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PaperclipPerfector  2mo ago (text post)   2667 thread views

Wellness Wednesday for February 21, 2024

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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I've been a lurker for a long time but wanted to post with a question about getting the maximum amount of skeletal growth (wingspan, height, bone thickness, anything) possible after a long period of malnourishment as a 22-year old male.

BACKGROUND ----

If background is important, here it is: I had moderate, to at times quite serious, restrictive eating disorder from age 9-20, and was already a picky eater before then, never eating dairy because I hated the taste of it. I was even doing compulsive over-exercising from ages 15-18, very sedentary after that, and have significant osteoporosis to this day despite weight gain.

At age 20, I recovered in the course of a few months to a bmi of 18.5, and many joint pains, feeling of constant coldness, constant finger/nail infections, lightheadness/weakness between meals, and dry skin that I was dealing with gradually went away when I gained weight.

I'm now at a bmi of 19, and last week I suddenly discovered that my growth plates are not completely closed when perusing over my recent imaging for hip impingement and scoliosis. I'm not sure how much growth can be squeezed out of nearly-fused/post-peak-growth-rate-stage plates, but I have read about "Type 2 catch-up growth" (see: https://academic.oup.com/edrv/article/18/5/646/2530771?login=false), and I speculate about whether the expected amount of growth based on the degree of ossification of growth plates could vary depending on your nutritional history.

Anyway, this has inspired me to gain more weight, up to a bmi of 21, as due to my scoliosis that shortens my height significantly, it is arguable that I may still be slightly underweight according to my corrected height. A BMI of 21 ensures that I will not be underweight even at that "corrected" height. Now coming to the point of this post:

I want to use this period of gaining weight to at least try to get bigger skeletally in some way. I will accept if I do not get bigger in any way. I just don't want to have any regrets that I didn't do everything I could to maximize my skeletal health and size. In part, I want to get bigger because my frame size/transverse size of bones is literally off-the-percentile-charts small by my calculations, and height and limb lengths are somewhat below average, and well below average in comparison to other people of my generation in my family. I know I have to get over that insecurity (which ironically is the fricking opposite of the disorder I struggled with for 10 years!) but I still want to try and get measurable, even if not outwardly noticeable, skeletal growth, either in thickness/transverse growth, or length/longitudinal growth. I understand it may not happen, and that catch-up growth is not guaranteed, and I am trying to keep my expectations in check.

I'm going to see a doctor about all this stuff anyway to see what they have to say. I already see an endo for my osteoporosis but at the time, I thought I was done growing so I didn't ask them any of this stuff. Plus, I'm now a bit scared of being laughed at for trying to grow more at age 22, although my rational mind tells me that it is not totally impossible that I could still grow some measurable amount.

I figured that there may be lifestyle, exercise, diet, or supplement modifications that I have not heard of, and that are at least sufficiently plausible from a mechanistic perspective, to optimize skeletal growth after malnourishment, as well as potential critiques of my current system and places where I might be going wrong that I don't even realize. I thought that this would be the place to find that out or at least to point me in the right direction to where I can find that out. I am also aware that I may very well grow a tiny bit even if I don't do anything special, heck I probably should not be stressing out over it as much as I am, that's probably already a major change I can make. At the same time, I do want to be proactive about my health and optimize this.

I know this website is full of very insightful people, and in-depth discussions that I don't see elsewhere, so I figured if anyone has any ideas for trying to get even marginally better conditions for skeletal growth in someone who is almost done growing but probably has stunted their growth, I might find them here, and I am all ears.

BACKGROUND (ABOVE) IS FINISHED -----

What I'm currently doing: -3 cups of milk per day (Started last week, this is up from 1 cup per day that I have been drinking since age 20 and 0 cups before then) -Full body weightlifting 3x/week (have been doing since age 20 but 6x/week at a volume that was my maximum recoverable volume, and probably became a bit of an obsession as well) -Very hot bath to replicate a sauna, 1x/week after watching a video on some experimental sauna protocol for HGH (started last week) -Trying to destress -10g Collagen supplement to get more nonessential but possibly under-synthesized (not an expert, so this may be false?) amino acids like glycine -High protein diet -Surplus of about 300 cal/day

What I'm not doing but maybe should be doing: -Cardio -High-impact exercise (I was under the impression weights are just as good, but not certain about this) -Earlier bedtime, more time sleeping when it is fully dark outside, getting off screens earlier -Weighted hanging/exercising with high tensile forces on your bones? -Avoiding compressive exercises? -More relaxation

Concern regarding exercise: -I'm not sure if weightlifting and the resulting compression of bones would be bad for getting the most growth out of growth plates, and if I should instead just do high-impact exercise like jumps, and stick to lighter weights until I'm certain that I won't grow any more, or if this line of reasoning is misguided and I should just keep doing weights. I could argue that I should be weight training because it can boost HGH and other hormones more than other types of exercise, and that it might be more important to boost anabolic hormones considering my history than trying to avoid the slight fusing effect of compression on growth plates?

Things I am considering taking soon but not sure how effective they are: -Creatine and L-Arginine for HGH -L-Ornithine for sleep and possibly HGH? -Wondering if any other supplements can reliably, or at least theoretically, boost growth-related hormones (not just HGH, but I suppose testosterone too?)

I probably do not want to take exogenous hormones in case there are side effects and I end up with no growth anyway. I'm trying to just do my best from the exercise, diet, lifestyle, and supplementation side of things.

Any advice is much appreciated and sorry for the super long post!

I thought I caught COVID for the 8th time, but no, the PCR came back negative and it's likely just the bloody flu.

I was fervently hoping for a positive result (and confident in it, since I'd expect I'd know what the disease feels like by now), but it was not to be. No sick leave for me. You'd think being in contact with thirty or so immunocompromised people might make them care, but alas. Anosmia, the works, maybe I'll bother with the flu vaccine next time.

You got anosmia through flu???

As best as I could tell, yes, couldn't smell perfume or taste food. That increases the odds the COVID test was a false negative, for what it's worth, but I couldn't bother with the nasal rape of a new swab.

My family has had this for a couple of weeks, but haven't bothered with a Covid test, because it's not like we'd get extra sick leave. In the US sick leave and (paid) parental leave come from the same bucket, so I've no interest in taking time off unless I can't function. We don't have fevers, so maybe it's just a very, very long cold.

Yeah, if you're not getting any benefit from a formal positive diagnosis, you're doing much the same as with a regular cold or flu, lying in bed and trying not to spread it to anyone you care about. More serious if you're ailing or old, at which point paxlovid is a good shout, but for anyone outside that, just wait it out with a cup of something hot.

In my case, I am all too familiar with COVID and I could swear blindly this was a bout, but either the lab fucked up, or it's the flu. The complete anosmia was only for half a day, whereas with COVID it lasts at least one or two for me personally.

Huh. I have a very narrow nose but sticking a swab deep in there is no big deal.

Sorry, being sick sucks. Having to work while sick really sucks. I definitely see people blame forcing people to work while sick on US-specific idiocy so it's interesting to hear the same from another country.

I thought doing flu/RSV PCR along with any COVID PCR was standard? Maybe just in the US?

I guess he hasn't mentioned it in a bit, but for a while Daniel Griffin in the TWiV clinical updates was harping on the fact that COVID+flu happened enough and had a sufficiently different treatment plan that flu tests should always be done for COVID patients (I'm guessing he meant hospitalized ones?).

It's standard for the cancer patients, but gone are the days when most Indian hospitals provided PCR tests to their staff for free when suspected. At least I managed to get my money's worth when I worked in a (COVID) ICU during the peak of the pandemic here, and two weeks off certainly eased the very real pain. I was looking forward to the sick leave than anything else, my boss is an asshole who wouldn't approve it if it wasn't COVID, or at least he'd make a fuss about it.

Oh well, I'm alive and not at any risk, and thankfully today wasn't the worst day at work. Just a pretty bad one.

