Septivium Begins

"All that is gold does not glitter,

  Not all those who wander are lost.

  The old that is strong does not wither,

   Deep roots are not reached by the frost.

   From the ashes a fire shall be woken.

   A light from the shadows shall spring.

   Renewed shall be blade that was broken.

   The crownless again shall be King."

-Tolkien

I apologize in advance for a long and fairly rambling post.  My intention with this one is to simply provide a bit more detail to the Septivium blueprint that I raised previously and to start getting feedback as I proceed in developing it.  It's very much a work-in-progress, so offering previews to any interested readers may lead me into all kinds of interesting areas that I would never have come up with on my own.

I will probably have to iterate through, change, and refine this information many times before it really can come to life.  The plan is ultimately a book-length treatment.   

Initial Caveats:  Politics and Religion

There are a couple of points regarding my own biases which I should state right from the beginning:

1.  Septivium idealizes personal freedom---including freedom from coercive force---as one of the defining achievements of a civil society.  Even when taken up individually, the disciplines involved in Septivium tend to make one increasingly skeptical about centralized socio-economic planning, and more and more inclined towards political libertarianism, perhaps even anarcho-capitalism. I have found that the people most inclined to pursue these study areas also tend to have a strong libertarian bent---either they started out that way or they became so inclined because of the effects of the training itself. 

I have also discovered that even something as seemingly apolitical as biohacking can draw opposition from fascinatingly broad factions along the political spectrum, with leftists worrying that it will increase social injustice and right-wingers believing that it involves playing God.  While both groups have historically pursued interests in eugenics programs, they appear to prefer that any tinkering takes place within a tight regulatory environment (Francis Fukuyama has argued that governments should "draw red lines" around certain biohacking practices). 

I am aware of concerns that widespread adoption of a Septivium-type self-development program would be dangerous from the perspective of social order, as it produced "living weapons, ungovernable and heavily armed human gunships piloted by flight crews of Selfish Genes", sort of piratical guys who pursued potentiated physical, cognitive, and psychological capabilities and who were motivated with highly individualistic agendas and loyalty to their cult (rather than towards the defined duties of the obedient nation-state subject). 

"Those who seek absolute power, even though they seek it to do what they regard as 'good', are simply demanding their right to enforce their own version of heaven on earth.  And let me remind you, they are the very ones who always create the most hellish tyrannies.  Absolute power does corrupt, and those who seek it must be suspect and must be opposed."

-Barry Goldwater

2.  Some aspects of this program view biological processes as a mix of information technology and organic chemistry.  To recap, DNA sits inside a cell nucleus that is protected by a regulatory protein sheath.  When DNA "decides" to do something, it dispatches a shorter version of itself---messenger RNA---that can cross the nucleus sheath and into the cell's cyotoplasm.  The mRNA then goes to visit little cellular 3D printing-type facilities called ribosomes; the ribosomes use the RNA as cookbook recipe directions for building proteins.  We are built of these proteins.

To influence phenotypic expression, one can use an "insertional vector" to get into the nucleus and change the genome itself---this is an enormously expensive undertaking, as it typically involves deliberate infection using a retrovirus that carries the new genetic information you wish to include---or one can use "non-insertional vectors".  The non-insertional vectors usually do not give permanent changes---i.e., they do not typically lead to gene-splices that get copied when a cell divides.  Rather, they have to be put into part of a lifestyle and administered again and again (as opposed to being inserted via a single exposure).

However, these methods can cause certain gene expressions to turn on and off, and some of these approaches can be "hacked" by manipulating the "exposome"---the epigenetic habitat and surrounding triggering mechanisms---in which the larger organism operates.  We will be giving much consideration to possibly useful types of cultivated exposome-manipulation; it's the central theme of the biohacking/biopunk community.

It may be useful from this POV to start thinking of food, sleep, even exercise and sex as drugs or medicines or supplements which can have particular effects on physiology and subjective experience.

This is clearly a secular humanist approach to research, and some more religious parties may find it troubling.  I have dealt with this type of thing before---some of my best college students have been religious young people who were able to take my use of something like evolutionary psychology and covert it or transform it into practical information that still fit within their belief systems.  If you are similar to these students, then you may find that a few of my Septivium-recommended practices which initially seem to be at odds with your religious convictions can be similarly modified so that you can use them for performance without necessarily buying into my particular explanations for why they work.

Polyspecialization 

Just to recap, Septivium---"The Seven Ways"---is meant to serve as a holistic, differentiated, and integrated system for lifelong learning and personal development.  Septivium is a creative, artisanal production process that is hopefully going to help create what a good friend of mine has termed "The Sovereign Man."  I believe that the Sovereign Man concept is being developed as we speak; I will no doubt modify Septivium in response to work being done in that area, because this system is my own take on a much broader new masculine synthesis that is being put together in different ways by various communities and enclaves.

I picked up the term "polyspecialization" in the book Mindhacker recently and really liked it. Here are how the authors, Ron and Marty Hale-Evans, define the term:

"Why not become a polyspecialist?  That's our word for someone who knows a lot about multiple things, and a little about even more.  The emphasis of the polyspecialist is *neither* on extreme depth in one subject nor on broad but shallow understanding of the whole world of human knowledge.  Instead, the emphasis is on a deep understanding of several subjects together with a nodding acquaintance of many more, incidentally acquired during study...Any individual area of a polyspecialist's study may be useful, but the real power lies in how those areas complement one another..."

