If we focus only on acceptance and immediacy, we may ignore historically conditioned patterns that are causing harm to ourselves and others. I’ve worked with a number of spiritual practitioners who are able to generate very spacious states of mind but who avoid dealing with basic human concerns like work and relationship.

Reminds me of Freud's "love and work" as the fundamentals of mental health.

As children, we were basically powerless in the face of the adults around us. We couldn’t simply leave and navigate the world by ourselves. And, our parents had their own issues, issues that came across in their relationships with us. [...] his parents rewarded him disproportionately for demonstrating his independence.

This is called "racket" in transactional analysis. The idea is that as children we need our parents' attention, but our parents may be selective about our emotional expression; reward some of them with their attention, and ignore the others. To get more attention we learn to convert the unrewarded emotions to the rewarded ones. And the habit often stays long after we stop being dependent on our parents, because we are not consciously aware that this is what we are doing.

For example, as a child I was often ignored or rebuked when I expressed happiness, but received compassion when I expressed sadness. So I learned to convert happiness into sadness... for example, by finding some flaw that ruined what otherwise could have been a fully positive experience, and then making that flaw the central point of the story -- that made it a story that I could share with my parents and feel accepted. Nothing is perfect, so one can always find a flaw, but of course this habit reduced the amount of joy I felt in my life, and probably made me a less enjoyable person to be around.

It might seem that happiness shouldn't be a problem in this sense. Why should it matter if people important to me do not reward my happiness with their attention; happiness is already its own reward, shouldn't that be enough to reinforce it? -- The problem was that my parents judged my expressions of happiness as "silly", and I have unconsciously accepted that judgement. So it took some courage to learn to enjoy the "silly" feelings.

Sometimes you want/need other people to help you, and if you display less suffering, they may assume that it's not serious, and therefore won't help you. This can be a problem for people who do not display suffering in neurotypical or culturally expected ways.

Sometimes there are situations where you are not allowed to say "no", and then "I can't, can't anymore!!!" becomes the next best thing. Or sometimes people just suck at saying "no".

Weird. I think I remember seeing a different version. Not sure how that happened...

...maybe some of my ad-blocking programs interacted with the website's CSS in a bad way?

Uhm, if that's the case, I apologize for spreading misinformation.

.

Off topic, but Jesus, in the comment section: people [...] go to better schools [...] to increase their IQs [...] Not like anyone is born with a 170

I don't read newspapers, so I don't have much data. Perhaps I notice the bad things more, because I do not have the good things to balance it with? (Kinda like if neither you nor your friends have a dog, so the typical moment when you notice a dog is when some stranger's dog threatens you. So your model of a dog is that dogs attack strangers, and you miss all the nice moments when they play or relax, which is what their owners see.)

I was interviewed by a journalist twice in my life; both time the journalist wrote totally made up things unrelated to what I said; and I suspect that the story was already written long before they talked to me, they just wanted a name to attach to their fictional person.

Once I participated in a small peaceful protest (imagine a group of less than ten people standing on a street with banners for 30 minutes, then going home), and a TV commented on it while showing videos of looting (that happened a few months before, on the opposite side of the country, in a situation related neither to our cause nor our organization). When we called them by phone to complain, they just laughed at us, said that there were tiny letters saying that the videos were "illustrations" so it's legally okay, and if we have any complaints we are supposed to address them to their well-paid legal department. (We didn't do anything about it.)

A few years ago (I don't remember when exactly) there were "scientific" articles approximately every month about how theory of relativity was experimentally debunked; people shared them on Hacker News and social networks. And always a few weeks later there was a blog post somewhere explaining now it was just a mistake in calculation, because someone forgot to use a proper relativistic equation somewhere. Of course, these blog posts were not shared so much. -- Later, I guess, this topic went out of fashion. (Perhaps because the newspapers switched to stronger clickbait?)

My very first blog post was a response to a popular journalist, basically just a long list of factual mistakes he made in a popular article. (And I mean factual mistakes in a very literal sense, like how many countries were members of a specific organization, what year the organization started, etc. That is, not something that could be explained by different people having a different political opinion.)

Uhm, Gamergate. A situation where a bunch of nerds complains about the way journalists report on their hobby, and the journalists decide to go nuclear on them: holding ranks, posting absurd fabrications, refusing to even mention the talking points of the other side, then doubling down repeatedly until the topic gets debated at UN.

Which reminds me of how journalists treated James Damore. The "original memo" that practically all newspapers referred to was actually heaving redacted (all links to scientific papers removed). They even changed font to random sizes to have it appear unhinged.