Hey Wellness Wednesday, I've completely lost faith in the motte this week. See I've used "I think I fucked up my niece/nephew by playing a single song/tv show/movie" as a premise about a dozen times over the course of my life, and the only time it was taken seriously was with a group of college freshmen. Everyone else immediately understood that it was a premise, because you would have to be totally disconnected from reality to think a single piece of media reshaped someone's entire worldview. 100% disconnected, Being There disconnected.

But the thing is, I know the motte isn't full of freshmen, it's full of gen xers and millenials. And yet posting here was the second time my ridiculous premise was taken seriously. I used to make jokes 10 times as convoluted on /r/cwr and everyone got them, and when I'd do one on the motte I'd get accused of going for cheap laughs!

So it brought to mind a lot of other things I have noticed over the past few months, which can be summed up like this - I no longer believe I am stupider than the average motter. But, and this is the important part - I still know I'm a fucking idiot. Half of the cwr threads might as well be written by markov bots these days, there are still quite a few insightful comments every week, but so much of the rest is just rote bullshit. Just everyone talking down to each other, using passive aggressive laziness to evade the modhats - but not even making it entertaining, it's just talking points vs talking points.

I want to feel stupid again. I want to have to bring my a-game again. I don't know how to make that happen.

The forum is being overmoderated, and the additional mods are not helping. Not that they are making bad decisions or moderating good posters particularly, but the presence of somebody breathing down one's neck as to whether a toppost is 'substantial' enough makes the place less fun for everyone, resulting in people finding better things to do with their time.

I don't have much a reputation on TheMotte because I don't really write much about the things that are discussed here, nevertheless I felt like commenting on the change of tone - if I can define it that way - of the discussion and subsequent reevaluation of my abilities. I started lurking in 2016 but I posted my first comment on the reddit sub in 2021 because I felt unprepared to participate, now I wonder if it is because I learned the jargon and the writing style or the discussion just became more... I don't even think the correct term superficial, it is more surreal, like we are retreating more and more into rarified sophistications that exist only online: it's not our off-line life that help us navigate the online but the online life that provides an interpretative framework for the real life. I'm sure there is some philosopher that has written about it but I do not really recall the name, maybe Debord?

Baudrillard's simulacrums?

Damn chum, if this is your average level of response I would love it if you joined in more. Surreal is an excellent way of putting it, although I see it more as a reaction to the society of the spectacle, like monks retreating to their cloisters to argue about dancing angels.

I'm going to chime in, too, because I was looking at this before nara, dammit!

I can't tell how many levels of irony you're on. It's kind of a moot point, given the "speaking plainly" rule. I don't have any reason to believe that you're trying to pull one over on those dumb idiots who can't comprehend your humor. And yet, users dipping into farce have a strange tendency to push that boundary. Please don't give me such a reason.

It was the Friday fun thread. I don't want anyone to feel bad in the Friday fun thread. This is not a speak plainly issue because the joke was only, in my eyes, a clear cut example of the issue of surface level engagement. It was in itself not a big deal, but it both made me think of a problem I had seen more and more and appeared to be a perfect example of it.

I made a mistake in this Wellness post. I forgot how highly smart people value their intelligence, and so my claim that I no longer felt stupid here is all anyone can focus on and has caused great injury. I am sorry. You should probably mod me. Threatening to shut down analogies and metaphors on the speak plainly rule is absurd.

No, no.

You’re allowed to cause great injury and/or post cringe. What you aren’t supposed to do is ironic stupidity.

Know the difference.

For clarity, acting as if I think something which even the people arguing with me about it down thread agree nobody ever thinks is ironic stupidity?

It sounds like an accurate label to me, yes.

Ironic as you’re “acting.” Stupid as “nobody ever thinks” it.

I made a mistake in this Wellness post. I forgot how highly smart people value their intelligence, and so my claim that I no longer felt stupid here is all anyone can focus on and has caused great injury.

You've missed the point of why people are upset with you and I honestly can't tell if you genuinely don't see it, or if you're trolling. People aren't annoyed because you said that the posts here are getting less intelligent. They are annoyed because you are using people's good-faith responses to your Friday Fun post as some kind of gotcha.

Your actions here, simply put, come across like you were setting out to pick on people from the beginning. Of course nobody likes that. If you simply had posted about how you felt like the posts here have gone downhill (and left the movie thread out of it entirely), nobody would be upset.

I can get thoughtless good faith responses from reddit or Facebook or a million billion other places.

Your actions here, simply put, come across like you were setting out to pick on people from the beginning.

Really? Which ones? The action where I mentioned being a fan of two of the posters who misunderstood? The action where I said I don't think people are actually less intelligent, but behaving less intelligently? The action where I said the problem is people are retreating from their humanity out of fear and complacency? Or is it just the action in the op where I impugned people's intelligence?

I genuinely can't see it. I expected people to be upset with me, but I didn't expect this level of upset, with cjets mantra of mod vengeance and so on - it genuinely looks to me like narcissistic injury (as in identity injuring, not implying narcissism). The conflict I was expecting was for people to bring up examples of times I have been guilty of using semantics and passive aggression to avoid actually engaging, because they absolutely exist. Is any critical comment a gotcha now? Can we not just say "yeah that was dumb, we need to get our act together" Not to mention if I brought it up without an example it would have been immediately dismissed as a strawman.

For what it's worth I agree, some people were made a fool of and aren't taking it well. I don't see why your statements should be modded here or there. I responded as though the question were a serious premise, though if it were the question under discussion I would have argued the premise.

Part of the problem might be people getting used to truly insane posters, who have become legendary around here in some cases, and as a result responses were tough to nail down tone for. Is believing Fight Club might brainwash your teenager more or less crazy than any other aspect of American politics at this point, though it may represent a decline for this particular board?

Not to pile in, but people are trying to give you thoughtful good-faith responses. The expectation of good faith is one of the things that separates the Motte from most of the rest of the internet; I really don't want to try and dissect exactly which bits of people's posts are truthful and which bits are jokes, ironies, or falsities for the purpose of eliciting a reaction. Especially when many of us come from quite different cultures.

people are retreating from their humanity out of fear and complacency

I really think this is just a cultural expectation that's being violated. Maybe as we move off reddit our demographics have changed? Personally I value sincerity and prefer to be straightforward when discussing things; a friend enjoys being gratuitously rude in order (he says) to shock out a reaction and that doesn't sit well with me at all.

I would have appreciated the pile in earlier, I don't know why anyone would think I wasn't expecting pushback, if everyone agreed with me there wouldn't be a problem because everyone would have also decided to make an effort to understand every post they reply to at the start of the year.

But I have learned my lesson now. I was picking on people and no I don't get to find out how I should just shut up already. This is fine.

For what it’s worth, I have caught myself deleting posts a couple of times because I responded to what I thought someone was saying rather than reading their post properly. I’ll try to be more careful.

I'm not really interested in hearing your defenses. What I said is how your post came across to me, regardless of whether you think it should have come across that way. I can't speak for others, but you certainly rubbed them the wrong way and I would guess it's for similar reasons. If I were you, I would walk away from this one and simply accept that it didn't go over how you thought it would, rather than trying to defend yourself.

Yes, less engagement is what this place needs.

I'm not going to dig up the post where you made this "joke," but one way to follow the rule requiring charitable interpretation is to take people seriously even when you're unsure about them.

I'm not going to dig up whatever post it was where you did this, but if I see you doing it, I'm going to moderate you for not speaking plainly.

Did I touch a nerve?

  • -16

Okay so, reevaluating your premise again: it is not impossible that a single exposure to a social event can change a young person’s interests and then trajectory. A young person might go see a baseball game and that sparks a lifelong interest in baseball. Or they might have seen a cool juggler, then gone on to juggle as a hobby. Or maybe they saw V for Vendetta and became infatuated with the idea of anonymous figures and rebellions, and then decided to form a hacking collective…

Fight Club presents an attractive image of young men forming an identity around primitive masculine fighting and tribalism. It’s also a great movie. So this can absolutely affect a young person’s life, who has just been exposed to a persuasive argument for masculine bonding and detesting female-coded safe spaces. Young people are also hardwired to imitate cooler older guys, and the movie stars prime Brad Pitt.

