All of riparianx's Comments + Replies

I will do that. I think I may actually have a copy of Chaos lying around. I've actually read (most of) Luminosity- I lost my place in the story at one point due to computer issues and never got back to it.

I tried CodeAcademy once, didn't find it that interesting. I don't think it used python, though. I'll check it out. Programming is in general very useful.

If I can find someone to tutor, I'll try that. It certainly can't hurt. Thank you!

While I agree that society tends to dissuade women from math, it doesn't really work in my specific subset. I grew up with more female math-related role models than male. (Mom was chemistry major, dad majored in education partially because he sucked at math.) And the B is a massive outlier- it takes a lot of work for me to keep a C, usually. But thank you for the input.

Hi, I'm Alexandra. I'm turning 18 tomorrow, and I'm slowly coming to the conclusion that I have GOT to be more rigorous in my self-improvement if I'm going to manage to reach my ambitions.

I'm not quite a new member- I've lurked a lot, and even made a post a while back that got a decent number of comments and karma.

I discovered Less Wrong through HPMOR. It was the first time I'd read a story with genuinely intelligent characters, and the things in it resonated a lot with me. This was a couple of years ago. I've spent a lot of time here and on the various o... (read more)

-7ChristianKl
3CCC
Hi, Alexandria! Okay... I am one of those people who is really good at math. Of course, I cannot be certain, but I suspect that the trouble here might be that you failed to grasp some essential point way, way back at the early stages of your mathematical education. So, let's see how you handle a non-obvious problem. In answering this question, I'd like you to show me, as far as possible, your entire reasoning process, start to finish; the more information you can give, the more helpful my further responses can be. The question is as follows: John is on his way to an important meeting; he has to be there at noon. Before leaving home, he has calculated what his average speed has to be to arrive at his meeting on time. When he is exactly half-way to his destination, he calculates his average speed so far, and to his dismay he finds that it is half the value that it needs to be. How fast does John need to travel on the second half of his journey in order to reach his destination on time?
2[anonymous]
Hello, Alexandra. I also struggle with the math thing. My secret to success is practicing until I'm miserable, but these things also help: 1. Read layman books about mathematical history, theory, and research. It ignites enthusiasm. I recommend James Glieck's [sp?] book Chaos, and his book The Information. He has a talent for weaving compelling narratives around the science. 2. Learn a little bit of programming. While coding is frustrating in its own right, I find that it forces me to think mathematically. I can't leave steps out. I'm learning Python right now, and it's a good introductory language (I'm told). 3. Explain it to your cat. I'm only mostly kidding. I've found that tutoring lower-level math has helped my skills in calculus and statistics. Learning to walk through the problems in a coherent way, so that a moody sixth-grader can understand it, is tremendously helpful. I'd love to work together on exploring mathematical concepts. If you'd like to collaborate, hit me up sometime. Also: if you like HPMOR, you should read Luminosity. It is a rationality-driven version of Twilight that's actually really good.

I like this idea. Sort of a "this journal article showed that this technique was statistically useful, this one said another technique was not" kind of thing?

1SanguineEmpiricist
Yes, we have the competence to achieve this and it would be extremely beneficial. For example people still say ADHD meds are equally as effective and you can't get legitimate discussion of efficacy because every conversation is just bogged down. Few people with ADHD know that Stimulants plus Intuniv should cover the broadest range of their symptoms and that having medication last longer because it covers a higher duration of symptoms is better. Random stuff like that is simple but there exists no place to get it.

Wow. You've been thorough. Note to self: modafinil is probably something I want to avoid if it can exacerbate anxiety that badly.

0Nick_Roy
If you do decide to try it, start with a very low dose.

I got the anxiety book, and I'm starting to go through it. I absolutely recommend it- a few pages in and I was thinking "This guy just completely destroyed a lot of my justifications for having low self-esteem."

