demands a certain embodied way of being with another, a commitment to see them grow, perhaps having a mutual dependence on each other to actually survive. The latter requires some developmental program. I am more interested in developing the capacity at this point, rather than jumping into such a potentially intense relationship, which seems foolish to do.

[7Wannabe5]

It seems to me that eventually from a monastic community of ascetic practice that which would emerge would be a complementary "community"* of voluptuary practice. IOW, the monastery and the harem are just two sides of the same coin.

*Perhaps not consisting of humans.

[daylen]

The tension between capacity and actuality may result in a measurement or uncertainty problem (or rather a feature of game B framing). Having an example graph at a snapshot in time is like making a measurement in this friendship space. Though, too many measurements can start to look dystopian.

It's like in order to confirm that your capacity for friendship then you need to make measurements or establish boundaries across time, though the act of sharing a measurement can adversely affect capacities for establishing friendships outside boundaries. Lack of sharing can lead to uncertain communal boundaries across perhaps a swath of scales which may tend to make people uncomfortable from their loss of the ability to act across that swath.

Perhaps game B requires human culture to be steered towards favoring uncertain or chaotic communal boundaries between the neighborhood and bioregional layers as well as between the bioregional and global layers. I am probably going a bit off topic, though.

[7Wannabe5]

If each cluster in a small world network is based on a "virtue" (as opposed to location on planet surface) then the individual/node who "trades" in many virtues of similar "value" will carry the most influence.

[peterlimberg]

IOW, the monastery and the harem are just two sides of the same coin.

Care to elaborate?

then the individual/node who "trades" in many virtues of similar "value" will carry the most influence.

My sense as well.

[daylen]

If each cluster in a small world network is based on a "virtue" (as opposed to location on planet surface) then the individual/node who "trades" in many virtues of similar "value" will carry the most influence.

I like this approach. Seems like it may help to make the assumption of an invariant human virtue set across the planet. Such an assumption might lead to conflicts between relative valuing of each virtue in the set based upon geometry/geography/geology at the bioregional scale. That is, the virtue of patience may tend to skew up in value from a densely forested region to grasslands to desert. Sparce resources may incentivize a higher relative position of patience in the virtue hierarchy for a region. Especially as the technological sophistication decreases (which helps to overcome the three G's of geometry/geography/geology).

[7Wannabe5]

7WB5: IOW, the monastery and the harem are just two sides of the same coin.
Peter Limberg: Care to elaborate?

A community dedicated to promotion of masculine energy through goal setting/GTD and adherence to ascetic practices and the freedom provided through philosophy will on some level create or expand or preserve a "community" with equivalent feminine energy.

Simple example: If you possess the masculine-energy self-discipline to pass the "marshmallow test", you will have created the opportunity for future you to relax in your feminine energy and enjoy the sensual pleasure of not just one, but two delicious marshmallows! Now imagine a community of monks who never eat any of the marshmallows. The practices of this community will create an attractive vacuum or ecological niche for somebody like the very chubby bikini-clad teenage girl I saw (right after reading this thread) at the rural beach-side ice cream store, sitting in the sun while her friend-of-pleasure deposited spoon after spoon of ice cream right into her mouth and/or some other aspect of nature such a stream of worker ants heading towards their queen.

Another example might be that a human could choose a highly ascetic sexual practice, rather than a practice such as "Fuck like a beast" as recommended by Hanzi Freinacht, and transfer the masculine energy/money saved/sublimated to an organization dedicated to the preservation of some aspect of nature such as polar bears, thereby better enabling the polar bears to literally experience fucking like beasts.