Now I would argue every young man should watch fight club, but that’s a separate point.

edit actually for an even better example, fight club influenced early early 4chan, instituting the norms of anonymity and secrecy, the anti-mainstream ethos, the “operations”, and some early memes. So that’s a good example of how one movie can influence something larger. But also, your post could easily have been read as “coloquial exaggeration”. Like someone posting, “did I ruin my life by choosing a culinary institute over Harvard?” Obviously not, but the person is really asking whether they’ve done goofed sufficiently to feel bad about their decision and readjust their future decision-making.

I disagree. If anything, the mean writing quality of the weekly thread has undoubtedly improved since we left Reddit, and I say that as someone who was extremely skeptical of that move and argued against it consistently.

Go back to the CW threads from 2020 or 2019 and they’re stuffed full of low effort drive-by posting from default redditors (of all political persuasions). Low quality writing, bad argumentation, random schizoposting, autism, baiting, boring incelposting, /pol/ trolling, all the usual stuff was commonplace. Seriously, go back and check! (Some was surely moderated, but not all.)

At that time, while the board was still very high quality compared to other Internet forums in general, I’d say it was probably still substantially below a good LW or SSC comments section, perhaps even a good HN comments section. Today the above three have all declined, but The Motte has at least held its ground. As I said last time this was brought up, there is nowhere better on the public internet. Yeah, perhaps you have access to Moldbug’s secret elite discord server populated solely by intellectual titans, but I’m gonna say it - a lot of people here write better than Yarvin does, so I’m not sure I’d frequent it even if I had access to it, and I very much doubt it has better moderators than we do.

I’ve been here since something like 2015 or 2016, almost a third of my life. In that time I have yet to find a superior online locale for English-language politics and current affairs discussion. Believe me I’ve tried and There Is Nothing. So I guess I’ll be here until the end.

Go back to the CW threads from 2020 or 2019 and they’re stuffed full of low effort drive-by posting from default redditors (of all political persuasions). Low quality writing, bad argumentation, random schizoposting, autism, baiting, boring incelposting, /pol/ trolling, all the usual stuff was commonplace. Seriously, go back and check! (Some was surely moderated, but not all.)

that is what made it better in some ways. things have gotten worse since 2022 in that things seem too serious and the stakes too high instead of just chit chat. i don't feel like having to always take a side or be conscripted to fight the culture wars.

I mean over the past few months. What it feels like to me, is that everyone is afraid of a) looking stupid and b) getting modded, so they pull back, and like @f3zinker said only engage with the barest surface reading of the posts. And so every second thread devolves into arguments over semantics - I'm half afraid someone's going to pull me up here and show me three threads in a row with no semantics, like that means anything. I'll get dinged for not "speaking plainly".

I don't want to go anywhere, I had hoped I could maybe wake people up to the fact that it kind of looks like we're all retreating into autism to avoid our humanity.

Edit: accidentally hit post. To continue: I have professed my love for this community many times, and I always try to encourage good writing when I see it in posts, I think there's only one or two users who encourage others more than I do in fact. I haven't been here as long as you, but it is special to me too. Like I said, I don't know how to fix the problem.

being downvoted to oblivion is worse than being seen as stupid

The mods here are very light touch, really (how many times have Hlynka and Count been modded now? They’re still here) and nobody cares about you looking stupid as long as you own up to mistakes. When I get schooled here (which is often) I usually say ‘thanks, fair enough’, either directly or by DM, and/or change my view. Everyone’s been embarrassed here before, I can’t think of one regular who hasn’t written-before-researching and come up against a quality rebuttal at least a few times.

But the line is mockery. Nobody likes to get made fun of, certainly not relentlessly, it’s a respectful environment.

Is that what I do, relentlessly mock people? I am asking genuinely. Also you have never thanked me for an argument.

No, you don’t, but I think you got some pushback because people did think you were making fun of them. It’s not a big deal! Sorry that I’ve never thanked you for an argument, I enjoy a lot of your posts.

you would have to be totally disconnected from reality to think a single piece of media reshaped someone's entire worldview.

Oh, wait, I was skimming and didn't even read this part. This is just flatly wrong. Single pieces of media do sometimes change the entire direction of peoples' lives. I've seen it happen! I mean they technically don't change someone's "entire worldview" because that's not really possible, but definitely can be critical very large personal changes. And yeah, I know, everything changes slowly and maybe the piece of media was just a "straw that broke the camel's back", but in my experience that's only partially true. Which makes sense, "media" broadly are stories that are designed to be as compelling as possible to people, and the reason we like stories is that we learn from them. It just makes sense that strong resonant "emotional" experiences could influence someone.

Now of course it's very rare for that to happen, given how much people read and watch and listen in their life, and even if it does happen it's probably better to let the person evolve by learning new compelling information even if it makes them partially wrong for a time, you can let them fail and figure it out later.

I mean they technically don't change someone's "entire worldview" because that's not really possible

...

And yeah, I know, everything changes slowly and maybe the piece of media was just a "straw that broke the camel's back"

Come on man.

  • -11

But how else do you think beliefs/worldviews are shaped? Lived experiences usually, sure, but I believe it's the 21th-century schizoid modern man we're talking about, whose lived experiences account for like 20% of his actual sum total of EXP points (guilty as charged, at least), the rest is pixels or letters. Do you totally deny the ability of artistic media able to change people's minds in any way, or is the issue that inducing anything less than an immediate and total crisis of faith is not enough?

I join other commenters below in their admission of being thoroughly influenced by media, mostly vidya in my case: Bioshock planted seeds of doubt against libertarianism which persist to this day (even if I was a countryside rube and knew jack shit about e.g. coordination problems at the time), Persona 3 made me a robofucker introduced the careless teenage me to the concept of death and its consequences, etc. Call me shallow if you like, but I firmly believe that the correct response to "to think a single piece of media reshaped someone's entire worldview" is "that but unironically", and media doesn't actually have to be "deep" (which is subjective as hell anyway) to get the proverbial noggin joggin - it just has to resonate with you to some extent that you begin to think on the evoked themes independently. It is indeed closer to a spiritual experience instead of anything literal.

Feel free to consider this a midwit take because it kind of is, but I struggle to understand or agree with your viewpoint. I'll posit that either it's the air you're breathing to some extent, i.e. you're so accustomed to thinking along the lines of or drawing inspiration from various intellectual works that you don't notice the influences in your thinking, or that you've actually never experienced that distinct "THIS HOLE WAS MADE FOR ME" feeling of inexplicably clicking together with a piece of media, a sensation definitely not age-restricted to zoomers or millenials, in which case I respectfully sympathize.

Am I wrong about the average age here? The joke was that I was afraid this kid would watch a movie and suddenly flip his entire worldview, a premise that was mocked mercilessly when I was growing up, because "everyone knows" that nobody is influenced by just one thing, everything is a confluence of the innumerable stories everyone hears all day every day. That doesn't mean media doesn't have an influence on people, of course it does! But nobody becomes a nihilist after watching fight club one time, just like nobody becomes a libertarian after reading atlas shrugged and nobody becomes a mass shooter after playing doom - there are a thousand other stops along the way there, and if it looks like an immediate turn that is because prior stories predisposed the person to absorb that influence.

I chose the words "a single piece of media reshaped someone's entire worldview." very carefully, to avoid this exact tangent.

So the issue is that inducing anything less than an immediate and total crisis of faith is not enough for the purposes of your joke?

I chose the words "a single piece of media reshaped someone's entire worldview." very carefully, to avoid this exact tangent.

Not carefully enough, it seems, they could use a timeline descriptor since from what I read the pushback you get (mine included) seems to be that a single piece of media can absolutely [re]shape someone's entire worldview, just not immediately.

This seems like a semantic quibble at its core - you yourself admit in your reply "that there are a thousand other stops along the way", I'm not sure what your objection is when people point out that a single piece of media can indeed be the last stop, the straw that breaks the camel's back (which as written would presumably qualify for the purposes of your joke?). I'm not even sure we disagree at all. Maybe the argument is too big brained for me and I embody everything that's wrong with the Motte nowadays.

