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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Oh no, you could have had lots of babies with a beautiful blonde wife. The horror, the horror. So glad you escaped that tragic fate.
I forget when I heard this, could have been 12 years ago, maybe 15. But it was an episode of Radio Lab about telling yourself a lie to beat addiction. I remember two segments from it, one where two women quit smoking together, and decided that if either one of them starts smoking again, they'd give the other $10,000 or something like that.
The other was about this Russian treatment for alcoholism. They take the alcoholic, and they put a medical implant in his arm, and tell him the first time he drinks after this, he'll get horrifically sick. The second time he'll die. The doctor is laying it on incredibly thick. Then in the back half of the episode, after all this build up, he breaks kayfabe and is incredibly jovial. Admits the whole procedure is a hoax, and the pill they implant in the arm dissolves after a week or two. But it will make them incredibly sick if they drink with it in (which they always do), but it could never kill them. Still, believing it will grants the procedure a pretty good success rate.
If it were easy to Just Be A Good Persontm then we wouldn't have nearly the problems we have, nor would the self help section at book stores be so over flowing. If there were one lie you could believe, and it would make you nicer, give you hope, give you purpose, and generally make every conceivable facet of your life infinitely better and more rewarding, and it might not even be a lie, why not?
Well... I guess for that last part I'm more speaking about my own personal dalliances with Catholicism. The Book of Mormon is still bad bible fan fiction, but I can't judge too harshly these days.
This is Scotland. I'm convinced that natural blondes are a myth.
That sounds like a disulfiram depot or implant. Which is a real thing. That particular story about Russian doctors is not something I can source, but they're Russians, so I'll believe it.
Unfortunately, disulfiram depot and implants don't work. They don't beat placebo, or beat it by a pointlessly small. margin.
Oral disulfiram? That works well. It works even better when the patient is motivated and is supervised by a doctor or someone they trust. Current guidelines stress the latter.
(By motivation, I mean wants to get off the booze, not scared of dying)
Either way, it works by giving you a case of Asian Flush. Your body can't break the alcohol down properly, which screws you over with even a small drink. It doesn't matter much if you "believe" it will work, since it still beat placebo. Your disbelief will sort itself out quickly when a chug of beer leaves you wishing you were dead. The scare tactics are both uniquely Russian and uniquely pointless.
Skill issue, I'm afraid. It's not like self-help books actually do anything, with narrow exceptions for things like targeted CBT books and checklists. People should actually read scientific literature and look for things that usually work. Don't read books on dieting if you can get Ozempic.
That is a really, really big if. And the "might not be a lie" is doing a lot of heavy lifting. It depends on how strong the might not is, and how honest you're being about it. I am not categorically against such a tradeoff, but I don't see myself making them. Even the more speculative things I believe (and which also give me hope) like the feasibility of mind uploading or AGI, those are probabilistic estimates and not things I intentionally delude myself into believing to avoid dealing with mortality. I genuinely believe they are more likely than not in my lifetime, and I engage deeply with the counter-arguments.
You Will Know Them By Their Fruits.
Mormons have produced a High Quality Civilization, even by Anglo standards (compare to the native English working class, beset by various issues).
Their tribe, their identity, their mode of being and living works, by an objective, scientific measure, indeed according to the only measures by which a civilization should be judged.
You, dear friend, are the one making the emotional argument. I am not emotional about it. I agree that this is a faith founded on a ridiculous story by a charlatan. But, by Jove, it works.
I genuinely expect less sloppy use of terminology from you.
Firstly, I think it's clear that this is a values difference, or at least weighting different values differently. I am not categorically against potentially trading a bit of epistemic clarity for more mundane wellbeing. Mormonism simply asks too much of the former. That does not make this an "emotional argument".
We're not living in the Expanse, the Mormons are a small clade that's barely been around for a hundred and fifty years, they're not the rulers of the stars. It is far from clear how long their ability to maintain their community and way of life will hold. Finally, what's objective about it? In the strict sense? Do you seriously think that GDP per capita, indexes of mental health and TFR are such robust metrics that they overshadow everything else? Do you not care about anything else?
