This makes me think "tulpamancy-lite". Not that that's a bad thing - perhaps it's like a safer tulpamancy. Some thoughts:

(It's just such little mannerisms that allow a shoulder advisor to be "really real"—to bring it to life, give it a personality separate from, and not dependent on, your brain's main central personality. Again, I don't have a sound explanation of the mechanics, but it works.) Would it be useful to have a shoulder-advisor not constrained by having to relate to a real example? Or perhaps, without that link it will just tend to become more and more like you, or otherwise drift into some territory outside reasonable personality-space. Although, authors seem to be able to write stories just fine.

How hard would it be to just create a shoulder-advisor from scratch? - I mean, people can do that with tulpas, and shoulder-advisors definitely seem like less work than tulpas (no need for hallucinating them).

Do shoulder-advisors have moral value?

I find that I get self-conscious when in public without close friends, and I've wanted (but have had neither the time nor motivation) to create a tulpa, with the idea that it will make everything a lot less stressful. They wouldn't really have any actual input on anything, but just sort of raise my baseline positivity and self-esteem. If there were two of me, I'd be a lot less afraid of doing anything.

How many solutions are there that we overlook because they seem childish or "cringe"? Maybe that's just something I notice, since I notice myself avoiding "cringe" things too much. I think being averse to cringe is not entirely a bad thing, because it helps rule out solutions that probably wouldn't work.

Here's a link that seems to confirm what I wrote: https://chandra.harvard.edu/graphics/resources/handouts/lithos/bullet_lithos.pdf

I think what's happening is basically that the pink shows where the visible mass is, but the purple shows where the mass should be according to gravitational lensing. Dark matter should pass straight through, and that is what we see according to lensing, even though the pink lags behind because it can collide (since it's mostly the hot plasma).

At least, I think that's what's happening... I myself am really confused and am pretty unconfident in that explanation.

I'm also confused as to what modified gravity predicts, and how bullet clusters disprove it. I guess what we'd see is that modified gravity would alter the gravity around the visible mass, not just make it magically act like it just passed through. Ie, a lot about gravity would have to change for such a drastic difference between the mass as perceived through x-rays and the mass as perceived through gravitational lensing.

This reminds me of lukeprog's post on motivation (I can't seem to find it though...; this should suffice). Your model and TMT kind of describe the same thing: you have more willpower for things that are high value and high expectancy. And the impulsiveness factor is similar to how there are different "kinds" of evidence: eg you are more "impulsive" to play video games or not move, even though they aren't high value+expectation logically.

I see. Thanks.

What does he do specifically? It's very unclear just from reading the Amazon description. Or is it like an entire program. I'm skeptical: I have never heard of this anywhere else, so it seems like one of those $100-bill-on-the-subway-floor type things.

it needed me to also have an active project I was working on that I actually enjoyed. I think otherwise I would have found other ways to distract myself and eventually undermined it to the point that I gave up.

Same with me. Although it's still better than nothing: the usual distractions are more habit than actually fun, and I've found that I read more interesting things instead of just mindlessly browsing social media.

I like to use the add-on LeechBlockNG (I don't know if you can use it on mobile). You can use it to outright block sites, but also delay access to the site before you actually enter, and also put time limits. The delay is something I haven't seen other apps/add-ons use a similar feature, and it's kind of a deal-breaker, since it solves the problem of "instant gratification" that makes social media (etc.) addicting.

I really agree with this. I have been thinking that we should "default to privacy", because if we think we have to share it, we will change our thoughts because of the social anxieties/pressures. (It's similar to that experiment that demonstrated people make better decisions if they didn't have to come to a solution first (I just remember this from reading HP:MOR).) Only after we reach the answer, (socially) unbiased, then we can decide to share it.

I don't think privacy means dishonesty. I personally really dislike lying, and I think it's because acting with false information sort of takes away their free will, and more practically, this creates a lot of uncertainty. But I think you can be honest about how you withhold information, to an extent: instead of lying, you can just say, "I won't tell you" or something like that. (I'm not sure how much that is based on the practicality of it and how much is it is a like a terminal value.)

I'm sort of confused by radical honesty. Is it really, truly, "radical"? Literally everyone has intrusive thoughts, and I personally sometimes have intrusive thoughts about raping or killing or saying racial slurs. I guess that's just a nitpick, because I can easily see how to be "maximally" honest (compared to normal communication).