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 -
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.
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 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.
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