I sometimes think that LWers actually underestimate the help that individuals suggesting ideas can be. More than once, a friend has said something that made me think, "holy crap, I've approached this not just from the wrong angle, but the wrong freaking plane." I also have noticed that suggestions without disclaimers tend to get downvoted here, so I suspect the cached reaction is a good cached reaction.

Also, thanks for the giggle.

Huh. That actually does sound like what I do. Everything I've come across has suggested that's what you're supposed to do, though. And it is very relaxing.

I have no idea if any good teachers are around, but if they were, I couldn't afford lessons. Is there a reason why dissociating is bad? Because it's really enjoyable and makes me feel energetic and relaxed- even more than a full night of sleep does.

0ChristianKl
If you don't process the emotions that are in your body, they build up. In your case from time to time they release themselves in a panic attack. Detachment from emotions is useful disassociation isn't. In detachment an emotion can dissolve on it's own. You are aware of the emotion but you don't get meta emotions. You don't do anything with it. Without a new trigger that usually means that the body can go and work through the emotions. If there only one emotion in your system and no meta-reactions towards it, then the full processing ability can be used on that one issue. That's what happens during mindful meditation. Instead of doing 10 things at once, there's actually rooms to really process on thing at a time. That doesn't have to be a case, it's quite frequent to have meditation events on a donation basis.

Coming from a reductionist "mind is brain" viewpoint, therapy actually does help. This is pretty well documented in the fact that 73% of patients who go through it say it helped in the long run. (statistic from my psych 101 textbook) Talking to a therapist may not increase your serotonin levels, but it does help teach you new mental "patterns" and ways to cope with the results. Saying the brain doesn't follow patterns is, well, wrong. The more you have a thought, the more the thought comes to you. If a chemical imbalance puts you in a m... (read more)

4Salemicus
You have to admit, this is weak tea. What would you think of a pharmacological study that relied on the fact that 73% of patients "say it helped." We don't need no stinkin' effect size or control! As I'm sure you're aware, there is a great deal of controversy about the effectiveness of talking therapies, and it is even controversial whether such therapy really does anything more than "just talking." Now look, I too am in the reductionist "mind = brain" camp, and I too think therapy can be effective in principle. I am actually very sceptical of the idea that mental problems such as depression, anxiety and OCD result from a generalised "hardware" problem (such as faulty neuroendocrine function). Yet just by mentioning the (very widely held) notion that these problems do have such a basis, I'm apparently espousing dualism. It's very strange. Who exactly said that?

America actually has this weird cultural thing where living with your parents past 20 is seen as a badge of shame. You might have heard the "nerd in his parent's basement" stereotype a few times. The conservative families I know do have the "family values" thing, but they also have a huge "independence" thing. Most of them don't want their kids still in the home after they hit adulthood. They do tend to want to be near family, though. Obviously this is anecdotal evidence and should be taken with a grain of salt.

This is exactly what I was doing- constantly looking for the system that would let me be successful while ignoring the root problems. I only accepted the anxiety when it got too bad to ignore. Can I ask what you've been doing that's been so effective?

4Nick_Roy
Two Disclaimers: First, I am not a doctor. Second, beware of other-optimizing. This advice is working well for me, but it may not work well for others. The depression became obvious and major enough that I was forced to take action to stop it. The rationalizations had run dry, so I fully realized in both System 1 and System 2 that I was not "unmotivated", I was mentally ill. Years of life hacks and half-assed lifestyle interventions had accomplished some, but not enough, so it was time for medications, which I had previously feared due to bad experiences with bupropion years earlier. The constraints in my investigation: something effective for major depressive disorder in both the short-term to fight what I was then feeling and in the long-term to prevent relapse, non-serious side effects, anxiolytic properties, as there is comorbid OCD and social anxiety disorder (SA, also this is why I chose medications before psychotherapy), and a reasonable price. Tianeptine met these constraints, with the nice bonus of plausibly being a cognitive enhancer. Within six weeks of use, the tianeptine decreased the depression such that it was time to focus on the next most serious drag on my productivity and happiness: OCD. Not being majorly depressed allowed me to develop exercise and meditation habits that reduced the OCD down to a similarly manageable level. The anxiolytic effects of the tianeptine and the reduced stress of not being seriously depressed probably also helped. The depression and OCD were still there and still a nuisance, but they had become minor enough that it was time to continue prioritizing elsewhere. By then tianeptine's anxiolytic properties had faded to mildness due to tolerance, though it has continued to be effective as an antidepressant that at least does not increase anxiety, which was my primary issue with bupropion. Next on the list was either SA or an uncontrollable sleep cycle, both being about equally problematic. I chose to address the sleep cy