Yes, it is a semantic quibble.

My Little Pony Friendship is Magic is singlehoofedly responsible for:

  1. Reducing my depression to manageable levels which a support group managed to finish off
  2. Giving me enough confidence to get my degree
  3. Reigniting my passion for writing
  4. Teaching me about healthy relationships in a theoretical and logical enough way to break through my autism and show me what everyone had claimed was so profound all my life which I couldn’t see before, to the point people are now generally shocked when I say I have autism and I mostly don’t feel I have it anymore
  5. Showing me how journalism really works, and why never to trust a journalist
  6. Rescuing a long-time family friendship I accidentally almost broke
  7. Getting me the third best job I’ve ever had
  8. Revealing a piece of theology which is sorely underserved, the true meaning of shalom

I would be a completely different person today if I hadn’t seen the first episode I ever saw, S1E4, at that exact moment in my life.

lol wut? Am I missing something

I'm pretty sure he's entirely sincere, although idk if it's an example of what I described or not.

He's sincere, we've discussed it before. Personally I watched one specific anime series, maybe 5 hours long, in one afternoon and that had pretty formative effects.

I can't really narrate a personal experience I or a close friend of mine might've had without coming too close to doxxing myself (and I'm not a good enough writer atm to do it well), but things in the same vague category as 'fight club' have, in my direct experienced, causally affected peoples' life trajectory or ideology at the largest scale and in a non-butterfly effect way. Something doesn't need to change someone's entire worldview, nor does it need to require zero pre-existing affinity to the topic to work, to be the kind of thing you're claiming doesn't exist.

It's definitely a judgement call to say that it isn't mostly the 'straw break camel back effect' and I can't really justify it in any compact way, but I'm like 99% confident these individual instances of watching/reading media have several orders of magnitude more impact than others in these peoples' lives. It's sort of similar to a spiritual experience, I think.

iirc, 'this book changed my life' of thing isn't that uncommon a trope for notable figures, and while most cases are clearly exaggerated I think some cases aren't.

(I don't think this makes it reasonable to worry about individual pieces of media though.)

Single pieces of media do sometimes change the entire direction of peoples' lives

Right, the existence of this community is arguably a result of Harry Potter fanfiction of all things. That book certainly changed the course of my life.

you would have to be totally disconnected from reality to think a single piece of media reshaped someone's entire worldview.

A single piece of media can get someone to buy a product. A single piece of media could make someone decide to try a drug, or always avoid that drug. A single meme can cause people join online groups and that can lead to real-world consequences. It is directionally correct that media reshapes people's worldviews. Some people just steelman the main points to more reasonable positions instead of responding to the literal content of the post.

More generally, people lose interest in things over time. A video game can be fun at first, but then you get to the end and lose interest. You realize there are more fulfilling ways to spend your time. You skim top-level posts for the few topics that most interest you and ignore the rest. You can predict what will happen if you post a reply. There is no longer an expectation of getting into a novel conversation or learning something new.

I'm not sure it's a lack of intelligence, exactly. Smart and independent people usually have some (or many) strange beliefs they've worked their way into - it's just impossible to get the thousand complicated judgements you make every day all correct if you make any attempt to think about them yourself, and you won't be making the same mistakes everyone else makes. And as a result it's entirely plausible a motte member would have a dumb fear of introducing their kid to a movie. There have been stranger premises in Wellness Wednesday questions. And some of the very intelligent people I know personally have much dumber anxieties in their personal lives. I was skimming, thought the premise was kinda dumb (everyone makes dumb posts sometimes), upvoted Pasha and moved on. Maybe if I'd thought about it for more than three seconds it'd be weird that you'd take the implied political position, but whatever.

Also, some of the people who you say 'took the bait' are some of the best posters, so I don't really think it's strong evidence of anything.

Also, some of the people who you say 'took the bait' are some of the best posters, so I don't really think it's strong evidence of anything.

I agree, like I said it brought to mind a trend in have been noticing. Pasha is very insightful and orthoxerox is one of my favourite posters. The problem isn't that the level of intelligence has dropped, or I guess it is, but it's not that motters have lower intelligence, it's that nobody thinks for three seconds about anything unless it's their hobby-horse. Like @f3zinker, @ThisIsSin and @bolido_sentimental said, the engagement has turned superficial.

I was only pretending to be retarded ask for movie recommendations

Thanks for this, it's a perfect example of what I'm talking about.

For fucks sake you have catch 22 flair, how do you not understand the concept of farce?

Are you sure it's me who doesn't understand?

I was sincere about wanting movie recommendations. The joke was in the premise. That's the set up. Furthermore the pretending to be retarded meme is about someone doing something stupid in earnest then claiming it was a joke to escape ridicule. It is not doing something you think is too outlandish to take seriously and then having to disappointedly explain that you were joking. How much further do you need this broken down?

I didn't get it. Can you explain it again?

Lol good save.

This place is still a paradise compared to /r/ssc which has become Quora. ACX comments are looking rough too. I looked up to these people? Yeah, it's bad.

But another thing: You've grown. Communities don't grow, but individuals can. There's a chance you've absorbed whatever lessons TheMotte had to teach, and you're in a class full of students waiting for a new teacher. Stagnation is the fate of all adults, and like illness the best we can do is delay it. We are all destined to become boring, vegetative adults unless we have some process of continuous, lifelong self-transformation. Don't ask why TheMotte is failing to meet your needs. Ask how you're failing to meet your own needs, and then find a new teacher.

I think that's part of the problem - all of the "teachers" that interest me have been run off the internet or into some corner I don't know about. I don't even know where to look anymore.

Then the only remaining option is to either look outside the internet or stop relying on teachers.

Yeah, it's seemed less good to me than it did a few years ago, which I also don't know to what extent it's me acquiring the insights I once found novel vs. comment quality declining.

Just everyone talking down to each other, using passive aggressive laziness to evade the modhats - but not even making it entertaining, it's just talking points vs talking points.

I've also noticed that I tend to have trouble getting engagement with posts I consider well-written (and tend to get more engagement when I'm not sending my best). It depresses me that I get AAQCs with literally zero follow-on comments and maybe one that spawned more than one; sure, I get upvoted from time to time, but I'm looking to sharpen my knife further, not merely be praised with a show of hands that believe it is already sharp.

The few users with a worldview most starkly different from everyone else's barely post here anyway, which is unfortunate because I think they had facets of a clearer picture of certain things this board tends to concern itself with CW-wise (though not everyone is capable of hearing them since we wouldn't be treading the same ground were they taken seriously).

Maybe I just have myself to blame for expecting any different results from parrotting Orwell to a group of Winstons.

I think by now a lot of people have understood that there's no point to debate.

The big issues are settled; the Left wants mass immigration and promotion of transgenderism as there's a critical mass of activists whose jobs depend on it. They - and by this I mean race & gender activists are not interest in debating either, they never really were. They're conflict theorists.

We're even getting Carl Schmitt Friend/Enemy distinction videos for boomers now.

So there's not much of a point talking about any of it.

Personally, I'm beyond tired of CW. The right is mostly stupid, the left is mostly insane. To me, observing and discussing the precise ways in which the right is stupid or the left is insane did get old.

If I'm thinking about anything, it's doing something such as translating the better NRx adjacent essays to publish in our right wing boomer outlets and such, eschewing all esoteric language and such. Maybe find some sensible people to meet IRL.

People need to get organised and understand what's going on.

Saying "look at these insane people" is useless. Everyone in Europe needs to understand the bureaucracy / judiciary / NGO is their enemy and thinks it can set policy. "Civil society" is largely an enemy because it's composed of people who want to "change the world" and such are disproportionately utopian idealists.

The local language environment is largely impoverished in regards to good ideas, so maybe if I I'm concise and eloquent enough, some of the smarter people will learn something.

I think by now a lot of people have understood that there's no point to debate.

