An important point to me about "happy death spiral" is group effect : you join a group (be it a company for work, a political movement or even Less Wrong) and you start giving signals showing you belong to the group, agreeing with the thesis of the group, being exposed to more of the group rhetoric, ...
To counter that effect, I found that most useful thing to do is not to stay alone and refuse joining any group, which is anyway very hard to do, but to be part of different groups, who have different outlooks and sometimes contradictory outlooks on things, so you can sort out ideas on your own, and avoid falling completely to one attractor.
Today's post, Resist the Happy Death Spiral was originally published on 04 December 2007. A summary (taken from the LW wiki):
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This post is part of the Rerunning the Sequences series, where we'll be going through Eliezer Yudkowsky's old posts in order so that people who are interested can (re-)read and discuss them. The previous post was Affective Death Spirals, and you can use the sequence_reruns tag or rss feed to follow the rest of the series.
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