The original thread had some discussion of doing a postmortem for every case of psychosis in the community, and a comparison with death - we know people sometimes die at random, and we know some things increase risk of death, but we haven't stopped there and have developed a much, much more gears-y model of what causes death and made a lot of progress on preventing it.
One major difference is that when people die, they are dead - i.e. won't be around for the postmortem. And for many causes of death there is little-to-no moralizing to be done - it's not the person's fault they died, it just happened.
I don't know how the community could have a public or semi-public postmortem on a case of psychosis without this constituting a deep dive into that person's whole deal, with commentary from all over the community (including the least empathetic among us) on whether they made reasonable choices leading up to the psychosis, whether they have some inherent shortcoming ("rip to that person but I'm built different" sort of attitudes), etc. I can't imagine this being a good and healthy experience for anyone, perhaps least of all someone just coming out of a psychotic episode.
(Also, the attached stigma can be materially damaging - I know of people who now have a difficult time getting grants or positions in orgs, after having one episode years ago and being very stable ever since. I'm not going to make claims about whether this is a reasonable Bayesian choice by the employers and grant funders, but one can certainly see why the person who had the episode would want to avoid it, and how they might get stuck in that position with no way out no matter how reasonable and stable they become.)
This does seem unfortunate - I'd prefer it if it were possible to disseminate the information without these effects. But given the very nature of psychosis I don't think it's possible to divorce dissecting the information from dissecting the person.
Speaking about my own experience, but I predict it generalizes to many others:
I definitely frequently have the experience you're describing, of building up an aversion to a task I'm procrastinating and then finding it to be a lot less unpleasant than I expected when I actually get around to it.
But I have a more gears-level model of why this happens: it's when I have major open questions about how to approach the task in the first place.
I haven't done the drill you're describing intentionally, but I have definitely noticed that if I do several of these kinds of things in quick succession (e.g. when I decide today is the day to catch up on my backlog of stuff I've been putting off), even if each individual one doesn't feel so bad, I end up mentally exhausted and resistant to demands.
So I think the cognitive load of figuring out how to even go about a task is genuinely costly to my brain, and it correctly feels averse to doing too much of it.
1
1I spent an evening chatting with Claude about what its internal experiences are like, and ways that it relates to autistic people, and ended up getting more than a glimmer of the crush-fascination-limerence feeling.
As a result I have resolved to avoid all casual curious chatting with LLMs. I'll still use them as a tool, but no laying around at 1AM asking Claude "whatcha thinking about?" lest I fall in love with a machine.
I think a decent chunk of rationalists (myself included) are very aware that positive emotions can be lying to you - the notion of metaphorically "wireheading" is in the water supply, as are manic episodes, as is the fact that SBF was taking lots of stimulants which probably caused him to take stupid risks, as are the notions of limerence and NRE.
On the other hand you have the jhana folks who seem to be actively trying to train their emotions to be less correlated with reality...
Adding my anecdote:
The closest I have come to drowning was in about 6 inches of water, and I was 10 years old!
I was at a playground with water features and there was a little bridge over a little stream, and I looked at it and thought "I bet I could fit through there!" I was old enough that I really should have realized this was a bad idea, but... didn't, until I found myself with my head perfectly wedged under the bridge, face down in the water.
As is common in moments of panic, I was stuck for only a few seconds but it felt like an eternity. My parents were far enough away that I didn't think they'd notice (because they very reasonably thought I was old enough to take care of myself on a playground), and I wasn't sure anyone else would either - even if I thrashed around, adults not looking too closely might think I was just splashing and playing. I remember thinking "wow, this is it, this is how I die, what a dumb way to go!"
After a few seconds of wriggling I became unstuck and was fine, but it was definitely a wake-up call about how seeming dangerous and actually being dangerous are not the same thing.
In regions of the US that have a lot of open water (natural bodies or just hot places where lots of people have swimming pools), it's pretty common to start basic floating lessons in infancy, because you never know when a kid might accidentally fall into the water.
In other regions it's a lot less so.
I've seen and considered this advice before, but when I am doing perhaps too much apologizing, the reason is usually that I actually am trying to get signal on whether/how much I've upset the other person.
Even if they only say "it's okay" out of obligation, I can usually tell from tone and word choice and so on whether that's what's going on. There's a big difference between a terse "it's fine" and a warm "what? No, it's totally fine, you have nothing to apologize for". It's not perfect, of course, since people are sometimes intentionally deceptive here, but it's at least a decent chance of decent signal.
Thanking the person does not generally achieve this. In a sufficiently close relationship with sufficiently direct communication norms, I can sometimes just ask directly, but it would still be pretty weird to ask for every minor thing.
Hmm, while it's true that many women can still attract a mate/have plenty of sex if they don't put effort into their looks, it definitely seems to me (anecdotally, through both my own lived experience and what others talk about) that women get more male attention when they do put in effort
Maybe true, but I think it's even more likely that the world would be better if everyone were asexual, or at least did not have such a high sex drive that it causes them to do things they don't endorse
I agree that this is worrisome, but on the other hand, when I imagine a future where I'm memetically trapped into only ever consuming the future AI-generated versions of LessWrong and glowfic and ACX and The Precipice, and only ever attending the future AI-generated versions of LessOnline and Manifest and ratsphere Bay Area House Parties, and my children only ever meeting other children from the local ratsphere homeschooling collective, that's....not the worst outcome?
Don't get me wrong, in and of itself it seems like bad news for epistemics, there's a reason we have tried to avoid going full cult, but almost all futures that I can realistically imagine seem worse than that.