The ERE Wheaton Scale

[jacob]

Ah yes, this is where we disagree. I think any novel solution is interesting regardless of repeatability... though I am thankful you keep discovering repeatable solutions! I agree that repeatable solutions are more interesting. I love taking other people's solutions and playing with them, so a non-repeatable solution in my eyes is something that can be borrowed and rearranged. I'm not great at coming up with generalizable novel ideas by myself.

Well, sure, but "interesting" is not the same as "creative" even if they both may lead to "insight". For example, the former may serve as an example of what not to do. The differentiation between information, knowledge, and wisdom.

Pre-conventional: information (data points)
Conventional: knowledge (correlated data)
Post-convention: wisdom (correlated correlations)

This is a dangerous map as it may easily be misinterpreted!!! The parentheses are key.

[xmj]

As I've moved through the WLs, I noticed that WL1-5 is very specific, while WL6-8 is more general. WL 1-5 is pretty much achieving FIRE (though possible to FI without reaching WL5, it will just take longer). In the WL7/8 thread quoted above, there has been a more general discussion of WL 1-5. My interpretation: WL1-5 is the process of playing around with whatever the conventions of your culture are and learning to make that system work for you rather than working for that system. For most of us, money is a large component of this. However, this does hint at alternative paths outside of FIRE.


Ego Development Theory Overview (from 7->8 thread).

The trap of not following the FI plan is being "pre-conventional" and thinking you are "post-conventional."


WL 6-8 (and possibly beyond) has the opposite problem. This is the process of becoming post-conventional and moving towards self-actualizing, which means that a well laid out plan is not possible. The "Needs" series of posts in my journal is me grappling with how to figure this out and think of a possible system structure.


I agree. WL5 -> WL6 necessitates shattering an ego narrative about your place in the world. In some ways it felt to me like being born again or waking up from a long sleep. You also graduate from being at the top of one way of being to the bottom of another.

Self-employment and certain social processes that go along with it (constant rejection! tailoring offers to clients! empiricism, finding what works for you and in your target market!) may lead to you speed-running the transition from conventional to post-conventional without being aware of ERE Wheaton levels. This, I presume, is highly reproducible, and without stopping for breath I can name a large number of fellow self-employed people in the "Individual - Pluralist" stage, a decent amount in the "Autonomous (Strategist)" stage and a small number of "Construct-Aware and Ego-Aware (Magician, Alchemist)" stage.

This path may be more reproducible (for Ego Development) than ERE, mainly by virtue of there being a larger number of self-employed people who manage to stick out for a decade or longer.

Think of it this way: one of the golden geese is obtaining qualified inbound leads. It is near impossible to get that without having a reputation, and significant enough presence both online (digital real estate through websites, blogs, etc) and offline (conferences+events, professional networks, etc). Building this is in essence creating a web worthy of Yields and Flows consideration. If you manage to pull this off by being a specialist in several sought-after fields I do not see how you would not qualify for Systems Theory levels by virtue of **having built it** already.

In hindsight, it would seem easy to transpose and restate common business practice in ERE terms.


Quoting Jacob from the WL7->8 Thread because this bears repeating:

<snip>
Yes, this is much how the scientific process actually works in practice---like you just described (not the 1-2-3 steps they teach in high school---those only work for boring adding decimal point incremental-style research). Not as an engineering projects that can be chopped into milestones. The difference between the two is that when exploring unknown territory, one often needs to go back and try another path, retrench a position between the previous support was too weak (e.g. a beach head can only support 1000 troops and not the 2000 troops that our exploration revealed that we need).


<snip>
I'm mostly focused similarities because I have the [scientific] hypothesis, that all these semi-detailed tables ultimately follow EDT in some way. IOW, as adult egos mature, they tend to mature in more or less the same structural way even as they may focus on different things like sex or money or fabrication skills or ... OTOH, I'm pretty sure the hypothesis is correct, so I'm interested in the details of the more particular schedules as it would make it very easy to fit into existing general knowledge.

<snip>

Science isn't the only field relying on trial and error.

So does entrepreneurship (of the "fail fast and break things" mantra; certainly of the family business type iterations-over-generations mantra; and to a heavily scaled "seed N startups that explore this Gartner Hype-Wave topic" mantra).

So does music (lots of theory going into music hit production; but many musicians work by heuristics - and trial and error until "this sounds nice").

And so do interpersonal skills (advertising; sales; propaganda; seduction; etc).

