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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Notes -
Not really shocked or saddened. Scott may put his rationalist persona in the foreground, but in the end he's a human like any other - unreasonable to the extreme in any area he's not actively dedicated to reasoning his way through. And people usually avoid reasoning out anything if the process would be painful to them, which I guess it would be for someone who is likely circumcised himself and has a strong cultural attachment to the practice.
This doesn't really change anything. I'd never circumcise my child, advise anyone to do it or even condone it...but it's one of those little atrocities that people commit daily that's also just not significant enough to not tolerate. As long as they only do it to their own children I can live with it, and hope that they get a ton of value out of it. Any pro-circumcision propaganda is detestable though. Since Scott doesn't seem to be doing that - correct me if I'm wrong here, as if that weren't the whole purpose of the Motte - I'd say consider the man on those merits of his that are actually relevant to our interests.
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