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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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.
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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