The first answer that occurs to me:

• I am very significantly happier and more even-tempered.

To expand: I have long suffered from mood swings in which I would 'enjoy' a month or two of borderline hypomania, followed by one to four months of depression and anxiety, accompanied by a lot of akrasia and mildly self-destructive behavior.

Before my 'rationalist conversion' in 2005, my main support system for dealing with these problems had become various Alcoholics Anonymous-style 12-step groups. After my rationalist conversion (I'll use BRC and ARC from here), I realized these programs don't have very good efficacy, especially for their primary purpose of helping people quit self-destructive behaviors. They have a secondary purpose, which is enhancing adherents' quality of life, for which they are somewhat more efficacious, but they promote too many irrational beliefs to be recommended for this purpose IMO.

ARC I went on a fairly intense quest to discover better means to improve the quality of my life by rational means, which ultimately led me here, among other places. One of these other places was that I learned to practice on myself the psychological techniques of Stoicism (I use that to refer the ancient Greek and Roman philosophical school that was the basis for Cognitive Behavior Therapy, not the modern slang term), as outlined by William Irvine in A Guide To The Good Life.

Without writing a long post about Stoicism, one of the core techniques is to doubt the validity of your thoughts and interpretations, especially thoughts that you find disturbing or that give you pleasure. The reason is that you have zero, or close to zero, influence over many of the things that happen that you get disturbed or ecstatic about. The Stoics hold that it is irrational to get worked up over things about which you can do nothing. Thus the aim of Stoicism is to train yourself to pursue and avoid only those things it is possible to EFFECTIVELY pursue and avoid, and to cultivate serene acceptance of the The Things You Cannot Change. (Yes, this is the 12-steppers' Serenity Prayer, but with a much better set of psychological techniques for cultivating the lofty state it describes.)

In a nutshell, learning these techniques has allowed me to effectively short-circuit the mental habit of going into a "tizzy," which is what I call that thing where you start playing an anguish-provoking mental loop in your head over and over again. This in turn has reduced the cognitive component of my depression down close to nothing. It has also diminished some of the cognitive component of hypomania, by instilling a habit of being skeptical of my "high" thoughts as much as I am of my "low" thoughts. This also has a positive impact on my overall happiness by softening the crash that occurs when my rose-colored notions about things I am going to do (get rich by starting my own business, usually) fail to come true. (Note that none of this means I shouldn't start a business or aspire to become rich!! However there is a big difference in the hard-headed mental state that would set a person up for success in starting and running a business, and the fragile high I am describing.)

Bottom line: I've experienced a major improvement and stabilization in my mood, without antidepressants or other psychoactive drugs. (I do get regular exercise -- another direct outcome of Stoic practice -- and this also helps.) I haven't had a serious bout of depression in two years, which is unprecedented in my adult life.

I've got to stop writing, so for the moment I will just list a couple of other major benefits of my rationalist conversion, to be unpacked later:

• I indulge in fewer self-destructive/addictive behaviors, have lost a lot of weight, I exercise regularly, work harder and am more productive -- in short, I have less Akrasia.

This is a result of various aspects of rationality kung fu, most recently Less Wrong, commitment contracts, and Beeminder.

I also arguably:

• Make more money than I would have otherwise (because I studied negotiation techniques)

• Read and study more

• Sleep better

• And the skin on my hands is less dry, especially in winter. (I really like that last one, which is a nice little object lesson in rationality in itself, but in the interest of getting something posted, I will elaborate later.)

I think I may have a valuable point or two to contribute because of some of my life experience, e.g.:

• I had a business as a Life Coach (in California in the 90's).

• I used to be a fairly avid consumer of various flavors of coaching, motivational programs, self help etc. (I still am, I've just gotten MUCH more discriminating -- that's why I'm here.)

My primary reactions to your post are:

• There is almost certainly a market for the service you describe. Your big problem, especially at first, is going to be sales and marketing. I'm sure this much is obvious, but you probably ought to ask yourself if you have an appetite for doing full-time sales and marketing, because that is your future for the next 5+ years if you start this business and want it to be successful. This leads me to the next point:

• Be careful what you wish for. I often think about going back into some kind of coaching business, but when I do, I remember what it was like, and that gives me pause. I didn't like having to constantly market myself as a coach. There were a number of things that felt unsavory about it, including the fact that all my friends were now prospective clients. Surprisingly, I also really dreaded my coaching calls, even though there was frequently a nice feeling I had helped someone AFTER the call. My point is that it's hard to predict whether you are going to enjoy being a practicing coach or not, and I judge that it probably takes a very specific kind of personality type -- an aggressively extroverted sales-oriented type -- to really enjoy that business. This should be an important element of your consideration IMO.

