My communication rule is "using lols to soften your too long message, doesn't really work and I can't explain why."

I also recommend using this medical framing, where you take antidepressants, as a medical treatment for depression, if you have depression.

I have like 5 days of water saved for me/partner. I figure 2 days no water could happen under normal disaster situations (like 9/11 10 blocks away or something idk) but getting out into weeks is beyond my prepper aspirations. Does that track?

It's clicking to me how legibility and Goodhardt relate. What if an elite's window into society is Goodhardt-corrupted? This can happen without AI if they're corrupt, or just out of touch. It does seem like a sycophantic AI can really do something novel to this situation. If legibility is low enough, and AI helps make the system legible, outer alignment failure might lead to a successful, permanent deception of the user.

Also it's sort of crazy how AI more than any other STEM I've ever worked with collapses the gap from "very out there" to "practical." If you're using AI for observability, this is a non-negotiable problem you have to solve. Claude Code does answers-faking today; that sort of thing can happen in an observability system.

• "Learned helplessness" is a quasi-popular-therapy word for this.
• You're bringing up cognitive behavior therapy techniques for dealing with it basically. The oreo/heaven-or-hell thing is cognitive defusion in that you're showing your intention and anxiety sort of floats apart from reality. It's more specifically similar to an exposure response prevention exercise: induce the problem on purpose then react to it in a more defused way.
• I'm not entirely sure how this relates to seeing this pattern in others. If they're your friend, you typically take a two-pronged approach: help superficially and get them to address the root problem to the extent you're aware of a root problem. If the attention is the point, the most loving thing to do is show it can be asked for and given freely. Fake pain won't prevent getting attention any more than it will cause getting attention.

I think those "spaces" debate definitely invoke why the division exhibits in the first place. For example when someone is worried about a trans person attacking someone in one bathroom or the other, they very clearly are invoking the fact that the bathrooms are segregated to reduce violence. In girls' sports, it's always about competition, body size, some sort of social benefit of promoting women, bathroom privacy. I just don't think you've diagnosed the right problem here. Like as soon as someone gets to the word "because" in their argument about trans rights, they talk about why that gender segregation exists.

You usually realize you're ranting mid-way through the rant. Or possibly, you're posting to a reddit sub with the word "rants" in its name.

 A lot of this doesn't pass the smell test. 

• Most obviously - studies that say being vegan is good for you are bad studies. Studies that say being vegan is bad for you though, you acknowledge they're correlation but seem to let it speak for itself.
• I don't really like the "just look at that crappy male vegan podcaster" argument. It's invalidated by the 3 super muscly, athletic vegan friends (rock climbing, rock climbing, fencing) I can think of, anyway.
• I think you're lumping in psychiatry with nutrition. I don't agree psychiatry is stuck in a metaphorical 1800. Generally we can give you questionnaires and run blood work and figure out how your mood is doing. Is it perfect? No. Is it good enough to reject pseudoscience and follow our psychiatry science? Yes.
• To my knowledge there is no psychiatric or medical recommendation against going vegan.
• I think you're indexing strongly on the risk of a mystery nutrient that won't matter for 5 years. I think about 2 orders of unlikelihood out there -- nutrient we really don't know about it, and the effects go a bit past the window you might correlate your vegan diet change to your mood, which I take to be around 1 year of conscientiousness.
• Part of the problem with going this hard on rejecting science as too incomplete, is which intuitionistic knowledge do you privilege? Going all in against ultra processed food is more popular, and if you accidentally put a vegan back onto more processed meats, it's not really clear this is a win, against equally probably intuitionist knowledge. I'd probably cut back on microplastics in your diet I guess. And GMOs, why not.
• You're underestimating vegan as a tradition. My gut estimate is a few million over 50-75 years. It's enough to smoke test most issues you'd run into.

Where I agree with you:

• If I had spare research dollars on this question, I would explore if vegan causes neuroses chemically. It's another chore to worry about if nothing else, but so is any culture or religion with a meal practice.
• The vegan movement as a whole is in denial that we need to eat a lot of protein. It's not a huge gap but a vegan probably wants to supplement on the order of 20-40g of protein a day on top of regular meals.

For what it's worth I was vegan about 10 years and quit about 2 years ago. I have been more neurotic since then, easily.

• It's out of date given how much dating has moved to apps.
• And before apps, it was friends/families, and various communities like church, more than it was bars.
• Whether cause or effect, alcohol interest has gone down, so it's only weirder to picture meeting someone in a bar.
• There's some moral panic that Gen Z doesn't know how to talk to people in person which interacts with your question somehow. Like people will excessively mourn the loss of bar dating, when actually meeting dates while drunk sort of sucks. I'm sure there's a kernel-of-truth here, but generational moral panics are pretty much the default.
• It's extremely sitcom-friendly in a way that staring at phones and computers isn't.
• By the time it's in TV/movies, it's already heavily romanticized. The best example is "Cheers" which is a bar-as-church show. But the show is made when that type of community is already bygone.
• When I was dating 10 years ago people still romanticized "meeting someone organically," but not in any serious way that would stop them from app dating.

One quirk about the political donation problem is that activists respond to negative messaging but the broader base -- people who may donate/volunteer/vote based on the candidate not the party -- responds to positive messaging. I think it's fair to say this creates a "poisoning the well" problem, where the fundraising emails are doom, activists respond to doom, but the base is cut off from the party. Relevant to this forum, something like "ensure AI benefits everyone" might message better with the base, and "prevent AI from killing everyone" might message better with the activists.