I have a pet hypothesis that almost anything popular or widely consumed/practiced is some kind of porn, that is an extremely potent stimulant for any positive number of human needs. I do not mean drugs like heroin which is chemically inducing a pleasant state in the brain, but stuff like hamburgers, the recipe of which is designed to be a food porn.

Assuming some truth in this hypothesis, what items can we add to your list? Movies, series and television in general are an example of what I think is story porn. Of course well designed games exploit this need too, but appeal to other emotions too. Thinking about your example of exercise, the converse need to relax is exploited by particularly comfortable home surroundings and furniture.

Thank you for putting so much time into spelling out your work and thought process !

Question: Did you try to assess whether converting existing software/platforms or joining/taking over existing online communities would be better (along the various metrics you care about) ? If so, what were your conclusions ?

"Keeping busy" is based mainly on my personal experience and from what I've heard other people say. But in the book Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience (which I didn't cite because I assume you're familiar with it), it's suggested based on self-reports on subjective wellbeing that people are, on average, happier while at work than they are in their leisure time - even though they don't feel as if this is the case.

In Stumbling on Happiness, Daniel Gilbert also suggests that when making decisions about the future, we rely on our own speculations of how we'll feel less than on the reviews of those with experience. This isn't a way of treating depression as much as it is a way of making decisions better at keeping our future selves happy.

"De notre naissance à notre mort, nous sommes un cortège d’autres qui sont reliés par un fil ténu."

Jean Cocteau

("From our birth to our death, we are a procession of others whom a fine thread connects.")

An especially important example of macro choice that deserves some thought is the choice of a professional activity. See 80000 Hours:

http://80000hours.org/

I'm a feminist. I started reading this blog because I like Methods of Rationality and the overlap between rationalists and nootropics nerds intrigued me. I studied sociology, gender studies and cultural studies in college, so that's where my background is.

In discussions I've been a part of, evolutionary psychology ends up being sort of a pariah viewpoint because it's constantly used to reinforce social norms that are tied up in patriarchy. We also tend to, for various reasons, believe more in nurture over nature. Here's my reasons why I do that, and why I am dismissive of evolutionary psychology by default.

The idea that evolution has driven men to be a certain way and women to be otherwise is generally really hard to prove because it's pretty much impossible to find people who are outside of the social structures that exist. However, historically ideas of how men and women evolve are tied up in ideas of hunter-gatherer cultures, many of which are being regularly proven wrong (the recent evidence found on the proportion of gathered food vs. hunted food eaten by hunter-gatherer societies, for example). These assumptions are based on how we view gender as a society and how we perceive "primitive" (scarequotes used because of the social baggage around the word "primitive", which is both judgmental and inaccurate) cultures.

Historically, the sort of people who use arguments based in biological determinism are creating arguments for the status quo. You see this in the history of the relationship between race, biology and evolution and in the history of how women have been perceived by "science" (scarequotes used both in self-awareness that science is hardly a monolithic entity and because a lot of this was bullshit spouted by people in labcoats more than actual science). As this stuff is proven to not only be wrong, but to be extremely harmful, I've looked at the arc of history and decided that when an argument is made for something that reinforces the current social order (particularly patriarchy, but other social structures too) and it uses biological determinism as it's basis, I usually take it with a grain of salt the size of a glacier, because historically those arguments have tended to be wrong, and the context in which I've seen them used is almost always one in which people with privilege are circling the wagons in an attempt to defend their privilege as biologically just. It's also something I see used by people who are determined that their relationship with the opposite gender is because of some biological reason and that default to biology as the reason for that when it's really easy to find extremely blatant examples of how social conditioning controls how people think and behave and/or their issues come from treating any group of people as a monolithic entity.

Also, I've seen a lot more sociological studies and research from that perspective than most people doing the evopsych side of the argument, and when given the science behind evopsych as I've seen it and weighing it against the sociological stuff that I know fairly well, the sociological evidence tends to be more compelling and obvious. Sociologists, of course, are likely to have the same issues as scientists do with their biases influencing their data, but because it's the sociologist's main job to understand culture, I give them more of the benefit of the doubt than most "hard" scientists for the same reason I would give a linguist more credit in understanding, say, connotation and denotation-- it's easier to break out of society's box, even when you were raised in said box, if you have more knowledge of what the box is and where it's edges are.

TL;DR: Evolutionary psychology tends to lead to biologically deterministic arguments and biological determinism has historically not only been wrong but has been actively harmful to marginalized groups. I generally choose to take any argument involving evolutionary psychology or biological determinism with a grain of salt, particularly when that argument supports the social status quo, because historically biologically deterministic arguments about marginalized groups (the big ones being women, racial minorities and sexual minorities) have turned out to be wrong. Because it's impossible to separate scientists from the society that they work within, I assume that biases are reflected in data, and I also know that the way that evolutionary psychology studies are reported in the media tends to exaggerate findings, so I particularly have to take reports of evopsych findings with a grain of salt unless I or someone I trust has run the data. Even if I can trust the data; I can't always trust the interpretation of the data because the person doing the interpretation is from a culture with a vested interest in preserving the status quo.

I hope that gives you guys some insight on the whole thing. The other thing you might want to know is that the majority of people on the internet arguing for evolutionary psychology are gigantic assholes, so you have to get over the initial bias against you that's brought on by, you know, reddit comment threads you can play evolutionary psychology bingo in. In the same way that "state's rights" can be a codeword for racism, "evopsych" can be a codeword for "I am a misogynist douchebag, and also probably a pick-up-artist, who is into harassing feminists on the internet as, you know, a hobby".

As far as major scientific facts go, I am surprised that evolution has yet to be mentioned. Let me try:

"All the complexity of Life on Earth comes from a single origin by the following process: organisms carry the plan to reproduce and make copies of themselves, this plan changes slightly and randomly over time, and the modified plans which lead to better survival and reproduction tend to outcompete the others and to become dominant."

The example about stacks in 1.2 has a certain irony in context. This requires a small mathematical parenthese:

A stack is a certain sophisticated type of geometric structure which is increasingly used in algebraic geometry, algebraic topology (and spreading to some corners of differential geometry) to make sense of geometric intuitions and notions on "spaces" which occur "naturally" but are squarely out of the traditional geometric categories (like manifolds, schemes, etc.).

See www.ams.org/notices/200304/what-is.pdf for a very short introduction focusing on the basic example of the moduli of elliptic curves.

The upshot of this vague outlook is that in the relevant fields, everything of interest is a stack (or a more exotic beast like a derived stack), precisely because the notion has been designed to be as general and flexible as possible ! So asking someone working on stacks a good example of something which is not a stack is bound to create a short moment of confusion.

Even if you do not care for stacks (and I wouldn't hold it against you), if you are interested in open source/Internet-based scientific projects, it is worth having a look at the web page of the Stacks project (http://stacks.math.columbia.edu/), a collaborative fully hyperlinked textbook on the topic, which is steadily growing towards the 3500 pages mark.

Been there, done that survey...

I'm curious about the results.

At least those