Septivium, then, is my own best attempt at polyspecialization.  I will never be superb in any of the disciplines, but I hope to eventually be pretty good in all of them (I personally define "pretty good" as being able to teach the subjects at a graduate program level, or to possess an equivalent level of in-field performance capability).   This is probably going to take the rest of my life to achieve, and unfortunately development in one or more domains may be offset by deterioration in others due to the physical impacts of age if nothing else.   I think this just has to be accepted and we need to do the best we can about fighting the clock.  In the movies, actors playing Batman or 007 can just be replaced with a younger model.  Real life is not so forgiving. 

Each of the "Ways" actually encompasses a family of disciplines, and each of those disciplines could *easily* fill decades of study.  So it is important to realize that one should not expect to become a world-class performer in any of these areas.  However, we get a strong headwind with the Septivium arts because it is my contention that these are not truly disparate, randomly assembled, independent disciplines.  Rather, I firmly believe that they share a grand "source art", a sun which they orbit like planets in a solar system.  This source art is the overlapping area which supercharges polyspecialization.

The essence of polyspecialization is, to me, the identification and cultivation of a grand source or supersystem which reveals itself in many exciting, superficially unrelated individual arts and sciences.  It potentially allows for deep insights as the boundaries between the various disciplines become less and less distinct.

The particular disciplines included in this approach reflect the kind of curriculum that I believe that a fictional order of totally badass, elite assassins like the League of Shadows or Faceless Men of Braavos would push in their internal training programs for new associates.  I personally find this almost sexually exciting---from my perspective, someone who was really good in all of the Septivium areas would be supremely cool to hang out with and talk to. Your perspective probably will be different, but you can still use that "coolness" standard as a template for your own version of Septivium, because it is very hard to be enthusiastic over the long term about something that you don't feel is incredibly cool.

Septivium's Ways are:

Way #1.  Lifestyle Design as a Cognitive and Metabolic Dominance (CogDom; MetDom) Platform.  We're talking about becoming a real carnivore, a keto-adapted athlete with an emphasis on combat sports and on biohacks that support the ketogenic lifestyle, plug some potential health-related holes, and enhance performance.

The winner is the athlete for whom defeat is the least acceptable rationalization."

-Tim Noakes

This topic will occupy the next several posts on this blog, so I'll just leave Way #1 as a placeholder right now. 

Way #2.  Strategic Thinking System via 1) Big History, 2) Evolutionary Psychology, 3) Microecon (in this case, Austrian Economics and Public Choice, plus some limited Game Theory), 4) Decision Science (heavy on models of "ecological rationality" or "naturalistic decision-making"), 5) Military Strategy, and 6) Worldly Philosophy mixed with contemporary Positive Psychology (the ancients and modern researchers have come to many of the same conclusions about what makes a human being reach his highest potential).

This part has turned out to be a really ambitious undertaking and I actually became a part-time college professor specifically to work through it.  A couple of quick notes here:

First, some of the people that I have discussed Septivium with have already brought up the gaps in the strategy disciplines outline that I put together.  For instance, I do not include cross-cultural anthropology, great works of art and literature, sociology, and so on in the group.  I concede that these all should be studied to whatever extent is possible.

Perhaps the best way I can explain my reasoning behind the Septivium emphasis would be to use the metaphor of a raging river.  Imagine that the river represents a torrent of information and experience, both signal content and noise.

A man wishes to move from one side of the river---"blind strategic ignorance"---to the other side---"competence in strategic thinking."  Let's pretend that in order to cross the river he must choose a path created by big boulders which have fallen into the river.  If he falls in he is going to face a very rough time.

When choosing a path, the man wants to see two things in the pattern of boulders that he selects:

1.  Collectively, the pattern of rocks must effectively span the breadth of the river.

This translates into collecting disciplines which, particularly when put together into a system, do create very good strategic thinkers.

2.  Individually, the rocks must be placed close enough together that it is possible to hop from one or another.  The span between rocks cannot be too excessive.

This translates into having some cross-over, momentum, or efficiency gained by overlapping areas between the fields of study, so that skill in one area will give you a head start when you jump to the next metaphorical boulder. 

Another related term for 1 and 2 combined would be "MECE"  ("mee-see"), or categorization using a list schema that is "mutually exclusive, collectively exhaustive."   The individual items are meant to be distinct enough from one another that they can and should be listed separately, but when combined they must "span the river."   For polyspecialization purposes, I am adding the requirement that the items have enough commonality within their basic assumptions and models that it is possible to become reasonably competent in all of them within a normal human lifetime. 

I readily confess that some of the "boulders"---the disciplines---that I have excluded from Septivium do contribute a great deal to knowledge on the subject.  However, many of them (in my opinion) will turn out to offer lessons that are redundant with those found in existing Septivium subjects, and/or they will be located so far in isolation of the other rocks that it is very difficult to reach them without becoming something of a dedicated specialist in that rock.  The gap between typical sociologist and evolutionary psychologist positions, for example, is frequently so wide that it is difficult to synthesize the two without using so many caveats that you effectively say nothing at all. 

