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