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PaperclipPerfector  3mo ago (text post)   1417 thread views

Wellness Wednesday for August 6, 2025

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'm grateful for Substack's ability to show me the sources of traffic. As I've previously mentioned, it keyed me in to the fact that Gwern himself had archived me. I was quite pleased to see a few people independently share my posts on HN too.

But, sometimes it raises more questions than it answers. Why are my posts being shared via the Steam forums? Why Slack? Who is using their company comms or a gaming website to talk about anything I've written?? I wish I knew, but it's a mystery that I'm unlikely to solve. I even saw Localhost:1881 in there, which I strongly suspect shouldn't be sending me any traffic.

After writing the above, I went back to my most popular article, the one about the effects of psilocybin on depression. Substack has 800 views from LinkedIn, 15 from Microsoft Office, 2 from the Brave browser (?).

I hope someone can tell me what the fuck is going on here.

If mma.tv were still around and I weren’t banned - so like 6 years ago really, you’d see me share a link or two from there.

Most forums’ most active places are their misc. sub forums.

Localhost:1881

Substack is just processing the Referrer header in the HTTP request that browsers will send when users click a link.

So, someone has links to your Substack on a locally hosted page. Maybe one of our own viewing a locally hosted version of The Motte?

Hmm.. How would that work? If they're self-hosting, then are they executing all the server-side code themselves and also mirroring the content?

I mean someone working on the site’s codebase, presumably with all the necessary credentials.

It makes for very short iteration times to run dev code locally connected to the prod database. That’s how we work on the front end code at Meta.

But I have no clue how people work on the code here.

In the past I've known people who've made a simple HTML page with some links on it set as the home page for easy access from new tabs. Not sure if file:// would send a referrer, but a lightweight local-only server isn't crazy either. I doubt they know they're sending referrer headers.

Maybe someone is self-hosting something that takes, filters, backups etc content? Or some other kind of custom front-end?

Why Slack? Who is using their company comms or a gaming website to talk about anything I've written??

Slack is used for some like Discord with less stupid name or by people working far more than gaming and exposed to it as a primary real-time chat. Also, some companies have very relaxed policies, that would make USA HR department die on spot.

You can be a software dev in a small 100% male company in Eastern Europe that has a chat channel for sharing porn.

I even saw Localhost:1881 in there, which I strongly suspect shouldn't be sending me any traffic.

maybe someone self-hosts "to read" list?

Why are my posts being shared via the Steam forums?

Why not? You posted that Avatar tech stuff? Seems quite easily linkable to some gaming discussions.

2 from the Brave browser (?).

Appeared in some recommendations shown by browser?

15 from Microsoft Office

link in .doc document I guess

You can be a software dev in a small 100% male company in Eastern Europe that has a chat channel for sharing porn.

This is both mind-blowing and completely believable.

car repair workshop/factories may have posters with almost naked women - is it also something that would not happen in USA?

Thank you. That seems quite sensible

You can be a software dev in a small 100% male company in Eastern Europe that has a chat channel for sharing porn.

I suppose they need additional perks to make up for the low salary haha.

Rat-adjacent spaces have a soft spot for jaded psychiatrists with penchant for writing. I am not surprised.

During the great awokening, lots of niche forums moved to private groups on discord and slack. TheMotte is a rare space that has both open conversation and is publicly accessible. Goes to show how badly Reddit fumbled the bag.

Are you accusing me of being a worse version of Scott?

If you are, I can't fault you haha. I live in the shadow of giants, and try to grow in the space between their toes.

Is there anywhere to see which pages actually link to your substack posts?

Not that I'm aware of. In the specific instances of Gwern, X, HN and a few others, I was able to track down the original link manually, or using Google search parameters.

Recently, I have been reminded why so many lawyers are fat, drunks, or both. There are just too many days where the stress levels are atrocious, and as if dealing with clients/courts/etc. aren't bad enough, then adding in training and supervising other attorneys means there are constant small fires that need attention.