If anyone is interested in actually being part of a support group of sorts, let me know- if enough people are interested, I'll see if I can find a good way to do it.

Well, I'm not the only person who struggles with anxiety, much less mental illness in general, so while your advice may not apply to me it probably applies to someone else. Focusing all of the discussion of mental illness on the one mentally ill person who started the discussion is... well, not exactly what I started the discussion FOR. So, any advice you have is totally welcome and appreciated.

1spriteless
I guess that disclaimer was a bit of a cached reaction, since the main forum where I talk about mental illness issues is Tumblr, and I need to explain that I know I'm not omnecient on Tumblr, and can't prescribe treatments better than the people it would effect, just suggest ideas. I did catch the extra disclaimer that you are not to use cognitave therapy on other people without their consent or knowledge, because in lw I expect you already know that and I won't get status from pointing out that people have, like, agency and stuff. You can't just do things to people. Wow. So much friendship for hitting such a low bar of decency. All the applause lights. Ramble ramble ramble.

I meditate regularly- not quite daily, because when I get into a meditative state, I tend to not want to come out. When I do meditate, I'm still and quiet for at LEAST an hour. If I try to meditate for, say, 30 minutes, I end up setting another timer because I didn't get deep enough into quiet state. Meditation doesn't bring up suppressed emotions for me, though.

I do journal, but not gratitude journaling. I haven't tried that one because it seems more suited to a sad, apathetic person than a person who cares too much about everything and tends to minimize the good and maximize the bad. I like tracking the anxiety, though, and writing down thoughts lets me temporarily remove them from my mental state.

0ChristianKl
To me that description suggest that are not meditating in an effective way. An hour meditating alone is likely too much. You likely aren't present but are disassociating. Doing 20 minute sessions where you focus on feeling your breath in your hara while sitting still in a stable position would likely bring up emotions from time to time. Otherwise meditating with a good teacher beats doing it alone. But of course I don't know the quality of teachers where you live.

I empathized maybe a little too much with this post. Thank you for writing it.

Sometimes I'll read something written by a person from a different area of the world and be utterly baffled- these people are WALKING to the store? I mean, there's a Braum's about half a mile away, but if you're actually buying things that can be pretty impractical. I live pretty close to the metro in my state, but even still, everything's pretty far away.

Something I've noticed about Europeans in particular- what to us is the next big town over, is the next country over to man... (read more)

Interesting, I haven't heard of most of these. When I get the chance I'll have to do some research.

Anxiety CAN be a good response. The fear-response that anxiety basically is can be a good "oh crap, I'm in a bad situation here." Getting nervous when asking someone out is uncomfortable and kinda useless. Getting nervous walking down a street at night when someone seems to be following you is normal, and helps you respond properly. The pervasiveness is a major part. If the anxiety is infringing on your life in a lot of useless ways, you probably ha... (read more)

Your english is better than the english of a lot of native speakers.

Well... yeah, online discussion is inefficient. But when you're cut off from the efficient options, you probably shouldn't throw up your hands and give up. I'm not sure if that's what you meant, though.

