site banner
PaperclipPerfector  1yr ago (text post)   2034 thread views

Wellness Wednesday for June 14, 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).

1
Top Bottom Old Controversial Comments
Jump in the discussion.

No email address required.

Can I get some tips on grilling burgers? Tried my hand at it this past weekend for the first time in a while, and I totally fucked it up hah. I used a lot of cayenne pepper, and like a dumbass I thought the redness was the burgers being raw, instead of the spice so I overcooked the hell out of them.

At least my dog got to eat well this week.

I've watched videos and looked at timings and such, but honestly I'm a bit paranoid about eating raw meat, even though I love burgers medium rare. Curious if any grillpillers here can give me some advice.

Get good quality meat, no spices except salt and maybe pepper, you’re making a burger, not meatloaf.

American cheese. No other cheese compares for a burger. Put it on after the flip and close the grill to get it to melt.

Make the grill spitting hot before putting anything on.

Don’t make a dad burger, make those puppies thin. It’s hard to control heat on a grill compared to a skillet, don’t risk a raw middle and a burnt outside.

Don’t worry about undercooking, so what if you eat some undercooked meat? You’ll survive just fine.

Get a meat thermometer and grill to 170F internal temperature. I mix 4 eggs, 2 cups panko bread crumbs, 1.3kg of extra lean beef, 3 tbsp smoked paprika, 2 tbsp garlic salt and 2 tbsp crushed oregano together into the burger paste, and they turn out great every time if grilled at around 450F. Spices don't burn if you mix them into the meat itself.

Great burger advice from @yofuckreddit in this comment.

On grilling specifically, you're going to need to just spend some quality time with your grill and be kind of picky about things to sort out the right flame level and timing. The biggest thing I can recommend there is going fairly hot (generally around 475 grill temp for me) so you get that fantastic sear and crust while still keeping the burger moist. I would also strongly suggest starting at a third of a pound or higher on the grill because quarter pounders tend to get overcooked pretty easily.

OH I totally forgot about that comment, thanks for the link! Good point on the quarter pounder- I had definitely cooked other burgers for the same length of time and had them come out fine. Hadn't considered the thickness of the patty.

Grilled burgers should be seasoned only with salt. Spices burn. A little oil, maybe, if the beef is lean, which it shouldn’t be.

I prefer thick burgers on the grill; smash burgers are better made in the pan where you can smush in onions and mustard.

So, I did the stupid runner thing and managed to injure myself. Coming off an excellent spring where I knocked out personal bests at 8K, 10K, and half marathon, I started to ramp up for a marathon cycle, had a nice 80-mile week, a couple solid workouts, and then a quad that had been bugging me since before the last race I was in started to flare up a bit. Naturally, as an idiot, I ran through it, declared that I was optimistic that it wasn't getting worse, and it promptly got significantly worse. Weird injury too, I can't quite pinpoint where it is and it feels more like it's to the fascia than the muscle or any particular tendon - generally inflamed, non-specific, and soreness increases significantly when absorbing the impact of a stride.

So I'm going to get some more quality time with walking and cycling than I'd particularly care for in the near future. Such is life, but it sure is frustrating. On the flip side, this is why I celebrate PBs enthusiastically every time.

Summer + Lower Body Injury = Time for the bro split. Pull ups and Dips and Bench Press, Oh My!

Commiserating with you. Nothing more frustrating than an injury right before the fun part of the cycle. Last year I was doing Smolov Jr. working on hitting a two plate overhead press, and right at the end of week three when I was close to hitting my old PR for triples, I threw something out of place and had to stop. All that hard work out the window.

Yep, it's pretty frustrating. I'm having some luck coping by reminding myself that spring was a big success and a couple weeks of recovery isn't even a bad thing from a pure physiological perspective.

So yeah... way more time to go do the right thing in the gym rather than staying outside for runs.

Cheers!

I'm a cycling nut - how into it are you? Doing just road stuff?

Yeah, just road biking. I actually have a pretty nice road bike that I got back when I first started endurance sports (Cervelo R3) and I've intermittently put some effort in when I was thinking about multisport or recovering from running. Honestly, I just don't like it as much. I think the biggest reason comes down to having an unshakeable feeling that some idiot's going to hit me with their car while they're staring at a cell phone or something, which keeps me from getting into as comfy of a mental place as I can running. I think the other big thing is that I just haven't invested the hours necessary to be any good. I do like group rides with friends though - way less mental stress than I put on myself riding alone.

So I'm sure you've heard this before, but...

I share an immense anxiety with road biking. At the same time I like going long distances uninterrupted and I like MTB but only as a complement to everything else (high injury risk, no real ability to actual travel).

Gravel biking is yes, largely a conjuration of marketing departments. But bigger tires on a road bike and more aggressive gearing allows me to (in an urban setting) handle sidewalk riding, curb hopping, and off-road detours with an extremely minor cost of spinning out on downhills above 30mph. While I don't have any KOMs I'm still coming in 2nd behind people with $10k road bikes. In my city there are quiet residential routes through a large chunk of it, along with a rich greenway artery, so it works out.

