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 think most of our cognition happens unconsciously. We build up intuitions and principles over time, then when it's time to evaluate things, we mostly evaluate something based on those intuitions/principles and not all the way from first principles. Doing otherwise would be impossibly time-consuming and would utterly paralyze anyone.
I think that a lot of my "small-scale failures of rationality" come from this though. I'll come up with a fairly good principle, then refuse to rethink it even in situations where it doesn't make sense. Paying $2 for a steam game is a good example; I have a principle of not spending money unless I really should, even when it's a very small amount of money and the time spend deliberating over the decision is worth a lot more than the purchase itself. Another example is work--I have a hard time pulling myself away from my job even when I'm getting absolutely nothing done and know that nothing will be done for the rest of the day because my brain is exhausted.
Somehow, abandoning these (often useless) principles feels extremely dangerous. Eat out once, and maybe I'll start a habit of eating out every day. Give up on work early once and maybe I'll just get lazier and lazier until I get fired. This seems very true to me, so I would characterize this sort of cognitive error less as a flaw and more as an inevitable result of being human.
Side note, I like your "explore vs exploit" term; that's a nice concise way to describe that tradeoff.
Im thinking that allowing some minimum frivolous miniscule spending daily should help me with that. Im thinking I will allocate 3 USD a day maximum for spending on stupid shit without thinking twice. This will add to roughly 100 USD a month and wont kill my wallet. As for eating out you can limit it to once a week.
The explore exploit dichotomy is a common phrase in Reinforcement learning theory.
Ha, yeah that might help, hopefully you don't end up deliberating too often about some meaningless $3.50 purchase.
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