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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Notes -
How often do you end up reading one of your ideas by a public intellectual? I commented along the lines of athletes seem above average intelligence a few days ago. https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2023/08/in-which-sector-are-the-top-performers-stupidest.html
I’d say every 4-6 months I see a person I read say the same idea. A few times I assumed they lifted my thought like if Scott said something I wrote in the Reddit.
For athletes I’d say he left out Kobe Bryant who I believe is above most of the ones he mentioned.
I've noticed this as well. To me it signals that I am imbibing so many of the same ideas as other people, reading the same blogs and watching the same videos and listening to the same podcasts, that the same things are occurring to me at the same time.
If you are demographically and culturally similar to the public intellectuals you read (raised in the same kind of town went to the same kinds of schools at around the same time etc.), if you plug in the same inputs you will get some of the same outputs.
I noticed it when I would read a lot of fashion blogs in undergrad, I would pick something up at the thrift store and two months later I would see it on some trash-tier zine's front page. To a certain extent, this is what we mean when we talk about developing "taste."
My conclusion as a person with “taste” is that I’m a solid second rate mind. Not smart enough to be the leader like a Cowen or Alexander but able to get things early. Someone once said a writers readers are one intellectual tier lower. Either that or there is something about work ethic of the high volume thought leaders. Feynman had a quote about having 7 or so ideas he was working on and whenever a new process or paper would come out he would apply that to the things he was working on to see if he got a result. So perhaps there is some combination of being smarter or having better work processes/discipline.
Are you a girl?
No, I distinctly am not. But who knows anymore.
A lot of it is work ethic, or just putting hours in every week to produce content. Nobody remembers the blog posts that kinda suck.
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