• Another judgment I have is that coaching is hard, and it's hard in subtle ways. People are not very amenable to change, even if they THINK they are amenable. The behaviors that would make an actual difference to our lives are not as accessible to conscious tinkering as we expect them to be. As you contemplate starting this business, you may also want to ponder if you will be frustrated when you observe people not changing as much as you'd like them to change, in response to your coaching. Letting go of the results is a subtle and important skill IMO.

All of this is not meant to discourage you -- I think you have an interesting idea for a business, and I encourage you to pursue it IF none of the above puts you off. Just pay close attention and try to determine how much fun, or not, this is actually going to be. I think you should only do it if it is actually fun. It was not fun for me.

Well-put. Although, strictly speaking, you can prove a negative. Given the basic axioms of number theory, the statement ~0=S0 (zero does not equal one) is provable.

Hi all,

My name is Glenn Thomas Davis. I am a 48-year old male living in Warren, NJ with my wife and 5-year old daughter. I was born and raised in Ketchikan, Alaska. I am a creative director for a pharmaceutical marketing agency. I have been interested in science and skepticism since reading Godel, Escher, Bach in my 20's, but became a really serious skeptic and atheist after I started listening to the Skeptics' Guide to the Universe podcast in 2005ish. I beacame a fan of Eliezer and the Singularity Institute after seeing him speak on Bloggingheads 3 years ago, and I recently subscribed to the Overcoming Bias NYC listserve.

Most of my online friends are from the San Francisco Bay Area where I lived for many years. Not exactly the world's most rational bunch, and they don't often appreciate my atheist rants. I have been delaying introducing myself here because I am resistant to putting in the effort and time to become a known presence from the ground up, or even to write a proper introductory post. However, it recently occurred to me I could just share pieces of writing I've already done for other, less like-minded groups. Here's one:

--

(In response to an otherwise rational person who trotted out the following canard in a post about religion)

None of this proves there is no soul (you can't prove a negative).

The statement "you can't prove a negative" is meaningless. Or you could say that it is true in a technical, superficial way, but useless.

This is because your statement applies equally well to ALL nonsensical claims. After all, I can't prove Santa Claus doesn't exist. True, we could fly to the North Pole right now and demonstrate there is no Santa Claus there, but you could always argue that his workshop is invisible. Or that Santa Claus is real, but his workshop is in an undisclosed chicken coop in Jamaica. Or... ?

Saying "you can't prove a negative" perpetuates a pernicious distortion, which is that science is about the black-and-white notion of proving and disproving things. As you know, that is NOT what science is about. Science is about reducing our level of uncertainty about how well our beliefs map onto reality. Looking at it this way gives us a useful way to address the question of whether Santa Claus exists.

To reduce our uncertainty about the existence of Santa Claus, we can try to find alternative explanations for the phenomena that are supposed to be explained by the existence of Santa Claus. Which of these claims is more likely to be true?

1. There is a real Santa Claus who travels on a flying sled and delivers presents to children everywhere each Christmas Eve.

2. Santa Claus is a fictional character. Children who receive Christmas presents usually receive them from their parents and relatives, who find it useful to lie to them sometimes about the existence of Santa Claus.

I can't completely prove or disprove either of these claims any more than I can prove or disprove the existence of any other supernatural character, but lines of evidence could be marshaled that would establish that 2 is more likely to be true than 1, beyond a reasonable doubt.

This applies equally well to the question of the existence of gods and ghosts:

1. Human consciousness resides in a disembodied energy field, called a 'soul', that persists after death.

2. Human consciousness resides in human brains, and perishes when a person's brain stops working, i.e. at death. The idea of a 'soul' is a myth left over from the days when humans lacked a detailed understanding of the way mental processes work.

The same thing I said WRT to the existence of Santa Claus applies to these two claims. I cannot prove or disprove either claim, but I can marshal a great deal of evidence for scenario 2, and little or no good evidence for scenario 1. Hence 2 is correct beyond a reasonable doubt, by which I mean beyond the doubt of a person who applies the same rules of evidence and logic to this question he applies to any question in which he has no investment in the outcome.

The existence of Santa Claus or the Easter Bunny is thus on EXACTLY the same footing as the existence of gods or ghosts of any variety. A person who takes action on the premise that there are invisible ghosts that will help or hinder them is in the same position as the person who doesn't buy any presents for their children, on the basis that their children have been good this year, surely Santa Claus will arrive to deliver presents under the tree on Christmas morning...

I respectfully urge you to therefore stop saying "you can't prove a negative," as if this somehow puts the existence of gods and ghosts in a special category where it isn't subject to the same rules of evidence to which we all subject all the other claims people make, every day.

--

Nice to meet you all --Glenn Thomas Davis