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naraburns  nihil supernum  1yr ago (text post)   2343 thread views

Wellness Wednesday for January 11, 2023

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.

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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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Good point. I do think that it's much easier to change the world nowadays--those with intelligence have much larger levers than they used to. So hopefully step 0 will be made easier because the group will be so much smaller.

TBH I've pretty much given up on the dream, and am now hopeful to just grow rich myself and then go from there. I've been wanting to do a big effortpost on this for a while, but too busy getting rich lol. Seems like the modus operandi of billionaires is to surround themselves with intelligent people who help them manage everything, and that sounds like a perfect starting point to me, if sadly lacking in true loyalty and unity of purpose.

I wouldn't want to team up with rationalists so much as TheMotte rationalists in particular. I think the former has essentially lost to Berkeley (great essay btw if you haven't read it) and attempts to resurrect the original purpose now seem quite prone to entryism.

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