And yes, there are reliable ways to reproduce this progression in each of them. Many of them come down to learning the language (happens reliably fast), the concepts (somewhat slower) and the heuristics (might take a while) -- similar to the apprentice/craftsman/master/phd/field leader stages of Human Capital.

[AxelHeyst]

I’m interested in a discussion about rate of movement through the WLs. Right now I feel like all I’ve got are questions and a few isolated thoughts, but I’ll try to arrange them. First some definitions:

Crowbarring is a tactic/technique. Eg put $100 in an envelope and those are the only dollars you’re allowed to use for food for a month. Or BNY.

Speedrunning is more of an overall strategy/approach of attempting to progress through the WLs as rapidly as possible. Not necessarily bad, but frought with risk (skipping steps and tripping).

The danger of trying to go fast is in not actually achieving unconscious competence at certain skills and thus winding up in a situation of dragging along several WLs worth of conscious competence. AKA not actually transcending precious levels but finding yourself spinning plates at multiple WLs and getting overwhelmed.

‘Why would you want to move through the WLs quickly?’ To me is about the same as asking ‘Why would you want to get to black belt quickly?’ Because you have a vision (wissen) of black belt which is attractive and is motivating you forward.

It’s not about rushing, it’s about a desire to be efficient/effective with your time and resources, and wanting to avoid stagnation, coupled with the vision/desire to be operating at a different level. Festina lente.

Since I’ve been bikepacking while thinking about this I’ve been contemplating metaphors from biking. Momentum, picking efficient lines through rock gardens, and then the whole philosophy of ultralight. Maintaining a flow of momentum can carry you through obstacles that pure torque applied from a standstill will put you on your ass.

Bicycle7 asked, somewhere out on the slickrock,~”what don’t you need to bring when you go fast?” Put another way - what lessons don’t you need to learn if eg you’re not planning on spending very long at 5 or 6 or? What is essential kit vs ‘luxury’?

(A trivial example might be: you can skip learning how to optimize/game for credit card points if you have a vision of getting COL super low in near future).

Part of the challenge is we don’t have enough data (yet) to have a clear idea of what ‘fast but appropriate’ vs slow looks like based on real examples. We have a pretty good sense for getting to 5 and maybe 6, but above that it gets vague (to me).

And maybe we only can get a sense for appropriate speed up to 6 or 7, as above that it gets into choose your own adventure territory.

[jacob]

Speedrunning is more of an overall strategy/approach of attempting to progress through the WLs as rapidly as possible. Not necessarily bad, but frought with risk (skipping steps and tripping).

The danger of trying to go fast is in not actually achieving unconscious competence at certain skills and thus winding up in a situation of dragging along several WLs worth of conscious competence. AKA not actually transcending precious levels but finding yourself spinning plates at multiple WLs and getting overwhelmed.

‘Why would you want to move through the WLs quickly?’ To me is about the same as asking ‘Why would you want to get to black belt quickly?’ Because you have a vision (wissen) of black belt which is attractive and is motivating you forward.

The risk/danger of speedrunning is that the mental constructs that one builds up become a house of cards. Using martial arts as an example, some McDojos offer couch to black belt in a year. While it is possible to learn [about] all the techniques in that timespan, it hardly makes for a good fighter. Ditto handing out black belts to pre-teens. Recall, that belts didn't use to have colors...instead a white belt slowly turned black from accumulated sweat.

If you cover material too fast, the risk is that knowledge becomes shallow. Basically, without mastering the fundamentals, one might be good at talking about things but not very good at actually doing them. The pedagogical difference in focus between the university, where I did my phd, and the university, where I did my undergrad, were stark. The former covered twice the range of the latter. However, most students of the former were useless at solving textbook problems because they basically never practiced it. All the focus was on regurgitating material convincingly.

To wit, going to fast and one risks dragging the less developed frameworks from lower stages along and proceeding to project them onto higher states. (The threads are full of these problems. Like not understanding the "tap water" metaphor due to skipping the focus on money ) The black belt who has only be practicing for a year and thus lacks strength, robustness, conditioning ... will fight in a different way to compensate for their shortcomings. The physicist who did a "deep dive" on quantum field theory "all yesterday afternoon" might be able to bullshit their way through a 10 minute presentation, but they won't be able to work out the simplest expectation value for an actual experiment.

To me, being motivated by a "goal", suggests an achievement-oriented mindset. However, someone should not train martial arts in order to become a black belt. People ought not study at the university just in order to "get a degree"---those are the worst students! The point of the WL table is not to figure out how one can mostly quickly call oneself WL8 or WL4.