At the very top of the CWR, for as long as I can remember, it says 'Arguments over culture war issues generate a lot of heat and little light, and few deeply entrenched people ever change their minds.' The goal is mostly to clarify one's thoughts.

@ThisIsSin's problem seems to be in this line — his ideas aren't being challenged and refined, not that he's frustrated talking past people or whatever.

We're even getting Carl Schmitt Friend/Enemy distinction videos for boomers now. So there's not much of a point talking about any of it.

And yet, as far as I can tell, the NRx ideas are filtering down into the commons because they spread in the realm of internet debate. So clearly debate has some useful function, assuming NRx ideas are actually useful.

Which users are you thinking of most?

I sometimes wonder if we've fallen below a critical mass of insightful commenters. If nothing else, the CWRs certainly have just a lower quantity of comments - threads from 2022 usually exceeded 2500.

As a lurker who mainly reads the Motte during breaks at work, I am not helping in any way.

I think we’re also just at a less interesting place in the overall culture war. (And I like to hope are spending less time at our computers that 2020-21, anyway?)

I feel you man. Felt similar with my post about driving in New Jersey.

I made a comment about how New Jersey drivers are objectively better than drivers from other states because they demonstrate being able to handle more difficult driving situations and make less universally acknowledged driving errors. Not a single fucking soul got the point. New Jersey drivers are "aggressive" to the average American driver, who happens to drive like a grandma with Alzheimers, so I am the crazy one here who has to downvoted to negative. And no, I will not have my mind changed on this. I'm a hobbyist driver and I race JDM modded cars with 500+HP on the weekends, I know what good and bad driving is.

I just think a lot less people are truly engaging with posts like they used to. Everyones gotten into the pattern of just spitting out a thousand words in response that is tangentially related to the post in some minor way and not receiving any pushback for it. Because the other guy also read only 5% of the post. A few comment chains down, it's game of telephoned to a completely different topic.

I think the mods should in some capacity penalize soapboxing.

I meant to respond to your driving post before getting distracted, so I'll do it here:

Yes, drivers from New Jersey are probably more competent technically than in the rest of the country, but since America's urban planning or lack thereof forces people like me who hate driving and suck at it onto the road every day to get anywhere I would really much rather everyone around me drive "like a grandma with Alzheimer's" rather than get myself killed trying to keep up with the pros.

Having been all over the world it also seems pretty apparent to me that driving cautiously is correlated with having a wealthy and high-trust society, the same way that the more haggling you need to do in a street market the worse the material conditions around you are likely to be.

Everyones gotten into the pattern of just spitting out a thousand words in response that is tangentially related to the post in some minor way and not receiving any pushback for it

I mean, I like reading these, when they aren't clearly motivated culture war reasoning. If gattsuru makes a post about an obscure legal issue I have no natural interest in or a furry VR video game drama, I'll still read it for the same reason i'd read a Scott blogpost about some random thing, it describes interesting relationships between ideas in some niche, and if you read a thousand things like that from a hundred different people you'll see trends and learn a lot about the world in general.

Maybe there's just fewer grand stories to mine in the culture war. It's the same for rationalists and AI risk people and right-wing twitter, all of the fresh big ideas have been mined, every obvious fruit has been picked, there's nowhere left to go. Once you read moldbug or yud or scott there are a bunch of obvious next questions, and they've all been asked and answered over and over. We all know all of the various right-wing ideas and most people agree, anyone who hasn't been persuaded by now probably isn't going to be. Not too much one can do about that, and I don't see why that should stop me from enjoying reading about regulation to prevent hypoxia while flying, or whatever hundred other small topics.

I mean, there obviously are many Big Ideas that we don't know about yet but should. I'm not sure to what extent we'd recognize them as important if we saw them, there's something to the idea that when the time is right, the people naturally have similar ideas due to the surrounding environment and simultaneously become more receptive to hearing about and spreading them.

What are your must-have browser extensions?

Mine are the following:

  • Search by Image - Right-click and get a list of multiple reverse image searches to search an image with. I mostly use Yandex, ime it's the best general reverse image search.
  • Vimium - Keyboard-only navigation for browser. It comes with Vim actions as well if you are into that. Using a mouse is a huge impediment if you want to be fast with a computer and my nontech coworkers think I am a wizard.
  • Grammarly. I might get some hate for this. But I just write out some shitty text without regard for punctuation or grammar and just click on all the red words until they are gone. Allows me to spit out passable text FAST. I wrote this comment in around a minute. Including looking up and embedding the URLs.
  • TamperMonkey, to run miscellaneous short JS scripts here and there. For example, turning all www.reddit URLs to old.reddit URLs.

Don't accept webp

What's wrong with webp?

Compatibility issues aside (which are ridiculous because the format is more than a decade old), .webp is actually a good format on its own merits. Far better compression and quality than JPEG, and quite close to PNG in terms of the latter.

It's funny/sad the creator actively participates in Twitter threads trying to clear his name when it's being maligned, but it's not really his fault that software devs are too lazy to implement it. It makes for massive savings in image size for hosts, and for little loss in quality, you'd hope they'd have picked up on that by now.

WebP wasn't awful for 2014 -- though it wasn't as clearly beneficial as Google tried to argue, the major alternatives were either obnoxious to implement (JPG2k/JPGXR) or had annoying licensing issues (HEVC) -- but it's since been badly outmatched by more focused variants. Google has been pushing AVIF as the next step, with good reason, and while JPEGXL isn't without its downsides (how many fucking flags can the example implementation have?!), if you were building a new project from the ground up (or especially with a lot of pre-existing jpgs to transcode) and didn't absolutely need motion video support, I'd almost always recommend it.

And it does have some obnoxious limitations. Pixel size is the one that's bitten me in the butt the most often -- yes, 20k+ pixel dimension images probably should be done in a mipmapping/tiling format like JPG2k, yet there's a surprising number of use cases it still comes up -- but the fixed chroma subsampling is the most incomprehensible.

I think WebP gets more of an unfair rap than format deserves, largely downstream of how aggressively Google pushed it and the extent it's been used as justification to cut off support for other formats in Chrome- and Chrome-derived browsers. But it's really frustrating what Google and Chrome developers have done as a result of the format.

It's often incompatible or partially compatible with other programs and websites.

For firefox and not mentioned by others: old reddit redirect.

Man, I just don't understand why everyone likes old reddit so much, maybe because I didn't get into reddit until after old reddit was over and done with. Why do people like it?

It has custom CSS for subreddits, so each of the most popular subs felt like a different site, making “reddit” more of a genre than a free forum.

It has a granular interface with the ability to customize the sorting and time range, and even the depth of replies viewed. I would often set Askreddit to two replies deep for fast browsing of the most interesting replies. Yet if I wanted to dig down in a fascinating thread of replies, I could.

It has massive amounts of info per page, reminiscent of the old web, where you can fill your eyes with as much as you want.

To this day, I use old reddit manually on my iPhone, making up over 80% of my daily web consumption.

New Reddit’s design has more white space and shows less content. It also requires you to load a new page in order to read comments that are more than a few levels deep, whereas old Reddit just requires you to tap a [+]. And as No_one said, Reddit requires you to log in to view some content, including sometimes perfectly innocuous content. Really the only downside to old Reddit is that it doesn’t have a dark mode.

Oh, and like you, I didn’t start browsing Reddit until after old Reddit had been replaced, so I don’t say any of this out of nostalgia for the old days.

IDK, for some reason I like the white space. Less congested. It's just like if someone dumps a lot of text without using paragraph breaks, I find it much harder to read.

I find it fascinating that I would encounter someone who likes it here. I find new reddit to be so thoroughly infuriating and unusable on every level that I truly can't empathise with how someone could stand it, and until now it seemed that nobody I could actually talk to did either - its fans, I thought, would perhaps be found among the same zoomer shadow-people who find longer stretches of text easiest to consume when they are overlaid piecemeal on an unrelated 5x speed video of someone running around a parkour circuit in Minecraft or Roblox.