Nearly ripped my hair out today so hey you're not alone. The feeling of having constant small fires that need attention is definitely something that also exists in tax, and to add to that tax software is an absolute bitch to deal with (seriously they all look like they're from the 80s and function that way). Trainings. Deadlines. Impromptu dealings with the Australian Taxation Office, an institution which is infamously unreasonable and practically all-powerful. Timesheets where your productivity is tracked by the 15-minute increment and incentivises you to rush out jobs, making you more error-prone. Engagement letters. Clients who refuse to provide PBCs that are remotely legible and instead choose to vomit out 350 documents that barely reconcile. Byzantine tax laws that just keep fucking changing, something I'm sure you're more than familiar with.

My current work arrangement enables me to to work from home at select days during the week and I will admit to taking this opportunity to talk shit with friends sometimes while I work, which helps to make the day less desolate (whenever the job allows it, that is). That's a boon. But the job itself makes me want to chop my fingers off.

I would probably hate being a lawyer though. Too much human interaction for the likes of an autist such as me.

What's specifically stressful about it? Aren't you just, like, talking to people and billing hours?

I could imagine being forced to care about people you don't care about can wear on you. But make you an alcoholic? Isn't the point of training and experience so you can autopilot most of the time?

Are you talking about being a corporate attorney?

talking to people

If by "talking to people" you mean dealing with unreasonable felonious clients, their unreasonable families, obnoxious and occasionally unethical prosecutors, unhelpful court staff, belligerent judges, probation officers, police officers, and a bunch of others, then yes. And of course, most of the court staff, probation officers, police officers, clients, and their families all believe they're lawyers and know more about the law than I do.

None of that includes the administrative side of things.

Isn't the point of training and experience so you can autopilot most of the time?

lol. lmao, even.

Are you talking about being a corporate attorney?

No, criminal defense.

Okay so, talking to the worst people in the world all day? Yeah I could see that driving me to drink. I'd probably have to just start treating people like holograms to protect my sanity after awhile

What did you think criminal defense would be like?

What did you think criminal defense would be like?

Sunshine, rainbows, drinking champagne on unicorns, perfect 10s throwing themselves at me, etc. You know, the usual.

ha, honest mistake

Now that makes me wonder why more doctors aren't fat and/or drunk. Everything you've said about attorneys fits our bill. Maybe we're more health conscious (and I hope we are), maybe we run around more, or maybe we just sleep better at night from a clean conscience.

The median quality of the people becoming doctors compared to lawyers is generally a fair bit higher, so one would expect them to do better. The comparison shouldn't be between the median lawyer and the median doctor, but between a fairly successful lawyer or judge and a doctor.

I have another observation though, and this of course varies by country and specialization, but my impression is that doctors work life is comparatively (in relation to other similar high status white collar professions) "relaxed" a few years after residency, which coincidentally is the same age people usually start gaining weight. If I'm comparing my friends and acquaintances, the ones in private industry seem to work more, harder and with far less stability than the doctors.

A lot of the stressors that exist in other comparable careers don't exist and things are far more stable, for good and ill. Very high salary, ironclad employment security, lifelong employment, clear delineation between work and rest, etc. To me the biggest issue among my doctor friends seems to increasingly be boredom/under stimulation rather than stress.

I also imagine that a lot of the people unsuited to the medicine specific stressors wash out before they actually become doctors due to how the education is structured. You're much more removed from the actual reality of your future career as a law student for example which can lead to nasty surprises.

clear delineation between work and rest

While this can be true for some practice environments and specialties, I would hazard it is untrue more often than not.

Most doctors have some combination of research, teaching, administrative, and managerial duties all of which bleed outside of traditional work hours in the usual ways. Additionally many specialties (ex: family medicine) will involve significant time outside of work catching up on documentation and managing your in basket and so on.

