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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Notes -
This past Sunday, I received baptism into the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints.
As some of you may be aware, I have been passively orbiting this church with various degrees of interest over the course of my entire life, as a result of family connections and several very close friends. Like most non-Mormons, I found various reasons not to pursue any active interest in the church: the total lack of anthropological/scientific evidence for historicity of its central religious text; the concerning signs of Joseph Smith’s charlatanry and general strategy of “making it up as he went”; the onerous lifestyle restrictions; the financial burden which tithing imposes, etc.
Furthermore, I’m occasionally cited here as an able critic of Christian ideas about theodicy, the efficacy of prayer, and the apparent contradictions between the idea of a loving and omnipotent God on the one hand, and the sheer amount of random and wanton suffering present in our world on the other. People have linked to my somewhat recent discussion with @FCfromSSC regarding this matter as an example.) Thus, it may strike many users here (and does seem to have struck at least some people in my IRL life) as surprising to see me commit myself to this church.
However, about eight weeks ago I was approached by a pair of pleasant-looking young sister missionaries at the mall while leaving the gym. Although I was sore and tired and just wanted to go home, I couldn’t resist stopping to speak with them. We had a conversation about what I believed about the Book of Mormon, and about my research into, and interest in, the church. They invited me to attend services with the local Young Single Adults ward that upcoming Sunday, and I accepted. I decided that this would probably be my last opportunity to sincerely immerse myself into the church, at least on a provisional basis, and see what my experience would be. I also, for reasons I’ll keep personal, saw this as at least possibly an answer to prayers I’d offered not too long ago. Since that day, I have consistently attended Sunday church services (both the sacrament meeting and the subsequent scripture discussion sessions, where I’ve been an active participant even since my first week of attendance as an “investigator” of the faith) and plan to continue doing so. I have successfully given up coffee (not caffeine entirely, although I’m actively working to reduce my daily caffeine consumption and dependence) and pornography. (I had already drastically decreased my alcohol consumption, so reducing it even further to zero has been trivially easy.) I’ve attended various social events organized by the ward, which has allowed me to ensconce myself into a community of bright, wholesome, surprisingly-mature and well-grounded young people. I finally decided that baptism is the next important step — a costly signal of my escalating commitment.
It is difficult for me to articulate the reasons for my decision in a way that would meet the intellectual standards of this forum. I still have many of the same doubts I did before accepting baptism; I still don’t believe that the Book of Mormon is a historically-accurate description of real events that took place in the pre-Columbian Americas. (Rather, I currently believe that it is an allegorical text, intended by God to usher in a new dispensation by providing a scriptural text which would be narratively and intellectually compelling to the specific audience to which He intended it to be presented, given their particular interests, level of historical understanding, and literary/religious frame of reference.) I still have a lot of questions about Joseph Smith’s character, intentions, and leadership qualities. I’m still working on wrapping my mind around what it actually means to aspire to live a Christ-like existence; toward what political/philosophical positions and actions does this obligate me? There are, however, many elements of Mormon theology and the Mormon lifestyle which appeal very strongly to me. (Ideas about the Plan of Salvation and the nature of the afterlife being chief among the theological appeals, and the sexual conservatism being the primary secular/lifestyle appeal.) I was strongly influenced and encouraged by a post a few months ago by @2rafa — arguably my favorite poster here, and the one with whom I probably feel the greatest degree of intellectual and personality kinship — in which she implored people here to embrace the benefits of a loving and welcoming religious community and to try hard not to ruin the experience by thinking too deeply and skeptically about the inner workings of the theology. I decided that if she could do it, I should probably try to see if I could as well. So far it has been more enriching than I could have imagined.
Over the coming weeks I will undergo the rites of the lay priesthood common to all male members of the church, set myself up to begin automatically tithing, and begin working towards obtaining a “temple recommend” allowing me to enter LDS temple buildings. I am actively working on finding a spouse with whom I can raise a family; I’ve already been on a lovely date with an intelligent and creative woman (one of the few female members of the ward somewhat close to my age, as most are closer to 18-20) and have another one already arranged. I expect at least a few of these people to become long-term friends. I don’t know what else to expect in terms of how this will affect my life trajectory, what will be asked of me, etc. All I know is that right now I am finally beginning to taste what it might be like to truly believe that I have a Heavenly Father who loves me, that my Redeemer lives, and that he has provided me with a way to dwell with Him eternally along with my loved ones.
I am increasingly happy to have turned down invitations from two pairs of hot bubbly blonde Mormon missionary girls in a row, I had an intrusive thought pop into my head, perhaps I should attend their sermon that Sunday, I wasn't doing anything important and it would be funny. I'm glad I didn't, because I look at this and think "there but for the grace of
Godmyself go I".I find the invocation of @2rafa's advice particularly interesting. Her argument, as you present it, is to "embrace the benefits of a loving and welcoming religious community and to try hard not to ruin the experience by thinking too deeply and skeptically." This is a known strategy, but coming after a discussion on the downsides of wireheading, it creates a certain cognitive dissonance.