How do you deal with the circumstance that it defaults to hiding everything? Do you just make a habit of clicking to expand the picture, text and comment section repeatedly? Do you not bump into the more aggressive child filters (new reddit straight up blocks guests from "nsfw" forums, while old reddit just requires you to click "I'm 18") or are you just constantly logged in? Do you not run out of RAM,/CPU if you have more than a handful of tabs with it open?

its fans, I thought, would perhaps be found among the same zoomer shadow-people who find longer stretches of text easiest to consume when they are overlaid piecemeal on an unrelated 5x speed video of someone running around a parkour circuit in Minecraft or Roblox.

Well, I'm definitely not one of those people. I rather dislike that kind of weird zoomer tendency. But I'd say that the desire to have proper whitespacing is less like this sort of weird zoomer multitasking trend, since it's a desire for a simplistic and clear mechanism for consuming text. What you're describing sounds to me like it has more in common with old Reddit, since it lumps everything together into an information overload.

Do you not bump into the more aggressive child filters (new reddit straight up blocks guests from "nsfw" forums, while old reddit just requires you to click "I'm 18") or are you just constantly logged in?

Well, the "I'm 18" filters are annoying, but until just now, I didn't know it was only a new reddit thing.

Do you just make a habit of clicking to expand the picture, text and comment section repeatedly?

I'm not clear on what you mean by this. Can you elaborate?

Do you not run out of RAM,/CPU if you have more than a handful of tabs with it open?

No

Well, I'm definitely not one of those people. I rather dislike that kind of weird zoomer tendency. But I'd say that the desire to have proper whitespacing is less like this sort of weird zoomer multitasking trend, since it's a desire for a simplistic and clear mechanism for consuming text. What you're describing sounds to me like it has more in common with old Reddit, since it lumps everything together into an information overload.

To be clear, I'm talking about this stuff (Googling revealed the term is apparently "sludge content"). I would have considered it less of multitasking/information overload thing and more of one where the user has trouble pacing their own information intake, with the Minecraft videos' most important aspect being that they convey the text a few words at a time at a fixed pace rather than presenting an overwhelming wall of everything at once. In other words, the users require something that's more IV and less pill (with the Minecraft video in the background being the saline in the metaphor). New Reddit seems to go in exactly that direction, as there is less on the screen at a given time, you have to take delaying actions to "advance", which results in a new morsel of information being displayed, and there is a lot of "incidentals" (whitespace, "designer" UI elements) to make it go down more smoothly.

I'm not clear on what you mean by this. Can you elaborate?

Comparing new [edit: themotte seems to autoedit new.reddit links into old.reddit...?] to old, for example, the latter immediately shows all of the discussion under /u/HyperConnectedSpace's post. The former is first gated under a "(+) 3 more replies"; when you press that, it still doesn't expand fully, but instead leave you with a "(+) 1 more reply", which, when pressed, sometimes (I still can't figure out what the conditions are) takes you away from the rest of the thread to a "you are looking at a single comment's thread" page. I've also seen a scenario in different threads where you have to press the (+) repeatedly for it to show even one additional comment; this may have to do with comments that were downvoted.

I don't know where I saw the picture thing (might only be some subs), and I also am failing to rediscover another obnoxious pattern where a small slice of a post's comments were expanded inline in the subreddit view instead of on its own page. In general, there seem to be a lot more distinct mystery interactables resulting in subtly different behaviours on a new reddit site, with the boundaries of each of them being unclear.

No

Superior hardware, I guess

takes you away from the rest of the thread to a "you are looking at a single comment's thread" page

Yes, I do find this annoying. I don't mind so much the "(+) 3 more replies", when it actually does work and when it also doesn't direct me away from the page.

It's far less shit. New reddit is less usable and looks worse.

You also avoid log in necessity for some content.

Higher information density mostly.

uBlock Origin. For my personal systems I also install SponsorBlock, I Don't Care About Cookies, and a script that removes Shorts from all the YouTube pages that have them.

Mostly, it's all just anti-ad (things I want to buy are never advertised) and anti-frustration stuff. Most of my interactions with computers these days are inherently mouse-driven anyway so having to use one doesn't bother me, and I buy laptops that have the mouse in the middle of the keyboard rather than having to remember keyboard shortcuts that were out of date 40 years ago so all the ostensible benefits of "you don't have to leave the home row" extend to every application I use passively.

For Firefox:

Foxy Gestures, Context Search, uBlock Origin (of course)

Do we have any humanities-brained fellows here?

In Rationalist groups, I feel like an odd duck. My passions are philosophy and the arts -- especially moral philosophy -- but I see them coexisting side-by-side with the intellectual world in a sort-of symbiotic, 19th century German way. This is a rare attitude among humanities-brains though. There's a weird, depressing tendency of the humanities towards absolute self-exile now. As if studying the humanities means adopting a milquetoast belief in "human nature" divorced from any serious biological or psychological context. You must accept as axiom that literature is important, even though this literature has no tangible message to give, no way to prove its importance; the Western Canon matters but no one knows why. Undeniably, books would be an amazing way to make sense of this confusing age we live in, but that requires admitting the sciences actually matter, which is an awful blow to the ego.

Okay, I didn't mean to rant. This is my way of saying, damn I wish I'd gotten into the sciences sooner. This is a topic that has 0 exposure, but the way we segregate our intellectual disciplines is, IMO, very damaging. When everyone engaged with a thing has the same thinking style, and interacts with it in the same way, blind spots form. Maybe we need some organic amount of cross-pollination to keep things healthy.

I mean I hobby write, if that counts. And one thing that gets me into it is that a story can much more easily get a person to understand a concept or idea or problem much more readily than a science book or philosophy book. Write a philosophy book about what makes people human and nobody reads it. Write a story about whether some creature is worthy of human rights and people talk about it. Literature is humanity dreaming — making sense of the facts of the world.

Literature is humanity dreaming — making sense of the facts of the world.

Yeah, this was the original point of literature. Somehow everyone forgot this. Old literature is still helpful, but new stories to fill the same purpose would be amazing.

There are a bunch of humanities-ish people in the 'postrat' area of the twitter rationalist social sphere.

Do we have any humanities-brained fellows here?

Yes, I'm low IQ as well.

I'm at a real low point in my life right now. In addition to all of the health issues I've been experiencing lately, I'm struggling a lot to find a new job.

Long story short, I work in tech as a SWE, worked in FAANG for 5 years, then worked at a VC-backed company I cofounded for 4. I left my last job to go start something with a friend, but he decided he didn't want to do it anymore after months of exploration. I really regret leaving my last gig:

  • Getting interviews is rough. I'm easily getting 10x fewer responses than last time I was looking and often get form rejections.
  • When I do get interviews, they're all FAANG-like now: either leetcodes and contrived systems interviews or long take homes. I'm prepping for leetcode, but it continually feels demoralizing and defeating that my experience is held secondary to the capacity to manipulate linked lists effectively, something I've never done once in my career.

I very much don't fit into a consistent bucket anymore, I'm much more of a jack-of-all-trades kind of person in a sea of specialists after doing most of the full stack, platform eng, frontend and backend eng for my startup and I enjoy that work.

I'm finding myself feeling awful about myself and my abilities. The rejections and non responses are starting to get to me too. We were unable to raise at my startup, after 4 years of hard work, and I'm starting to wonder whether these interviews are just accurate representations of my real abilities. I'm feeling like most of my life is characterized by intermediate beginner skills, from meditation to work and everything in between, and that I'm incapable of change or improving myself.

I spent most of my time at FAANG living very frugally and saving cash, and I'm very lucky to have a substantial moat to find the right gig, but I'm just so in a rut right now that it's hard to see the light at the end of the tunnel. This is all just multiplied by my health problems (pancreatic insufficiency out of the blue, joint pain) as a young guy. It feels like I'm staring into a void, I can't really visualize my future anymore.

Can't you go back to the company you cofounded?

Or was it a bridges-burned moment.

We were unable to raise at my startup, after 4 years of hard work, and I'm starting to wonder whether these interviews are just accurate representations of my real abilities.

