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Eliezer_Yudkowsky comments on Strategies for dealing with emotional nihilism - Less Wrong
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I'm interested in testing what happens if you watch "8 minutes of courage":
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LI1FP3czJnY
Are you supposed to watch it full-screen while staring into the eyes of the wolf and listening to the thumpa-thumpa on headphones?
I found the off-putting slogans too jarring to make up for the rest, and I generally don't have the patience to watch video. I'd prefer to look at a static, full-screen montage of the better ones.
I made up a few more:
THE VERY BEST YOU CAN POSSIBLY DO
IS WHERE THE REAL WORK BEGINS
DOING THE IMPOSSIBLE
WAS JUST FOR PRACTICE
RUN
FOR THEIR LIVES
DEATH RIDES A PALE HORSE
STEAL THE HORSE
ETA: A static, full-screen montage of the better ones.
I like your last one. "Stealing the horse" should be a metaphor for conquering death.
T-shirt design: in an arid landscape, a man on Death's horse rearing up in triumph, while Death, depicted as the traditional cloaked skeleton, lies dead on the desert floor, pinned to the ground by his own scythe through his chest.
Meme generator.
The premise is alright, and having a well-made video like that handy would be useful. Unfortunately, the execution sucks; most of the platitudes are alright, but a few of them were very jarringly bad, and that ruined it for me. They also seem to presuppose that you're trying to psych yourself for a fight or competition of some sort (many of them make reference to a human opponent), which doesn't work to motivate me to, say, finish the programming I'm working on.
I'm not exactly the target audience-- did you watch it through to the end?
It was so over the top and insane that it didn't knock me into raving self-hatred, but I did feel some habitually tight muscles getting tighter.
I got a possibly salable button slogan from it.
I think a relatively small proportion of people are susceptible to pep talks, but I'm curious about whether I'm right.
Which slogan might you buttonize?
Being #1 is how I warm up.
I didn't actually see my favourite one in the video:
Bite more than you can chew
THEN CHEW IT
I think it was there.
It's at 7:56.
I'll have to try watching it again when I'm feeling down and/or unproductive. It didn't elicit much of a response either way. However, according to a friend, listening to Courage Wolf and adopting that sort of over-the-top "fight everything" attitude helped her change things in her life. She's now adventurously taken a working holiday in Australia, though I can't say to what extent these things are correlated.
That actually made me kind of upset.
I couldn't even watch two minutes of it. The music was sort of cool, but the text was a distasteful blend of macho crap and meaningless, vaguely punny platitudes.
Hrm... I wonder then about the effect of absurdly over the top macho crap: Specifically, the original Powerthirst. (TURBOPUNS!)
That's just funny. Especially "400 BABIES".
As I said, absurdly over the top. Is indeed amusing. :)
I didn't feel a surge of motivation, but I laughed a lot. The best one was "PROCRASTINATE LATER". Some of the offensive ones would've been more appropriate for Advice Dog. The music wasn't good at all, why is everyone saying it was?
What was your theory?
Apparently my theory was wrong.
When I'm feeling down, what snaps me out of it will be something which exhibits what TV Tropes would call the Determinator trope. Shinji 40k, Fate/stay Night UBW route, etcetera. 8 minutes of courage is that in highly concentrated form, and the silliness doesn't bother me. I guess, however, that this is an idiosyncratic response which doesn't extend to anyone else.
But yes, when I get up in the morning, and didn't get quite enough sleep, and the prospect of working on the rationality book fills me with weary dread, watching "8 Minutes of Courage" is enough to make me think, "YOU CALL THIS AN OBSTACLE? I CALL IT A SPEEDBUMP".
Maybe when MoR finishes, I'll find someone with the flash skills to do some slogans set to the Rationality Patronus and the music of Emiya #0.
I tend to think of myself as someone who's nothing like a Determinator, so looking at that particular video made me feel inadequate.
That's something like it at my end-- we're definitely in PJ Eby territory of how different people hear advice.
With an added layer of "would you really like another round of why there aren't many women at LW?",
About pep talks, mostly from people who hate them. It would probably be useful to get some counterbalancing detail from people who like them.
I think pep talks only work on me when I'm in a reasonable mood to begin with, and even then they can still backfire some of the time.
(I tried to find an appropriate Gurren Lagann clip to link to, but the copyright police are keeping them off of Youtube. Sorry!)
I have a similar response, but it is concentrated to only very few of the slogans, probably one in twenty or less. "Do not settle for second, winning is everything" has little or no effect on me, nor do some of the more outrageous/offensive/sexual ones, but "THEY DIED FOR YOU; LIVE FOR THEM" or "FALL SEVEN TIMES; GET UP EIGHT" are like a direct injection of energy.
My response is probably concentrated to one in five or something like that.
I chuckled in amusement. Basically, my reaction was similar to cousin_it's and jimrandomh's.
I don't find machismo nearly as distasteful as Alicorn does, but probably a bit more than you do.
Good music.
Would be more fun with Insanity Wolf.
I concur with Alicorn: