Can confirm that cultural messaging around drugs made me delay useful mental health treatment.
- (Some) left straw-view: Meds are a way for The System to enslave you and destroy your creativity/individuality/humanity.
- (Some) libertarian straw-view: You're a strong smart Galt-like ubermensch already, why would you need drugs as a crutch?
- Conservative depressingly-common view: All this is fake, mental health is fake, you're just a whiny pussy who can't handle real life, bootstrap yourself.
All these views intersected into a rarely-explicit "I don't need medicine for my brain!" that hampered my life trajectory.
Then again, drug effects can have complex interactions with one's thinking, so who knows? Maybe I would've been more productive in high school and gotten into a better college... and then proceeded to work on the wrong things! (This is what some rationalists think happened with rats/EA as a whole, or OpenPhil, or therabouts something something moderation vs extremism yadda yadda)
I think lots of humans are also just starved for compliments in general, outside of contexts like "You are a waiter and the social script tells the table to thank you" or "You are someone's spouse". The classic example in my mind is "male vs female socialization" and its consequences, e.g. as discussed in this screenshotted tumblr post or this other one. Men often, in some sense, get "too few" wanted compliments, and women get inundated with too many unwanted ones. "It's like one person dying of dehydration watching another one drown". Then, of course, classic nightmarish social/cultural/internet incentives layer atop this dynamic and make it worse.
Widespread chronic human under-complimented-ness seems relatively easy to explain, from the supply-side. How often does the average person hand out unsolicited compliments, outside of well-known contexts like the restaurant example above? I'd hazard a guess of "too little". People could easily be "well-put-together" and still suffering from this, just as "feeling full" and "having proper nutrition" aren't the same.
I'm curious to see if I'm in this data, so I can help make it more accurate by providing info.
From the MIRI announcement:
Our big ask for you is: If you have any way to help this book do shockingly, absurdly well— in ways that prompt a serious and sober response from the world — then now is the time.
sober response from the world
sober response
Uh... this is debatably a lot to ask of the world right now.
I said "one of the best movies about", not "one of the best movies showing you how to".
Can... uh... at least partly confirm 🙃