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'd chalk this down to being a very atypical India who is quite unhappy in India. If you don't like your native culture, you can't help but try and find out more about others.
Now, over the years, I've become less of a West-aboo, especially give the rise of Wokism. I can appreciate the aspects of it I care to nurture, like liberalism; while also appreciating certain aspects of my own. Extended families, more interest in academic performance, the optional fallback of arranged marriages, all of these are things I now appreciate. But the best part of the West, and why I'm moving there, is that you have a great deal more freedom to import your own cultural mores in addition to the local ones, as opposed to cultures that are more insistent on conformity.
I've been a transhumanist ever since I was a child reading sci-fi.
Ever since I realized the weakness of my flesh, it disgusted me. I craved the strength and certainty of steel
There's no solution for me to share here, either you are simply highly open-minded and unattached to your current form, or you aren't. You could try psychedelics if you want to try and boost your openness to experience, but that has its own risks and downsides like becoming more susceptible to woo. As a doctor, while I consider the human body as a marvel, I can also see it as the machine it is, with obvious design flaws.
Thank you! I pride myself on my writing, and being significantly smarter than average, even if it's gauche to celebrate the latter. I've never taken an explicit IQ test, but based on standarized tests, I should be at least 99th percentile in terms of IQ, or ~130, which is also around what I got the times I solved Ravens Progressive Matrices (a very large component of modern IQ testing) online or with an app. Still wish I was smarter though, and while my mom was great at art and by dad at math, when it was my turn the both canceled out, leaving me a 99.999th percentile Wordcel haha
Unfortunately, there's no real way, easy or hard, to significantly boost your intelligence at all; and humans have been trying for a good while. Of course, if you're a Mottizen, you're already a cut above average.
If you want your kids to be smart, suppress the urge to marry hot bimbos, and choose a smart partner. Rich dudes who marry trophy wives with an empty display case in their skulls are doing their kids a disservice.
As for writing, well, once again largely immutable, but with significant effort, you can improve to a degree. Additionally, writing a lot will obviously improve your quality and output. Now, you can also use GPT-4 as a writing aid, albeit for me it's often not worth the hindrance since I still think I can write better than it can if I care to.
I do my best to be nice to people until they give me good reason otherwise, be it online or IRL. This can be improved with practice, though my parents inculcated a great deal of politeness in me, and in my adulthood I've noticed you can get quite far by being kind and considerate.
Unfortunately, I am anything but happy IRL, even if my efforts to be more expressive and enthusiastic than most give that impression. I'm pretty depressed, to the point that I'm mostly just holding on till I can find a definitive cure, perhaps ketamine therapy in the UK, or electroconvulsive therapy, albeit the latter scares me due to memory loss.
Still, I do try to be nice, and mostly avoid descending into bitterness in my interpersonal relationships.
We are very lucky to have you in the West! I hope you will always be well-treated.
I dislike the lack of nuance most Westerners bring to immigration. Every person is different. There are some native Westerners I wish we would kick out, and some immigrants I would bribe to bring in. But almost nobody else wants to take things on a completely case-by-case basis.
Maybe we are both grass-is-always-greener-on-the-other-side types. I don't like the USA very much, but I hope it will do well for the sake of my loved ones. And for the sake of my Indian friends, I hope India will do well, too!
Powerful words!
Nice perspective :).
It shouldn't be considered gauche, IMO. A lot of high-IQ people aren't actually smart enough to celebrate it, because if it were more celebrated, it would change the culture towards encouraging people to develop their intelligence more. This would benefit society at large, and it would especially benefit the high-IQ types.
This seems to be one of many perverse tradeoffs I have observed with high IQ. High IQ people should by a narrow theory be utterly dominant, especially in an age like ours, and yet they aren't, for a variety of strange reasons like this self-abnegating tendency (including having so few children, although perhaps in the future that won't matter).
I mostly agree with you, yet I also think it's strange and can't really be true... How is it that we can change our muscular strength so much, but our intelligence so little??? What evolutionary purpose does that serve?