At the end of the day, humans are very prone to rationalization. You are clearly benefiting to some degree from compromising your epistemics. You've landed a date, and it might lead to marriage. You've found a sense of community. Is the cost of lying to yourself worth it? That's for you to decide. My concern is that you will likely succumb to the deep pressure to suppress your doubts, to fall in line and parrot the party line so hard you forget that you once didn't believe it.
Maybe you're the exception. Maybe you've found a way to have your cake and eat it too. Or maybe in a year or two you'll be writing posts about how you used to think the Book of Mormon was allegorical but then you prayed about it and received personal revelation that it was literally true, and I'll be reading them through my fingers like a horror movie.
The part that really gets me is how perfectly optimized the whole system is. The missionaries approaching you at the mall when you're tired and vulnerable. The Young Single Adults ward (which I'm convinced was invented by someone who read about PUA tactics and thought "what if we made this... holy?"). The way every social incentive pushes toward deeper commitment. It's like watching a chess grandmaster play against someone who's only just learned how the pieces move. Someone who, deep down, doesn't want to win, and would benefit in obvious ways from throwing the game.
If you had been capable of living a lie, of snatching all the benefits of their community without compromising yourself (leaving aside the virtue of not being a liar), then I'd be marginally less concerned. Good luck, I can't really find it in me to condemn you, but I wish you hadn't gone down this rabbit hole even if it has hot blondes and fun, family-friendly activities along the way.
I'm increasingly skeptical about this whole "lying to yourself" business. The reason is, we lie to ourselves in so many ways. Sometimes because we are ignorant (and the reality being so vast, most people are ignorant in a real lot of subjects), sometimes because we are lazy, sometimes because it's too hard to face the unadorned truth, sometimes because the truth would be detrimental to what we want to achieve, or maybe because it's more profitable to believe something other than the truth. Is it really that huge a deal doing it one more or less time, or this is just an inflated ego speaking - "they may have fooled those idiots, but they are never fooling ME!". And then he goes and buys stuff and drinks stuff and eats stuff because the TV told him so (one of the ways, not a personal observation).
Really, if you think about it for a while, there's a lot of self-fooling involved, and probably necessary, for normal life. True, self-fooling about "is there a God and what does he want from me?" may be a bit bigger deal than self-fooling about "is eating this fast food meal really good for me?" but is the difference in kind or merely in degree?
I do not say it's necessarily always good to be fooled. I'm just saying maybe sometimes it's not that bad, if the beneficial outcome is worth it. And also maybe when people say "I just can't let myself be fooled" it's something else than the insatiable lust for truth is speaking. Because they must know they are letting themselves be fooled already in so many ways - at least if they give themselves a time to think about it. I can imagine a person that goes radical "no fooling ever, for any reason, I'll always get to the ultimate absolute truth in every matter" and lives a life like that - but that would not be what one calls a normal life, and would likely be very unpleasant to be both in and around it.
I dunno. I can't speak for every other human alive, but I think I go through my days with a negligible amount of fooling myself involved.
When I do, it's more of a "just one more turn of Civ before I go to bed" thing rather than true self-delusion. I knew I wasn't particularly likely to stick with going to the gym, but it was still positive expected value to try.
I eat fast-food despite knowing it's bad for me. I am not lying to myself at all, if I choose to interrogate that impulse, I recognize it's because I like some fast food on occasion, and I can handle the downsides. Which is all true, at least for me. I'm not crying while pigging out and then telling myself it won't happen again.
Is that really so hard to go through life without lying to yourself? I don't think so. If there is some kind of lie that's load-bearing for me to lead my life, it's not at all obvious to me. I have meaning, I have hobbies and friends. I might not always say the truth, but that's not the same as not being aware of the truth.
Acting against one's idealized self-interest is not lying. Having moral failures and being a flawed human being is not lying. Being ignorant is not lying. To lie requires you to know the truth and then deny it.
How much research did you do on the downsides before you ate that meal? Did you spend a considerable time to be sure you know all of them, assign proper probabilities and weights to every single one, and properly value each and every single one of them according to the best of current scientific knowledge, and then also assign a proper probability and weight to the fact that the current scientific knowledge may be imperfect or plain out false, and add that risk to the calculation too? Or did you just think "yolo, one burger won't kill me, here I properly evaluated the risk and step into this with my eyes fully open now!"? If you did the latter, you are like about 100% of other people and you are fooling yourself. If you did the former, you are like about, within any reasonable rounding, 0% of other people and all other people would call you "weird" if they knew. And that's just a puny burger which, yes, most likely won't kill you (unless the luck selected you to be the random victim of the Burger Serial Killer, which is also a possibility - did you account for it in your evaluation of risks?)