Imagine a very benevolent alien parasite. If you accept it, it will perfectly manage your life to maximize your health, social success, and contribution to a harmonious society. Your measurable outputs, your "fruits," will be spectacular. You will be happy and productive. The only catch is that you, the conscious entity reading this now, will be gone. The parasite will be piloting your body, living a life that is, by all objective measures, better than the one you are living now. Few of us would take that deal. We seem to value something like authenticity or self-sovereignty, even at the cost of being less "objectively" successful. For me, deliberately adopting a belief system I consider false, even for its wonderful benefits, feels too much like accepting the parasite.
Finally, you're on the AGI hype/doom train. It would confound me beyond belief if the Mormon memeplex was the dominant one even in the near future. That's really unlikely, to say the least. In other words, a choice like that is to tell myself I have compromised my values, and for what? Something I can get anyway?
A recipe for an existence spent in the lobby of life, constantly waiting for something big to happen. Even if you agree with Yud that extinction is probably inevitable, there is nothing for it but to live as if it isn’t. (Speaking of that kind of ‘lie’ to the self…)
I believe the average Mormon in Utah lives a better life than the average person with a similar genetic makeup in almost every sense. This is backed up by metrics but is also backed up by vibes, aesthetics, and my personal experience.
How should we determine human flourishing? That’s a big question, but questions like “would I rather live in a slum in Kinshasa or a slum in Copenhagen?” or “is quality of life higher in Singapore or South Sudan?” can help up determine the baseline correlations if we can find it within ourselves to approach an answer.
Semantic babble. Will the parasite have my memories, personalities and genetics? Will my children be genetically identical to my children if it doesn’t exist? Will ‘I’ love them the same way? Will my family not notice any difference? Will I be the same person in every conceivable non-magic sense? Will I act within the bounds of my own personality, developing naturally according to the genetic and environmental destiny with which I would otherwise have been aligned? If a comprehensive scan of brain and body were performed, would I be entirely identical to my current self?
If the answer to all of the above was ‘yes’, then sure, you’re just talking about a magic, better version of me. This is just a ‘brain upload’, something you yourself have expressed interest in.
You are not adopting it, you are suspending disbelief, no differently to when you watch a movie or play a video game and don’t obsess over plot holes. As others noted, we do this thousands of times a day, tell ourselves, friends and family thousands of little lies, just so stories. It is only your sentimental attachment to this specific narrative about religion and God that makes it harder for you to understand the same applies.
I want to push back on this characterization, because I think it misunderstands both my beliefs and their practical implications.
I have been quite vocal about the fact that I don't agree with Yudkowsky's >99% p(doom). At that level of confidence, the rational move is to take out high-interest short-term loans, blow up data centers, or just do a lot of drugs. My estimate is closer to 20%, high enough to take seriously, low enough that planning for normal futures makes sense.
What does a 20% p(doom) actually look like in practice? I hedge against short-term unemployment risk. I should invest in index funds that will go brrt if nothing happens. I should worry slightly less about dementia and type-2 diabetes than I otherwise would. That's... pretty much it? My day-to-day life is not particularly different from the me who didn't care about AI x-risk at all.
(Also - and this is important - I think good outcomes from AGI are quite likely too, though I'm genuinely uncertain how they stack up against the 20% doom scenario. There's even a 10-30% chance that progress stalls well short of ASI within my lifetime.)
The Yudkowsky principle you're invoking - "live as if extinction isn't inevitable even if you think it is" - is about allocating agency and resources to timelines where they matter most. It would really suck to have no retirement fund if Nothing Happens, whereas I'm completely out of luck if I get paperclipped. This isn't a lie. It's just expected value calculations weighted by subjective probability.
I'm not sitting in the lobby of life. I'm living pretty normally while maintaining slightly different priors about the future than most people. If that's "waiting for something big to happen," then so is having any belief about anything that might occur later.
I think we're talking past each other on the parasite analogy. That's mostly my fault, I could have been more precise. Let me try again.
