Ponder
20d ago
Something I've done before is to print off a map of the area. Whenever I go somewhere new for the first time I highlight it on the map. Then when I went for a leisurely bicycle ride I would look at that map and choose a path that would lead to somewhere I hadn't highlighted yet.
I'm sure you could do this digitally too: download something that tracks where you walk/ride then specifically look for areas that you haven't been to.
Ponder
29d ago
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/W5HcGywyPoDDdJtbz/trigger-action-planning
- Choose a goal (a desired outcome or behavior)
- Identify a relevant trigger (something that will happen naturally)
- Decide on an action that you want to occur after the trigger
- Rehearse the causal link (e.g. with deliberate visualization)
Basically, you can find the trigger that causes undesirable behavior and change it through intention and repetition. You can also build productive routines using this algorithm.
Ponder
1mo ago
I have no personal experience buying from the current sellers. It is still legally available as a research chemical in the US. The main issue is trusting that the supplier has sufficient quality control. Places that sell it are science.bio, Trafa Pharmaceutical, and edengrows.
You might be able to get an off label prescription from a doctor to pregabalin which might have similar effects. However, I don't have personal experience with anything similar to Phenibut, and they can often vary in effects significantly even though they are structurally similar. See: https://slatestarcodex.com/2019/07/18/know-your-gabapentinoids/
Ponder
1mo ago
turn into a cool guy who dances with babes at the club. Is that possible? Has anyone actually done that?
Yes, I have done exactly this. I did it through the use of psychoactive substances, mainly Phenibut combined with extended-release caffeine. For me Phenibut increases social confidence, reduces self-doubt, reduces self-censorship, makes music sound amazing, and makes me want to socialize. It is like alcohol without the impairment. This was back when you could buy Phenibut from reputable nootropics vendors, but that is no longer the case as of 2023. Also, Phenibut can be addictive if used more than once a week and it is dangerous to combine it with alcohol/benzos/opiods/CNS depressants.
I found it fun just getting the attention of hot women even though I have a low sex drive and I wasn’t trying to get laid. I became way more interested in figuring out why what I was doing worked, how to optimize it, and the limitations of it. I started reading about psychology, cog sci, pharmacodynamics, etc.
The simple lesson is that I had a part of me that was shutting down a different part of me that wanted to connect with people. In Internal Family Systems language I had a manager that was shutting down the exile that wanted to be playful/fun because the manager thought I should always act logically/rationally and the exile’s plans were dangerous and stupid.
Furthermore, becoming the cool guy has pros and cons:
Pros:
- It builds confidence and skills
- Reduces social anxiety and this somewhat persists when sober
- Increases interest in psychology/cog sci
- More friends
- Feel way more optimistic about life and people when under the influence of Phenibut.
Cons
- New friends are flaky and only want to be around me when I’m in party mode
- The newly learned confidence is mostly tied to the environment (club) and mental state (not sober) so the benefits are limited in normal situations
- Sleep cycle gets interrupted due to staying out late
- I became more jaded and cynical about people. Other people like me when I’m clownish and not when I’m being thoughtful and sober.
- Damage to professional reputation if you’re the guy in club every weekend.
- Probably could have found a better use of my time.
stupid pop music
This will probably work better for you if go to EDM clubs or festivals. You want to go where there are people that use MDMA or other drugs that increase openness and friendliness to strangers.
In conclusion, you can use drugs to change the activities you enjoy and to make it easier to connect with strangers. However, I would advise you to think long and hard about how that will impact you if you succeed because it probably won’t be as rewarding as you expect.
Ponder
1mo ago
There is research that synthetic fertilizers reduce the nutritional quality of foods.
There is research on if synthetic fertilizers pose a risk to human health and contribute to the development of chronic disease (I'm not sure how conclusive it is, I haven't dug into it).
Ponder
1mo ago
https://www.meaningcrisis.co/ep-48-awakening-from-the-meaning-crisis-corbin-and-the-divine-double/
The last section, "An Aspirational Process Towards A More Angelic Self", can probably steelman this much better than I can.
Prayer is something like a process that affords you the ability to transform directionally towards an aspirational self (symbolic). If you believe your aspirational self has the qualities that you are asking for in prayer, then the action of praying can help start the process of bringing those qualities to your current self.
