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).
Jump in the discussion.
No email address required.
Notes -
I suspect your wife is intelligent, and specializes in something different from you. Most people are not that intelligent, and are mediocre at both practical and intellectual tasks! You didn't randomly select a wife from the American population.
Do you think that, if society had an IQ cap of 100, we would understand quantum field theory, or general relativity, or have most of the technology we use so much? This is a bizzare statement. The average person mostly can't do algebra, and genuinely doesn't understand why they keep getting inflation when they vote for more spending and less taxation. Yes, smart people use their intelligence to be wrong in novel ways, but it's a process that in many areas converges.
This is conflating the fact that Von Neumann's technical aptitude was controlled by highly intelligent people with social and political aptitude with strong progressive / democratic values guiding public opinion with a sense that Von Neumann was being guided by the People and their average intelligence.
If the world were entirely composed of 100 IQ people, the world would be so much worse by any reasonable set of values. We wouldn't have an internet, we'd be missing most treatments for currently existing diseases, we'd lose great art and music (Scott Alexander's brother is a famous musician. Coincidence? lol). This isn't neutral!
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