I want to be continually conscious of the fact that these are all *huge* areas of study---there are specialists who have devoted their entire lives to only a single aspect of, say, decision science, and many of them still are uncomfortable saying that they are "experts" in even that area.  So if you run into someone who claimed to be an "expert strategist" you should probably immediately be concerned that this person may lack any real professional respect for his or her own subject matter. 

Second, please note that I am talking about strategic thinking, *not* strategic planning.  I am well aware that strategic planning has become something of a joke in the decision sciences, as it tends to rely on optimism about forecasting ability that is no longer considered serviceable after guys like Phil Tetlock and Nassim Taleb have rather thoroughly dealt with forecasting-related problems and the dismal track record that "experts" reveal in this area.

The process of planning is very valuable, for forcing you to think hard about what you are doing, but the actual plan that results from it is probably useless.

-Marc Andresesen

High-performance strategy formulation has since become more about management of a portfolio of limited-liability strategic options than going "all-in" on massive directional bets.   The emerging state-of-the-art decision synthesis attempts to unify both Kahnemanian Type 1 and Type 2 decision systems (intuition and formal analysis) by mastering "sophisticatedly simple" heuristics; it avoids irrational escalation of commitment, overbetting, and playing negative expectancy games at all; and when used in an adversarial sense it creates shock in opponents by controlling situational tempo.

 For each of the half-dozen strategic studies disciplines I want to concisely describe:

A) A Canon (a relatively small set of core instructional materials that an interested person should read)

B) Most-Used Mental Models (simplified as much as possible, these represent the ways in which experts in these fields process information and view the social world)

C) A Skill-Building Methodology (a set of practical exercises or study habits which someone can use to pursue competence in these areas)

D) Applied:  Structured Analytic Techniques (these are the applied, formal frameworks that an expert would use for problem-solving)

E) Applied:  Heuristics (these are the fast, in-field decision rules that an expert would use if he or she did not have time to employ structured analytics)

All of these tools are meant to be used to develop Situational Awareness (SA) of a given problem space, and an understanding of cultural nuance as it will place constraints on later tactical decision-making.  We ideally want 360-degree SA as quickly as possible via some outside research, but mostly from the "groundtruth" developed from putting a highly educated and trained analyst in the field, and allowing an operator to plan his own missions and to own the intellectual material that goes into such plans.

The Strategic Thinking System I will be discussing in the Septivium material is meant to be employed by the person who is actually tasked with executing a given strategy; I believe in things being developed and boot-strapped from the grassroots by super-empowered, entrepreneurial individuals, rather than execution being managed from afar via edicts or advice given by outside individuals---individuals who are not participating in the risk and reward structure of the given game and who are not really exposed to any resulting market- or battlefield-disciplines that will be imposed on bad ideas (the first questions you should ask of someone offering outside strategic counsel---even before hearing the pitch---are usually "how do you develop SA/groundtruth where *my* localized problem space is concerned?" and "who really gets hurt if you turn out to be wrong?"   Make sure you are satisfied with these even before you hear the proposal). 

When it comes to tactical applications, I will frequently be incorporating something that decision scientists call "Scan To Task".  Scan To Task means that the decision-maker will normally look at a series of problems and a series of resources, and start assigning open resources to open problems without attempting to optimize resource-problem fit until much later.  This prevents analysis-paralysis and jump starts the problem-solving process; it requires experience and composure to pull off.

Scan To Task is a "satisficing" rather than "optimization" strategy in most cases because it plugs a hole to some minimum standard and then moves on to address another hole.  It's basically a format that is more appropriate for fluid, reactionary situations like crisis management than it would be if you were dealing with problems that held still for long periods of time.  Most of the problems that I will be discussing do not hold still. 

Several of my colleagues who read this blog are familiar with some of the more theoretical work I have done on the transition from structured analytic techniques used by experts to adaptive heuristics which can be used under field conditions.   Part of the value of Septivium for me is in trying to present these ideas for consideration by a wider audience and for possible application to many different fields of activity.

 There are a couple of rules which must be followed for all of this to work:

1.  Situational Awareness is king.  SA must be developed by deep, first-hand experience with a given domain or milieu; strategic and tactical tailoring are bespoke rather than one-size-fits-all.  Decision-making should be decentralized so that a trained, empowered man on the ground can make the call. 

2.  Go Bayesian.  For social systems that impose emerging trend/unstable volatility characteristics, Bayesian statistics has taken a position of prestige, while naive frequentist models are generally seen as amateur hour stuff.

I realize that this is getting into some jargon, so I should probably give an example of how Bayesian and frequentist models differ in practical application, and why Bayesian stuff is seen as more "ecologically adaptive" under certain conditions.  Imagine this pair of problems, which I have borrowed from a textbook on the subject of adaptive decision-making:

1.  You want to buy the most reliable car possible and have two brands to choose from:  Saab and Volvo.  A discussion of Volvo and Saab automobiles in a leading consumer advocacy/testing magazine reveals that, over the past ten years, the Volvo has been judged by experts to be about five times as safe as the equivalent Saab (don't take this literally---I made this up).  