Ponder
1mo ago
Generally, some ways a person might become less impacted by their feelings are:
- Internalizing ideas from Stoicism. There is a difference between the event and how we frame it. The feelings we experience are caused by how we choose to internally frame the event. We can choose to internally frame events in less distressing ways.
- Realizing that some feelings are influenced by extra information that we add to events. If someone is rude to you then we might add the assumption that they don’t like us. We don’t know this for sure, it may just be that they are having a bad day. If we add a mental note that this extra information is tentative instead of certain then the feelings associated with it may be less intense.
- Exposure Therapy. For example, working in a retail sales setting makes people less sensitive to rejection if they face it a lot in their job.
if someone who's sensitive starts creative endeavours they will be better than average?
Yes, it can help in certain situations, but it takes some training to make it work to your advantage. It is probably similar to how certain physical characteristics make people better at certain sports, but they have to (1) be interested in the sport (2) train themselves to use the physical characteristic advantageously.
Ponder
1mo ago
'relevance realization'?
I was using relevance realization to mean the process by which things motivate people, what arouses their energy, what attracts their attention, etc. Right now you probably aren't paying attention to the wall or the furniture even though it is in your environment, there is a process that puts it in the background as not important.
I feel like paragraph 1 is a fully general argument against e.g. having fun, randomly reading wikipedia pages to learn new things, or really anything other than 'working in the domain you specialize in', unless i'm misunderstanding, which is plausible.
You can find anything relevant, including just having fun. A drug addict finds drugs highly relevant and salient. I was indicating that there is a process that causes people to find certain things relevant and causes them to background other things. Relevance changes depending on context too (such as when someone is at work, and when they are at home).
but if you can't get anything out of talking to random people at a reasonable frequently you're doing it wrong.
It isn't that you can't get anything out of it. It is that you have limited time/energy and you can get similar things more efficiently. If you read certain books you will gain knowledge you find relevant at a faster pace than if you spent that time on small talk.
Ponder
1mo ago
you should be able to participate competently.
You can, but I think this perspective dismisses an important point.
People have limited metabolic energy and therefore must have a system of filtering information in the environment to avoid combinatorial explosion. If your relevance realization machinery focuses on mastering a domain and looking into the unsolved questions of the domain then you can start finding small talk far less relevant. It is taking time away from you making a potential contribution to the domain that could help many people.
Small talk becomes far less interesting when you get good at predicting what the other person will say because you’ve had similar conversations with other people. It is no longer a source of interesting/relevant information.
Ponder
1mo ago
Is there some Machiavellian tactic I can pull to force Bob to work harder or get fired altogether?
Potentially, you could convince Bob that he would like some other job better. Then you could provide encouragement and support with helping him get another job.
It will probably be hard to convince Bob to pursue a new job, but you may know him well enough to figure out his motivations. Maybe you can appeal to his laziness by finding him an easier job that pays more. Maybe you can show concern that you think he may be let go by company for not performing, but you would like to help him find a new job before that happens.
Ponder
1mo ago
- Choose environments that you’re more comfortable in that naturally highlight your good qualities. Maybe something like a book club
- Prepare and bring something thoughtful to share with people. In book club it could just be some interesting knowledge related to the chapter. At a house party it could be a homemade snack. The thing that you share should be something you put thought and effort to, not just something expensive.
- This last point is very controversial, and you need to proceed with extreme caution. In party situations you can explore the use of psychoactive substances that do some combination of: (1) reduce your anxiety (2) increase confidence (3) make socializing more interesting/fun (4) don’t make you noticeably impaired.
Participating in flow arts.
ETA: Some animal shelters have a program where you can borrow a dog for the day. You could do that and go around trying to find someone to adopt it.
Ponder
2mo ago
From the perspective of a long-term investor, I wouldn't buy. Stocks are a claim on future profits of the company and I don't think their future looks better than other investment opportunities.
- The user base isn't as sticky as other social media because it is based on interacting anonymously. Other social media has more of a moat due to the connections you have with people you know IRL.
- Users could easily get similar content elsewhere on the internet
- Since users can easily leave any attempts to increase profitably could drive users away (such as the API changes). Competitors can eventually capitalize on any errors Reddit makes while chasing profitability.