In a rural setting of course the bike really shines as long as things aren't too crunchy. Tires can only doo so much, and a gravel bike with a ton of suspension dongles too clearly exposes the absurdity of even giving a special name to drop bars and wider forks. I prefer keeping my gravel bike to single-day excursions and don't involve going completely off-road.

Finally it's not as related to the sort of competitive PR element you crave, but loading up a mountain bike with bags and humping through the mountains while camping will put hair on your chest. Flat ground with your R3 and grinding up steep dirt with a 50lb hardtail are wildly different animals, but it's also a way to connect with nature and see far more than you would by backpacking.

I had to switch from running to biking after getting shooting pains in my ankles from the impact. It definitely doesn’t scratch the same itch, but it’s good cardio and I tell myself it’s better for longevity anyway.

80 miles a week is eye popping. Hope your recovery is quick.

Diet update:

Got to 72.15kg in 85 days. That's 400g a week, slower than I expected, but it's my first deliberate cutting phase. The BF%, according to the totally inaccurate Chinese smart scale is at 19.9% (down from 22.6%), higher than my original goal, but I don't worry too much about it. I'll get there. For now my plan is to reliably hit 72kg, spend some time at maintenance and then try to bulk up a bit, I've always been bad at gaining muscle mass, so I have to think about the best approach.

Bench press 1RM is at 77.5kg, pull-ups are at 3 sets of 8. Taking it easy with squats after a bad leg day.

Double-check the math on body fat %

Can't, it's inside the app that comes with the scale. That's why I wrote I don't worry about it that much; it's likely guesstimating it with a large margin of error.

Any advice from overcoming a particular pattern of procrastination where I put off something -> eventually start it which makes me feel stupid for not starting earlier -> causes me to put it off more after minimal progress?

This reminds me of the Internal Double Crux chapter of the CFAR Participant Handbook. Here are the notes I had:

Resolve conflicting beliefs by incorporating information from conflicting models.

For example, You want to run but you also want to watch Netflix.

  • Rather than summarizing this situation as "I'm just lazy" or "I struggle to stay motivated", it is instead productive to think: in addition to my belief that it is good to run, I apparently also have a belief that it's good to watch Netflix.

The part of you that wants to run is good at paying attention to your long-term goals, your social standing, your health, and your sense of yourself as a strong and capable person. The part of you that wants to watch Netflix is good at paying attention to your short-term urges, your energy levels, your sense of comfort, and whether or not the new Game of Thrones episode seems likely to be good.

…In order to build a maximally detailed understanding of the world and correctly strategize across all of your needs and goals, you've got to bring all of your models to the table…

Many approaches to this:

  • Pharmacological: Executive function in a pill, adderall, lisdexafetamine, modafinil, pick your stimulant (poison). Congratulations, spreadsheets and doing your taxes is now fun

  • CBT-esque: Stop blaming yourself for failures, understand that most people are behind on their todo lists. If it wasn't urgent yesterday, it can't be that urgent today. If it's worth doing well, it's worth half-assing (perfectionism trap). This addresses the 'feel stupid' part of your procrastination loop.

  • Mind hacks/habit building: Do this slowly, but maybe make a habit of 1 task at 6PM every night. Again re: CBT, don't blame yourself if you miss a night or two because you're sick. If it takes less than a minute to do, never put it off. Etc etc.

Cocaine is probably the only thing that makes chores ‘fun’. Adderall is halfway between that and coffee imo, it provides you with a lot of energy to do whatever you want, but it doesn’t turn you into a chore machine unless you still really want to do chores.

Amphetamines at therapeutic doses are indeed not euphoric, you're not having fun doing chores, but you also don't want to tear your hair and eyes out. They shift your reward curves just such that the delayed gratification and rhythm of work feel Sisyphean-esquely bearable.

Amphetamines at abuse doses/cocaine are euphoric, sure, pure dopamine, but affect your cognitive processes too much for genuine productivity.

Read the non-zero days post on Reddit. Acknowledge that x isn't going to do itself. Work out what the barest of bare minimums is that you could do, do that, and notice that you've given yourself some impetus to overcome the inertia.

Short task lists. Put every trivial thing on a task list just so you can get that boost of confidence when you mark it done. Make the list short enough that you can't physically plan another task until you finish one of the existing ones. If you let the list grow too long, you stop worrying about the task and start worrying about not doing so many of them.

If you find yourself doing zero tasks each day, I like CGP Grey's "half-marks", when you give yourself 50/100 for doing the bare minimum.

Did another KB penta last week.

Cleans 120@16kg

Clean and Press 60@16kg

Jerk 108/120@16kg

Snatch 90/108@16kg

Push Press 120@12kg

936 points total

Form is still very rough, particularly on the Snatch, and I still get badly gassed halfway through.

Other than that, not a great time. Feeling very low a lot of the time, particularly at the gym.

