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Wellness Wednesday for May 10, 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.

  • 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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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.