However, your neighbor has a Volvo and was involved in an accident just yesterday, and now she is in the hospital with serious injuries.   

Now consider this scenario:

2.  You live in a rain forest and have to decide where you will allow your 5-year-old son to play today.  There are two activity options:  climbing trees or swimming in the nearby creek.  You consult village records and find that, over the past ten years, five children from your village have died falling from trees, while only one has died from swimming in the creek.  

However, that child who died was eaten by a large crocodile yesterday. 

Most models of human decision-making rationality look at situations like Volvo vs. Saab and conclude that the use of frequentist statistics is appropriate and rational.  Someone who rejected the statistically-safer Volvo would be acting irrationally based on a silly cognitive bias like the "availability heuristic".

However, the assumption made in this scenario is that the design and production of both types of car are stable and fixed quantities.  What if we are dealing with a system that is NOT stable, a dynamic environment in which risk factors can quickly change?  Tree vs. Creek does not offer the comforting, sterile consistency of the automotive comparison-shopping example---the jungle represents a realistic, unpredictable system.  We intuitively know that in this dark world it is very possible that a family of hungry crocs recently moved into the creek, an event which literally would change everything for this village.  In this case, pure frequentist statistics would NOT work well and the best decisions would involve "Bayesian updating."

Bayesian thinking will help prevent the strategic analyst from falling for a major trap in strategic thinking, the so-called "Halo Effect".  Many researchers, particularly in management studies, have fallen victim to this trap.  The Bayesian material is extraordinarily rich and relevant to all manner of risk-taking endeavors, so I will endeavor to give it a thorough-but-practical treatment later.

 Some of this stuff does get a bit technical and "math-y", but take heart in two things:

1.  Robert Barro at Harvard has argued that a single standard deviation gain in STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, and Math)-related test scores among the general student population boosts a country's economic growth rates by about 100 basis points, which is an enormous gain from a development econ perspective.

2.  I was an undergrad English major and had to learn a lot of this stuff on the fly, first during the stress of multiple, fairly quantitative graduate programs, and then in the viciously Darwinian world of black-box leveraged derivatives trading.  As a young man I liked Homer and Chaucer, but did not like calculus.  So if I can learn this stuff, so can any of you.  

Way #3.  Study of Fighting.  In a nutshell, this discipline is where MMA meets high-end private-sector gunfighter/solo tactical training.

I assume that the value of MMA training for building terrifying fighters is evident at this point.  Because we are dealing with a contextual sheath that has no weight classes and allows sucker-punching, weapons, multiple assailants beating down one guy, and a legal system which can allow *completely untrained and uneducated (about fighting) individuals* to spend months in a comfortable courtroom second-guessing and armchair-quarterbacking the split-second decisions and actions of the man in the arena, we will also need some street-oriented situational awareness-type material and relevant, basic survivability/tradecraft habits.

There will be some bias towards "Sprawl & Brawl" approaches that keep you on your feet during the fight, but let's be honest---a lot of fights go to the ground even in situations in which NEITHER participant wanted them to, let alone if one guy was good at takedowns.  You need to be a dangerous man on the ground. 

There are some thorny, non-trivial tactical problems that come up when one primarily works alone and with a very small logistical/support footprint, and so I will turn to far tougher guys for advice.   Some of those guys have already been introduced in previous posts. 

Using the analogy of a car's transmission:  I think that the basic idea is that if this was a stickshift you would get up to about high-rev 3rd gear using a militarized, hybrid MMA/practical shooting system for fighting, but after that you probably have to diverge a bit from where many full-time professional operators would normally go and instead work more reactive street, vehicle, and home-defense type problems.

So let's immediately dispense with any illusions about ever being able to go toe-to-toe with a world-class operator in said operator's full-mission-profile tactical environment.  Even with huge amounts of training and discipline, you will probably be about a solid 3rd gear operator---a C+ or B- level grade point average---at best if you were for some inconceivable reason ever put in a professional operator's team-based, complex-missions/complex-tactics world.  There is just a hell of a lot you need to know how to do to play that game, and just as importantly that knowledge is perishable.

It is important to be humble and to give the real professionals their due.   However, Septivium has a more generalist, "highly capable Sovereign Man" orientation.  You could be able to go to 4th or even 5th gear in a different, more self-protection-oriented program, and this is the one that most people could really need in a real-life situation.  These more individualistic pursuits also provide direct building materials to develop the all-around confidence and peace of mind that naturally come with being so well-prepared for a violent physical emergency.

(Note:  it goes without saying that full-time operators can easily modify Septivium for their own ends)

In many of these self-protection problems, being ambushed (or executing a hasty ambush on someone else) is a real likelihood and escape would be considered a victory.  This is an important point, because the cultivation of a mindset which allows for deterrence, avoidance, de-escalation, and escape and considers these all to be wins does not always come easily to people who train specifically to dominate fights.  This is different---you aren't just fighting a man, you are fighting an uncertain and very dangerous tactical situation that was probably thrust upon you at a time and location that were not your choosing.   The situation is the Great White shark, and this can eat you even if you would normally be able to readily take your opponent out in the different context of a fair one-on-one fight.  Here, you will normally want to get off the X as soon as you can. 

