Depends on how old the friend is, and how prone she is to making dramatic declarations of that sort she doesn't actually follow through on, and on her relationship to her parents.
In general - if she's young (which from my current perch maps to mid-20s or so) and her relationship with her parents seems generally healthy, and she's not prone to following through on ill-advised oaths purely for the sake of consistency, I would probably ignore all of that and encourage her to talk (to someone) about her feelings about her father and his diagnosis and her own mental health, and expect her to gradually come to some kind of peace with it.
If she's older than that, or if she's more compulsive about consistency, I might engage her on the relationships question more actively... why not marry, for example? If her concern is with her spouse having to care for her, etc., I'd probably open the conversation up a little into questions of informed consent and whether she feels that's a situation people can choose to risk for themselves, and that sort of thing. If her concern is something else, I'd listen and try to decide whether it's a fair concern, and act accordingly.
If her relationship with her parents is unhealthy, I'd probably focus on that first. Not sure what I'd say exactly, but I'd encourage her to talk about that relationship and what she expects from it and whether she endorses that, and if not how she might go about changing that relationship.
She's almost 29, isn't prone of declarations of the kind at all (one of those ironic people who don't give much weight to others not giving much weight to what she said once), and hasn't done anything truly inconsistent with the claim in the last 6-7 years. She has talked about this issue with her friends, though many of them are child-free based on other considerations and so might not have steel manned homemaking. Her mother, who was the one to diagnose her father, has taken her to see a psychiatrist, who prescribed some antidepressants, I think (she als...
Related: LessWrong as a social catalyst
I primarily used my prior user profile asked questions of Less Wrong. When I had an inkling for a query, but I didn't have a fully formed hypothesis, I wouldn't know how to search for answers to questions on the Internet myself, so I asked them on Less Wrong.
The reception I have received has been mostly positive. Here are some examples:
Other student users of Less Wrong benefit from the insight of their careered peers:
In engaging with Less Wrong, with the rest of you, my experience has been that Less Wrong isn't just useful as an archive of blog posts, but is actively useful as a community of people. As weird as it may seem, you can generate positive externalities that improve the lives of others by merely writing a blog post. This extends to responding in the comments section too. Stupid Questions Threads are a great example of this; you can ask questions about your procedural knowledge gaps without fear of reprisal. People have gotten great responses about getting more value out of conversations, to being more socially successful, to learning and appreciating music as an adult. Less Wrong may be one of few online communities for which even the comments sections are useful, by default.
For the above examples, even though they weren't the most popular discussions ever started, and likely didn't get as much traffic, it's because of the feedback they received that made them more personally valuable to one individual than several others.
At the CFAR workshop I attended, I was taught two relevant skills:
* Value of Information Calculations: formulating a question well, and performing a Fermi estimate, or back-of-the-envelope question, in an attempt to answer it, generates quantified insight you wouldn't have otherwise anticipated.
* Social Comfort Zone Expansion: humans tend to have a greater aversion to trying new things socially than is maximally effective, and one way of viscerally teaching System 1 this lesson is by trial-and-error of taking small risks. Posting on Less Wrong, especially, e.g., in a special thread, is really a low-risk action. The pang of losing karma can feel real, but losing karma really is a valuable signal that one should try again differently. Also, it's not as bad as failing at taking risks in meatspace.
When I've received downvotes for a comment, I interpret that as useful information, try to model what I did wrong, and thank others for correcting my confused thinking. If you're worried about writing something embarrassing, that's understandable, but realize it's a fact about your untested anticipations, not a fact about everyone else using Less Wrong. There are dozens of brilliant people with valuable insights at the ready, reading Less Wrong for fun, and who like helping us answer our own personal questions. Users shminux and Carl Shulman are exemplars of this.
This isn't an issue for all users, but I feel as if not enough users are taking advantage of the personal value they can get by asking more questions. This post is intended to encourage them. User Gunnar Zarnacke suggested that if enough examples of experiences like this were accrued, it could be transformed into some sort of repository of personal value from Less Wrong