army1987 comments on Open thread, August 5-11, 2013 - Less Wrong

3 Post author: David_Gerard 05 August 2013 06:50AM

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Comment author: sixes_and_sevens 05 August 2013 04:03:00PM 3 points [-]

I've downvoted this for being bad advice that I explicitly requested you refrain from giving.

Comment author: achiral 06 August 2013 09:38:15PM -1 points [-]

I think that the advice is well suited to your situation. I suspect that you don't realize this because you spend so much time isolating yourself from people to study math.

I think it's great that so many people here are extremely intellegent, but one can hardly expect to relate very well to most people when one spends most of their time studying extremely obscure subjects alone while they sit down and barely move. That's pretty much the antithesis of what normal people enjoy.

Balance intellectual activities with specifically non-intellectual activities that are not based around the passive consumption of media. Actually get out into the world, move your body in new ways, interact with a variety of people, seek novel experiences, travel around to new places far away and try to find new aspects of the area where you live. Basically just do the opposite of limiting your physical mobility and emotional expressiveness in order to focus on logical thinking about intangible intellectual subjects.

Comment author: [deleted] 06 August 2013 10:32:58PM 1 point [-]

they sit down and barely move. That's pretty much the antithesis of what normal people enjoy.

You know there's a huge fraction of the people in the developed world who willingly spend a sizeable fraction of their waking time watching TV, right?

Comment author: achiral 07 August 2013 04:46:38AM 0 points [-]

Watching TV is not an intellectual activity in any real sense. Most TV stimulates the senses and evokes emotions in the viewer through storylines and such. This is obviously very different from studying mathematics seriously.