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Wellness Wednesday for July 17, 2024

The Wednesday Wellness threads are meant to encourage users to ask for and provide advice and motivation to improve their lives. It isn't intended as a 'containment thread' and any content which could go here could instead be posted in its own thread. You could post:

  • Requests for advice and / or encouragement. On basically any topic and for any scale of problem.

  • Updates to let us know how you are doing. This provides valuable feedback on past advice / encouragement and will hopefully make people feel a little more motivated to follow through. If you want to be reminded to post your update, see the post titled 'update reminders', below.

  • Advice. This can be in response to a request for advice or just something that you think could be generally useful for many people here.

  • Encouragement. Probably best directed at specific users, but if you feel like just encouraging people in general I don't think anyone is going to object. I don't think I really need to say this, but just to be clear; encouragement should have a generally positive tone and not shame people (if people feel that shame might be an effective tool for motivating people, please discuss this so we can form a group consensus on how to use it rather than just trying it).

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I am not a Luddite, nor do I consider myself internet illiterate. I am definitely online on a daily basis far more than my wife, though she and I seem to look at very different things (she seems to like cat videos and local--here I mean our surrounding city--news). I am probably more online than most (not all) of my peer group of guys with whom I regularly consume beverages (though I've been on the water wagon for a few weeks). I preface this to say I often find myself lost in discussions here when everyone seems to know what everyone else is alluding to.

Example: In this comment reference is made to LoTT, which I only know means "LibsofTikTok" from context. I do not however have any idea who this is. I could of course search--and often that's what I do, especially if literally everyone starts talking about x y or z, I search--but that quickly becomes tiresome. I also remember recent reference to LoTT when certain members were critical of certain other members--but it was all about events I know nothing about.

I am better equipped to understand references to ACX or SSC (eg Scott Alexander's stuff) but I by no means have read even 25% of that large body of online writing, as interesting and well-written as much of it is. I've never really browsed Lesswrong. I don't consider myself a rationalist or effective altruist. A lot of the names regularly tossed about (Yudowsky, Moldbug) are names I've had to look up in context of discussions because they're people I otherwise wouldn't have heard of.

As I say I am not an internet noob and I like to think I have a halfway-to-respectable vocabulary. When someone says something is "perfectly cromulent" I get the irony. But lots whizzes past me. Is this me being old? I'm wearing Vans ffs. Or am I just slightly removed from the typical demographic that ends up here?

I think a lot of it is the silo'ing of users into algorithm-mediated feeds on the small handful of social media websites that make up 80% of internet traffic. People are segregated (both by choice and by force via algorithm) into bubbles that don't overlap much.

Plus it seems like most of the new slang and acronyms are generated on X.com these days, which you miss if you don't have an account you actively use there. I don't have one and so I have to absorb these new phrases second-hand through the motte, rdrama, and irl friends that send me twitter links and screenshots.

Don't feel bad, I only contribute to threads that interest me since a lot of the high-volume posters are incredibly integrated into the rationalist community which seems largely related to west coast thinking and influences. This is simply one of the best places for discussion on the internet right now, so I tend to hang out here a lot.

I'm a big advocate of 'be the change you want to see' but I understand that it requires a lot more effort and time that makes being a catalyst for change on an internet forum a challenge, so I'm fine lurking the majority of the time.

I think it's just a normal bubble effect. I read a lot of social media content on literary fiction, speculative fiction, and just a whole lot of tech. And discussions in those spaces all felt like this in the beginning. Genres titles are abbreviated, authors I've never even heard of a constantly referred to and used for comparison, third-party apps/forums/podcasts are referenced and every thing with more than 2 syllables gets an abbreviation. It always was like this in tech, and the jargon really lends itself to it. It's kind of expected. But other fields of interest pretty much are the exact same, if you go deep enough.

Ist just happens that "rationalists" communities are a both large and tight enough community now to have formed a bubble.

I felt that trying to read Tracingwoodgrains' recent post and resulting comments. It's not that I'm unfamiliar with his persona -- I was following the Reddit when he used to post there all the time, and then left to found the Schism. Or that he didn't work at explaining the drama. But it still just came across as impenetrable.

Yes I was alluding to that as well. I was lost. From the reactions (and his subsequent fleeing from this site) I am guessing it was another tedious internet debacle.

I think it just means you're online but not "extremely" online. On my worst days I will look at my phone for several hours. Start the day looking at it, eat while looking at it, look at it at the gym, look at it as I go to bed. Essentially I will be looking at it continuously unless I'm doing something that absolutely requires me not to (like work, or cooking, or talking to someone). I've seen new things pop up in my feeds that get discussed to death over a short span (~hours) and then very quickly morph into acronyms or mutated meme versions of the original name for the thing. Unless you are truly near constantly on X or Reddit or whatever your knowledge of what's current can become out of date in less than a day and these new terms become hard to understand. So I think what you're describing is just inevitable if you're not completely plugged in all the time.

Ooof, that sounds kinda bleak. Are you happy with spending that much time on your phone?

Yeah, it's definitely bleak. And no, not at all. That's when my habit it at my worst. Usually it's an hour a day, including reading Substack and TheMotte. But I'm pretty sure there are a lot of people out there who are on their phones even more than I described, especially prolific Twitter and Reddit posters.