It's not impossible - gas usually does little outside of work, same for things like radiology, inpatient psychiatry and so on. Especially in a hospital employed community setting. But as soon as you take on any additional responsibilities, go academic, or hang your own shingle...that goes away most of the time.

My suspicion is that doctors seem to cope well in comparison to lawyers because the sheer depth of abuse, abstruse requirements and zero flexibility in the medical student and residency days makes anything that comes after seem reasonable.*

Although by the numbers substance abuse, divorce rates, suicide are all high for doctors (but maybe not as bad as lawyers).

*"My 24s aren't that bad" is a common attending refrain. It is also insane.

Most doctors have some combination of research, teaching, administrative, and managerial duties all of which bleed outside of traditional work hours in the usual ways.

I have a few doctor friends, most in family med, 1 in ophthalmology, 1 in podiatry (debatable) , and my wife's family are mostly doctors, including radiology, physiatry, and neurology.

Ive never heard of any of them doing any "research, teaching, administrative, or managerial work" past residency. They all seem to work 30-40h a week doing pretty much "doctor stuff" only.

Nobody does any teaching? Nobody has any Medical Students or Residents?

That doesn't seem right.

Could be regional though - Philadelphia (which is super dense) has nearly as many medical schools as the entire state of Florida, if you live in a place without trainees you aren't going to be teaching.

That said if you work for a hospital you should be doing something outside of your clinical duties (teaching, research, committee seats, extra jobs in the department like holding a medical director title). If you own your own practice you need to deal with the management side of this.

It'd be possible to work for someone to take on the least amount of responsibility (and the specialties you name are some of the ones it would be easier to do*) but you'd be leaving money on the table, not necessarily working any less (since teaching, research and administrative can eat up some FTE) and it is by no means typical.

*Family medicine in most practice environments is checking their in basket and finishing charts outside of business hours at least somewhat.

All of this is stay nothing of call responsibilities - someone is managing a phone line, going into the hospital PRN if needed, for most specialties. Ophthalmology is small and has rare but serious call responsibilities (going into the hospital) and has frequent enough need to phone triage. I'd be shocked if that person doesn't have some call. Radiology and Physiatry can dodge that. Neurology can be one of the busiest call specialties depending on practice environment, same with Family Medicine.

I would wager your friends do more than you think they just don't mention it or it doesn't come up.

Maybe things are different in America (you certainly seem to abuse your residents far more), I only really know and have experience with doctors from the Nordics and Germany.

Most doctors here absolutely do not have research, teaching and administrative duties that take place outside of work hours. Some do, like those pursuing MDs, but those a fairly small minority. Most attendings are "just" working and for most of them this work overwhelmingly takes place during office hours, including things like teaching.

The specific stressors they face are different, like the very long shifts, working nights and ethical stress.

Yeah the environment couldn't be more different - stress is going to be the same (not even long hours depending on the country) but the way US physicians have hundreds of thousands of dollars of debt, can be compensated very well (depending on speciality), have to deal with the nonsense of the U.S. health system, wearing of multiple hats and so make them functionally a different class of job.

Although by the numbers substance abuse, divorce rates, suicide are all high for doctors (but maybe not as bad as lawyers).

First result for searching for divorce rates for doctors and lawyers. Not too far apart. I did not find any quick results for suicide comparisons or substance abuse rates.

divorce rates

I'd suggest that divorce (and adultery) rates are high for doctors because one of the perks of the job is that hospitals are full of young female nurses. Of all the divorced men I know, the doctors are the most likely to leave their first wife for some kind of floozy from work. This alone probably encourages staying trim!

