Glad to help get awareness back out, that's what these posts are for. How does it sound to schedule a meetup and post it? I'll put it in the list, and I put meetups for the following week into the headline.

Hey Emile, thanks for keeping an eye on this. In this case it's expected though. These summaries are originally posted to LW main. When I post the new one, I move the old one to discussion, adding a note at the top about the original post date.

Shannon really is a long-time and hugely contributive rationalist, hosting a ton of meetups in a great space and making a lot of other contributions as well. Thumbs up.

Yeah, there was a salt shortage, it was pretty tragic.

Though I am surprised as to the move (my model had been that by providing summary cuts, the posts would be easy to skip for the uninterested, and sufficiently unobtrussive), this is a fine move which I don't oppose.

For whatever credibility this statement has now, I had actually changed my mind just yesterday on my posting plans - while previous posts were met with reasonable writing critiques, and this last post was remarked as a vast improvement and received no such critiques, it too was little-voted. Future posts therefore also seemed likely to be little-voted, whereas previously I thought I may be able to change that.

While being a bit anti-thetical to the point of the post, I recall a Slytherin motto that we become ourselves by following our desires wherever they lead us. In my own history, it was my desires to become super focused and productive that lead me to a lot of stuff I really value now. Was kind of a goal that defeated itself, in that to best achieve it I gave up the goal, but even so.

But a datum you might find useful is that most of these were some of my favorite media for years, I absorbed myself in them, and they mostly made me ignore everything except for self-improvement. In particular I was extremely fond of The Prince of Nothing series (it was primarily this series to which I compared LOTR). Understand is one of the few stories I have on my computer, House was an inspiration to me even before I found x-risk, I loved the Sherlock movies and owned the two most recent Bond movies.

These days I'm much more the person I wanted to be, but no longer care about being that kind of person. (I do value the results of being like that, but it's only the results I care about).

Unfortunately I'm guessing that you already put in some really solid thinking on this, and that there's not anything easy I can offer to either suggest a desirable thing you've overlooked or to provide more evidence for achievability. I put together the supplementary post but I'm guessing (if you're asking this question) that you read it and it didn't help much, and that you have good reason to expect that LOTR won't help (and that for a variety of reasons it might well not).

But a few ideas that seem fairly easy for us to see the appeal in, and that we can generally do something to increase. Maybe you'll find something here that strikes you.

• Human beauty and sex. (To anyone reading this, I don't go in for manipulative PUA, but do endorse mutually positive, happy interactions.)
• Children. This one is kind of a stretch if you don't see the appeal already, but you might try exploring it. I didn't get this appeal for a long time, and then I imagined in concrete detail raising a son or daughter in a happier world, where I could devote my time to them (if it's appealing in this world too, then by all means). Showing them the world, teaching them things, seeing them grow, them running to me and showing me things, I thought to myself "holy shit, that sounds awesome". People sometimes mention incredible joy in the birth and existence of a child, and that they would give their lives for their kids, and these things don't seem to be bugs. (Not to say other feelings are wrong - there are different unconscious strategies for different assessments about our situation - but that this answer isn't flawed.)
• Survival, being alive. Life being way better than not-living, even if we don't see anything spectacular about it at the moment.

Well, it has 1 downvote. In answering, I went too straight for giving a functional description of what I do, rather than 1) sufficiently pointing out how it's done (e.g. going out of my way to tell someone when it's neither helpful nor wanted is not decreasing stigma, though that's the more natural map thing to map my answer to) and 2) writing my answer such that the answer itself helped to reduce stigma, make people comfortable, etc.

...but thank you for answering in a manner consistent with your theory.

You're welcome! However, I didn't select these strategies so that I could write consistent comments on LW, I selected them because I really like their results.

By the power of Greyskull! I noticed this tastefully funny comment and go to the context to find no less than 6 comments analyzing my hyphenation of ice creams!

Indeed it's mostly random. I didn't even notice I was typing it differently - looks like my brain just wasn't sure how to write it, and gave me different answers at different times.