Keep it up! You'll break 1K soon!

Well, 1k is still a pretty low score. I don't think it's anything to be proud about.

Progress is always something to be proud of. Don't let comparison be the thief of joy, take pleasure in the improvement regardless of whether you're one of the best at what you're doing or just grinding to get better.

I've heard this bit of Reddit wisdom before, but honestly I don't want to be joyful over my current state - I want to be big and strong, and I'm not. My improvement doesn't impress me - anyone can make improvement in the first few weeks and months of trying something, particularly if they start at a low level. At the end of the day, a 140kg bench that stays the same is still better than going to 90kg from 80.

deleted

Thank you for the kind words! I never expected to become That Grumpy Old Geezer Chasing The Kids Off The Lawn on the Internet, but we all find our level in life, don't we? 😁

I appreciate the honesty of what you say above, about how you feel and how this place is and is not working for you. Good luck and remember, I flounced out and here I am flounced back in again! You may return yourself one day with a lot more grace and tact.

You've captured something I've been feeling since the /r/SSC split. I've pondered and written drafts that I've discarded, because they never quite hit the nail right about what I felt had changed.

After reading this, I think you really got it. Optimism and hope are gone. That doesn't mean that verbal sparring isn't a worthwhile exercise, but the people who do genuinely see a hopeful vision for the future have mostly left (or are drowned out by the sunken masses).

Since the move from reddit, I've found myself almost exclusively posting on the WW thread.

Also mildly disappointed no one has picked up (or at least commented online about) Veritas vos liberabit, which, like Arbeit macht frei, gives me a sardonic reminder of what transpires here every time I post.

Man, I felt this post deeply. This describes my experience and feelings to a tee. I've never been a big name around here, but I've been around since we lived on the SSC subreddit and I've enjoyed the years of effort posting. But I too feel that nowadays I often come here to hate read or consensus build rather than to engage. Similarly to you, some of this is because there is just less charity all around, but a large part of it is also that I feel that I've seen the "other side" of most issues and that my mind is more or less made up. And so it's probably time for me to stop posting.

The most valuable takeaway for me has been reading the writings of the progressive-adjacent posters who patiently stick around and explain blue tribe ideals despite the increasingly frequently dogpiles. They helped me discover some blind spots I have and have gotten me closer to passing the Ideological Turing Test. I am indebted to them and wish them all the best.

Big thanks to @ZorbaTHut for putting a ton of effort in to this community over the years, it couldn't have happened without you.

See you space cowboy...

I'll miss you, for what it's worth.

Nowadays, I cringe when I get a comment. I feel anxious when I see a lit-up notification bell. Frequently the sort of responses I engender seem not to be positive or helpful engagement -- often just dismissive one-liners, low-effort commentary that half-makes a point while being maximally personal or inflammatory, without any empathy for other perspectives or attempt to try and understand where I'm coming from.

Yeah, I acknowledge this is a problem. We're running into various problems with long-term shifts, and it's unclear how to fix them; I have some ideas that I'm going to be trying out, but the core issue is just that value drift is hard to deal with. And I haven't come up with a good solution besides "frequent new mods who haven't value-drifted yet" or "clever tricks".

Honestly, maybe I should be doing Doge elections much more often and turn moderation into more of a rotating duty. It's tempting.

Honestly, maybe I should be doing Doge elections much more often and turn moderation into more of a rotating duty. It's tempting.

I don't see how this is supposed to help. It's not about the moderation, or the rules, it's the zeitgeist. We've been through too much to pretend everything is fine, we're all in the same boat, and just trying to figure life out.

I say give people something to do that is not culture war. Any of you degenerates want to mod a game, or something?

Any of you degenerates want to mod a game, or something?

I do art, 2d and 3d.

Great, that's exactly what I suck at!

I've been replaying Freespace recently. It's open source, and very moddable, and I had an idea to turn it into something like High Fleet (in Spaaaace). I'm open to other ideas though.

Sweet.

I actually still haven’t played it, but I’m quite fond of highfleet and related games. Starsector, Airships, Endless Sky, etc. I will look more into the mechanics before I commit to any modding but it sounds great.

Cool!

I'll warn you in advance that FS is nothing like those games, but the idea is to try and cross them. I'll write a post outlining my idea in the next few days.

something like High Fleet (in Spaaaace).

You have my attention.

[EDIT] ...That's maybe underselling it a bit. I love designing spaceships, big ones, small ones, everything in between. I love anything involving guns and missiles and explosions. I haven't played high fleet or free space 2, but I absolutely love everything I've seen of high fleet, and from what I've seen free space 2 is a pretty sweet wing-commander-style arcadey space fighter sim, and I love those as well.

So yeah, definately interested.

Ha! If you're ever bored, you have to give FS2 a go, it's basically porn for someone like you. Not only is it a space fighter sim, it's centered around capital ships duking it out with giant lasers. With modern hardware and mods you can make it even more pornographic.

