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 -
The people who say flattery won't get you anywhere are lying, so I'm mostly happy to comply ;)
I do have a twitter account, but the issue is that it's entangled with my IRL name, which I'd rather not associate with my other online persona. It wouldn't even be of much use to you, since I mostly lurk.
That said, these are the accounts I follow:
Soren Iverson
@soren_iverson
New ideas daily. Contact: hello@soreniverson.com Twitter subscribers get exclusive ideas ✨
prerat
@prerationalist
social media influencee
gaut
@0xgaut
@alongsidefi
— Tweets that won't put you to sleep
near
@nearcyan
somehow, I keep ending up in the AGI timeline
😈
@deepfates
conceptual artist
Jim Fan
@DrJimFan
@NVIDIA
AI Scientist.
@Stanford
PhD. Building multimodal generalist agents. Sharing hot ideas & deep dives! NeurIPS Best Paper: MineDojo. Ex-
@OpenAI
,
@GoogleAI
@goth
@goth600
ACCELERATE, THIS.
Ethan Mollick
@emollick
Professor
@Wharton
studying innovation & startups and (now) AI. Democratizing business education with games. Substack: https://oneusefulthing.substack.com
janus
@repligate
🔄Bing Orchestrator🔁 🌐🎰🌐🎰🎰🌐🎰🌐 💻💻💻💻💻💻💻💻 ⬇️⬇️⬇️⬇️⬇️⬇️⬇️⬇️ 🎮🔤🔀🌎🗣🚪👥🔎 Tweets can be accessed via Bing chat 🔑
roon
@tszzl
spice must flow
ToughSF
@ToughSf
Matterbeam. Author of the ToughSF blog. Original SuperNerd. Kurzgesagt Team Duck. Discord http://discord.gg/MzSjtqw
depths of wikipedia
@depthsofwiki
I am
@anniierau
and I also run
@internetdepths
!
James Miller
@JimDMiller
Smith College economist. Author Singularity Rising, Game Theory at Work. JD Stanford, PhD U of Chicago. AGI alignment, free speech, free markets.
Fascinating
@fasc1nate
Posting interesting science, gadgets, history, art, and more.
Stonetoss Comics
@stone_toss
@FlurksNFT
Rob Miles
@robertskmiles
Explaining AI Alignment to anyone who'll stand still for long enough, on YouTube and Discord. Music, movies, microcode, and high-speed pizza delivery
Zero HP Lovecraft 🦅🐍
@0x49fa98
Let no one reduce us to the status of ascetics. There is no pleasure more complex than that of thought.
Flick
@Flick06484765
https://boosty.to/dimetrius http://patreon.com/flick
Alexander Kruel
@XiXiDu
“We are more often frightened than hurt; and we suffer more from imagination than from reality” ― Seneca
KEITH BLAST
@keithjohnstack
I just want to play video games. No commissions or interviews. he/him
Zvi Mowshowitz
@TheZvi
Blogger world modeling, now mostly AI and AI x-risk, at Don't Worry About the Vase (http://thezvi.wordpress.com or SS), founding Balsa Research to fix policy.
Stanford AI Lab
@StanfordAILab
The Stanford Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (SAIL), a leading #AI lab since 1963 shares its latest AI news, research, and more! ⛵️🤖
DeepLearning.AI
@DeepLearningAI_
Gain the knowledge and skills for an AI career.
Bryan Caplan
@bryan_caplan
GMU econ prof, NYT bestseller, father of 4, author of Myth of the Rational Voter, Selfish Reasons to Have More Kids, Case Against Education, and Open Borders.
Scott Alexander
@slatestarcodex
I have a place where I say complicated things about philosophy and science. That place is my blog. This is where I make terrible puns.
Paul Graham
@paulg
Robin Hanson
@robinhanson
Let’s skip witty repartee & discuss fundamental questions. Views are mine, not GMU’s or Virginia’s. Books: http://ageofem.com, http://elephantinthebrain.com
Google DeepMind
@DeepMind
We’re a team of scientists, engineers, ethicists and more, committed to solving intelligence, to advance science and benefit humanity.
Eliezer Yudkowsky
@ESYudkowsky
Ours is the era of inadequate AI alignment theory. Any other facts about this era are relatively unimportant, but sometimes I tweet about them anyway.
Of these merry band of misfits, ZeroHPLovecraft is by far the biggest Culture Warrior, and while I don't endorse the vast majority of his views, he's almost always very funny in a mean way. There's a lot of shitposting in there, so caveat emptor.
In terms of being a better, more self-actualized person, I doubt I'm the best person to be giving you advice. Am I doing anything special to be the way I am? Not that I can tell. The best advice I can give you is-
A) Take performance enhancing drugs, medical science will almost certainly be good enough to undo most of the damage if you aren't a retard about it. Since I have ADHD myself, it's not really negotiable if I have to worry about academics.
B) Read shit tons. Of course, given that you're a denizen of The Motte, you too likely have a crippling insight porn addiction, and your life might actually become better if you suddenly develop illiteracy and need to focus on IRL matters.
If there's any specific aspect about my persona you want to know more about, feel free to ask. Who doesn't like talking about themselves?
Thank you very much for sharing your follows, and I understand your desire to preserve free-spirited anonymity :).
Those are a great list of follows. I follow most of them already. I will add the remaining ones, too.
Yes, I also have "crippling insight porn addiction", but there's "insight", and then there's.... INSIGHT. I would guess you have more of the latter, than most purveyors of "insight" have.
What were some of your favorite sources of INSIGHT? Favorite books or websites or... whatever.
What "performance-enhancing drugs" have helped you the most overall? I apologize if you've already written about this before and I missed it. I am doing better recently with repeated small dosings of nutritional yeast and NALT (for the dopamine boost). But I like to try new things!
I mentioned "aspects of your persona" in my other reply comment to you.
Let's see, the most obvious suggestions are ones you likely already know, such as Scott, LessWrong etc.
For keeping up with scientific advances, I highly recommend Quanta Magazine, it manages the rare feat of being very high quality and in-depth, while also being approachable for laymen. Unlike typical popsci sites, they don't dumb things down.
Other substacks I quite like are Emil Kirkegard and Richard Hanania, they cover quite a bit of thoughtcrime surrounding HBD.
Zvi Moshowitz is a good follow on LW, Twitter or his own substack.
Matt Lakeman covers loads of stuff on his, from interesting ethnographies to geography and science.
In terms of performance enhancing drugs, stimulants are great, assuming you can get a prescription. If you work out, creatine is cheap and also surprisingly effective with a degree of scientific validation most PEDs can't compare to, while being entirely legal.
Thank you, I will check out Quanta, and thank you for reminding me about Matt Lakeman :). (The others I already followed, luckily... convergent interests!)
Creatine makes me feel irritable, and it's the most ADHD I ever get, which is weird, since it does't seem to have that effect on most other people. I just literally can't seem to control my attention when I use creatine, and my working memory becomes terrible.
And because it doesn't seem to affect other people that way, I can't copy other peoples' research on what to do to balance out the negative side effects. I love the increase in physical stamina from creatine, and the positive effects of more exercise do help somewhat.
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