Fighting Style:  Art and Science

The integrated use of empty-hands, AR (both for shooting and as an impact weapon), handgun, and a small, fast-access, ambi-oriented fixed-blade knife (I personally prefer push daggers, but there are many ways to skin the cat) will be explored as a solution for in extremis, totally out-of-control close-range problems.

From the standpoint of statistical decomposition, you are probably talking at the most dangerous end of the continuum about a fight that involves putting 1-2 magazines of rounds into 1-3 bad guys at a range from approx. 1 to about 50 meters, with shooting positions being primarily offhand with angular movement or rough- supported off of a barricade, in an encounter that lasts less than a minute between the first and last shots fired.  The fight probably takes place at night and in a relatively low-SES urban environment, and involves either a single emotionally disturbed person with a weapon (sometimes two) or a small group of predatory criminals.

A significant percentage of these encounters take place in parking lots outside of bars or nightclubs, at gas station/convenience stores, and in ambush-friendly areas adjacent to ground public transportation lines.  Home invasion is another possibility that should be considered.

The relatively short ranges involved in these fights are not an excuse for having low marksmanship standards and do not mean that we can accept slop from rounds fired:  on the contrary, the required precision or technical demands on the shooter to make some of these shots should be assumed to be quite high (missed rounds not only mean a threat that is still there, but these rounds are now heading into the community and possibly into the wrong people), as should the urgency of being able to identify friend and foe before taking a shot.   

The chances of you having a helmet, plate carrier, war belt, ear protection, night optics, hydration bladder, and various other types of supporting gear with you during this fight are not very high at all unless you are willing to go to some lifestyle extremes that very few people are willing to go to (and which may present some new problems). I think that you should still enjoy these things for other reasons, that you should not apologize for them or feel that these interests need to be justified on practical grounds, and that a limited paramilitary capability is a positive, alpha-male thing to cultivate, perhaps even a contemporary expression of budo-type ideals. 

...but we also need to be reasonable.  We probably should do what a lot of the best guys in this very particular game do and learn to do the bulk of our "tactical" work out of high-end camera bags or other forms of compact, shoulder-carried luggage, and otherwise look at what we realistically will have with us.   

If it is an unarmed fight, it will probably consist of one very exciting and glycogen-depleting round of headhunting strikes, primarily big punches (but then again you never know), followed by either one guy getting dropped by a hit to the face or being taken down via deliberate or accidental grappling.  If neither party is skilled, a headlock will somehow/probably turn up in that mess somewhere. The guy who ends up on the bottom faces the threats of ground-and-pound and/or a "boot party".  The main submissions used---infrequently used, but still in there---are the guillotine and the rear naked choke. 

That's not to say that longer distances, more opponents, and so on are not possible, but it probably is fair to say that as a self-protection-minded individual you should make sure that you own the main sphere first before worrying too much about those more exotic sorts of problems, deciding if 5x magnification is sufficient top-end on your variable optic, etc.

In terms of prioritizing training, I think that a useful way to start *if you are quite aggressive about this* would to look at formal (coached) training following a 20:3:1 split between MMA: handgun: rifle.  So, on paper, for every 25 hours of formal instruction in MMA you would want to have 3 hours of formal handgun training and 1 hour of formal rifle training.  In practice, however, it will probably work more like this for an annual training plan:

-During that twelve month period, attend a 3-day tactical carbine course with approximately 24 hours of total training (3x8 hours)

-During that twelve month period, attend three 3-day  handgun courses, each with approximately 24 hours of total training, for 72 hours of handgun.

-During that twelve month period, complete a little less than 500 hours of MMA training (10 hours per week x 50 weeks)

So an aggressive, ambitious plan for most people would be to do 1-2 classes of MMA and/or related combat sports disciplines per day, 5-6 days per week, and to do a high-end private-sector shooting course every quarter.  It may not sound particularly intense, but I actually doubt that there are more than about 200 civilian guys in the country who actually do this:  there are a lot of people who are religious about training MMA stuff, but who don't shoot very much; and there are a lot of shooters who practically collect training courses---some probably do a course once per month rather than once per quarter---but who do not do any combat sports.

The age demographics involved in serious MMA and tactical shooting tend to be very different, too. Tactical shooting is an expensive hobby; the start-up costs to set up the gear can be substantial, particularly if the top-shelf stuff is involved, and attending even a single high-end class can cost almost as much as a year's worth of MMA training at a reputable gym (when one includes travel and ammunition expenses).  As a result, the guys who can afford to do this stuff to be north of 35.  These same "older" guys may find MMA to be too physical, and to have trouble fitting daily classes into the work schedule that they need to maintain in order to be able to afford the tactical training every few months (!).    

If you are a full-time operator, you might need to reverse the split and do 20:3:1 in a Rifle: Handgun: MMA pattern, simply because you fight with rifles so much and need to be so good with that weapon.   