Recall that the primary purpose of the WL table is to allow people to communicate across different frameworks. A higher stage framework is only better in the sense that it is more comprehensive. However, it does not necessarily make one happier or even more effective at doing whatever it is one wants to be doing.

I think it's much better if we stick to using the WL table in the way it was originally intended, namely to communicate with others or at least understand that other people aren't lazy or crazy but that they simply see things differently.

Add: To give an example from standard EDT. In EDT, "unitive" is considered the highest level. However, a consequence of feeling unitive with everything is also a feeling of total acceptance, which as a side-effect tends to ruin any motivation to actually change the world for the better. Instead the attitude is that "the world is beautiful and amazing as it is". So the rhetorical question is ... would this unitive stage really be something desirable to achieve deliberately or as fast as possible? I don't think so, but many do anyway... also see spiritual bypass.

[AxelHeyst]

Thanks Jacob. I do think I at least wissen all of that (while lacking the ability to articulate it as well as you just did). Insofar as I’m guilty of an achievement focus, I don’t know how to work through it without working through it, if that makes sense. In other words I know about the downfalls of box ticking and ladder climbing, but I don’t know how to approach transcending that focus without, uh, climbing to the next rung of the ladder.

I suppose the answer to my question in fewer words is “calm down, work smoothly, stop and think, enjoy/experience the process.”

(ETA I will add that I haven’t explicitly thought about WLs in quite some time until this recent surge of activity on the forum, which worked out well I think.)

ETA2: I guess I don’t really know the difference between wanting to get a black belt because black belt and wanting to get better, improve, grow, become more authentically the best version of myself etc. Internally it feels like I pursue the latter, but I am always suspicious that I’m fooling myself about that.

[daylen]

Add: To give an example from standard EDT. In EDT, "unitive" is considered the highest level. However, a consequence of feeling unitive with everything is also a feeling of total acceptance, which as a side-effect tends to ruin any motivation to actually change the world for the better. Instead the attitude is that "the world is beautiful and amazing as it is". So the rhetorical question is ... would this unitive stage really be something desirable to achieve deliberately or as fast as possible? I don't think so, but many do anyway... also see spiritual bypass.

Seems for me that I somewhat accidentally stumbled upon the unitive frame while attempting to understand the universe inclusive of myself better. Motivation within this frame doesn't get ruined so to speak as much as it changes form. There is still some semblance of better and worse pasts/futures. However, the unitive frame is like the ultimate stress dissipation device which renders any past, present, or future less scary, so more time(s) are considered (or even alternative reincarnations).

Any form of "achievement for the betterment of mankind" is one hell of a can of worms to accept at face value.. hence spiritual bypassing around false idols. Choosing the right idols or ideals is half the battle to doing your best work. Believing in your own agency to change the universe (i.e. heroic arc) too strongly is the flip side of the spiritual bypassing coin.

Not to say that speed running towards a "unitive all is good" frame is "good" but that perhaps it is a universal adaptation for stress-feeling creatures stuck in a seemingly infinite void of hill climbing.

[mountainFrugal]

Any form of "achievement for the betterment of mankind" is one hell of a can of worms to accept at face value.. hence spiritual bypassing around false idols. Choosing the right idols or ideals is half the battle to doing your best work. Believing in your own agency to change the universe (i.e. heroic arc) too strongly is the flip side of the spiritual bypassing coin.

In other words... knowing yourself enough to know how you want to fully show up in the world moment to moment, but being reflective and humble enough to actually read the external [subtle] signs that might be providing you crucial feedback? One needs to have a healthy ego developed that can both reflect on itself AND reflect the external, ideally simultaneously? (words are clunky).

[jacob]

ETA2: I guess I don’t really know the difference between wanting to get a black belt because black belt and wanting to get better, improve, grow, become more authentically the best version of myself etc. Internally it feels like I pursue the latter, but I am always suspicious that I’m fooling myself about that.

I'd suggest looking into the ~90page Cook-Greuter pdf I linked elsewhere. There's perhaps more work to be done at the "pluralist" stage first. "Getting better, improving, growing, being the best version..." all suggest an exclusive framework of individual [comparative] achievement as the highest value (SD:Orange).