@ZorbaTHut, is it ok if I open a catch-all thread for this until we get subs running?

eh, I'll see about giving it a try... I've seen a bit of footage focusing on playing capital ships, is that what you're thinking in terms of gameplay?

Maybe... Piloting capital ships always felt like something I should find appealing, but in practice it always felt a bit 'meh'.

What I do want to do is add a strategic and tactical dimension to the game, and with that maybe it will be more fun to fly a capital ship, give orders to fighters, and the rest of your fleet, etc. Though it might turn out that fighters are still more fun... we'd have to see how it pans out.

More comments

Sure, go for it :) If it's successful that's honestly good incentive for getting something like that going.

I don't see how this is supposed to help. It's not about the moderation, or the rules, it's the zeitgeist.

The idea is that you pick people who aren't jaded, and as they get jaded, they get rotated out. If you want to remain stationary but you're standing on a slow-moving train, you walk in the opposite direction of the train.

I say give people something to do that is not culture war. Any of you degenerates want to mod a game, or something?

This honestly makes me tempted to set up Reddit-esque subreddits. I'm not sure it would work, but it's tempting.

(The codebase did have this functionality, but we pulled it because it was completely bitrotted. Wouldn't be too hard to reintroduce it though.)

I think part of the problem is that we desperately do need a constant influx of new members, else we will turn into an echo chamber, but the problem with that is Eternal September.

And right now everywhere (not just in the USA) is polarised and drawn up in battle array on both sides of the Culture War, so the temptation is there for one-liners, cheap shots, building consensus, and the rest of it - among the old-times and the new 'uns.

I don't know the solution to that, apart from an influx of the Holy Spirit and the grace of God.

else we will turn into an echo chamber

I don’t think there’s been a single CW thread yet that I would describe as having an insufficient amount of disagreement.

I’m not sure what all the doom and gloom is about tbh. I think this place is fantastic the way it is right now. The only thing I would want to see change is more essayposts about a wider variety of topics (your Narnia post was an excellent contribution in this regard).

Yeah, and it's really really hard to figure out how to get new members. There are a lot of places that would simply ban us because we allow witches to participate, and the places that wouldn't do that are entirely full of witches. This makes it hard to build a community whose signature property is "some, but not all, witches".

This honestly makes me tempted to set up Reddit-esque subreddits. I'm not sure it would work, but it's tempting.

Yes!

I brought it up some time ago (was checking out the codebase, and saw some tables set up in the database), and was shocked we're not using it. If I did the work of reintroducing the feature, will you release it, or would you need to think about whether you want to do it or not?

Well, the core issue is that there are a lot of questions about what exactly "the feature" is. We don't have any support for non-admin moderators, for example, so do we want to implement that? Suddenly the work is like three times harder. Or do we want the existing admins to take the load of entire new communities? I don't want to do that. Who gets to make new communities? Who gets to edit community pages (which right now are just hardcoded .html)? If someone is a moderator of multiple communities, do they get to see shared usernotes? Can someone be banned from one community and not another?

If you did the work of reintroducing the feature then, hmm, I'd have to run it past the mods, let me know if you're seriously thinking of doing this, but yeah I think we'd probably figure out a way to get it going. But I think "the feature" is going to prove to be a lot of work.

If you did the work of reintroducing the feature then, hmm, I'd have to run it past the mods, let me know if you're seriously thinking of doing this, but yeah I think we'd probably figure out a way to get it going. But I think "the feature" is going to prove to be a lot of work.

Yeah, I already figured there'd be questions like that we'd need to answer, and there might be a lot more work involved than just reverting a commit. I can't promise I'll get it done in a timely fashion, but I'd like to take a stab at it at least, so yeah I'm serious about it.

Join the Dev discord if you haven't already. That's where development discussion mostly happens, and that's also where the people who took it out originally hang out. I think the first step here is to just come up with a list of stuff that would have to get done.

It would have to be pretty seriously restricted, if it existed at all, I think. Having one megathread in which most things are happening helps with engagement, and separating things out would dilute attention and decrease activity, at least under my current mental model.

If you allowed this at all, I think you'd need to restrict the ability to do so pretty heavily, and it would have to be kept to being fairly separate domains (the modding a game example is probably a good example of something disparate enough not to cause things to fall apart). To keep the community functioning the way it has been, you'd also want to try to make sure that what's currently going on (or rather, an idealized version of what's currently going on) would remain the central thing, with the others more fun side things—the Sunday, Wednesday, Friday etc. weekly kilothreads are probably a good example of that happening currently. That leads me to the question, how do you think subreddit-equivalents would work versus a megathread?

Having one megathread in which most things are happening helps with engagement, and separating things out would dilute attention and decrease activity, at least under my current mental model.

This is definitely true . . .

. . . if you assume that users are kept constant. It may be that splitting things up actually attracts more users because people can join communities that are better-suited for them. This is the transition that Reddit made, several times, with great success.

Are we at that point? No idea, which is why if I do this I want to ensure that I have ways to undo it and good metrics on what's going on. But it's at least something I'd be willing to try.

