jacob wrote: ↑Sat Oct 14, 2023 2:25 pm
To bring the thread back on track, there exists non-ERE allies, who are not as interested in solutions as they are in having someone listen to [how they feel about] their problems while resisting the temptation to present solutions.
And there exists non-ERE allies, who are not as interested in the message, as they are in the messenger.
Humans that convince themselves that they were incorrect after hearing/reading/seeing a correct argument from a random person are actually rather rare. They're mainly found in places that deal with interobjective reality, such as coding, science, accounting, ... which it is not only important to have a factual understanding of reality but also the ability to share it with others (so no idiosyncratic tips of the trade).
As such, maybe we've been having this discussion in a bubble of trying to find the exact "reasonable argument" to present to whichever group while failing to take the subjective and intersubjective operation of the other humans.
shaz wrote: ↑Sat Oct 14, 2023 10:27 pm
J+G, for the artists and musicians in your circle, is it too simplistic to pitch ERE as "fewer distractions from your art/passion?"
Yes, my experience with the public and what I've seen of others pitching the same message is that pitches don't work very well.
"Show, don't tell"... but do it in a way that the receiver can
relate and see themselves in your place. Most humans want to mimic and/or anti-mimic other humans. For example, I've famously been dismissed for wearing the wrong clothes. To me clothing is a distraction. To others, clothing is so important that it forms much of their identity. Some even feel like a different person when they change it: "This is my serious suit. This is my party shirt. This is my uniform..."
In some domains, the correct clothes (lawyers and businessmen?) is maybe 75% (random number) of what is being communicated. Some people will gladly pay $2000 for a weekend seminar of trivialities and nonsense as long as it's presented by someone in a fancy suit driving a fancy car. A better version of the message might be available from a student borrowing a room at the local library, but these people would not even show up for that. (Place holder reserved for a snarky comment about Ted talks.)
On a more microscopic level, some will listen more (and better) if a message is communicated with passion. In other cases, people will listen more if they like you or if you're part of their group or even
a group. Also see Asch experiment.
But good news... if you're part of an Artists-Community, some of these channels, which are closed to me, are open to you. You wear the right clothes. You talk in the right way. You're part of the in-group. You make art which they can understand/relate to(*).
(*) Conversely, there are very few humans who relate to the finer details of woodworking. A handcut mitered dovetail is meh. Slather three layers of poly on some crappy wood that came out of a barn door and it's ooh and aah. But so it goes ...
The problem is that some of these "channels" do not allow the communication of behavioral change. (In some cases, that is by design.) For example, some families "do not talk about money" or some families "do not read". The question which has persisted in this thread is how to open these channels.
Another strategy (The Harry Browne "How I found Freedom in An Unfree World") strategy is to simply put yourself out there without changing a thing about yourself. This is time eventually draws like-minded people to you. (time * increased probability = eventual success). This method is available now that we have the internet. Previously, people would have to leave the valley, go to the big city, and make themselves known. It is much easier now.
In between the two---to connect them---there's the strategy I presented in Stoa2. In practice, if you want to communicate a message, you can do it in the following order.
1) Put a megaphone on the internet (e.g. blog)
2) Attract people, who understand the message.
3) Help these people become different messengers (e.g. their own blogs, podcasts, journals, ...) with their own megaphone.
4) Create synergies between these groups (forums, blogging networks, ...)
5) ???
In some ways, you can model this as an epidemic with people being more or less susceptible to infection depending on which channels are open.
Add: This meta-strategy is still very much "on the internet", that is, it's a big-world-attraction strategy rather than a small-valley-convincing strategy. I've been much more effective with the former than the latter. For example, my family with the exception of DW and my parents still have no idea what ERE is about and strangely little interest in finding out.