Why is that so? Is it because you grew up in the US? (Concerns about status and achievement come up a lot when talking about freedom-to with Americans. Less so in Scandinavia. Why is that? #rhetorical) Are there perhaps other values that could more important that self-improvement? What about being happy? Or fitting in? Being included or including others? Having a role or a place? Belonging? Being on a mission? Having a purpose? Is self-improvement really the highest goal in life... or is it just the ego you constructed---the ego that was constructed for you---swimming in the waters of the American Dream(tm).

Point being: Life (living) might not be all about getting better at something whatever that thing is. Nor is it about picking any other of those metrics (possibly suffering from Goodhart's Law) and optimizing for that or worse seeing it as a dichotomy of pass/fail. Like, "if I'm not better at something today than yesterday, I'm failing!" (yikes!)

FWIW, I think the EDT scale follows the same crazy/lazy structure IFF used correctly. Higher levels---insofar you're not trying to self-declare---will seem crazy. E.g. if you're a technical specialist you might find management consultants or the idea of doing something like that to be a waste of good breath. Conversely, if you're starting to put things together, you might wonder why anyone would want to spend their life focusing on details that only 5 other people in the world care about. Your attitude towards the different descriptions reveal where you really are. This requires the ability to do an honest self-evaluation.

[daylen]

@mF

Absolutely. This hallway of mirrors can be tricky to navigate.

[AxelHeyst]

I'd suggest looking into the ~90page Cook-Greuter pdf I linked elsewhere. There's perhaps more work to be done at the "pluralist" stage first. "Getting better, improving, growing, being the best version..." all suggest an exclusive framework of individual [comparative] achievement as the highest value (SD:Orange).

My take is that I spent a decade swimming in SD:Green waters and am currently going back and doing remedial achievement (?) work in order to shore up my foundation in order to be able to do beyond-self work (step 1 put on own O2 mask)— but your point is taken and I don’t want to derail this with my story. I’ll do some more reading etc and take it up in my journal if appropriate.

[black_son_of_gray]

The danger of trying to go fast is in not actually achieving unconscious competence at certain skills and thus winding up in a situation of dragging along several WLs worth of conscious competence. AKA not actually transcending precious levels but finding yourself spinning plates at multiple WLs and getting overwhelmed.

‘Why would you want to move through the WLs quickly?’ To me is about the same as asking ‘Why would you want to get to black belt quickly?’ Because you have a vision (wissen) of black belt which is attractive and is motivating you forward.

It’s not about rushing, it’s about a desire to be efficient/effective with your time and resources, and wanting to avoid stagnation, coupled with the vision/desire to be operating at a different level. Festina lente.

[snip]

And maybe we only can get a sense for appropriate speed up to 6 or 7, as above that it gets into choose your own adventure territory.

This is what comes to mind for me: my relationship with time within an evolving system is just different (than in other aspects of conventional modern life). As a component within the system, I am not in complete control of its rate of change.

Example: Let's say I want to set up a permaculture garden on land that is close to a 'blank slate'. Intellectually, I might know aspects of the ecosystem I want to create: I know about nutrient cycles, the weather patterns, sun exposures, drainage, soil types, flora and fauna I want to cultivate, and so on. It is certainly a huge head start in knowing all those relationships. That being said, at the level of implementation, there is a certain mandatory time component to just letting the system equilibrate and establish the balance that it is going to establish. At best, that can be sped up with careful attention to starting conditions or perhaps more careful monitoring of the roll-out, but it can't really be forced. This is how I interpret the idea that 'steps can't be skipped'. I could have a blitz of a weekend where I go out and buy and install all the plants and set up the chicken tractor and build out the retaining pond, etc., and this is going to look on Monday morning from the outside (and probably for a while from the inside) like my goal has been accomplished, but there is simply no shortcut for time in such a system. There are a million ways to slow down the progression of a forest to "old growth", but there isn't really any way to dramatically speed it up. Roots need to get established. Species need to balance. Seasons and cycles need to pass. If I really want to be abstract, I might say: the possibility space needs to be more fully explored. That just takes time. The parts of the system need time to interact with each other in different contexts so that everything may adjust/balance out accordingly.

Which brings to mind my relationship with 'goals', which is also just different within evolving systems. "Old growth" is not permanent. An evolving system isn't static, so my goals cannot really be discrete. It can't ever be permanently 'solved', so the way I think about 'goals' is more akin to a North Star. Specific numbers cease to be as meaningful/useful as a guide than the ideas behind them. Ideas become the North Star (e.g. "My goal is $500k to be 'financially safe' vs. " 'safety' is one of the North Stars that I use to navigate decisions/options within my system"). In the above example of the permaculture garden, I'm not even sure starting out the garden with such a blitz would ultimately prove more 'efficient' either*, because the term 'efficient' (at least how I think of it) only really make sense in the context of knowing what your final endpoint is. The more vague or uncertain the final endpoint/goal, the less useful 'efficient' seems to get.