People are no doubt going to disagree with my positions on a lot of this stuff.  Fighting style ultimately becomes a deeply personal affair:  past experiences and natural proclivities play huge roles in how someone evolves as a fighter over time. My waza was shaped by some influential training experiences I have had; after a short time, one finds commonality between, say, the aggressive Muay Thai-based MMA program taught at some great striking-centric gyms and the offensive mindset and supporting techniques taught by a noted multigun shooting instructor and competitor like Bennie Cooley or all-around operator like Travis Haley.

*Feel free to skip the following if you don't train in grappling/MMA.* 

Let me further this point about my biases by getting fairly specific here with a martial arts-related example:  in the grappling domain, I tend to use the overhook quite frequently, and this bias will show up in Septivium.  I do not come from a college or even high school wrestling background and have had to deal with All-American level wrestlers for years.  These men are professionals at getting underhooks in the clinch; much of their lives has been spent getting really, really good at this.  You are naive if  you believe that you can "out-underhook" an elite wrestler with any degree of reliability.

I found that I was able to successfully pummel for underhooks in a semi-cooperative training environment, but this artificial success led to me developing a false sense of clinch security:  when we really went live and made it competitive, the great wrestlers would always get the underhooks on me, and when I tried to repummel I would get dumped (usually by a standard, running-the-pipe high-single leg takedown). If I just sagged and made space I would get pushed around and eventually dirty-boxed against the wall in a grindy, unpleasant way.  And then I would get dumped.  So to make a long story short I was more or less forced to develop some semblance of a viable overhook/whizzer game in the clinch.

If I am fighting in the clinch, I may try to pummel for unders once or twice.  If this doesn't work, I go for the whizzer.  For a variety of reasons---many of them having to do with my whizzer-based throw attempt (harai goshi and seoi nage both can work well off the whizzer) failing and turning into a wild scramble with both of us ending up on the ground---a lot of my guard game off of my back uses an underhook on my left side to try to take away the other guy's big overhand right and hammerfist right---two staples of heavy ground & pound---while working to get my right knee in front of his left shoulder (I believe that BJ Penn calls this position the "Damn Good Guard").  Assuming I get guard I will usually try a couple of explosive sweeps first and/or to stand up out of guard, but if these fail I may be in for a long siege and that overhook can be really important to limit the damage you will begin to sustain.

*MMAspeak ends*

Way #4.  Study of Interpersonal Influence and Strategic Social Dynamics.

Here I will be expanding on the "ATTiC" construct that I have mentioned in previous threads and that I use in my Strategic Social Dynamics (SSD) course as the general framework for exploring social influence scenarios.  By the way, ATTiC is Kenny Brown's invention and he deserves full credit---I got it from him.

To recap, ATTiC refers to:

Agent----Target----Tactics---Context

The Agent is the person trying to persuade someone else.  The Target is that someone else.  The Tactics are the influence methods that the Agent employs during the activity.  The Context is the pre-existing social environment in which this all takes place. 

This framework has proven to be extremely useful for analyzing a very wide range of interpersonal domains, from political campaigning to seduction, from hostage negotiation to used-car sales. It ultimately becomes a kind of mandala that you use to ponder deeper structures to interpersonal relations.

I have found that, frequently, students underestimate the effects that Context in particular play in making a Target agree to comply with an Agent's persuasion request.  The impact of this variable is actually really tremendous; Context is like the "Unknown Stuntman" of the influence domain.   It deserves equal attention to that given to the others: if you get the Context right, the precise mix of Tactics used often don't matter very much at all, and a David can sometimes triumph over a Goliath. 

SSD will take the grand lessons about human behavior from the Strategic Thinking System and apply them in the sphere of actual social relations.  This will mean both preparing what can be prepared in advance and being able to adapt very rapidly to the dance of human relations. 

"I try to plan, in your sense of the word, but that isn't my basic mode, really.  I improvise.  It's my greatest talent.  I prefer situations to plans, you see..."

-Wintermute the AI in William Gibson's Neuromancer

I will import the concepts of "tempo" and "narrative mental models" that have been put forward by a dark sorcerer of independent decision science named Venkatesh Rao.  They will be primarily useful in analysis of the Target's meta-models or stories by which he or she tries to make sense of the world ("sensemaking" is the current term du jour) and to achieve SA.  If the details of this model or story are also known to to the Agent, the Agent can use this information to very heavily influence the Target's decisions (by fitting into the pre-formed narrative and then increasing or decreasing the tempo---the energy and emotions and sense of time/location---that the Target experiences).

This probably sounds mystical or metaphysical, and it will no doubt deserve much explication on my part and much skeptical critique and modification from interested readers.  I want to make it as concrete and resonant as possible

We will also find that human social behavior in a tactical context displays strong evidence of momentum, or serial correlation, characteristics, while over much longer periods of time we usually see more evidence of reversion to the mean.   This means that, in the short term of an immediate compliance request, a social influence operator or Agent may start with the best package and presentation possible, but then must adjust dynamically in response to the Target's feedback.

