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).
Jump in the discussion.
No email address required.
Notes -
And what are tribal reasons? Differences in behavior. A symbiotic relation is made possibly only by very advanced social mechanisms, and when you consider the advancement of tribal peoples, you should take it to heart that failure to innovate in these systems more than anything concrete is the culprit for their failure. Someone very well read in Chinese history would probably get me, since this process is much harder to see in Western society, as low population density is the historical norm and we had generous time to figure these things out.
Belief precedes action by necessity. This will boil down to a debate about determinism, but other objections to the assertion made are irrelevant.
Homogenous Japan doesn't feel compelled to attack itself - and hadn't for 250 years - but they became enthrall to attacking their nearest neighbors for a period, then they got nuked, and then they formed warm relations the formerly enemy distant genome.
My point is that John Walker Lindh chose to fight because of idiotic Iron Age beliefs. No advanced social mechanism was necessary. High IQ might help to build better systems for producing beneficial beliefs, but its not dispositive, and doesn't preclude the intrusion of bad ideas. Adopt a low IQ tribe-baby, raise him in the west, and I don't think they'd grow up with a burning desire to return home and fight the Afro-McCoy's.
Keep in mind that religion is a social mechanism -- one of multiple nigh-invisible but indispensable mechanisms to keep us from clawing out one another's throats. In Japan's case what happened is not religion, but something functionally equivalent to one, which is that the entire country sort of melded into one enormous clan, and the operative faith here is that if one performs his duty in the clan to the nth degree he's going to get all the spoils of society, which is why Japanese elders make no bones about picking up trash or being a crossing guard, and why they're so reticent and polite. Japan is also by no means homogeneous, and that word is a phantasm unless you're talking about very old villages or uncontacted tribes.
Politeness is a social mechanism too
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link