There is a certain relationship between the statement "snow is white" and what you see if you look at snow. The same relationship holds between the statement "my partner is cheating on me" and what you will see if you covertly follow your partner around all day. Between the weather forecast and the weather. Between what a government says about its military activities and what you will see if find all its forces and watch what they are doing.

This concept is of fundamental importance to every aspect of life: thinking, doing, feeling, everything. It deserves a single, short, familiar word that means that thing and nothing else. That word exists: it is the word "truth". To discover truth, you must look and see, and experiment.

All of the extensions of that word to other concepts, such as "affective truth", "my truth", "spiritual truth", and so on, apply it to things that lack that fundamentally important quality: that the words match the way things are. They are ways of passing off ignorance as truth, feelings as truth, lies as truth. It saves you the trouble of looking, seeing, experimenting, and updating. You can say "this is true for me" and pull the wool over your own eyes while claiming that blindness is but truer vision.

Likewise, replacing "truth" tout court by adding limitative modifiers, like "empirical truth", "scientific truth", "rational truth", and so on, is an attempt to pretend that that fundamentally important quality is not of fundamental importance, but just one small part of a rich panoply of other ways of relating to the world. But it is not.

Feelings exist. True statements can be made about them. Whatever feelings you are having, it is true that you are having that feeling. But the feeling itself is not something that is capable of being true or false. Whenever you say "I feel that...", it is more accurate to say "I believe that..." Only when you do that can you ask, "Is this belief true?" Only when you shy away from that question will you need to say "it feels true."

Theoretically, the 'Love Hormone Measurement System' has some utility. We form bonds to others with every kind word and familiar touch, it may be useful for many different populations of people to gain a clear sense of how they really feel about "loved ones", and why that is.

Also a general purpose sense of whether a person has spent too long or too little in the sunlight might be very harm reducing. A lack of light can cause myopia, too much is cancerous...

For myself...maybe a sense of polyrhythms?

My go-to definition of introverts and extroverts goes like this: Extroverts gain energy from being with other people. Being with others is a relaxing thing which recharges their batteries. Introverts pay energy to be with other people. Being with others tires them out.

What exactly does energy mean here? How many joules does it cost?

I have the impression that when new age people use energy is a way that doesn't correspond to something that can be measured in joules that's bad, but when people with a more rational background do so, it's completely fine.

I think I am very confused about the idea of mental illnesses.

First of all to understand an illness, we need a ideal of health to compare to. Where does this ideal come from and what it is? When I come to LW (or even Reddit) I feel like i am depressed compared to you because I never really had much of a goals or passions or interests in life, so generally being anhedonic and alway have to keep fighting boredom. On the other hand, as far as I can tell, my attitude is not different from that of my parents and family members, I was raised so that they told me life is hard and it is about survival, not fun, and indeed my parents had their two hands full and more with just securing a comfortable middle class existence, they did not really have any energy for personal goals. If my father was alive and I would complain about boredom, he would say "you have it too good, when I was 37 I was standing 12 hours on top of a ladder painting houses so that we can pay off our flat" and things like that. So compared to LW, I am depressed, compared to my family norm, I am normal (except having it too good, obviously). The point is, there is no cast in stone definition of what is healthy. It may depend on culture, on age, on time, on a lot of things how we define the healthy.

A decade or two ago I had a strong interest in Buddhism. And my teachers were of the opinion that what most people consider healthy, in the sense of happiness / non-depression, is still a very low level and we can improve on that. They kept quoting Freud, saying the goal of psychotherapy is to turn abnormally unhappy people into normally happy people. And they claimed to take over from there, to try to turn people into being radiantly happy, through meditation. Their philosophy was that only complete happiness can be defined as healthy.

So, the point is, we do not have a "cast in stone" level of mental functioning that we could call unanimously "healthy", so we cannot really objectively define mental illness as a comparison to that. Pretty much it seems like the question of whether people like me or my parents / family members are depressed or not just depends on whether they want to change their mood or not , seek therapy or not. They can be seen as pretty normal, in a society that not too "dreamy" (i.e. not US-type "follow your dreams" type of society, but a more grim one).

Another weird issue is blame, stigma etc. In my childhood it was very confusing. It is the natural instict of children to be cruel assholes to people who seem to have some deficiency or problem. And then they tried to teach us e.g. "do not make fun of this man who sits in a wheelchair, he cannot help being disabled" so we tried to learn the distinction that sometimes you can be an ass to people, if it is about something they can help, but sometimes not, when it is about something they cannot help. As children we developed roughly this model, a milder defect is usually something that "can be helped" and thus you can be an ass to people who have it, and a harder defect is something "cannot be helped" and thus to be met with compassion. So for example we could make fun of a child for being clumsy, but not if a neurological disorder made him very clumsy. We could call a child stupid as long as he was only little stupid, but someone with serious mental retardation, very low IQ not. Our model of illness was largely a more severe version of normal defects, the kind of normal defects we made each other fun of for. Or bullied each other for verbally. When we grew up, of course we stopped behaving like little pricks about it. Still the essential distinction stayed there: if, for example, a man is only somewhat stupid, you can think "haha what an idiot" and consider this an insult or censure. If a man is very ,very stupid, clearly mentally retarded, then not, then your appropriate atttude is compassion, not censure. Later on I learned that there is no reason why not think that moderate versions of the same problem do not work through the same pathways as illness. So this distinction is not tenable. Since then, I cannot tell the difference if a person is simply an ass or has antisocial personality disorder, is a fucking coward or suffers from anxiety disorders and panic attacks, and so on. I can no longer tell the difference what could rightfully drawn criticism, scorn, censure, and what should be met with compassion. The only consistent solution would be to consider virtually everything an illness, and think "he cannot help being what he is" and meet everything with compassion, but that is an entirely unusual and weird human norm. It is not how people normally feel. If for example a soldier runs away from battle leaving his comrades in the shit, they will not think "poor fellow has anxiety disorder and panic attacks". They will think "fucking coward". This is the normal human attitude. And we are trying to wall it off into illnesses that "he cannot help being what he is" in which cases we do not use this normal attitude but more like think with compassion and understanding. But this distinction is not really tenable. Ultimately the illness and non-illness are very much the same thing. So what is the truly proper attitude? Give up all kinds of censure and criticism? I am really confused by this.

Set up a darknet black market for farmers to sell water to residents. for bitcoin.

This is especially true for antidepressants because some are only effective on more severe cases (eg Zoloft); self-selection will yield a body of faux-depressed and mildly depressed people on whom the drug has no result.

EDIT: Apparently I was thinking of a different drug.