That's a good point. The attracting users might have to be done carefully—users won't stick to one community, and if culture war things are our core thing, we'd hope the new users wouldn't make that too much worse…

Really depends on what sorts of users it might attract.

More comments

It would have to be pretty seriously restricted, if it existed at all, I think. Having one megathread in which most things are happening helps with engagement,

It helps with engagement for things that go into the thread (culture war), but it sucks the oxygen out for everything else. Having non culture-war subs would probably help engagement, because people would have other reasons to come here.

The old place had Mafia games, and while I didn't participate, I endorse this precedent.

I meant making a mod for a game, or some other creative endeavor, but I suppose playing something wouldn't be bad either.

Talking with friends with whom you disagree can create understanding; talking with strangers on the internet creates strife and flame wars.

Yeah, this is really fair. And even with friends, speaking in person versus over the internet makes a difference—giving that extra context gives all sorts of signals that text can fail to convey, and really can help with charitable interpretations.

I've certainly learned all sorts of things on the internet, but it's much rarer to be persuaded when you don't want to be. And I've learned things on the motte as well—people discuss topics that I wouldn't have seen elsewhere. I think that's often what I'm looking for in a comment responding to me—insight, things I've missed, not takes that I could have predicted myself. I think the AAQCs are among the best things about the motte.

often just dismissive one-liners, low-effort commentary that half-makes a point while being maximally personal or inflammatory, without any empathy for other perspectives or attempt to try and understand where I'm coming from.

Have you considered reporting some of the worse comments when you get them? My understanding of the rules is that they would not meet them, and enforcement is probably a good way to improve the norm?

there are viewpoints represented here that I find even more repugnant than many of those that I dislike which are popular, and whose only saving grace is that they aren't popular…But I've become less interested in weird ideologies

Yeah, I can sympathize a lot with this.

It's more the general sense of pessimism and hopelessness that drips from almost every poster, the belief that wokeness or neoliberalism or socialism or right-wing extremism or China or Russia or immigration or Trump or AI will inevitably destroy the world.

Yeah, that's also fair. You seem to be a Christian, the proper response to any of this (well, except maybe AI, if that would actually destroy the world, though I don't know that that's compatible, really, with the second coming) isn't despondency, but the repeated testimony of the new testament is "we rejoice in our sufferings, knowing that suffering produces endurance, and endurance produces character, and character produces hope, and hope does not put us to shame, because God’s love has been poured into our hearts through the Holy Spirit who has been given to us." Recognize whatever difficulties may be coming all of our way (and accurately—neither exaggerating nor minimizing helps), do what you can, but know that this is really only a pilgrimage, not our home.

Anyway, I wish you well on your soft retirement, and hope that it is not a total one.

Sometimes I feel like you do. Maybe there are a few more ridiculous witches here than there used to be, but at least I feel like this place is still pretty based, for the most part. Definitely the fear and lack of hope is a downer, though.

But one thing I wanted to say is that irrespective of everything else the Motte may be and may try to be, it still has one thing for me, which will probably keep me coming here for a while, even if just to check in. When I hear the latest ridiculous mainstream takes on the latest breaking stories out in the real world, the Motte remains a place where I can come to hear some other takes which I will likely trust a little more. I won't trust all of them, but invariably, I can usually count on there being some viewpoint on the Motte that is closer to what I believe to actually be true about the issue at hand, than the mainstream viewpoints out in the world that I'm constantly exposed to. I therefore consider the Motte useful for keeping tabs on what's going on in the world, and contextualizing it in a way that I find much more palatable and likely true than any alternative.

As an example, when the charges came against Trump recently, I found there to be a good mix of people here indicating that the charges of this nature were unprecedented and it was not okay for some reason, or that the charges were unprecedented but it was okay to charge him for some reason. But generally out in the rest of the world, I can't even hear people admitting that the charges were unprecedented at all (other than Fox news, which I can't trust because they will always go with the contrarian take, regardless of its veracity). I don't know if I'd have come to that understanding of the issue without hearing people from the Motte speak up on it.

Eh, I just don't read the threads that don't interest me or where I can easily predict the responses. I've had periods without reading the motte, but then a world event would happen, and again and again TheMotte was the only place I could find to discuss it in an intelligent manner.

We've become like Harvard, almost none of the value is in the content provided, it's rather in the pre-selection mechanism for who ends up here.

I mostly stick around for the technical parts of truth-seeking and discourse - how to figure out what's true, how to prioritize what's important. Being able to write stuff like this, and read everyone else's similar.

I still believe that people of different viewpoints discussing issues can help create understanding and perhaps approach the truth.

I haven't changed any large-scale political or philosophical positions that I can think of due to themotte but I have changed my mind on a lot of small-scale issues, learned many new things, and gotten a bit better at presenting ideas and understanding things. And as one forms larger-scale ideas from smaller-scale ones, it's still valuable for, maybe, future large-scale ideas.