I think you may be disregarding the viewpoints of others, here. You can't do any efficient self-improvement if you refuse to call your problems what they are. It might feel nice to say "You know what? I'm not mentally ill. I just need to improve myself." I WANT to improve myself. M... (read more)

-1[anonymous]
I doubt it. Who cares about mental illness? There's action and inaction. Action WILL lead to something and if you do it well you'll get GOOD results.. Inaction gets you nothing no matter what you do. No, it's always useful and is a good way to think about things in general. Why should things be more complex when they can be simplier? Do you begin with a simple (or rather, minimal) model and later expand on it or just build a complex theory and try it? The time investment, effort, and return are way better on the simple route, the complex route sucks because by the time you do both you WILL get a sharper pencil using the simple way. You should also remember that complex things are built out of simple things, so you won't be a complex master before you're a simple superhypermegaultragrand-master. I think I need anger control.

Agreed. But mental illness is such a weird and complex thing that it's even hard for trained professionals to help with. A lot of the posts here about Akrasia helped some, didn't touch others. I suspect we'd see the same results with this.

For some reason, your first sentence gave me the urge to hug you. I suspect it was a reaction to the fact that someone understood that. I've never been able to explain to anyone why "but it isn't your fault" doesn't let my brain believe it's not my fault.

Interesting. I suspect it did, except in particularly strong attacks (if her schizophrenia was periodic rather than constant).

Ooh, cool. I did not know that. Thank you for posting these!

The brain is an organ. Like any other organ, things can go wrong. It's becoming the consensus that mental illness is caused by imbalances of hormones and similar things. Dopamine and serotonin in particular. It's an invisible illness, though, and so sometimes it's hard for people to take it seriously. Parents who don't think of "clumsy kid" as a potential problem might just assume they'll grow into their limbs. That's what people thought clumsiness in childhood was for a while- uneven growth that would eventually normalize.

People normally find ... (read more)

Vague, yes, but I disagree that it's useless. It at least is an extremely basic overview that someone can build on.

Hmm. I wouldn't call stupidity mental illness- low IQ doesn't necessarily mean they're an illogical person. it can mean they're slow, or challenged, etc. A person can be "stupid" and not, say, think the moon is made of cheese. Limitations on your complexity of thought doesn't necessarily mean the thoughts you have are wrong.

No, 100 years ago, a woman getting mad at her husband was a sign of mental illness. Mental illness was consid... (read more)

It's possible we could. I certainly hope so. But it's such a complex question that, at the least, we probably can't have a simple universal answer.

My opinion is that saying that all mental illness falls into one camp is oversimplifying. Someone who's schizophrenic is definitely in the brain category, according to the current consensus I've seen. Depression is moving into that camp. Anxiety is on the fence- it can be chemical or mental.

If I were to answer "is mental illness a mind thing or a brain thing?" my answer would be "neither, both, one, or the other" because the brain is a complex thing and breaks in a lot of different ways.

Anxiety, for instance, is typically treated with t... (read more)

Oh, sorry. I misunderstood.

I should hope not, that would make me seriously question a good deal about history and biblicism. That's very true, but narrowing the problem too much causes the same kinds of problems as opening it to everyone. If you give everyone with upcoming life changes a Xanax, you're not letting them learn how to cope. If you refuse to help someone unless their illness is ruining their life, you're letting a lot of people live seriously suboptimal lives. We don't have a good entry barrier for determining if someone is mentally ill or not. We simply don't know enough to make one.

0Lumifer
Do you think that such an "entry point" could be discovered once and for all, an unchanging truth like a constant in physics, or do you think that the answer will always depend on who's asking?

Anxiety transcends a normal thing and enters mental illness when it becomes pervasive and unreasonable. My anxiety about having used a wrong word in a conversation I had last year is unreasonable. My constant feeling of dread is unreasonable because I'm not constantly in a situation that should inspire dread. Mental illness is really hard to define properly- there always seems to be something left out, or something that's implied to be illness when it isn't.

