Addicted to curiosity.
Declan Molony
Karma: 140
An unintended consequence: While writing this post, I realized that adopting this heuristic for my dating life led to it bleeding into other parts of my life. In conversations with friends, family, bosses, I found myself asking what an emotionally healthy person would do in this context and it improved those interactions, as well.
To make an analogy to diet, you essentially replaced a sugar fix from eating Snickers bars with eating strawberries. Gradation matters!
I had a similar slide with my technologies, as I explained in the post. I eventually landed on reading books. But even that became a form of intellectual procrastination as I wrote in my latest LW post.
Another example of Mental Masturbation I decided to exclude from the main text:
While playing a piano piece I already know fairly well but am lacking in one specific spot, my brain will say, “Hey, rather than painstakingly drill the 1-2 measures that are tricky, you should play the entire song through to get a balanced perspective of the piece!” To fix this, I put a sticky note on my music stand that says: “Stop Mental Masturbation and practice the hard part!”
The person totally understands the point I’m trying to make, and is then surprised by something I assumed they already understood.
Reminds me of Expecting Short Inferential Distances.
When I watched “Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse” in theaters last year, the animations were amazing but I left two hours later with a headache. Maybe it’s a sign that I’m getting older, but it was just too much for my brain.
Good point. The question I use to identify perceptual blindspots is best suited to ask people who are interested in your genuine well-being. Asking a toxic ex-girlfriend is probably not going to be a productive conversation...
It was outside the scope of the original post and cut for space, but I’ll add that these types of conversations operate best when they are a collaboration. Even when I’m the one receiving constructive criticism, I try to help them make the best argument. Then, we can determine together whether it’s an accurate assessment. Regardless of its veracity, you may discover a new way that people perceive you that maybe you weren’t aware of before.
Depends on the conversation and application. When applied to engineering, math is the language used to solve problems.
Math is also used, for example, to help explain the principles of physics. And the physical laws help tell the story of our universe.
Huh. When I search using either google or duckduckgo they both show the tweet under Images. I edited the above post to include this image, per your suggestion.
I attempted to find additional sources online while writing this post, but there’s nothing out there. Perhaps the Youtuber stumbled across it at the time and wrote it down, but it wasn’t covered by any media outlets. And that’s part of the point I was trying to make—trolls can take you down with no repercussions. Keisha’s left to pick up the pieces of her tarnished reputation.
I think it depends on the motivation. If you’re trying to become stronger by following shoulds/oughts (ie: external motivation), you’ll most likely burnout and may (incorrectly) assign the blame to yourself.
Example: let’s say you’re trying to lose weight. If the motivation for doing so is because you feel you ought to be healthy or to try to gain the approval of others, then you’ll most likely fail. Try to remember previous times in which you attempted to achieve something with the use of external motivation. Did you succeed then? If not, why not?
Let’s compare that example with being internally motivated to lose weight. What first has to be asked genuinely is: why exactly do you want to lose weight? Let’s say you love the taste of food and believe only unhealthy food tastes great. Then exposure to a healthy-eating cooking class may help you realize that eating healthy is not a substitute for eating great-tasting food. Finding the right motivation is dependent upon being exposed to the right information that is unique to your situation. If the desire to change is not genuine, then you’ll never become stronger. So yes, I agree with you that “depression [is] manifested by doing it the wrong way.”
My original intent was in talking about how I shouldn’t use information I found online about the other person to try to impress them (e.g., I find out they used to play volleyball, then slip into conversation that I like volleyball). It makes things messy.
What you’re talking about is whether one should try to impress their date in general. In this case, my dating heuristic on what an emotionally healthy person would do is up for narrow interpretation. I say ‘narrow’ because lying to impress someone would be out of scope for the heuristic. But your interpretation (trying to authentically impress and attract someone), I think most people would agree, would be within scope.
Personally, I try to live a diverse lifestyle and let the other person decide on their own if they find me impressive.