Generally speaking, winning positions reveal themselves quickly, while losing positions are equally compelling and will not get much better with more time (at least over the immediate, more tactical time horizons of a compliance request).  You will usually scale into winning positions rapidly and press the good energy up-tempo, while attempting to de-conflict or de-escalate social losing positions just as rapidly (i.e., using the positive aspects of psycho-social momentum when something is going your way and thus reinforcing the trend, but *avoiding* the negative aspects of momentum when something is going against you).  

Another way of putting it:  from a social dynamics/persuasion perspective, you're a lion when things are going well and a wraith when they are not.

We will also find that most people suffer---reliably---from multiple cognitive blind-spots or biases such as biased self-attribution, and that these blind-spots are leverage points for skilled persuaders.  In addition, there is often a gap between the narratives that people use to reduce cognitive dissonance and the actual heuristic they use to make real-world decisions. Narratives and mental models can be constructed differently and based on different experiences; if someone is not aware of a difference (and frequently people do not have conscious accessibility to their actual real-world heuristics), the spread between them can be potentially "arbitraged" by an Agent.

The link between strategic analytical skills and Strategic Social Dynamics is obvious, but I should  also a tremendous interplay between SSD and the biohacking material.  In studies of monkey dominance hierarchies, for example, researchers deliberately destabilized the existing hierarchies by removing the alpha male of each social system.  One male monkey in each experiment was given the anti-depressant Prozac; the Prozac-treated monkeys normally became the new alpha males, with all of the nice treats that were attendant to such status.  Prozac of course is known to effectively increase seratonin levels in the brain; in the chaotic power vacuum that followed monkey hierarchy "regime change", the Prozac-treated monkeys had suppressed submission reflexes and were able to establish themselves as natural leaders, dominant, etc. by showing lower stress reactivity. 

Way #5.  Study of AIS-APPLE (Alternative Investment Strategies, Asset Protection, Privacy, and Lean Entrepreneurship).  This mix could be seen as the money-generator of the Septivium approach.

The AIS area that I will focus most on is the global macro hedge fund strategy space for analytical firepower, and systematic/black-box CTA for actual trade execution (for those who are actual traders and willing to get into the futures markets) and for thinking about risk management and the mathematics of gambling (for most people).  The relationship between these two can be volatile because they often have very different risk management appetites, but I believe that they can be used together.  

"...and that, my friends, is how Kingslayer Capital Management, a crisis-hunting global macro hedge fund which specializes in paramilitary activity, shorting sovereign debt, and arbitraging political risk, was born."

Here is some stuff to get you going if this is new to you and you are interested...  When I teach my Global Macro course I typically assign the following book as part of the class:

The Invisible Hands

...students have given me generally good feedback about it.  

Overarching theories for development economics are a critical, underutilized input for global macro analysis. These attempt to define what makes some countries/peoples so rich and others so poor.  I'm personally partial to the Easterly school of development for reasons that will probably be readily apparent, so I'm probably going to add the Professor's newest one to the course book list:

The Tyranny of Experts

 Asset Protection is a study of ways to avoid losing one's assets during a hostile legal event like a lawsuit or divorce.  It goes extremely well with the hedge fund material. Privacy will mean protecting one's sensitive information; it goes extremely well with the Asset Protection material.  Much more on these later. 

Lean Entrepreneurship (LE) is a relatively recent trend in management studies which looks at the market as a complex system and resists traditional business planning in favor of decentralized testing and evolutionary or organic models of company growth and performance (i.e., it pays homage to Austrian economics).  It is "lean" because it avoids high initial expenses and instead "bootstraps" itself up as customer discovery and product-market fit are developed---these are directly analogous to Situational Awareness in the strategic and tactical domains. 

I find that LE is a particularly practical sub-discipline within AIS-APPLE because the methodologies have been codified by great thinkers (usually coming from STEM backgrounds and now having to figure out the social dynamics of starting and running businesses).  They lend themselves to a way of thinking about all manner of new projects and undertakings---LE is by no means limited to tech start-ups.  The desire to "stay in the problem space" as long as possible is similar to developing Situational Awareness in a military context, while the distinction between pivot and optimization stages of entrepreneurial activity calls to mind a famous essay by Nobel laureate Albert Szent-Gyorgyi on the differences he found between "Dionysian" and "Apollonian" forms of scientific research.

If you want to start getting into this stuff, let me recommend a short, inexpensive, accessible, and informative general treatment of the subject:

The Customer Discovery Matrix

LE represents a way of thinking about new undertakings that really mobilizes and enhances the strategic thinking and SSD curricula, and leads them towards tangible entrepreneurial goals. 

Way #6.  Development of a Survivalist Capability.  The peculiar Septivium approach to survivalism will focus less on primitive living or achieving a spiritual union with nature and more with an emergency that *starts off* with an accident or trauma that has immediately posed potentially life-threatening medical challenges.  It will assume that outdoors survival and medical emergencies frequently come together in an unpleasant package deal, and so a self-medical capability, navigation, and redundant communications may make all the difference.  Once again, I have to rely on far more knowledgeable friends for assistance in this area.  

Thus. there will be relatively few optimistic assumptions made about availability of, say, natural resources for fire or shelter-building in the survival environment, or even assumptions about the survivor being able to operate at full physical work capacity.  Imagine a NASCAR pit crew changing a tire and this is my basic template for how many survival tasks should be approached:  speed, efficiency, technology, etc.

