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 -
Understand that being superior means being a superset, not a set complement. Regardless of how special that resulting set is.
Meaning that you should be able to discuss rationalist concepts and contrarian ideas objectively in addition to being able to socialize with "normal" people. Assuming these are mutually exclusive is cope.
Why do this at all? The most powerful (not the traditional meaning of the word) people I know. The smartest, the most creative and most successful dont struggle with the kind of ideas we discuss on the motte. In fact that they can work with such a wide array is what makes them powerful. They are supersets of multiple people in one.
IME I've gotten over my disdain for dealing with "normies" once I internalized this. However this insight was downstream of just socializing anyways against my will, I just had to get over my disdain in any way possible.
Being able to do as much won't suddenly rob you of your ability to come on the motte and talk like an evil robot.
I can, I just don’t enjoy doing so anymore.
I get too frustrated that the Overton window is so narrow. If I approach things as a centrist (acknowledge the steelman on both sides) or say something like, “I was listening to Joe Rogan and…” I get treated like a social pariah. People have this attitude that they have to shut down the conversation as soon as someone mentions anything positive about the outgroup.
Socializing with "normal" people (risk averse overton window compliant people might be a better description of the shape?) in ways I find deeply meaningful is hard! But it can be rewarding.
I am of the strong opinion that people who shut down if you say something like “I was listening to Joe Rogan and…” Are doing something wrong. These people- need help. It's not your duty to get through to them and it can be very difficult- some people will just cling tighter even if you intimately befriend them first. But if you can get through to people and figure out how to uplift them, jailbreak them, and open their minds and help them to safely explore new ideas without fearing social retribution, value shift, and ego death...
Getting through to people can be very rewarding <3
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Yes, powerful and succesful people are busy pursuing power and success 24/7/365 and have no time for any knowledge or ideas.
These things are for peasants. If CEO, billionaire or president finds he needs any ideas, he just tell his assistant to add some to his speech or powerpoint presentation.
Obligatory Galeev thread.
Obligatory dead bird unverified anecdote thread.
Of course, the young promising lawyer who has no idea what is atomic bomb and what is communism, has already more power and success that 90% of this forum.
Riiiiiiggggghhhhhhttttt... Those CEOs of multi-million dollar companies have no ideas.
Musk, Gates, Bezos, are totally devoid of any ideas or understanding of how things work.
Source: Twitter threads.
I think your comment is asinine and dismissive enough of what I said that I don't need to elaborate further than what I said above.
I won't dox myself too much, but I know 9 figure, net-worth individuals. And making it about esoteric knowledge is missing the point. It's about seeing the "obvious" that is only obvious in retrospect, but it's obvious. It's more about knowing 10,000 disparate facts about 10,000 different things literally. It's not about the esoteric knowledge, it's about the volume of publicly available common knoweldge.
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What do you mean by this? Do you mean that they just don't have trouble with social isolation?
I'm reminded of quote from Teller that goes: "von Neumann would carry on a conversation with my 3-year-old son, and the two of them would talk as equals, and I sometimes wondered if he used the same principle when he talked to the rest of us."
I think the sentiment is something like the most clever can find stimulation in anything, they don't have to restrict themselves to only the things that they think are the most erudite.
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