...all these things considered, why should I even read newspapers?

No opinion on content, but wanted to say that I dislike the style where 90% of your article's content is someone else's article. If you provide a link to the original, I think it is okay to only quote the important parts.

The easiest rationality skill that you currently fail at is probably the most important one for you now.

So if you are someone like me, the basic rationality checklist will feel pretty condescending. Something like:

• Have you even noticed that you have a problem, or is it just a vague bad feeling that you are trying to ignore most of the time?
• Have you spent at least five minutes by the clock trying to describe the problem and come up with some possible solutions?
• Did you write down the results, or are you going to rediscover the same "original insights" every few months?
• Did you make a specific falsifiable action plan with a specific deadline, or is it just a vague non-committal verbal declaration to "try doing better the next time"?
• Did you notice that the deadline has passed and/or the plan failed, and are you going to do something about it?
• Okay, the same plan has failed three times in a row, and that's probably not a coincidence, but evidence of the plan being unrealistic. Are you going to reflect on that failure and revise the plan, or will you keep doing the same thing over and over again (perhaps with increasing time intervals, so that you can conveniently forget about the entire thing at some moment in the future)?
• Have you tried asking a friend for help? Or even asking an LLM for advice?
• Maybe you shouldn't be trying to do so many things at the same time, but focus on one or two most important ones. Otherwise you will use temporary improvements in the less important topics as an excuse to procrastinate on the more important ones. (You can still write down the less important ones and return to them later.)
• Yes, it is hard. Which is not the same as impossible. If it was easy, you would probably be doing that already (and complaining about something else being hard).

I want to ask: how have you coped with something like this, and how can one go trought it?

If you believe in MWI, then your friend is still alive in another branch. This branch of you will never meet him again. But some other branch of you can.

In this branch, take care to interact with the people who are still alive here.

...but those are just excuses, and it would be preferable if all our friends lived happily in all branches.

Have the AI edit a condescending post so that you can read it without taking damage. Variations on this theme are also highly underutilized.

Fun exercise: have an AI read the entire frontpage of r/SneerClub and steelman the criticism, try to remove all toxicity, all value disagreements (e.g. if someone thinks that rationality or fanfic or polyamory or whatever are intrinsically stupid, ignore that part), etc.

Simply, AI being unemotional and impartial (but configurable) could be the perfect tool to steelman your opposition without enduring the emotional cost of reading texts that are toxic on purpose.

This is heinous behavior. Somehow it seems like this is legal? It should not be legal.

Yep. The obvious next iteration is something like: the ICE agents shoot you, and produce deepfake evidence of you having attacked them.

Should we make a "skill" file for the AI to play Pokemon?

Hmmm... on one hand, this feels like cheating, depending on how much detail we provide. In extreme, we could give the AI an entire sequence of moves to execute in order to complete the game. That would definitely be cheating. The advice should be more generic. But how generic is generic enough? Is it okay to leave reminders such as "if there is a skill you need to overcome an obstacle, and if getting that skill requires you to do something, maybe prioritize doing that thing", or is that already too specific?

(Intuitively, perhaps an advice is generic enough if it can be used to solve multiple different games? Unless that is a union of very specific advice for all the games in the test set, of course.)

On the other hand, the situation in deployment would be that we want the AI to solve the problem and we do whatever is necessary to help it. I mean, if someone told you "make Claude solve Pokemon in 2 days or I will kill you" and wouldn't specify any conditions, you would cheat as hard as you could, like upload complete walkthroughs etc. So perhaps solving a problem that we humans have already solve is not suitable for a realistic challenge.

one annoying thing about anti-psychiatry people

I find annoying that they take "X is related to something" as a proof that "X does not actually exist". I'll try to explain by a parody:

"Doctors sometimes tell you that you have a broken leg. But why is that a problem? Legs naturally come with different shapes and different conditions. It's just that capitalism requires you to work, and that sometimes involves walking to places, and a broken leg decreases your productivity. If we could for a moment abandon the mindset of capitalism and productivity, we could easily realize that there is simply no such thing as a broken leg."

But people would care about broken legs even without capitalism, because broken legs hurt, and because people who have broken legs often wish they could walk and run, even for reasons unrelated to productivity.

Basically, most of their arguments feel like this to me, except instead of a broken leg, insert autism or schizophrenia or Down syndrome or whatever. It is completely irrelevant what the condition does to the person and everyone around them. No no no, you are just brainwashed by capitalism to believe that <insert symptom> is a problem.