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).
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Do we have any humanities-brained fellows here?
In Rationalist groups, I feel like an odd duck. My passions are philosophy and the arts -- especially moral philosophy -- but I see them coexisting side-by-side with the intellectual world in a sort-of symbiotic, 19th century German way. This is a rare attitude among humanities-brains though. There's a weird, depressing tendency of the humanities towards absolute self-exile now. As if studying the humanities means adopting a milquetoast belief in "human nature" divorced from any serious biological or psychological context. You must accept as axiom that literature is important, even though this literature has no tangible message to give, no way to prove its importance; the Western Canon matters but no one knows why. Undeniably, books would be an amazing way to make sense of this confusing age we live in, but that requires admitting the sciences actually matter, which is an awful blow to the ego.
Okay, I didn't mean to rant. This is my way of saying, damn I wish I'd gotten into the sciences sooner. This is a topic that has 0 exposure, but the way we segregate our intellectual disciplines is, IMO, very damaging. When everyone engaged with a thing has the same thinking style, and interacts with it in the same way, blind spots form. Maybe we need some organic amount of cross-pollination to keep things healthy.
I mean I hobby write, if that counts. And one thing that gets me into it is that a story can much more easily get a person to understand a concept or idea or problem much more readily than a science book or philosophy book. Write a philosophy book about what makes people human and nobody reads it. Write a story about whether some creature is worthy of human rights and people talk about it. Literature is humanity dreaming — making sense of the facts of the world.
Yeah, this was the original point of literature. Somehow everyone forgot this. Old literature is still helpful, but new stories to fill the same purpose would be amazing.
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There are a bunch of humanities-ish people in the 'postrat' area of the twitter rationalist social sphere.
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Yes, I'm low IQ as well.
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