Of course it isn't obvious to you. That's the whole point.
Do you think that you are actually aware of The Truth? I mean, that all statements you believe in are objectively true, and for every statement you can determine (if it's logically possible, let's not get into paradoxes here) whether it is true or not, and that determination would be the objective Truth? If you think so, you are either an avatar of God, or have a giant ego and are fooling yourself. If not, then there must be statements that aren't true and yet you think they are true. But you probably don't spend each available moment of time to find out which those are and correct them. You are fine with it being, more or less, as it is. For some people, one of such statements may be "What is written in the book of Mormon is a literal description of events that actually happened". For you, it may be a completely different statement.
I think you're conflating two very different things here: "lying to yourself" versus "being a computationally bounded agent operating under uncertainty."
Nothing you've described about the burger scenario is a lie. Seriously, none of it. The only way it might be is if I had a strong suspicion burgers were far more unhealthy than I was acknowledging, but refused to do the research because I was afraid of the results. That would be lying. Not doing exhaustive research isn't.
Information comes at a cost. You also have to spend the opportunity cost of time spent processing that information. Taken to its limit: are you sure that opening your eyes isn't bad for you? With arbitrary confidence? What if rolling out of bed gives you a stroke? Did you read the literature on the link between sedentary lifestyles and DVT risk? If you did, did you run a replication? Did you pre-register your claims?
We are, unfortunately, computationally bounded entities. We have to prioritize. You recognize that, which makes it all the more absurd that you even raise it in the first place. The topic we were debating was lying, which is not the same as failure to instantiate the idealized form of perfect rationality.
This is profoundly unhelpful. If you're postulating that there must be some kind of lie lurking in my worldview that I'm willfully or accidentally blind to, and that it's effectively unfalsifiable from both of our perspectives, why bother asking? You can't trust my answer either way.
But fine, I actually did something about this, even before I swe your comment. I fed several hundred of my comments into two LLMs and asked them to carefully review them for evidence of lies I'm blind to. The best candidate they found was that I hadn't signed up for cryonics without doing my own cost-benefit analysis, just reading other people's. Fair enough, though I'd call that laziness rather than self-deception, and I'll probably fix it at some point. Nothing else stood out. If you have a better method for interrogating myself for falsehood, I'm all ears.
When have I ever claimed to be a universal Truth detector? I'm a goddamn Bayesian (or trying to be), so of course I'm aware of the importance of accounting for uncertainty. It's entirely possible that I hold false beliefs. In fact, it's practically guaranteed.
The thing is, if I knew where I was wrong, I would just correct myself. And spending "each available moment of time" self-scrutinizing is daft and counterproductive for agents that want to do other things with their time. I'm such an entity. But I do spend a ridiculous amount of time intentionally trying to learn things and examining my understanding. I'm the kind of person who enjoys learning for the sake of learning, and appreciates having my errors shown to me. Why else do you think I'm hanging out on this forum?
What I do is consider the value of truth, accounting for the unavoidable tradeoff between accuracy and relevance. Does it matter if the 12th digit of Pi is odd or even? Not in the least to me. Even five post-decimal digits are enough to calculate the circumference of the universe down to a hydrogen atom.
Does it matter what the risk of AI extinction is? Or the evidence for HBD? On the most appropriate antipsychotic for the obese? Believe it or not, I try to do my due diligence on things that actually matter.
Those people are engaging in far more motivated reasoning than I am (assuming I am). The difference between having unknown blind spots and knowingly adopting a belief system you privately reject is not one of degree, it's one of kind.
Hoffmeister explicitly stated he doesn't believe the Book of Mormon is historically true, then got baptized into a church whose central truth-claim is that it is historically true. That's not computational boundedness. That's not rational resource allocation. That's not honest uncertainty. That's adopting a belief system you privately reject for instrumental benefits, or at least acknowledging that the process might turn you into a person who cares less about the truth. That's what I'm calling lying to oneself, and it's genuinely different from the everyday epistemic compromises we all make.
Everyone has some motivated reasoning, sure. I believe I do much less of it than most, and when I do, it's by accident. But there's a difference between "I round off my exercise benefits slightly because I want to feel good about myself" and "I'm joining a high-demand religion whose foundational claims I think are false because I want community and a trad wife." The magnitude and stakes matter.
Do you think there's any belief system someone could join that you'd consider epistemically irresponsible? If Hoffmeister had said 'I don't believe the earth is flat, but I'm joining a Flat Earth society because they seem nice and I want friends,' would you defend that the same way? If not, what's the relevant difference?
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