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Wellness Wednesday for November 8, 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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Another test for the Motte:

The Moral Foundations test

I'm listed as being closest to libertarian, which I will admit isn't entirely incorrect, even if I'd prefer to term myself a classical liberal with libertarian tendencies. Ideally I'd prefer a test that broke things down in a more granular manner, but I suppose of the options available here, I can't complain too much it lumped me in with the libertarians.

My results below

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  • Care: 60
  • Loyalty: 80
  • Purity: 60
  • Liberty: 60
  • Fairness: 72
  • Authority: 86

Interestingly I answered ‘neutral’ to maybe half the questions, in that I didn’t really consider them moral issues (hiring the hotter over the more competent intern isn’t immoral, it just may or may not be poor business practice; killing a rabbit on TV is neither particularly immoral nor moral, nor is serving dog meat). My strongest positions related to respect for parents and authority, but I also thought the man not greeting the other parent at school because he was a janitor was very rude/wrong. Buying your kid all the toys so the others can’t have them is just deliberately petty and therefore wrong too.

Generally speaking, prosocial behavior is good, antisocial behavior is bad, libertarianism cannot effectively handle defectors, fanatics and degenerates, who are three primary risks to an advanced society (the NAP means that, by definition, libertarianism or even classical liberalism in general requires the great majority of the population to be ideologically libertarian to work).

I mostly agree with you, which is why I'm mildly surprised our scores differ so much.

Your criticism of pure-blooded libertarianism is precisely why I don't consider myself a card carrying member, if someone was say, building an unaligned AGI or performing dangerous GOF research or maybe raising malaria ridden mosquitos in their backyard, I reserve the right to stop them by force, even if I'm tolerant of less pernicious activities.