Scott 2 wrote: ↑Mon Apr 05, 2021 4:52 pm
I wonder about the intersection of people who understand the ERE message with those wanting to be lieutenants. The topic selects for people without much interest in following or having authority.
I wonder if that's true. If the topic is for "people who want to FIRE because they hate their boss/w*rking so bad they're willing to eat lentils forever", aka extremeFIRE, then yes. But if the topic is Emergent Renaissance Ecology,
that certainly selects for independent-minded people but not necessarily people who can't wrap their heads around the notion of learning from someone and then passing on that knowledge, because they have a greater sense of purpose and meaning in the world than just "take this job and shove it".
The metaphor of being a lieutenant resonates strongly with me (I don't have any baggage around military metaphors, I know what is implied and what isn't. I'm not worried JLF is going to start barking orders at me and expecting obedience. Rather the opposite - he's hoping for people to figure it out for themselves and get on with it in their own way). I actually feel somewhat strongly that I have ~something like a duty to pass on,
in an effective way, what I'm learning from ERE to my social group. How to introduce the idea of DIY vs. comparative advantage, or skill replacing consumption to achieve the same living standard, or WoG tensegrity, in a way that my WL1-3 friend might resonate with, is something that occupies some significant portion of my attention.
But I'm glad that Jacob isn't spending his brain cycles on that. I'd actually be disappointed if he was, because that's a total misallocation of resources. I want him to be piercing the fog of WL8-9-10, so
I don't have to do the heavy lift of inventing it myself (wouldn't happen, probably). In addition to just helping people up, my efforts to grease the slides from WL3 to WL6 is a great exercise to internalize ERE myself (if you want to learn something, teach it). I'm glad to be engaged in lieutenant work, but I see it as hopefully just a phase as I level up myself.
I'm glad to see the thread converging on this in the last dozen posts - I've found this thread frustrating in multiple ways that I couldn't really articulate without sounding like a jerk (too late), so I couldn't figure out how to try to contribute without venting. On the one hand, it feels like Jacob is being criticized for not making ERE easy^H^H^H^simple. On the other hand, the discussion that's coming out has produced some gems and is really clarifying some stuff, so it's worth the cringe factor.
I think having a discussion about how to make ERE accessible to broader audiences is an extremely valuable one. I just wish it didn't come across like "Hey Jacob you should...."
because that normalizes the idea that all things ERE have to flow directly from Jacob, which is not only wrong but it throttles the power of ERE.