- Advertisers continue to shift to more targeted advertising and Reddit has a lot less data that is useful for this type of targeting than other social media that has user's personal details.
- The utility of the site is going down. It isn't good for truth-seeking. It is a good place for social confirmation but eventually people get bored with constantly seeing variants of the same content everyday.
- The quality of the data is going down as people get better at gaming the system to push their ideologies or spam.
- I think there is a general societal trend of getting sick of all the bullshit on social media and wanting to have more authentic connections. At a minimum people are shifting to things like invite-only discords or online communities that require some digging to find.
Ponder
2mo ago
The vast majority of his dogs went to a sanctuary. They say “adopted” and that is technically correct- but they went to the dog equivalent of a zoo....Most were never integrated into homes....
The point of the link I shared was that his dogs went to the sanctuary, received rehabilitation, and then most were then able to pass the Good Canine Citizen test and be adopted by individual families into their homes.
The fallout from all of this has been 15 years of pro-pitbull propaganda and an incredible increase in dog bite attacks, disfigurements, and deaths. We have plenty of dogs, put the bad ones down.
The crux of this issue is determining if the increase in dog bites is caused by bad dogs or bad training. I think the evidence points to bad training being the cause in more cases than not. Pit bulls were a popular breed of dog in the 1900s and earlier. It doesn't make sense that they would be popular if they were an inherently bad breed. Generally, pit bulls are intelligent and loyal which makes it easier to train aggressive behaviors into them. Some people wanted a dog trained with this behavior (people living in dangerous situations that wanted a protective companion) and just happened to choose pit bulls because they are one of the easiest to train to do this. There are certain characteristics that are specific to the breed, but others like biting are more influenced by how humans train/raise them.
Ponder
2mo ago
I think this perspective discounts the transformative power of dog training. There are a lot of changes that can be made by a skilled trainer. Here is some information about what happened to dogs rescued from Michael Vick's fighting ring: https://bestfriends.org/sanctuary/about-sanctuary/animal-areas/dogtown/vicktory-dogs/champions-film/stories-about-dogs
It may be worth paying a trainer to help your dog learn less anxious behavior if you don’t have the time/skill. Also, it is worth considering how to adapt the environment to make the dog less anxious. Maybe put the dog in doggy daycare, or hire a pet sitter, if you are going to be for extended periods.
I have seen someone that had success drugging their dog, but I don’t recall the drug. The outcome was that they gave it to the dog when they had guests and the dog would become sleepy. I don’t think the dog had any other issues, it just got excited in friendly ways when new people entered its environment.
The best ways to avoid dog behavior problems is to adopt one slightly past the puppy stage that has all the behaviors you want already trained into it. Or do extensive training when the dog is a puppy and seek external help if you can’t train the desired behaviors yourself. Once a dog gets past the ~puppy stage it takes a lot more effort to change its behavior.
Ponder
2mo ago
There is a weird sense of freedom that comes with truly believing you will never find another suitable relationship. It opens you up to trying weird things. If you believe everything that you do will leave you single and alone then there aren't any real consequences to your future relationships by trying new things and failing.
You could try weird/new things to break out of your thought pattern. In certain contexts you are correct that dating gets hard past a certain age, but you can change the context to make it easier. There are lots of places you can seek unconventional relationships, but you have tunnel-vision and have already dismissed them.
Also, if you are going to be alone forever you might want to look into communities that explore spiritually/contemplative/meditative practices to alleviate your suffering. Being connected to something larger than yourself may help provide a sense of meaning/purpose in your life.
I don't think you will be alone forever. I think you just have given yourself too many constraints on how to approach the problem and it is preventing you from discovering a clever solution.
Ponder
2mo ago
I can do small talk and sometimes even get a bit of enjoyment from it. The problem IRL is that many people's beliefs are so intertwined with their politics. If I talk about something completely unrelated to politics they might bring up progressive stack concepts as a way to discount a source.
I do talk about things they are interested in too, but they aren't interested my truth-seeking style of discussing the topic. I like to pull in a lot of data, consider all sides of an argument, and explore the topic in novel ways. Most IRL people seem to just want the social confirmation/validation of their deep thoughts instead of wanting to think in a scientist/rationalist adjacent style.