Honestly, I feel like the discussion has been derailed a bit- we're focusing on defining a very vag... (read more)

0ChristianKl
If the thought of asking out a woman for a date raises anxiety in me I don't care at all whether or not that's "reasonable" or "normal". It's a trigger that I don't want to have regardless of whether it's classified as a mental illness. Yes. I have multiple different one's. In Danis Bois perceptive pedagogy an answer might be: "You have problems with anxiety and worry about what you said last year because you constantly feel that you have to prove that you exist. If you would have a strong feeling of existence, your issues with anxiety would simply clear." In NLP it might be: "There are a bunch of situation where you are ineffective triggers that produce unproductive emotions. Let's do the Fast Phobia Cure on all of them and get done with the problem." Lefkoe Method would say: "You might have 40 limiting beliefs that produce that problem like "I'm not lovable", let's go and clear those beliefs by spending 30 minutes on each of them with the Lefkoe Method." I haven't been at a CFAR workshop so I don't know their exact answer, but part of it seems to be: "Let's get clear about how our emotional desires differ from our intellectual one's and train comfort zone extension." That's no complete list. But when we go back to how to discuss the issue on LW, framing the issue as being around anxiety is likely more productive than framing it as being about mental illnesses in general.

I'm aware. I do study psychology, although my personal passion is microbiology. The question Lumifer raised was if mental illness is really that common. It's pretty hard to find any evidence saying it's uncommon, and a LOT of evidence saying it's common. I'm curious- from your comments here, you seem to have a differing point of view than I do. Could you explain what you think mental illness is, and your related opinions? I think that would lead to a more productive discussion.

-1ChristianKl
I sometime do have some reservations against what happens in psychology departments, but I don't think they are completely hopeless. You could start a self help group with fellow psychology students. It would likely be a more productive road then seeking help on the internet. There are various CBT techniques in the literature for dealing with anxiety that you can do as peer training. You might even use the daily gratitude sharing exercise in such a group.
2ChristianKl
I'm not sure that the term "mental illness" is pretty useful if your goal is to do change work. Part of the societal role of the term is to distinguish mental phenomena where it's legal to take drugs to solve them from mental phenomena where it isn't. To decide what insurance will pay for and where it won't pay. Those concerns dictate how wide or narrow we have our net as to what constitutes "mental illness". If we talk about anxiety I'm not sure that "mental illness" is a good framing. Every healthy human being sometimes has anxiety. There might be some brain damage that prevents certain people from having anxiety, but it's part of normal human functioning. That means it's useful to learn how to deal with anxiety in a productive fashion. There are a bunch of emotional management skills that are useful for everyone. I know little about schizophrenia but my general impression is that it's something that's qualitatively very different from a phobia.
0Lumifer
Not quite. I pointed out that mental illness can be defined in different ways (DSM was not brought back on stone tablets from Mount Sinai) and these different ways will give different answers about the prevalence of mental illness.

It's awesome that you're able to help people so well. At the same time, though, I get the feeling that you're falling into the trap of other-optimizing. In-person support is probably a lot more helpful than internet-based support, I suspect. But when the right people aren't around you, and you can't go to them, having instant communication over the internet is a good second-best. Certainly over the internet there's things you can't do, like determine a physical state. But if people refused to use any method but the absolute best, we'd spend more time trying to find optimal strategies than anything else, and humanity would die out because we'd be too busy designing soylent to eat.

0ChristianKl
It's not like I don't give out any internet based advice. In this thread I did make a point to recommend gratitude journaling. It's good even if you don't do it in a group. I haven't heard from anyone messing themselves up with gratitude journaling. Another recommendation would be meditating. Meditating is more risky. It makes suppressed emotions come up and you have to deal with them. I have no way of judging to what extend a person like you will handle that, because I don't know much about you. I know that on average meditating is great, but it's not without risks. The standard advice would be to find a good local meditation teacher but I can't say anything about the quality of your local teachers. I don't think it's impossible to give good advice via skype in principle but it's not a skill in which I'm well trained.

Semantics matter to the extent that everyone is on the same page. Mental illness is pretty clearly defined.