I've grown to feel the same towards the motte. The rate at which randomuser399707 finds out about ABC CW topic for the first time, or finds XYZ annoying the first time is greater than the rate at which I won't get mad reading the same shit over and over again.

What I've done to still keep the motte enjoyable is to find missing links. Add in a viewpoint no one else has thought of. It doesn't matter if its my honest viewpoint, if its a straw or a steel man. As long as it's not there, I get some mental exercise by adding it in.

Sigh.

What you are describing is very similar to how I'm feeling nowadays.

I guess my own personal hobby horse, and the reason I am still here (and a mod) is that I really, really value free speech, the whole post-Enlightenment American Constitutional version, the version that says yes, even Nazis and pedos and people who've made it clear they'd gulag me if they could should have it. And since the rest of the Internet (and essentially all public spaces) don't allow that anymore, here we are.

But we are approaching a zillion witches, and the views of most people here have calcified. Worse (for me personally), the conflict theorists won. They persuaded me. It's war to the knife and I need to act and prepare accordingly.

I'll probably stick around as long as the lights stay on.

Appreciate your work.

I'm sure you don't hear it enough, but thanks for modding, dawg. It's probably more frustrating than anything, but for what it's worth I appreciate it when you guys help keep the posting here to some standards. It's one of the reasons I like being here, frankly, granted I mostly read and rarely post.

What do you mean by the conflict theorists won and persuaded you? In what domains? (take this as a chance to elaborate, not as some specific question, I guess)

Anyway, thanks for sticking around thus far, the work you do is really valuable in keeping this place running something vaguely like it should.

I've increasingly become convinced that the underlying principles of the motte aren't working, or aren't true.

...From something I wrote several years ago and never got finished enough to post:

Charity is the benefit of the doubt. All charity comes down to some approximation of the following proposition: "I think you might be a bad person, but it's possible that I'm mistaken. I'll hedge my bets, and not treat you like a bad person if there's another option until I'm extremely certain."

Hedging is the technique of sacrificing scarce resources to offset risk, and the sacrifice generally involves a number of irreducible inefficiencies. The greater the risk, whether in probability or severity, the more sense it makes to offset that risk with a hedge. As risk declines in probability and severity, the inefficiencies involved in hedging eventually make it a net loss. With Charity, we're hedging against the risk of embracing conflict when productive cooperation was possible if we just worked at it a bit harder. The more uncertainty we have about whether some act is being taken in bad faith or not, and the lower the apparent severity of being wrong, the easier it is to treat them with charity, to extend them the benefit of the doubt.

All of this is just groundwork to hammer out a simple point: Charity is not free. It costs scarce resources, and its cost fluctuates according to your supply of doubt. The more certain you are, the less benefit of the doubt you can supply, and the more expensive charity grows. The less certain you are of bad intentions and serious consequences, the cheaper charity is.

Uncertainty exists in the absence of information and evidence. As evidence and information accumulate, uncertainty diminishes, and charity grows increasingly expensive. It costs you in terms of stress, attention, time, frustration. And of course at the tails, poorly-chosen charity can cost you your career, your friends, your sanity and if you're extremely unlucky your life.

Back in the early 2000s, when I was all hopped up on Blue Tribe 9/11 conspiracies, there was a idea kicking around my circles called "Peak Oil". The idea was that oil takes millions of years to make via geological processes, our society depended on it to function, we had used up most of it, and the price of oil was only going to rise from here on till it grew too expensive and society ground to a halt.

Of course, that never happened. Some brilliant engineer invented fracking, and political winds shifted, and here we are still driving cars and pumping cheap gas. Still, the logic seems sound, doesn't it?

Charity takes a long time to form, possibly on the order of generations. Our society depends on it to function. We have used up most of it, and there does not appear to be a way to manufacture more on short notice. Further, technology is making this problem a lot worse, not better, and it is difficult to imagine the social equivalent of fracking. Charity is expensive, and when people cannot afford it any more, society will grind to a halt.

Back in 2015, arguing with people who disagreed with you was a wonderful thing. The ideas they were pushing might seem strange, bizarre or maybe even harmful, but they were also very new and their outcomes and consequences were very much in doubt. There were still a great many uncertainties, hypotheticals, open questions about how things would play out. These uncertainties made charity relatively cheap, and discussion flourished.

It isn't 2015 any more. We've had seven years of incidents, arguments, and happenings to test our predictions and models. We've had seven years of data to examine. We've gotten to see long-term outcomes for a variety of issues. As events stack up, conversation becomes less and less useful. There was a point to arguing about whether Eich's firing was a good idea or not, whether it was a trend or not. By Damore, wherever you fell on the issue, you probably weren't going to change your mind. By Jeong, there was little left to discuss, and the positions people take largely serve only to disprove what few charitable models remain, or to run up the confirmations for sport[...]