The thing is I've found online spaces where I can talk about deep things in a way all participants enjoy. We use our real names and do video conferencing. So some of this is specifically me being frustrated by IRL people because they are so different than my far away friends that I talk to virtually.
decide if what you really want is to have a conversation with another unique human .... or to have an audience.
Sometimes I'll watch a podcast where 2 people get deep dialogue on a subject. I'd like to be participating in conversations like those without being on a podcast.
Ponder
2mo ago
That's interesting. I do sometimes take NAD+ precursors, but I never realized that it might help prevent hangovers.
Ponder
2mo ago
Almost everyone I know supports my sobriety. I have a few friends that say things like, "we miss seeing you at the bar it is more fun when you're here", but that is no big deal.
This issue is more that alcohol allows me to get into a playful state that makes socializing fun. If I stay sober for long periods of time my interest in socializing goes down and I tend to get fixated on special interests. I get bored with IRL conversations because nobody wants to have deep conversations or talk much about the things that I find interesting.
Ponder
2mo ago
When I drink I aim for .05-.08 BAC, but sometimes I'll get as high as .1 BAC. I have a series of controls in places to make sure I stick to that that when drinking. I don't get hangovers. I just want to limit negative effects as much as a I can. I have noticed that certain parts of memory (like word recall) feel a bit worse as I've gotten older and I don't want alcohol to exacerbate any memory issues.
I'm not in many social settings where I'm expected to drink and I know how to politely decline alcohol in these settings. The issue is more that drinking gets into a playful mood and allows me to practice humor and different ways of being charismatic. When I don't drink for long periods of time I start to lose my interest in socializing and the more creative/playful parts of me get weaker, which makes it harder to connect with people.
Ponder
2mo ago
I've been sober since December, but I think I might start drinking once a week again in order to improve my social life. I've made some progress at sober socializing, but then I got to a plateau where I started losing interest/motivation. The people I meet IRL aren't interested in having deep conversations about the things I'm interested in, and navigating modern conversation norms is exhausting.
Can you prevent most of the long-term damage from alcohol by boosting glutathione to quickly break down the acetaldehyde?
How effective is this supplement stack at preventing the negative effects of alcohol?
Before drinking: emoxypine, milk thistle, S-Acetyl L-Glutathione
After drinking: Dihydromyricetin, Pyroglutamic Acid, Succinic Acid
Ponder
2mo ago
You are correct I'm not asking if I should belong to a religion. I was pondering the concept of 'Religion of No Religion' that John Vervaeke talks about
...we need to do something like what religion used to do. We need a comprehensive set of psychotechnologies that are set within communities of practices that allow for the comprehensive transformations of consciousness, cognition, character, and culture in a way that is analogous to religion...
Ponder
2mo ago
Is there anything that you can only get from belonging to a religion that you can’t get from secular alternatives?
There are things that you can get from both religion and secular alternatives (such as moral guidance, community, solace). Is there something about religion that makes religion the better place to seek them?
Ponder
2mo ago
you would have to be totally disconnected from reality to think a single piece of media reshaped someone's entire worldview.
A single piece of media can get someone to buy a product. A single piece of media could make someone decide to try a drug, or always avoid that drug. A single meme can cause people join online groups and that can lead to real-world consequences. It is directionally correct that media reshapes people's worldviews. Some people just steelman the main points to more reasonable positions instead of responding to the literal content of the post.
More generally, people lose interest in things over time. A video game can be fun at first, but then you get to the end and lose interest. You realize there are more fulfilling ways to spend your time. You skim top-level posts for the few topics that most interest you and ignore the rest. You can predict what will happen if you post a reply. There is no longer an expectation of getting into a novel conversation or learning something new.
I agree with this answer. Religion allows small groups of people to slowly reshape the culture as it attracts new members. The religion grows stronger as the mainstream culture grows weaker, which can eventually lead to the religion re-shaping/replacing parts of mainstream culture. A historical example is the rise of Christianity in the Roman Empire.
States with Religious Freedom Restoration Acts have stronger religious protections than those that don't.
Traditional religions in some people's eyes have lost their credibility/safety so there seems to be an opportunity to create a new religion that is better aligned with modern scientific beliefs.
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