Ponder
11d ago
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When my bicycle was stolen and nobody provided useful assistance.
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When my rent went up a over 15% and my landlord refused to negotiate even though I’ve been a good tenant. They claimed their expenses went up that much but I did the math on the publicly available property taxes and determined their costs did not go up anywhere near as much as they raised rent. They ended up causing a lot of tenants to leave and then had to offer new tenants lower rates.
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When I was in a job that was paying me below what they would pay a new employee for the same position. I had good reviews and they expressed appreciation for my work, but they couldn’t negotiate salary due to HR policies. I'm pretty sure they ended up paying a new employee more than I was making when I eventually left.
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LSD and MDMA being schedule 1 drugs (no currently accepted medical use) when they both were being successfully medically used at the time of scheduling. I believe MDMA or psychedelic assisted therapy would be beneficial to me but people have made it illegal for me to participate in it.
Ponder
11d ago
Thanks for the response, the way you explained it makes a lot of sense to me.
Next, consider the elements of harmony and where the other person stopped being an “us” and started being a “them” to you: are they being unkind, untruthful, disloyal, ungenerous, too serious, or under-involved?
In the triggering situations I almost always find what I believe is strong evidence of the other person being unkind or untruthful. I realize that they will never value me like they value the other relationships in their life. My model of them suggests they view me as a “them”, and there is nothing I can do to change this.
In many situations I just accept this and move on to doing other things, but sometimes the trigger is very strong and I start going down the path of dark/anti-social thoughts. It is like I find the triggering situations are a significant injustice and therefore I’m allowed break social norms in order to make things right.
The problem is I don’t want to go down the path of dark/anti-social thoughts. Even if I can find some unorthodox solution to the injustice it is almost always a case of winning a battle, but losing the war. The dark/anti-social thoughts also start bleeding over to other situations where they don’t apply.
Ponder
12d ago
When I feel like people aren't being reasonable/rational then my mind often starts to treat these people as objects and obstacles. I start coming up with autistic machinations that are often dark and anti-social.
Normally, I'm a very polite and cooperative person that tries to see people's good intentions. Sometimes I'll encounter a situation that is very frustrating where my normal approach doesn't work.
Do you have any advice or tips on how I can avoid ruminating on dark/anti-social thoughts when I encounter challenging situations where cooperation doesn't work?
The pattern seems to be something like: I encounter a frustrating situation then I start brainstorming a lot of ideas on how to solve the situation without any ethical filters. If any of the ideas seem like they might work then I continue thinking about that idea even if it is dark/anti-social. At some point I realize the thought is dark/anti-social and that I shouldn't think of such things. Then I try to avoid the thought, but part of me gets obsessed with thinking it all the way through. If I ignore it then the idea will manifest itself again if I can't find a better solution.
Ponder
23d ago
increasing longevity
According to marketing literature:
- Bioavailable CoQ10 - CoQ10 functions as a carrier to transfer electrons across the membrane of the mitochondria to drive production of adenosine triphosphate (ATP), or cellular energy.
- NAD+ precursors (including Nicotinamide Mononucleotide and Nicotinamide Riboside) - may help support overall cell proliferation. NAD+ levels decrease as we age which leads to the belief that lowered NAD+ levels are responsible for lower energy levels
- Astragaloside IV (a compound in Astragalus membranaceus) - can enhance telomere length. Telomeres are protective caps on the end of our DNA, which helps ensure proper DNA replication. However, the older we get, the shorter our telomeres become. Due to this, telomere shortening is often seen as a hallmark of aging.
- Peptides - I have no idea about these but they are building blocks of certain proteins needed by the skin, like collagen and elastin.
Personally, the first 2 seemed to give me a mild energy boost for a few hours. It is hard to say if they did much beyond that. I was only taking them 1-2x a week and not daily.
I would enjoy seeing more discussion on these because my research is from a biased source (a nootropics seller).
Ponder
26d ago
History is filled with many examples of violence on massive scales (wars) and violence initiated over religious/superstitious beliefs (like the Salem witch trials). There are still wars in today’s world.
This desire and use of violence is part of the human condition. John has an attitude that helps him remain vigilant and alert to the fact that humans have the potential to resort to irrational and gratuitous violence. It seems like part of why John is like this is because it is an adaptive strategy to anticipate what might trigger violence in humans so that he can avoid triggering it in other people. Of course he is assigning incorrect probabilities to the violent outcomes, but the strategy still makes sense directionally.
Ponder
1mo ago
This probably isn't the exact post that you were looking for, but I think you will find it interesting and related to what you asked about. It is about how people's views on X becomes distorted by taboos and shift when the taboo is lifted.
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/KpMNqA5BiCRozCwM3/social-dark-matter
[Social Dark Matter is] anything that people are strongly incentivized to hide from each other, and which therefore appears to be rare. And given that our society disapproves-of and disincentivizes a wide variety of things, there is a lot of it out there.
By the Law of Prevalence, any given type of social dark matter is going to be much more common than your evidence would suggest, and by the Law of Extremity, instances of that dark matter are going to tend to be much less extreme than you would naively guess.
Ponder
1mo ago
Ponder
1mo ago
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.
Ponder
1mo 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
2mo 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
2mo 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
2mo 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
2mo 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
2mo 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
2mo 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
3mo 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
3mo 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
3mo 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
3mo 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
3mo 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
3mo 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
3mo 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
3mo 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.
As others have said some judgement is helpful (example: a doctor telling you that you drink too much alcohol and it will cause health problems). It can help you see self-deceptive or self-destructive behavior that you can’t see on your own.
However, some judgement is unhelpful or mean-spirited. In that case here are some techniques to make you care less about judgement from other people:
To reiterate another comment: judgement is something you need carefully and thoughtfully balance. If you are too dismissive of judgement it can lead you to having delusions of grandeur.
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