[...]In this environment, given a reasonably stable userbase, Charity drops asymptotically to zero. It's never gone completely, but there's not enough to do what we need, and there's a little less every day, and what there is is a little more expensive, requires a little more effort, and the next day a little more care, and more, and yet more. People start rationing their charity. They start hoarding. The community stutters, chokes and seizes. No one wants this to happen! They want the conversations to keep going! They get angry at people for not being charitable enough, and demand more effort. They get angry at people for growing more certain, less open. But what else is evidence for, if not to lead to conclusions? What is the point of conversation, if not to move from less knowledge to more knowledge? Why ask questions if you don't want answers?

Still, it isn't as it was when we knew less and laughed more, and we miss what we once had. And so we try to adjust things, we try to put in more effort, we change rules and adapt approaches. And the evidence continues to accumulate, three thousand comments and maybe two or three hundred headlines and articles and studies a week, steadily, monotonously burning the charity away, belching out whatever soot is generated by burning the milk of human kindness. No one wants it to be that way. No one wants the thing we love to be its own annihilation. But it is that way, and it will be no other.

I don't think people are going to discover a way to frack charity. On the other hand, maybe it helps some to realize that the problem isn't just other people being awful, that the problem really is, lord help me, systemic, an emergent property of the world we're stuck living in rather than a choice people are making.

Sadly, the above is probably just more of the sort of depressive worldview that you're objecting to. Faith was the only exit from this dead-end that I could find; so long as the Rationalist tendency to empirical calculation is followed, fatalism seems inevitable. To escape the trap, it is necessary to defy the odds, to embrace axioms rather than evidence.

I don't think people are going to discover a way to frack charity

One thing that gives me hope for the future is promising results from clinical trials of MDMA and psychedelics. I think eventually this could eventually lead to legalization outside of clinical settings. That could lead to something like the hippie movement of the 1960s. This time the movement would have much better odds at succeeding because:

  • The government would have a much harder time shutting it down

  • The public image around these drugs has shifted favorably

  • The movement could attract wealthy supporters

  • Lessons have been learned from the failures of the earlier movement

At the very least I think drug law changes would lead to the creation of new spiritual communities that could fill a void for people who are not currently religious.

My problem with that is, setting aside the whole question of legalisation, this is the same brightly optimistic view of "it will change and elevate human consciousness, as a species we will evolve past war and hatred!" that the proponents of LSD and the hippies had first time round.

How did that work out?

Legalise psychedelics, and it'll be like legal weed: people breeding newer strains to be even more powerful, because what users in general want is not to expand their consciousness, they want to get high. They want to feel good. They want more bang for their buck and they don't care about becoming an evolved future human.

Read subreddits where the druggies hang out, and it's often "so I took six different and contradictory drugs at once, my heart feels like it's going to explode, do you think taking 'shrooms would help?"

Legal E will be like all the other drugs we've legally consumed over the generations. Has alcohol make society better regarding spiritual communities, even though it was associated with Dionysius and sacred? We'll take your sacrament and turn it into a consumer experience, packaged for maximum effect and leaving you okay to go back to work on Monday as a productive economic cog.

How did that work out?

I’m much more realistic about the expectations of how this will work out. Both LSD and MDMA were used very successfully as therapeutic tools when used in a session with medical professionals. The drugs ‘escaped the lab’ because they were so effective and beneficial at what they do. In trials today people have said that sessions with these substances were one of the most meaningful experiences of their life, that the psychoactive session was more beneficial than years of traditional therapy.

Of course people will misuse drugs and use them for escapism but that doesn’t reduce the benefit for the people that use them responsibly. You can find people that misuse/abuse anything (e.g. cars, prescription drugs) but that isn’t a good argument that nobody should have access to those things.

There are an incredible number of psychedelics and entactogens that have been discovered (see PiHKAL and TiHKAL by Alexander Schulgan). Much of this had to with finding ways around the drug laws to make legal substances. Some are more powerful, some are weaker, some are less visual, duration of effects varies, etc. I think new drugs being discovered is a good thing because each drug may be useful in specialized situations.

Has alcohol make society better...

Alcohol is not a fair comparison; the mechanism of action is different and it is not being used as a medical treatment.

"Escaping the lab" is the trouble, though. "they work if used responsibly" works for all the pain-killers that are being widely misused. Let's face it: most people won't want access to psychedelics to help with their personal therapeutic journey, they will want to get high and have fun. Just like everyone who uses/abuses drugs recreationally. And so we have the problem: how do we control access to these drugs?

Let anyone who wants them get them? Then what about the irresponsible users who will jump out windows thinking they can fly? We can be hard-headed and go "if you kill yourself or someone else because you are such a fuck-up you don't know how to get high responsibly, that's your problem" but I don't think society as a whole will be happy with that. Certainly not the families of those harmed by the druggies. 'Make it all legal' may be a good plan or not, but the after-effects have to be considered as well.

"If you fuck yourself up we will spend countless sums on helping you fuck yourself up, but heaven forfend we make rehab or counselling mandatory"? We're not seeing much benefit there.

