Good point -- I removed the tag!
Somewhat related, though different in various ways, is this post by Bryan Caplan: https://www.econlib.org/the-cause-of-what-i-feel-is-what-i-do-how-i-eliminate-pain/
I'm curious to hear examples of other worthwhile things in the direction that you have in mind!
Thanks -- good points and well-presented with precision and flair!
Good point! It could be that both kinds of mental exercise (excess stimulation and lack of stimulation) are important for building mental strength; modern society provides the former in abundance (and particularly so for LessWrong readers!), so the form of exercise we're constrained on is the lack-of-stimulation kind (and that's where meditation helps). How far-fetched does that sound?
An anonymous friend to whom I sent this post writes:
He has a good point that most people just want to do the universal “safety” precautions. I think a big reason that he doesn’t mention is that reasonable precautions are how all businesses defend themselves from lawsuits (e.g. sexual harassment and DEI training); as long as they take the reasonable precautions, then they are immune from lawsuits. But I don’t buy “safety” as an explanation for what policies are possible. It sounds like a just-so story for why we are in the mess that we are in. Vaccines are available and thus a reasonable precaution because the government subsidized them. Respirators and HVAC filters could have been a reasonable precaution if governments had subsidized and encouraged them. I think better leadership could have made a difference.
I wish the federal government made it patriotic to make PPE and safety retrofits. They should have announced programs to set up melt blown respirator manufacturing in America. They should have made a tax credit (like the solar tax credit) for retrofits that improve ventilation in retail or offices.
I just got my booster dose today (December 24) and intend to monitor closely. I'll be regularly updating https://github.com/vipulnaik/diet-exercise-health/blob/master/notes/2021-12-24-pfizer-covid-vaccine-booster-dose.md with temperature readings and subjective details of my experience.
I did similar logging after the second dose, that you can see here: https://github.com/vipulnaik/diet-exercise-health/blob/master/notes/2021-06-25-pfizer-covid-vaccine-dose-2.md
By "this way" do you mean the way I wrote it or the way Alexei would have preferred?
I added logs of two further ChatGPT sessions, one of which repeated many of the prompts I used here, tested against the 2023-01-09 version of ChatGPT: https://github.com/vipulnaik/working-drafts/commit/427f5997d48d78c69e3e16eeca99f0b22dc3ffd3
I had originally been thinking of formatting these into a blog post or posts, and I might still do so, but probably not for the next two months, so just sharing the raw logs for now so that people reading the comments on this post see my update.