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 -
Chess is a game. It's something to play, to exercise your faculties, to have transient moments of joy and frustration about. I think professional sport is in general a pretty perverse culture, precisely because it kills the playful spirit of games, turns them into a high stakes rat race, essentially creates evil out of thin air. The value of discovering natural genius and pushing it to the limit is not worth this tradeoff.
Particularly seeing as that genius, confined to the realm of the game, doesn't contribute anything tangible to the world. Assuming the fungibility of IQ, Magnus and others are an immense lost opportunity. If we are tolerating this, might as well let them have a good time instead of pointlessly forcing the solemn ethos of self-sacrifice for the greater good where there isn't any.
How many full time professional chess players are there in the world? If it is more than low five figures, i would be surprised (and large part of them are weird people who would not fit in professional scientific or engineering world, even if chess never existed).
If you want to be angry at waste of high IQ potential, better targets for your rage are things like this.
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