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PaperclipPerfector  11mo ago (text post)   2898 thread views

Wellness Wednesday for May 10, 2023

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:

  • Requests for advice and / or encouragement. On basically any topic and for any scale of problem.

  • 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.

  • 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.

  • 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 know what you mean. I felt this way somewhat when I found the rationalist space years ago. I basically just put my non work life on hold and read all these posts from slate star: https://slatestarcodex.com/archives/

With a lot of googling and other research as well. Took me about six months but it was worth it, my world view changed entirely.

Thanks for your response--I guess I need to accept it'll take time and things might feel different as time passes. Exciting to hear that you feel it was worth it, though! An ex of mine used to always share SSC posts with me and I felt like I couldn't understand them. Going to try again, but more slowly.

Unironically try asking ChatGPT about concepts and specific posts you couldn't follow. It knows about SSC, and is smart enough to help.

I appreciate this! Still stuck in my primitive googling ways but I should give this a shot.

It helps too if you can discuss these things with other people, online or IRL. There are a bunch of SSC meetups and effective altruism meetups if you’re into that crowd.

Yeah, I used to be terrified of "looking stupid" so kept my mouth shut on basically everything until... now? Bad strategy, would not recommend!

I still remember marveling that the stupidest-sounding kid in my college engineering classes was getting the highest test grades. It turns out that everybody had stupid questions, and "ask them right away and look stupid" was a better way to handle them than "keep your embarrassing secret and hope you can fix it all by yourself before test time comes".

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