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.
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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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