Both of my neighbors are doctors and both are on their 2nd marriages with younger women they met at work. The surgeon had a huge new sprawling estate built to house not only his current wife and 4 young children, but also his 3 adult children from his first marriage who refuse to move out. His house actually has separate living rooms, kitchen, garages etc for both 'halves' of his family.

edit - neither are nurses. While it is common for doctors to "trade up" to younger women, the doctors and nurses I've spoken with (my wife, sister in law, and nephew are all nurses), say doctor/nurse affairs seldom lead to long term relationships as they all kind of hate doctors generally, as a class of people, and nurses personalities are often not pliant enough for the doctor's liking. Instead both of my neighbors married admin staff of some sort, one was an insurance liaison at the hospital, the other worked in patient intake.

I know this is a meme but it is one I've never encountered in real life (although I've heard about it often). Hard to tell if that is due to geography or era (these days most of the male doctors I know are terrified of being on the wrong end of woke crimes and are careful at work for that reason).

I will tell you that this is definitely true for pilots, however, in full agreement with the popular perception. Of course the barriers or demonstrably lower (spending time in hotel rooms already, far from home) on top of the similarities (long work hours, mix of boredom and stress, an abundance of young female lower-ranked coworkers).

Yeah I've heard Pilots and Flight Attendants are basically fuck city. In truth I've never heard an IRL doctor make any kinds of claims about rampant sleeping around or cheating in the departments. I've heard patients who work in aviation tell me about their and their coworkers exploits totally unprompted.

Pilots and doctors are very different crowds.

Some societal stereotypes seem to be based on things that haven't been true for 10-20 years, and the updates are slow to happen. The "middle aged dude running off with the floozy from work and buying a red convertible" trope is indestructible, but I've personally seen more of the "woman loses her mind and gets divorced (or the opposite order), borderline abandons her kids, and goes on a years-long drunken sex binge" version.

Very high salary, ironclad employment security, lifelong employment, clear delineation between work and rest, etc

God, I wish that were me. Or true of most British doctors. At least the WLB is better in psych.

That's a pretty thoughtful comment, and I think it makes eminent sense.

I have zero doubts being a doctor is more stressful in some ways, especially in some specialties. However, imagine as a doctor, you had a counter-doctor working to fight or undo everything you were doing (even more so than the patient might fight you on things). It adds a whole extra level of stress.

Fair warning, no spoilers: Lynch left Twin Peaks for an extended period in Season 2, and it gets really really bad for a bit. Not quite unwatchable but close. Soldier on, though, because The Return is arguably the greatest TV ever filmed.

If you decide to take a break and watch other Lynch stuff, Mulholland Drive was originally conceived as a Twin Peaks spinoff, and Blue Velvet is probably his Peaksiest film.

Anti-recommend The Return, I thought it was pretentious arthouse nonsense.

Fire Walk with Me is the sequel that Twin Peaks deserved.

Maybe. But it did produce this behind the scenes gem. And if Lynch blowing his top on a producer nagging him to make his work more mass market doesn't endear the work to you, it probably is best you move on.

Nice, both great films. If you want an interesting experience that will teach you a lot about Lynch's influences, I recommend watching Eraserhead and then Orson Welles' version of The Trial.

I will post a review of Twin Peaks season 1 this Friday. Please do not post spoilers, even hidden ones.

Looking forward to it. TP, Fire Walk With Me, and then The Return is an incredible ride.

twin peaks was hailed by many as his best work. It's amazing.

For his works as a director, I think Fire Walk With Me and The Return are an improvement over the original TP. The original TP had too many outsiders meddling.

Since our stipend got raised to $52k this year, I actually have significant money to invest every month. Any tips other than just dumping into index funds? I've been doing about a third into index funds, a third into specific stocks and keeping a third liquid in money market. In my IRA it's about 70% index funds and 30% individual stocks.

Have you looked into real estate? Rental properties can offer a better return than the stock market and are a good way to diversify.

Getting good returns comes from timing the market as well as picking the right stocks/assets. You need to have the patience to wait for some panic like we got on August 5th 2024 and April 7th 2025. Then you must have the balls to pull the trigger and go in hard, when it feels frightening and wrong to do so.

