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).
Jump in the discussion.
No email address required.
Notes -
Didn't you go for vaping, whereas Gwern specifically distinguished between gum/patches and vaping, even in the abstract of the essay?
Yes, but I still think Gwern underestimates how debilitating any nicotine dependency is.
He is absolutely correct that vaping or gum is a massive upgrade over an existing tobacco habit. But among the examples of alternatives that he considered "safe" for the nicotine-naive included snus, which was later found to increase all-cause mortality, particularly CV mortality. His speculation about the potential benefits wrt Alzheimer's or Parkinsons proved to be wrong on the basis of RCT evidence.
TLDR: It's a shit nootropic, the dependency risk is significant enough to be concerning even for gum or pouches. He didn't see the Zyn craze coming. His claims that medicinal NRT is remarkably non-addictive held up, but were clearly not applicable to recreational use. Switching away from smoking tobacco is massively positive, for someone who doesn't have a habit, don't start.
https://www.fda.gov/tobacco-products/health-effects-tobacco-use/relative-risks-tobacco-products#NewNic
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