Not only does it seem so hard to improve overall intelligence, it seems quite hard to even change our type of intelligence.
Haha, amusing advice, and probably good advice!
I would need the help a lot more than you do, so I will try it :).
Good for you & for everyone else.
Oh no! I truly wouldn't have guessed that. I am so sorry.
I was once very depressed for many years, over a decade ago. Eventually, with enough changes to diet, sleep, exercise, beliefs, and social circles, I became much happier (but barely any smarter, which frustrates me).
My general suggestion is to keep trying new things, but to first maximize your trials with safe and highly varied experiments.
Only once you have tried all of the safe herbs, supplements, diets, beliefs, meditations, sleep aids, exercises, sunlight exposure, hobbies, people, environments, etc., should you try something like ECT, IMO. (Although maybe ECT has been improved since the version used by a highly intelligent friend of mine, which had a horrible long-term effect on her mind and didn't even make her feel any better.)
(Maybe ketamine, especially starting with a low dose, might be quite safe, I never researched it. But it seems like a weird idea to use an anesthetic to become a better person.)
Also, my experience is that lots of 0.1%-3% improvements will add up to a huge and resilient overall improvement. Small improvements really are enough, and a more diverse set of experiments and solutions yields far more self-awareness.
Unless I have a severe accident, I doubt I could ever be severely depressed again. For other people, if their pill stops working they are SOL, and they won't understand themselves any better than they did before.
That is admirable. It shows you still have fight in you, and standards.
Thank you!
On the topic of why intelligence isn't easy or even merely difficult to improve:
Unlike larger muscles, more intelligence didn't have any inherent downsides in the ancestral environment. Today, smarter people are more likely to end up in dysgenic IQ shredders like cities, or simply have less children, but that wasn't really the case before.
If you go from being a normal dude to being absolutely jacked, your basal metabolic rate can go from like 2500 to 4000, which is absolutely massive. That's even leaving aside exercise. In earlier times, when we weren't effectively post scarcity for calories, if being twice as strong didn't allow you to get literally twice as much food, you're going to starve to death while a scrawny dude might scrape by.
Thus, our bodies are programmed such that they refuse to hold onto to extra muscle unless it's being both actively used and well fed.
On the other hand, both Einstein and a village idiot have nigh identical brains that born burn 20 watts regardless of whether they're deriving E=mc^2, or going ooga booga.
In genetics, there's strong evidence that intelligence is a consequence of health, that every deleterious mutation decreases intelligence and there are very few mutations that increase it. The greater the mutational load, the lower the IQ. If you had an cloning machine that could create an individual who had the literal average of everyone's genes, they'd likely be significantly smarter than the average person because the errors would be canceled put.
(Brain size is a component, but that's the gist of it)
Since intelligence is so useful, there have been strong evolutionary pressures to increase it, such that the low hanging fruit has been long plucked by evolution itself. Most pharmaceutical aids are simply tradeoffs, such as Adderall increasing focus but decreasing creativity.
IQ scores can be increased by practise or education, but only to a small degree. That's because IQ, while a very good proxy got intelligence, is still a proxy that can be gamed. But the gains are limited, you can't take a 100 IQ person and get them to score 140 no matter how much you train them, and I doubt they could make 120 either. So in practise and reality, intelligence is largely immutable after birth.
Thank you for probably the most informative reply comment I've ever gotten online!
These reasons satisfactorily explain to me why it is so hard to become more intelligent, thank you.
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That is true.
If you are fairly well-off (say, a doctor or techbro) but also very unattractive, how might you do this while making reasonably sure that the kids are raised in an OK environment...no abusive shitbaggery, plus basic food, shelter, and medical care. I don't know about the route of importing a wife...that might work, but again, she's disgusted by you (for good reason!) and is only with you for $$$ and a green card. Maybe the husband's going to be a decent human being to the stepchildren. Maybe not; I've heard some stories.
I have no idea what specific combination of events made you so intensely self-loathing and nihilistic.
Since you're a med student, just know that you're going well past the LD-50 of black pills, and to no good end. There is such a thing as overcorrection away from normie stupidity.