For better or worse, this attitude reflects my own journey where the subject is concerned.  I've become more interested in the expedition planning and skills side and less interested in the primitive living side, and, as a result, I personally no longer give much time to fire-by-friction, snare-construction, debris hut construction, and so on.  These are very valuable skills and I have taken survival courses that were centered on them, but when you do this training you start to realize that things can go really, really wrong if you have not prepared well and considered contingencies and equipment needs in advance.

I still have a lot of respect for some of the primitive skills instructors and schools and can see how this training builds a confidence and resilience that my more technology-driven would lack:  the Septivium focus will be on the 48-72 hours of an emergency and will more or less presume that civilization as a whole is still functioning elsewhere.  If bad things were to go on for much longer and the disaster radius was increased, the primitive skills would become more and more important and my personal focus would be less and less useful.

The Survivalist material will probably consist of three major classes of problems:

1.  Bushcraft Problem.  "Something went wrong"---vehicle breakdown OR being exposed to unexpectedly severe weather conditions during foot travel OR a  medical emergency while in the outdoors OR a compound event that includes 2 or more of these factors.   In any case, the assumption is that you need to stabilize the medical situation as best as possible, avoid taking further damage from the elements, and get yourself extracted. It's ok to call for help...

2.  Bug-Out Problem.  You start in an urban area.  Something goes *really* wrong.   You need to gather your deployable supplies (or steal them), and need to access an appropriate mode of transportation (possibly steal one) and go somewhere else.  I think that having some quasi-criminal skills can be important here---B&E, grand theft auto, etc.. 

3.  Bug-In Problem.  Something goes wrong in the larger, outside world, and you need to hunker down at home. This is traditional "prepper" territory; Septivium's take will be fairly moderate by some of those standards, but will include a plan for *trying* to rapidly scale up the preparations if certain macroeconomic event catalysts in fact do occur. 

I should say that some very sophisticated global macro hedge fund investors have now become dedicated Preppers, to the point of taking physical delivery of some of their gold trades (normally commodity futures  trades are closed or rolled at contract expiration without any physical delivery taking place.  Physical delivery is a pretty big deal in most markets).  Keep in mind what they know that most people probably do not... 

At least some minimum level of equipment will be assumed in all three cases---it will be assumed that we have considered these as potential contingency scenarios and that appropriate technologies were incorporated into our risk management solutions. 

Way #7.  Becoming an Adventurer. 

This is sort of the flip-side of the Survivalist material---if you use the other aspects of Septivium to make yourself very fit and capable, with layered defenses against multiple possible threats, you can go out into the world and take calculated risks.  The Adventurer is in a very real sense built on the other six.

This is probably where there will be a lot of divergence between Septivium and the paths that readers decide to take.  If you are a "dopamine junkie" like myself, this will flow logically from the others.  However, those who have a more traditional and duty-bound perspective on the world my agree with me about Ways One through Six, but feel that the Adventurer material has far less appeal.  They may wish to replace this one with a goal/identity which fits within the responsibilities and concerns that they have---perhaps philanthropy, perhaps some kind of civic involvement, perhaps family.

Based on preliminary discussions with friends, it appears that the Adventurer in particular is a fairly arbitrary component based largely on my own personality.  The other ones have generally seemed pretty obvious, even if friends disagreed about my take on them or with something that I tend to emphasize here or there.  

Septivium will have a heavy emphasis on planning, organizing, and leading expedition-style adventures for private-sector groups of 1-6 people.  The best single source for this material that I have found is:

RGS Expedition Handbook

My approach is going to be necessarily very general and more about the process of getting going and the arguments in favor of doing it than about any particular adventure.  I look forward to getting your feedback on this stuff and on compiling various lists of recommended equipment, trips, and techniques.   


....
Conclusion:  The Lords of Chaos

These really are not completely separate disciplines:  for example, Lifestyle Design and Strategic Thinking  lend themselves naturally to Fighting and Strategic Social Dynamics.   Fighting essentially "weaponizes" the first two meta-disciplines, while SSD uses them as springboards to build a competent negotiator, diplomat, persuader, presenter, salesman, spy, and seducer.

AIS-APPLE, meta-discipline #5, derives much of its power from Strategic Thinking and Social Dynamics.  It's concerned with using those to build and protect Wealth.  Survivalist, Way #6, in turn builds heavily on Fighting and downside risk analysis enabled by Strategic Thinking and AIS-APPLE.

In fact, you could easily see Survivalism as being the other part of the Wealth Equation:  Wealth =  Resources - Needs.  Think of "Resource" acquisition as being the province of AIS-APPLE (many of the skills that will be discussed here are employed by the most highly compensated people in the world---hedge fund managers) and having fewer "Needs" as being the province of Survivalism.  Together they will make you just not give a damn about many things that really stress other people out.
 
 Coming Up Next:  Ketosis 101. 

The next post will be far more focused and will start discussing one of Septivium's most important base elements:  the ketogenic diet or modified/cyclical ketogenic diet (depending on your personal needs, you may alternate between these) and the use of daily "feeding windows" for Intermittent Fasting (IF).