*I can't tell you how many times I've tried to grow plants that, by all available information, should grow fantastically well in my climate/soil/sun conditions/hardiness zone/etc. At least half of the time, it is a catastrophic flop. Other times I've had amazing success from very unlikely beginnings. More than likely my thumb is not so green as it could be, but I get the sense a lot of gardeners experience this as well.

I see the 'unconscious competence' aspect as something like 'becoming one with the system', not in the sense of necessarily mastering skills or meeting any specific milestones, per se, but developing an intuition within the system as to its current state of balance and where adjustments might be made to keep the ship heading in the direction of the North Star. In other words, the 'competence' is in relation to the system*. Any skill of sufficient development to point the ship reliably to where it needs to go seems "enough" to me. (The captain of the ship should have a pretty good idea of how the engine works, but need not know how to rebuild it from parts while blindfolded.) I have no idea if this 'becoming one with the system' can be sped up, but I have my doubts, in part because familiarity takes unpredictable amounts of time (at least, it has for me), and also because the system is simultaneously evolving--there are always new little things popping up. But then again, I only have my own experience to speak from.

*I've been using the term 'relationship', and I think that has a nice angle to it. Quality relationships (as in, with people) have a necessary time component built into them as well. Similarly, more idea-focused goals. Contrast, for example, a person with the mindset of "I want to get to 'know' Bob efficiently" or "I want to have 20 friends" with someone who thinks more along the lines of "Bob and I have seen a lot together, have been through rough times and good times, and have through it all come to understand each other on a fundamental level" or "I have deep roots in the community and have enough positive, meaningful relationships to fit my needs."

(Of course, that opens up the question as to whether a person could intentionally design/participate in faster- vs. slower-evolving systems. There would seem to be all kinds of interesting trade-offs in doing so: e.g. a slower-evolving system could perhaps require less "course correction" or might be easier to develop intuition about given its slower rate of change, but a faster-evolving system might be more resilient/responsive to perturbation...I haven't really thought much about that.)

[7Wannabe5]

One towards unitive thought I had after reading one of Toby Hemenway’s last essays was “Oh, the planet is already a permaculture project.” Still, I can’t quite shake the illusion of agency.

It’s also the case with permaculture that there is a rule of thumb that a project will “pop” around year7. Obviously, this rule of thumb would vary depending on a number of factors, but it remains the case that if the project never “pops” then you probably weren’t doing permaculture.

[AxelHeyst]

It’s also the case with permaculture that there is a rule of thumb that a project will “pop” around year7. Obviously, this rule of thumb would vary depending on a number of factors, but it remains the case that if the project never “pops” then you probably weren’t doing permaculture.

This gets closer to what I was trying to ask, I think, which might be better phrased as ‘how to ensure I’m on the path as opposed to farting around pointlessly.” I’m motivated by friction and dysfunction in my own and external systems. I’d like to spend my time reducing friction and dysfunction at multiple scales (this is stating it negatively: I can state it positively as well). It’s an infinite game and there is no end. How to ensure I’m not inadvertently adding more friction and dysfunction, to my own and others systems? How to consistently be improving my capacity for friction-removal and dysfunction reduction? (I feel like there’s a lot of ways to phrase/frame this and I’m only scratching the surface of what I’m trying to get at, which makes it sound like I’m thinking one dimensionally about it.)

[xmj]

This gets closer to what I was trying to ask, I think, which might be better phrased as ‘how to ensure I’m on the path as opposed to farting around pointlessly.” I’m motivated by friction and dysfunction in my own and external systems. I’d like to spend my time reducing friction and dysfunction at multiple scales (this is stating it negatively: I can state it positively as well). It’s an infinite game and there is no end. How to ensure I’m not inadvertently adding more friction and dysfunction, to my own and others systems? How to consistently be improving my capacity for friction-removal and dysfunction reduction? (I feel like there’s a lot of ways to phrase/frame this and I’m only scratching the surface of what I’m trying to get at, which makes it sound like I’m thinking one dimensionally about it.)

Learn to walk through walls. I.e. try to learn to distinguish between reality (physics/biology) vs social reality (custom). Then learn to play with the latter to get around impediments in the former.