Even if you're very unattractive, it's still exceedingly unlikely that your spouse would be outright abusive to your kids. You'd have to pretty bloody unlucky, and in any relationship of reasonable length, you're likely to be able to filter out the psychos youeelr before they baby trap you.
The "maybe, maybe not" mindset is pointlessly helpless when perhaps fewer than 5% of all people are abusive to their kids, and maybe sub 1% for outright damaging.
Also, women are simply not as motivated by looks alone as men are, a strong provider looks eminently more desirable once they're past the fuck around phase in their early 30s.
I get it, you drew the short straw on looks, height, and being remarkably autistic. Even then, if you're intelligent and hard working, you can compensate a great deal with money.
Maybe your mail order wife isn't head over heels in love with you, but in all likelihood she's going to be content, and if you have kids, unlikely to abuse them, because most people don't abuse their biological offspring.
I am not sure about that. I think I'd be divorced at best and get my throat slit for life insurance money or something at worst. I don't blame her for that and am even mostly okay with that... if she's a decent mom, provides basic food shelter and medical care with her ill-gotten gains, and doesn't look the other way if her new boyfriend rapes the kids. I think it is relatively unlikely but fairly possible that my spouse might be an abusive shitbag to the kids…but more likely that she divorces my disgusting ass when the ink is dry on the green card, gets with another dude, and that dude is abusive to the stepkids. Kinda sucks for your kids to be raped by Mom’s new boyfriend while you can’t do shit about it.
As far as content: people can habituate to quite a lot, but I think that the absolute best outcome is that she is only mildly disgusted by me, loves our kids, and is with me because I send a bunch of money to her desperately impoverished family of origin. I don’t know much about alimony…say I’m earning $250k after taxes, could she potentially get $150k of that as alimony and child support? Maybe she endures being with me because she is devoutly religious or something and admires that I’m basically a cash cow for her family? Like…I don’t see a damn bit of value I’d provide that a smelly ATM can’t. At that point I’m basically livestock on legs, being milked for cash and either put out to pasture (where I had better cough up that milk and lots of it, or go to prison) or slaughtered (if it’s not too dangerous, and I’m worth it as meat).
No, most women are not like this. My argument is essentially garbage IN, garbage OUT: you fish with dogshit bait, you get shit results.
I know someone whose mother tried to fucking kill them when they were ten. Their father? A 5'4" special forces officer. Height can be that brutal if you aren't also rich, part of a religious community, or lucky.
As far as nihilism and self-loathing: I’ll cop (somewhat) to the second. As for the first: being very unattractive often leads to that. As can large changes in appearance, in either direction. Still. My interpretation is that people, in thinking that I can have a relationship, have faith in me to turn shit into sugar. To have a good (or at least decent) family in the midst of tragedy, to be a good father and husband while dealing with the fallout of a wife in and out of some kind of institution or other. That is a lot of faith to have in a person: be a good father and husband while dealing with What’s Eating Gilbert Grape-tier shit. I’ve seen it happen…one of my medschool classmates had a background like that.
You say this as if 5'4" men's wives usually attempt to kill their kids. That's such a rare occurrence that you're doing an incredible amount of reaching just to connect the two factors.
5'4" men are either remarkable, very lucky, or they decide where they want the ambulances. I've only once seen a 5'4" man with a woman that was sane and not morbidly obese. He was a future neurosurgeon with enough charisma for a career in politics.
My FIL is about 5'4" with a very normal (sane and not obese) wife, but admittedly he is quite successful and charismatic. Still, I really hope you don't seriously consider "getting stabbed" to be a normal outcome of a shorter guy getting married.
I mean...not normal, but if she's not morbidly obese it's likely to be something like alcoholism or drug abuse or yes, getting stabbed. Like...short dudes pick the least bad option. It's not that getting stabbed is the expected thing...but it's definitely on the table, where does he want the ambulances?
Is our pint-sized hero pulling down close to a million a year? Does he have a shot at political office?
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