I meant something like: a sophisticated impersonator takes over your body and does a good-enough job fooling your friends and family. It's better at your job, takes better care of your health, makes you more successful by every external metric. But it's not a high-fidelity emulation preserving continuity of consciousness - it's more like a skilled actor who studied you for a while and does a convincing impression. The underlying substrate of "you" - whatever makes you you is gone.
If it were a perfect upload that preserved everything about your cognition, memory, and sense of self? Sure, I'd take that deal. That's not the scenario I was gesturing at.
The parallel to religious conversion: from the outside, Hoff joining the LDS church and becoming a better, happier, more successful version of himself looks great. From the inside, at least from where I'm standing - it looks like he's agreeing to gradually replace the parts of himself that care about certain kinds of truth with parts that care about different things. Maybe that's a good trade! But it's a real trade, not just a costume change.
I don't think the movie comparison or typical suspension of disbelief as applied to the consumption of fiction works.
When you watch a movie, you don't actually believe it's real.
I will caveat this by stating that the unconscious parts of your brain do believe it's all real but they're dumb and always do that, I'm more concerned about higher order functions that pay attention to fact checking.
The neuroscience here is genuinely interesting (and fucking complex): your theory-of-mind networks engage with fictional characters, your prediction-simulation systems model what might happen next, but your anterior and lateral prefrontal systems - the parts that handle "identifying reality" - are turned down, not off. Very few people have the phenomenological experience of believing a movie is literally happening in front of them, even while emotionally engaged.
This is why a punch thrown at your face makes you flinch even when you know your friend is joking, why walking on heights in VR makes you feel sick despite knowing you're on your bedroom floor. Different cognitive systems operating simultaneously at different levels of awareness, with different relationships to "truth."
But religious practice asks for something categorically different. It's not just engaging your simulation systems while keeping your reality-testing active. It's more like... deliberately training your reality-testing systems to mark certain propositions as true, or at least to stop flagging them as questionable. To move them from "entertaining possibility" to "thing I orient my life around."
You can attend a church service while maintaining private doubts, sure. Lots of people do. But the full program usually requires something more than just showing up and enjoying the vibes. At minimum it requires acting as if you believe, which means routing your major life decisions through a framework you privately think is false. At maximum it requires actually believing, or at least successfully forgetting that you don't. I don't think Hoff is psycho/sociopathic enough to do all of that without truly coming to believe.
On the "thousands of little lies" point: I think you're equivocating between different categories of things that aren't really comparable.
White lies to spare feelings ("No honey, your ass looks great in those jeans") are not the same as lying to yourself. I can tell my girlfriend something without believing it myself. The cognitive operations are completely different.
Social conventions and politeness rituals ("How are you?" "Fine, thanks!") are not the same as adopting a comprehensive metaphysical framework.
Suspension of disbelief in entertainment is not the same as restructuring your entire life around propositions you privately consider false.
The scope and stakes matter here. Joining a church isn't like doing a Renaissance faire LARP on weekends. It's signing up for a package deal that includes: how you spend 10% of your income, who you can marry, how you raise your children, what you can consume, how you spend your Sundays, what you teach your kids about the nature of reality. The stakes involved and rigor required are rather different.
I want to be clear: I'm genuinely not arguing that Hoff made the wrong choice for him. Maybe he has successfully threaded the needle of "get all the benefits while maintaining enough epistemic flexibility to avoid the worst failure modes." Maybe the Mormon community really is good enough that it's worth the tradeoffs. Maybe his particular brain is constituted such that he can hold contradictory beliefs in separate magisteria without it bothering him. Some people seem to be able to do this! I am not those people. I find such contortions somewhere between impossible and insane (and no, I'm not autistic).
But I don't think I can, and I'm not convinced it's just "sentimental attachment" that makes me think the tradeoffs are real and substantial rather than trivial. The Mormons have built something impressive, I genuinely agree with you on that. But "it works" and "you should do it" are different claims, and the gap between them is exactly the space where individual values, personality, and epistemic commitments live.
You seem to think I'm being precious about a distinction that doesn't matter. I think the distinction is load-bearing, and that treating it as precious is actually the correct response. We might just have different values here, which is fine - but let's not pretend it's obviously irrational to weight epistemic integrity heavily in this calculation.
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