-2ChristianKl
Yes, and that definition leads to a field that's not productive at solving the problem. Plenty of criticism surfaced in the wake of the DSM-5 which currently contains the official definitions for mental illnesses.

Because not everyone has the practical ability to live where they want? If it were practical to do so, I'd be living in one of the Chicago suburbs by now. But finances, family, my current academic path, the people I care about, etc. are all here. I don't even have enough gas money to get TO Chicago. Much less enough to start a life there.

A meetup sort of requires more than one person. There aren't even any other HPMoR readers in my area, except the person I introduced to it. I'm sure this is a problem for others, too. Being the sole LWer in your area that you can find is frustrating. I'm in central Oklahoma, and according to surveys and the like, I'm pretty much the only Oklahoman here. And I'm pretty sure this is a common plight- Berlin is a big city full of interesting people with interesting viewpoints. What if you're from, say, Ukiah, Oregon, or Mobile, Alabama, or a place even smaller or further out of the way? Physical meetups are most effective, but kind of a luxury.

0CAE_Jones
Yes. I'm in Northeast Arkansas. I considered trying to reach the St Louis Meetup Groups (my town's only cheap way out for someone who can't drive just happens to be to St Louis, and only St Louis), but for a number of reasons that never happened before that meetup group was defunct. Meetup.com did briefly have a skeptics group in my town. Briefly--before I could get over my panic at the "describe yourself" requirement, it, too, was defunct. Otherwise, the meetups within 50 miles of me appear to include moms and a group of board gamers in Memphis.
-5ChristianKl

You're right that LW is definitely not going to be a cure-all, and obviously I'm not asking for everyone on LW to band together to fight this one problem. A lot of the people here have their own projects. But I think that LW could be a great help to people who are trying to get help and can't- either because they can't afford mental health care, or because their health care isn't helping. LW is a brilliant educational place that bases a lot on science and cognitive studies. I think this could easily extend to helping with mental illness.

Mental illness is... (read more)

-3[anonymous]
Argh. This post sounds like a lot of inefficiencies. Let's be practical and use the KISS principle the right way. What are your problems? What are you trying to improve? I'm no therapist, and my english is too bad to produce a decent quote, but I'm still quite sure that you can get amazing results if you cross off "mental illness" and open a new page with "self improvement". You're free to ad hominem me. You're free to do whatever you want. But the bottom line is that as long as you don't strive to better yourself, you're doomed, no matter who you are.
3CAE_Jones
I wonder if MetaMed does mental illness. Last I heard, they're still in the early, way-too-expensive-for-the-likes-of-me phase, but they're more or less "LW-affiliated rationalists try to filter the science to optimize your solution".

Thank you! I'll see if I can start compiling resources like this. If you think of any more, I'd appreciate it if you could message me.

4KPier
Brienne's Löb's Theorem Defeated My Social Anxiety deserves to be among your resources.
7Alicorn
I suppose there's Slate Star Codex, which is written by a rationalist psychiatrist who sometimes talks shop but doesn't tend to dwell on mental illness stuff in the same instrumental way. (It is highly recommended for other reasons, of course.)

Mayoclinic defines mental illness as such: "Mental illness refers to a wide range of mental health conditions — disorders that affect your mood, thinking and behavior. Examples of mental illness include depression, anxiety disorders, schizophrenia, eating disorders and addictive behaviors." This seems to be the standard definition.

The statistic of 1 in 5 that I used seems to pretty much only refer to diagnosed people with specific, named disorders. I don't think it was including "I feel sad sometimes" as a mental illness. And considerin... (read more)

0Lumifer
Actually, I think the "standard" definition is provided by the current DSM. The Mayo Clinic definition is way too vague and general to be of any use. Sure, but then you are defining stupid people as mentally ill. Are you willing to do that for everyone with, say, the IQ under 85? Go back a hundred years, for example. Under the definitions used then, was mental illness common? "Diseased thinking patterns" is a dangerous concept. In the Soviet Union disliking communism was a diseased thinking pattern and people were actually put into mental hospitals for that. Not long ago being attracted to people of the same sex was considered to be a diseased thinking (and feeling, and behavioral) pattern, to be treated as a mental disorder. If I want to lose weight, is that a diseased thinking pattern and who will judge that? If I feel dissatisfied with life, is that a diseased thinking pattern and what kind of a pill will I be prescribed?
0ChristianKl
You are on LW. Clear thinking is valued here and that involves debating how to talk about issues. Semantics matter.

So you think the idea of a rational support group could work? I'd certainly be interested in one. Any idea how one could be set up? Meetups are a little too far and few to be really effective, I think.

0ChristianKl
It's a vague general label. Part of what happens at our LW meetup in Berlin could be called a "rational support group". I don't think that's true. If there's no LW meetup nearby, start one. Bootstrapping trust is easier when one meets in person.

To my frustration, the majority of the results I found were not scholarly. Then again, the only database I have access to is Google Scholar, which is utter crap for finding specific results.

If anyone has access to a decent scholarly database, I'd much appreciate a quick search. It seems possible that this idea "mental illness is highly correlated with intelligence" is just another Lucy-esque pop psych idea with little truth.

I think my point still stands- mental illness is still really common. And I know a lot of intelligent people have a mental ... (read more)

2Ishaan
If you do look, you will find odd little relationships and hints. Maybe there's more autism among the close relatives of mathematicians and engineers. Maybe there are little hints that ADHD and schizophrenia are linked to creativity. Maybe there's more bipolar disorder among performance artists. Maybe depressed people are better writers. Maybe. These little hints and bits and bobs of evidence indicating trade-offs are rarely as straightforward as finding elevated rates in a gifted population, the way you propose. You won't find any links between general intelligence and mental illness. It's never "intelligence", it's almost always some weird, specific, difficult to study thing. I really doubt that high IQ puts you at elevated risk of anything. Sometimes people do come up with stuff, like "existential depression" (which I'm pretty sure is just normal depression with an intellectual rationalization), but it's pretty sparse. There's supposed to be a body of literature (mostly pre-2000) with "gifted children" which I haven't really looked into demonstrating frustrations arising from atypical development, but I haven't seen any really good evidence for trade-offs or especially difficulties on that front either. It's been mostly collections of case studies. (That said, I haven't read that area much.)
5emr
I agree that the relationship is separate question. I did find some links though: Here is a Swedish conscripts study, finding that pre-morbid IQ was negatively associated with later adult depression, anxiety, and schizophrenia, but positively related to mania, measured by hospital admittance. This New Zealand study replicates this: Low childhood IQ predicts depression, anxiety, while higher IQ predicts bipolar. These are about the best "large homogeneous" population studies I could find, in two more-or-less standard Western cultures. There is one study that tracked some particularly high performing children through adulthood, but the results weren't much different regarding mental illness than a normal high intelligence sample would be. Needless to say, it gets complicated when you look at populations that are preselected (college students, etc) or more diverse. Most popular articles that claim a uniform association are looking at some narrow populations (e.g. famous artists), or reporting how intelligence relates to different presentations of a given mental illness (e.g. intelligence seems to the presentation of anxiety). Even assuming genetic risk for a mental illness was unrelated to education or intelligence, you'd expect something like this given the environmental correlates: Better family conditions early on, better social status later. While there are some environmental stressors that are probably associated with higher intelligence (graduate/medical/law school, perhaps more status anxiety?), these are probably not severe enough to outweigh the stressors in the opposite direction.
7Lumifer
That is entirely a function of how widely do you define "mental illness". You set the bounds of normality narrowly and you get that mental illness is common, you set them far out and mental illness becomes a rarity.

Exactly. LessWrongians focus so hard on akrasia that I think they often fall into the trap of ignoring some of the causes of akrasia. If akrasia is your only serious problem, it's really easy to find ways to help. If you have akrasia because the idea of doing your work is terrifying, LessWrong isn't much help. So people like us get left shafted- too on the fringe for the majority of help to help, too in the middle for the rest to help.

5Nick_Roy
Agreed. Personal anecdote: once I redefined my "motivation problem" as a "depression and anxiety problem" a number of months ago, and began treating this depression and anxiety instead of wearily trying out yet another willpower hack, I have made more progress in being motivated in months than I had in the previous years.

That's true, obviously, but I was looking more for "people seeking out solutions together." There was a thread a while back where people ated akrasia fighting methods. Anxiety fighting methods could be rated the same way.

Of course. I love yoga. It's relaxing and fun. But it's no cure for anxiety. Yoga gives a very short "mental high" and doing it for months had no effect on the anxiety. This approach may work for a lot lf people, but as always, there's a fringe that needs some new approaches.

0ChristianKl
At our last LW meetup in Berlin one participant A said that he wills anxiety about the upcoming social interaction X. We did a Hamming Circle (spelling for Hemming might be wrong) and I was mainly leading the discussion. At the beginning he was shivering because of anxiety caused by thinking about the issue. Half an hour later he felt courage. I checked up later and he faced situation X in a relaxed way. Another member of the circle B mentioned that it was like me talking a different language to A. The flow of the whole process was intransparent to B. As such it's unlikely that describing what I did in a LW essay would be much help. A lot of what's written in the akrasia fighting methods carries little risk. Doing some form of trauma regression to combat your anxiety while you sit alone at home is qualitatively different. A month ago the loud drilling machine of my neighbors produced an uncomfortable feeling in me. I recognized that having that trigger is stupid and removed most of it. Does that mean I can write a text that teaches you to get rid of it? No. If I would meet you in person I would have information about your bodily state that helps to put the answer into perspective. Without that it's hard to estimate your state.

That's sometimes a very frustrating thing to read- the "get rid of environmental triggers" thing. Speaking solely for myself here, my triggers are either really, really difficult to do anything about (financial difficulties) or a bad idea to try and get rid of (my academics). Sometimes you're just stuck at a point in your life where you can't fix your triggers.

I think there must be more we can do than get rid of triggers, or add more meaningful things. Maybe not as effective, but mental illness is a complex thing. Complex things have weak points. Sometimes I wonder of we're ignoring the trees and just seeing the forest here. Mental self-help advice is so... formulaic.

3spriteless
Just getting rid of stuff is one way to stop a trigger. Building up a way to deal with it is another. Like, you could come up with a plan for your finances, and practice bringing up your finances and saying that plan, so you build another association with your finances that isn't a loop of anxious thoughts. Like role-play therapy, where you plan out and practice your reactions to someone saying something before hand. I am assuming a heluvalot about you with that advice though, sorry if that doesn't even make sense.

Ahh. Thank you, that actually solved my confusion. I was thinking about solving the problem, not how to solve the problem. I shall have to look through my responses to other thought experiments now.

Maybe I'm missing something (I'm new to Bayes), but I honestly don't see how any of this is actually a problem. I may just be repeating Yudkowsky's point, but... Omega is a superintelligence, who is right in every known prediction. This means, essentially, that he looks at you and decides what you'll do, and he's right 100 out of 100 times. So far, a perfect rate. He's probably not going to mess up on you. If you're not trying to look at this with CDT, the answer is obvious: take box B. Omega knows you'll do that and you'll get the million. It's not about the result changing after the boxes are put down, it's about predictions about a person.

1Wes_W
This should not be taken as an authoritative response. I'm answering as much to get my own understanding checked, as to answer your question: Omega doesn't exist. How we respond to the specific case of Omega setting up boxes is pretty irrelevant. The question we actually care about is what general principle we can use to decide Newcomb's problem, and other decision-theoretically-analogous problems. It's one thing to say that one-boxing is the correct choice; it is another thing to formulate a coherent principle which outputs that choice in this case, without deranged behavior in some other case. If we're looking at the problem without CDT, we want to figure out and formalize what we are looking at the problem with.