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PaperclipPerfector  10mo ago (text post)   2002 thread views

Wellness Wednesday for June 28, 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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Other hobbies like engaging in politics, watching the news, or watching sports do not have any specific design for positive sum human enjoyment. They are much closer to zero sum games, where one person's happiness is offset by another person's disappointment.

This seems like a fairly pessimistic view on politics. Do you not think that political problems can be ameliorated? I'd say the difference between war and peace lies in that realm.

If there were a bunch of p-zombies that all the real humans could beat them that would help.

The problem of politics seems unavoidable. People want to have more resources than their rivals. Their rivals want the same in turn. The winning move for humanity is not to play zero sum games.

I think war is a negative sum competition. Politics is an improvement over that, but that doesn't make it good.

The problem of politics seems unavoidable. People want to have more resources than their rivals. Their rivals want the same in turn. The winning move for humanity is not to play zero sum games.

People want more resources than their rivals sure, rivalries can also be dissolved or transferred into healthier forms of competition.

Then it ceases to be politics, but there are always other things that remain political. Almost any group larger than 5 people has politics, and certainly every group larger than 50 people.

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