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kajro comments on Links about naturalism - Less Wrong
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If I could travel back and time and show my 18 year old newly deconverted self on thing, it would be Existential Angst Factory. At the time, I was so depressed I was near incompetence. (I failed three of the first five courses I took in college). I thought I was depressed because life had no meaning without religion. In reality, I was depressed because
I went to therapy, which didn't work. I read self-help books, didn't work. I read continental philosophy, which didn't work. The only thing that did work was when my "other problems" started being solved. My relationship with my parents improved. I cut back my self-harm 95%. I received compliments that boosted my self-esteem. I made friends. I graduated with a manageable debt and found a job in Australia that will go a ways to reduce that debt. Now I'm happy, and it had nothing to do with changing my paradigm and everything to do with changing my circumstances. Reading Existential Angst Factory when I was 18 might have shaved off a couple years of misery.
Being relatively young I get really excited when someone gives advice that they wish they realized earlier (as if I'm privy to some unique and incredibly useful information), but I've now realized the huge plethora of information that I wish I could share with the "me of 2 years ago". After years of reading reddit, hacker news, etc, I must have come across hundreds of similar advice threads, and yet even now I feel like there are just so many things I figured out way too late. Our brains have a horrible self satisfaction mechanism.
Not that this devalues your advice at all (I have similar problems, so I'm incredibly grateful for the link). Just an observation.
There's also a lot of bad advice out there. So even if you find some good advice, it won't help you because you can't pick it out of the bad advice.
Which is why it makes sense to seek good advice on sites that have better signal-to-noise ratio.
For me this is one important aspect of LW. I can get good advice almost anywhere. But in most of those places I can also get bad advice with high probability. -- On LW I trust people to self-censor before saying something stupid (as opposed to enjoying a happy death spiral), and even if they fail, I trust other people to correct them. It does not work perfectly, but it's better than not even trying.