Most startups fail. Your startup going well enough for you to not want to pursue FAANG money for four years is a huge win. You should, unsarcastically, feel entitled to brag about it forever.

If you ever want a practice interview/some leetcode tips/to vent, DM me. (Current FAANGER).

I don't have much advice to offer, I'm no FAANG engineer or VC-backed startup founder.

But the fact that an ex-FAANG founder, is having difficulty finding any job at all, that too ones low level enough to make you do a leetcode interview, is dizzying to say the least. The tech job market seems to be beyond fucked right now.

I'm no corporate shill, but as someone at 1 YOE at a somewhat well known company right now, I would probably kiss the floor of my workplace if I could. If I ever get laid off, I will probably never make it back into the field ever again at this rate. Things seem to be really really fucked up.

Maybe... look outside the US?

The market is much worse, and pays much worse in just about everywhere else in the world, but in many places employers will get you a personal sex slave and a fulltime personal butler for someone with your profile.

If you have founded your own company, you probably have some leadership ability. Should you apply as a manager, or even a program manager? Even if that's not what you want to do long-term, it'll get you in the door.

Almost everyone has only intermediate-beginner, non-specialized skills. For a long time, that was enough to make sure you are well-paid in software. The industry runs on the ability of managers to take fungible engineers and turn them into productive engineers who they can apply towards their specific ends.
With the recent landscape changes (both the recession and chat GPT maybe starting to replace people), maybe that level of skill isn't enough anymore. I can't say but I haven't yet seen that trend personally.

Also, I think maybe the issue could be trying to get by on just your engineering skill. Technical ability is great, but if you're not a genius then it may not be enough to make you stand out. But having middle-level technical skill and reasoning ability combined with ability to lead, communicate, and make transparent decisions will make you much more marketable. As I said above, from your startup experiences, you probably have the leadership and communication, so you should leverage it. Apply to roles that will use that, and think about what experiences show off that ability that you can write about on cover letters and talk about in interviews.

Thanks to whoever recommended FreedomToons. I am enjoying the channel.

"Coulda woulda shoulda" - risk, decisions, regrets, emotional warnings. I need some help with this. I have some degree of alexithymia (inability to identify and understand some of my own emotions) which probably complicates it.

When I'm considering a risky decision that could go right or wrong, be profitable or cause loss - I get this emotional-physical sensation in a quite central area of my being: sometimes stomach, sometimes heart, sometimes closer to the middle of the spine. It can be big but always somewhat vague. It can be strong and convincing though. It seems to communicate "just don't do it, stay away". I suppose its mission is to protech me from pain. Emotional pain. This does not necessarily protect me from wordly loss, or from loss of opportunity. And, let's say this comes up during an investment decision I'm considering: it doesn't seem to be the potential loss of money itself that seems most horrible. What seems most horrible is the emotion from making a mistake. As if I couldn't live with the emotional pain from it, or what the mistake would say about me as a person... What is most bizarre is that I am also afraid and avoidant of making the right decision. For instance, if I identified an investment a few years ago that I "should have" just bought into right then and there, but didn't, the regret about it, according to the emotional warning, will become threatening if I buy in now and it still keeps going up. Because then the original mistake would be even bigger, in a sense. "Better to avoid the entire thing."

This avoidance behavior has cost me many millions of dollars over the years. Have any of you worked through this kind of thing, or know what it's truly about?

I mean, given the only context is handling large quantities of money in specific investments, I think it's not improper to just admit to yourself you aren't cut out for it. Bog standard advice is to just invest monthly in an index fund for a reason. Unless this is effecting other areas of your life, I'd consider the fact that you are just a normie and move on.

Avoiding making mistakes is typically a perfectionist issue, and can lead to risk avoidance.

And anxieties about money are very common.

The standard response that I would recommend in your case is figure out what your investment timeline and risk tolerance ought to be in terms of stocks/bonds/REITs, then start investing in low-cost index funds.

And just don’t look at the numbers.

Automate that shit and avoid being triggered. A financial advisor might be called for, but you have to be careful because boy are incentives misaligned there by default. If you want to get to the point where you can make investment decisions in a car-by-case basis it sounds like you might have to invest in formal therapy.

A tale of caution:

I had an older coworker who was very conservatively invested even though his house was paid off, he and his wife still had a decade of career left, and their kids were doing well with college paid for.

So I explained that standard advice would be he should adjust his portfolio, and he agreed it made sense to shift his allocation towards stocks.

This was in late 2019.

So, naturally, the anxiety that had led him to avoid optimal exposure to stock over the years caused him to sell when the market plunged. He listened to me give standard advice once, but didn’t talk to me when he got nervous. Emotionally, now it’s even worse because COVID did not destroy stock values forever and so obviously my “buy and hold” advice was right because it always is, short of a level of catastrophe the US has never experienced.

So he lost a painful chunk of his portfolio and, I imagine, hasn’t tried to reallocate back towards stock. So he locked in losses and now has a low-growth portfolio. He’ll be fine overall with his decent pension and responsible living for decades (a Jew married to a Korean, so relevant stereotypes apply), even if his investments were zeroed out. (That’s why I thought he would do well with accepting more variance in his portfolio… but actually risk aversion was the driving force.)

I’d feel bad about it but for the fact that level of emotional incompetence can’t be helped in someone old enough to have lived through the dotcom and 2008 crashes as an adult.

I’d feel bad about it but for the fact that level of emotional incompetence can’t be helped in someone old enough to have lived through the dotcom and 2008 crashes as an adult.

You know, the funny thing about this is that, unless you were invested in stocks at the time of the dotcom bubble or the 2008 crash, it won't help your emotional incompetence. Part of my learning to stay calm and hodl on was panic selling my 2 year old 401k (moved from stocks to money market) at the bottom. I had just started working, I had a very small amount in it, and it was a valuable lesson I had to learn the hard way. Sure would have sucked to have put that off for 40 years instead.

Well the individual in question was old enough to have had been invested in some stock during both. He was just in a conservative portfolio in his mid-50s (so he lost out on a ton of growth over 30 years). When I talked to my dad (same rough age) about investing he definitely knew the lesson of not pulling out in a downturn.

But overall I think you’re right about most people. I had also got my first adult job just before the 2008 crash and I was in a position where I had put a hell of a lot of my pay into my investment fund. (I was in the military so I didn’t have a lot of extra expenses for a few years.) It sucked watching the numbers go down but it wasn’t like pulling out a few grand ~40 years before I hit retirement was going to make sense. And I had read enough about buying and holding to not be tempted.

Thanks for the reply.

Yes, the advice in the book I'm reading on investing is to put most of ones money into a low cost index fund and to automate the adding of more per month. It's not particularly fun though, and the desire to "time the market" is coming up. But I'll do it, I think. I'll keep some money in cash (high % savings account with quick withdrawals) and perhaps bonds, for which to use to buy cheap stocks after the next crash. There's always another crash. Once every 6-12 years, I've read.

I intend to succeed in resolving the emotional issues around this, because I don't like the idea of giving up and accepting pains and limitations when they can be repaired, and because risk aversion and avoidance affects other areas of life too. I've worked through much bigger problems in the past. Meditation and CBT are great for me. Formal therapy less so, but maybe I was unlucky. I've started on CBT exercises prescribed in the book Woulda Coulda Shoulda and I'm softening the stress responses related to risk/loss by bringing them up in my meditations.

I've got time to put into learning about investments, economics, company analysis etc, so that's another motivation to get to a point where I can gamble a bit on individual stocks. :) Something like 10% of my savings will go to this.

The tale: Locking in losses, ouch, I did that too. Though in my defense I was very young and was wrecked by illness at the time. Investing is an area where "once burned, twice shy" can become very expensive through missing out on the recovery. Losing money seems to be very closely tied into starting up some serious stress, existential anxiety and poor thinking. It seems that even one major painful stimuli can establish a belief of "it'll crash again as soon as I risk money again, I just know it" or something like that.

Keep in mind that if you run some scenarios on holding bonds to buy cheap stocks during cyclic downturns you might find that timing the market (even optimistically doing so near optimally) might not pan out because of lost gains during all the years when stocks just did average.

You bring up another good point that I know some people do and I wish I did (or could do, now; I have a job that prohibits playing the stock game). Some people employ a strategy that’s like “90% boring index funds and assets based on standard investing advice” combined with “10% YOLO/WallStreet Bets/trying to beat the market”. Helps scratch the day trader itch and limits downside risk ruining one’s retirement.

Something like that, having a set level of risk, might help you edge away from the anxiety.

Sorry about the late reply.

Keep in mind that if you run some scenarios on holding bonds to buy cheap stocks during cyclic downturns you might find that timing the market (even optimistically doing so near optimally) might not pan out because of lost gains during all the years when stocks just did average.

I have thought about this. The old quote comes to mind: "The market can stay irrational longer than you can stay solvent." Even if there 'should' be a correction coming, the fed and others might kick the can down the road for a long time. Years of growth, so that the loss that comes from a crash might not even wipe out all the gains.

I've thought about the possiblity of selling non-callable bonds when interest rates go down. That makes them more valuable. But I'm not sure exactly how to buy them and how to sell them. And what if the markets crater without the interest rates actually going down? What if inflation is high at the same time?

Shrug

I probably have similar feelings. One thing which I've been thinking about lately is that the reason I try to do well at work, and the reason I'm afraid to get fired has more to do with wanting to avoid making a mistake and also to avoid the shame of it, as opposed to actually fearing that I won't be able to get another job. I also fear a spiral of self-blame and shame that could lead to me being unemployed and unemployable.

Also I have what I expect might be a similar feeling in my heart/chest when something occurs to me that could be big and impacting. This could be for things like having a (maybe true or not) realization that if I screw up a particular project or even a meeting I'm in, that this could be the start of the end for me at my job. Or it could even be different, like when I used to be single and would realize that I was in an opportunity to make a move on someone I was interested in.

I think for me, a lot of it is about that it's much easier to deal with life if you don't think about it as real. I lament the fact that I'm not living in a video game where I can just undo bad mistakes, I hate the permanence of it all. It's stupid of me, but that's just the way I feel, and I'm much better able to deal with making decisions if I put it in a sandbox, and think as if it's just something I'm trying out, that is not life affecting. I'm fortunate that I live in a part of the world that affords me enough disconnect from some harsh realities of life, that this strategy is doable. Also, SSRIs help me with this, too. Without them I'm a wreck who is always feeling the harsh reality of permanence, and I'm paralyzed.

Also, if you don't mind me asking, what sort of investments do you deal in that have the potential to make millions on over a few years? Are they real estate investments, or stocks, or something else? How does one learn to get into that sort of investing? All I do is index funds, because that's all I ever was taught about.

I've now found + started reading a book called, literally: Woulda, Coulda, Shoulda: Overcoming Regrets, Mistakes, and Missed Opportunities.

It seems pretty good. Something that resonated with me that the book describes is how incredibly tough I was on myself for my mistakes. Giving myself a harsh punishment over choices that were actually pretty reasonable. The "punishment" is what kept me from being able to take advantage of the next opportunities, which were still really big ones, just not as big as the first ones. I'm gonna do the CBT exercise in it where you list all your regrets and what should/could have happened, and what cognitive fallacy is being committed. I think hanging onto past mistakes is the core of my issue.

It's funny that you talk about permanence as a problem, when that's a thing that does not really exist. A couple hundred years down the line, it'll be as if you never existed. Your choices, forgotten. Most people have a problem with impermanence, the end of things, because all lives and things in this universe must come to an end. Anyway, I think I know what you mean, you lament that what happens is basically written in stone and can't be changed. May as well stop trying to undo anything. Wishing for a better past, and making the emotional stakes so high that every decision feels intense, is unskillful.

I don't recommend using "it's not real" as the antidote. What makes suffering into suffering is the presence of all four things: Conscious, Ownership, Negative valence, Real. If one of these factors is removed we don't suffer. But the one to remove is the ownership part. This is the most important teaching in Buddhism: anatta insight; not-self. The body, your emotions, thoughts, etc, come and go on their own, so why would you try to maintain an illusion of being in control of and owning them? Why would you look at that which functions autonomously and say "this is me, this is mine, this is my self"? :)

Potential to make millions in the past: I'm talking about cryptocurrencies. Many years ago now, but the mistakes were emotionally intense. I was young and poor and the loss of what was a pretty small amount of money felt so bad to my depressed and anxious mind that I kept myself from jumping back in and riding the wild upswing after a crash. These days I'm not likely to find any opportunities to make millions. But I have more money now. What I want is to make measured decisions for stock purchases and the like. I'll probably stick most of my savings into an index fund though. That seems to be the wise thing to do for anyone who does not have tons of time to sink into doing research. So you're probably doing the best thing you can do on that part. :)

I'll probably stick most of my savings into an index fund though. That seems to be the wise thing to do for anyone who does not have tons of time to sink into doing research. So you're probably doing the best thing you can do on that part. :)

I want to also add, it's not just research. It's the temperament, and probably also the income level, to routinely lose 50-100% of the money you have put down on certain investments, but you make enough good decisions to be up overall.

It's possible I'm a version of you that made moderately more impulsive/confident decisions. I lost a ton of money on CGC because I bought into a bubble, MO because of regulatory nanny state bullshit I probably should have seen coming, even MMM because of some pretty massive lawsuits they were on the wrong side of. However I made out like a bandit on NTDOY, NVDA, V and MSFT. And BTC of course. Still waiting to see how my bets pan out with COIN and INTC. Bought the COIN IPO which I've been kicking myself for, but since I thought it was good at $380 I thought it was even better at $35 and cost averaged down a ton. I still believe they will have a monopoly in the US thanks to regulatory capture. And INTC I still think will rise back to being a premier fab with Gelsinger back at the helm. China invading Taiwan might help some too.

Is cost averaging a real and prudent thing or more of a cope? Honest question, hehe.

Have you considered uranium and gold? Mining companies or otherwise.

I quite like the sound of Intel. A good CEO seems to make a huge difference to a company and its stock. I have some interest in Berkshire Hathaway, they're already up 17% YTD. Buffett won't last forever but he hires great people, so maybe it could be good to buy them during the inevitable slump after his retirement/death...?

I'm a newb to all this though. I'll keep reading. Next up is to do my first attempt at company analysis, starting by just finding book value, diluted EPS, etc.

Is cost averaging a real and prudent thing or more of a cope? Honest question, hehe.

I cost average because I have no idea what I'm doing. My most successful picks have been jumping at companies I like. I played the Nintendo Switch, and Breath of the Wild, before it was released and decided it was the real deal. This was at a time when everyone thought Nintendo should get out of the hardware business, and it's executives has taken pay cuts for their failures. It was deeply rewarding jumping on that stock.

I bought Nvidia back in 2017/18 because the Steam hardware survey routinely showed something like 80% of people had Nvidia GPUs. I've been an Nvidia lifer since my first Riva 128. Seemed like a no brainer to me. I can't say I ever saw this AI boom coming, but I knew they were a well run company with good products I use to the exclusion of all else.

I dollar cost average in because I mostly buy and hold forever, so investing cash comes at a slow and steady pace monthly. I also know I'm not educated enough to pick an entry price and throw down five or six figures on it all at once. I keep investing if I have faith the company will eventually do well (like COIN), or because they've been consistently rewarding (like V).

Sometimes I take profit. I had to pay off a $5000 vet bill once while I was saving for a house, so it came out of stocks. When ATVI got bought out I was forced to sell. I also finally cut a bunch of losses and took some profit from several stocks, when I threw down a fat wad on COIN.

Throwing down that fat wad on COIN turned out to be a terrible mistake, and that particular wad is still down over 50%. But like I said, I liked COIN at IPO prices, and I liked it 10x as much when it was 1/10th the price. So it all worked out in the end. Still, that was an expensive lesson. In the future I won't be doing that. I should have spread my wad out over a much longer time to be safe. If it goes up, good, if it goes down, that's alright too.

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