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Wellness Wednesday for July 31, 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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Man, this thread is an advertisement for the utility of the concept of infohazard. All I can think is that you would have been much, much happier if you'd simply absorbed the completely false polite fictions around intelligence and heredity that so many people believe.

I don't know about you, but I'd much rather be burdened by knowledge than live in ignorant bliss in most cases.

Are there situations where not knowing something bad will happen might be better? Sure. But not in most cases. If I had metastatic pancreatic cancer that would kill me in a year or two, I'd live my life very differently, and maximize it to the best of my abilities instead of being blindsided.

In this particular case, the social fiction is clearly to the detriment of his goals and values. He could probably knock up a gorgeous bimbo and have a great time doing it, except when his kids turn out to be dumb(er) than he is. They might be better looking, and that's certainly a perk, but I'd have to look very good to trade even a small number of IQ points for it.

His understanding of heridity makes him strictly better off, even if it causes him some pain such as the prospect of having to break up with a perfectly nice sounding person in the hopes of finding someone better (and there's no reason to assume he can't). C'est la vie.