"Everyone gets arrested" - I'm sort of on this side, and no I don't believe "poor Jamal had his life ruined because the cops caught him with a small amount of weed for his own use". But yeah, I'm willing to agree that this can be bad for small users and doesn't shift the large dealers or criminal gangs.

The problem with "make it all legal" is that we can't put the genie back in the bottle, and we can't undo harm that occurs when people do fuck around and find out.

I'd prefer to live in a society where people had the legal option to choose psychedelics over alcohol as their recreational drug of choice.

Psychedelics are far more physically safer: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Drug_danger_and_dependence-small.png

Users are far less likely to harm themselves or others when under the influence as compared to alcohol: https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-11660210

Psychedelics can cause you to quit more harmful drugs such as alcohol: https://www.nature.com/articles/nature.2012.10200

Additionally, psychedelics can inspire users to invent things, become more connected with the world, or feel a greater sense of purpose. Many psychedelics are non-addictive and can cause people to realize that they no longer need any drugs in their life.

If people switch from alcohol/pain-killers/benzos to psychedelics as their recreational drug of choice I think the net result would be less crime due to the drug effects being so different.

If people commit crimes (other than use/possession/distribution) then they should be held accountable in the same way as someone who committed the same crime sober.

I find myself in a weird position where I don't like to be alone for very long. I can't sit at home all day, and need to be around people fairly regularly. But once I'm around people and someone starts a conversation with me, I immediately can't wait for that conversation to end, even if it's interesting. I want to want to talk, but it just feels off and I never seem to know what to say.

The only workaround I've ever found to this is alcohol, which makes conversation entirely enjoyable, frictionless, and engaging, but it comes with obvious health downsides.

Are there any healthy remedies to make sociability not feel like awkward work?

Maybe add an activity so that conversation isn't the sole focus.

Any suggestions? I joined a climbing gym for a bit, but never got real into it. Seems like pickleball is all the rage these days... but it's kinda taken on that "Crossfit is all I talk about" vibe in my circles.

Whatever you like, or whatever you think might be useful. Fix something broken, make something new, kick a ball around, play cards or boules or dominoes. Something low stakes and easy access is going to get more takers than something that requires commitment and/or investment. Even if all you do is drink beer and eat pizza you can reframe it as a tasting session.

The trouble with climbing and that kind of activity is that it combines needing special arrangements with lacking a concrete purpose. Special arrangements make sense if you're trying to achieve a concrete objective like mending a car or remodelling your kitchen, it's a challenge you can look back on and see the result. It's not bounded by when you lose interest. And something that lacks a concrete purpose like playing cards is fine because it's so low stakes that it doesn't matter what the outcome is, you put the cards back in the packet and say see you next time. Or say fuck cards and throw them in the bin, who cares, it's less than the price of a beer.

The point is that you've got something to chew on conversationally beyond "So, how about those headlines? And did I tell you about my wellbeing lately?" Those will still come up but if the conversation lags there's a convenient external focus to return to that doesn't actually require talking. You can drift between talking and doing and talking about what you're doing without either one demanding precedence.

Yeah, for men working together on something is often much more natural than just talking for hours. I don't think there's anything at all strange about enjoying time with people but not enjoying conversation so much.

I’m kind of similar. But I treat conversation like a game where, if you’re friendly and open to it with enough people, you’ll eventually find those truly great conversations you remember for a while.

Marriage.

Nope, tried it already. Had very much the opposite of the intended effect.

What is this place?

This website is a place for people who want to move past shady thinking and test their ideas in a court of people who don't all share the same biases. Our goal is to optimize for light, not heat; this is a group effort, and all commentators are asked to do their part.

The weekly Culture War threads host the most controversial topics and are the most visible aspect of The Motte. However, many other topics are appropriate here. We encourage people to post anything related to science, politics, or philosophy; if in doubt, post!

Check out The Vault for an archive of old quality posts. You are encouraged to crosspost these elsewhere.


Why are you called The Motte?

A motte is a stone keep on a raised earthwork common in early medieval fortifications. More pertinently, it's an element in a rhetorical move called a "Motte-and-Bailey", originally identified by philosopher Nicholas Shackel. It describes the tendency in discourse for people to move from a controversial but high value claim to a defensible but less exciting one upon any resistance to the former. He likens this to the medieval fortification, where a desirable land (the bailey) is abandoned when in danger for the more easily defended motte. In Shackel's words, "The Motte represents the defensible but undesired propositions to which one retreats when hard pressed."

On The Motte, always attempt to remain inside your defensible territory, even if you are not being pressed.


New post guidelines

If you're posting something that isn't related to the culture war, we encourage you to post a thread for it. A submission statement is highly appreciated, but isn't necessary for text posts or links to largely-text posts such as blogs or news articles; if we're unsure of the value of your post, we might remove it until you add a submission statement. A submission statement is required for non-text sources (videos, podcasts, images).

Culture war posts go in the culture war thread; all links must either include a submission statement or significant commentary. Bare links without those will be removed.

If in doubt, please post it!


Rules


Recommended Posts And Communities

Recommended Realtime Chats