If you want guaranteed mediocrity in return for no thinking, just do dollar cost averaging into the index.

People will parrot "time in the market beats timing the market" and "nearly everyone who picks individual stocks underperform the market", and that may be true, but that's because most people included in the stats don't have a clue what they're doing, and/or can't override their instincts for the unnatural behavior of investing.

Interesting analysis of dollar cost averaging vs buy the dip at https://ofdollarsanddata.com/even-god-couldnt-beat-dollar-cost-averaging/amp/

I feel like that article's example is chosen more for shock value than truth, though. Practically, they only invest a single time for almost 15 years, even though it's a big amount, does that really reflect true investor behavior (saving in the meantime)? Not only staying put for a while, but your income won't stay the same over time, so even though they inflation-adjusted the core stock market measure, it's not going to be anything remotely like "I have 40k right now or I could strategically invest it over time in equal lumps on the dips" since that 40k is already inflation-corrected, you'd never have that to start with, so to me something feels a bit wrong in the setup. At any rate most people aren't debating between saving until a major dip and investing each month. Most people are debating between investing a lump sum all at once, or doing a structured investment. That is, I have 10k in savings, do I buy now or do I split it up into some number of equal parts over days/weeks/months? Notably both this more limited entry strategy and investing your extra every month ad infinitum are both sometimes referred to as dollar cost averaging, confusingly, since they represent two quite fundamentally different use-cases and setups.

Although a similar logic applies in the structured investment case, where the lump sum technically wins out mathematically, and the longer the time horizon the more this is true (somewhat counterintuitively), it's still worth noting that a structured deposit does offer both a decrease in risk as well as some emotional benefits (provided you actually stick to the structured deposit schedule without overthinking, which is a major doubt considering they're more also probably more risk-averse and overthinking in the first place). Overall I think the math says the risk decrease is overstated, so really it just comes down to emotions. Consider the worst-case scenario and if your precise entry strategy would have made an emotional difference or not, and then consider the best-case scenario and if you'd feel substantial regret not earning more. Only the investor themselves can say, but e.g. this Vanguard paper makes the claim that assuming you don't have loss aversion (which is to some extent irrational for most investors) only "very conservative" risk tolerance people should bother to DCA and also puts some numbers to it (see page 6 for some sexy money curves).

ninja edit: fixed objection about inflation

That appears to be a hypothetical strat of buying the market as a whole/index when it dips. I don't think index fund investing should be combined with market timing. That's a waste.

Why? No matter how successful a company has been in the past, any dip can be a long-term re-evaluation or even the start of the way to bankruptcy. Especially if you consider the average person asking for investing advice, thinking they can reliably tell apart an irrational panic that will soon be corrected, or a genuine problem that will have long-term impact seems foolish to me.

On the other hand, index funds can't really go bankcrupt. At most, it just stays lower than expected for an extended period of time before going up again. The risk/reward for buying into the dip seems much better here for the average low-knowledge investor.

A decent plan is to buy solid, growing companies during macro noise/sell-off events, such as the dates I mentioned.

It's very unlikely that the market uncovered terrible upcoming fundamental news about the specific company at the exact same date as the market wide fear and liquidity need.

The whole point of an index fund is that it's basically always better than guessing which companies are "solid and growing" and this advantage is only more obvious, not less, as time goes on (in part because index funds inherently re-weight on a mechanical basis as companies enter and exist whatever toplist they track, though minor differences especially within index ETFs exist in implementation). Turns out that judgement is way more subjective than often appreciated, according to the data.

There exist some speculative, theoretical reasons why index funds especially in their modern iterations might backfire in the future, but these remain wholly speculative, would mostly affect all investors roughly in aggregate together, and are not worth the time of day for most investors.

Index funds are hard to beat in terms of returns intersecting with zero thinking required. If you think you might enjoy a kinda rude but accurate quant's rationalization for index funds you can watch this.

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