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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 other sites the rationalist community likes.
I'm mostly posting this now because I'd like to get more involved. I recently read an article that said the best way to increase competency at a subject is to join a community revolving around the subject. I live in OKC, where I've never even HEARD of another student of rationality. The closest I've gotten is introducing my boyfriend to HPMOR.
I'm a biology student at a community college near my living space. I'm very good at biology, english, philosophy, etc. I'm really, REALLY bad at chemistry/physics and math. I've done some basic research into what makes a person suck at mathematical things, but it's been frustratingly low on insights. Most of the time, it's resulted in "you need to practice! you need to learn mathematical thinking!" which is objectively true, but practically, a little more detail in what to do about it would be nice. Practice hasn't really seemed to help too much beyond working problems. Give me an equation and variables and I can do the math. But I can't EXPLAIN anything, or apply it to non-obvious problems involving it. This is seriously getting in the way of both my biology studies and my study of rationality. I took general chemistry 1 twice to get a low B. I'm in the first two weeks of general chemistry 2 and it takes ages to get what seems like basic concepts. When I discovered I magically had a B in College Algebra, I suspected the professor curved the grade without telling us. I withdrew from precalc after three weeks because I realized I couldn't cope.
I'm hoping to get into contact with some of the more mathematically inclined people here who are willing to help. I considered emailing a few of the higher-profile contributors to the community, but frankly, they're intimidating and the idea is very scary to my inner caveman worrying about being kicked out of the tribe.
I have some pretty lofty goals for my future research- I want to go into genetically modified organisms, and try to improve nutrition and caloric intake in parts of the world where that sort of thing is difficult to get. Reducing scarcity in our society seems like a good start to a general boost in the "goodness" of the world. But there is absolutely no way I can succeed at this if I can't get a good handle on math and chemistry. My skill at the lower levels of biology is only going to carry me so far.
I've probably rambled enough, so thanks if you took the time to read. If, for some strange reason, you feel a pull towards helping a struggling student get a grasp on abstract thinking, I urge you to give into the temptation because oh god I need the help.
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?
Wow. You've been thorough. Note to self: modafinil is probably something I want to avoid if it can exacerbate anxiety that badly.
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.
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 mood that leaves you susceptible to a kind of thought, then you'll have that thought and start a negative pattern. So even then, if the chemical imbalance is fixed, you can still be stuck with the results. Therapy helps you build more positive patterns and maybe even let the old ones fade.
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?
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.
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.
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 many of them. "Hey, there's a meetup in Austin! That's only about 300 miles away!" is like "Well, there's a meeting in France, but no way I'm driving 300 miles just for that." America is BIG. If you take a major highway, there can be a hundred miles between one town and the next.
The whole, "well, why don't you just move somewhere better?" is particularly crazy when you think about this. Movers cost hundreds of dollars a day. Moving any great distance takes days. Getting a new residence is RIDICULOUSLY expensive in the "nice" places. Rent for a 1000sqft apartment in New York is more than I've made in the last six months. Then there's downpayments, utilities, setting up new accounts for phones and internet, etc. You'll probably need a new license. College costs TRIPLE if you move out of state, because there's this awful thing they do where if you haven't been a state resident for X period of time, they get to charge you triple tuition. Heaven forbid you have to move with another person- a kid, say. I'd have to save for YEARS to be able to afford the first three months of a new residence.
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 have an anxiety problem. If a minor problem causes extreme fear, like an unbearable fear of close spaces, you might have a problem- almost everyone has to get in an elevator at some point, and having a panic attack because of it would be inconvenient and unpleasant.
Perhaps tackling specific problems at a time would be more effective. But considering the sheer number of kinds of problems here, I'm not sure. If I wanted to write a sequence on "general mental illness" (sorry, I'm going to continue using that phrase because it's not confusing and it's a good, simple term that doesn't require a lot of terms and you all know what I mean), and wrote, say, one article per mental illness... Well, I could say goodbye to ever getting anything else done. The research alone would take a lifetime, just on what we know now. Writing something worth having on LessWrong is a pretty big endeavor.
Once again, the problem is the sheer complexity of the problem. If we only tackled the really common ones (depression, anxiety, bipolar disorder, etc.) we might be able to do some good work, though.
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. Most people here do. I've hit a roadblock here, and I want to talk to other people that have, or have in the past. I'd like to hear the viewpoints of others. What worked, what didn't, etc. Group therapy/discussions with people with the same problem or similar have been extremely helpful to a lot of people.
Also, "keep it simple, stupid" is only helpful when the problem can be simplified further. Simplifying things is really hard when we don't understand them, and mental illness is one of science's big question marks.
I'm not trying to ad hominem you, and I'm sorry if I came off that way.
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 out they're mentally ill when they realize the people around them don't struggle like they do. When I realized that constant soreness and tiredness and sense of dread was a thing most people didn't have, I called in to make an appointment and started searching the internet. Also, it's not a stupid question. Personally, I'm a mix of B and C. I hope you realize that it isn't your fault, because I haven't gotten there yet.
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 considered very common. People were put in asylums for anything from homosexuality to being too smart, or being transhumanist, or atheist.
I can see how the concept is dangerous, but only if misused. Cars are dangerous if misused. We use them daily. The idea isn't to toss pills at anyone unhappy or who happens to have different beliefs, the point is that some patterns are harmful and some people would like help with that. I think deciding for others what is harmful is, itself, harmful- if a person enjoys their hallucinations, and the hallucinations don't cause them to do harm, then honestly, we should leave them alone. If a person likes murder, we shouldn't. If you want to lose weight, you should get nutrition and exercise advice. It becomes a diseased thinking pattern if you think you still need to lose weight when you have a body fat index of 5%, or if you think no one will ever care about you if you weigh above 125. If you feel dissatisfied with life, the question is why. If you have everything going perfectly in your life and you're still constantly sad, that's a sign of a problem, and you should probably see a doctor. You might be prescribed therapy rather than a pill.
I think most people decide for themselves if they like their thinking patterns. I don't like mine. I'm seeking help. A person might be friends with the voices in their heads. A person might be tired of them telling him to kill himself. A transgender person may be miserable with their body-mind disjointedness and want therapy and/or a treatment plan to become what they want to be.
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 temporary medication and long-term therapy. We treat it as "mostly mind, hint of brain."
Depression is treated with long-term therapy AND medication, or just medication. It can be a product of thinking patterns, but the consensus now seems to be that it's mostly a hormone thing.
It feels, to me, like if two groups were arguing "grass is yellow" or "grass is blue" when most grass is green but there are weird variants that are yellow or blue.
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.
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 vague thing that we don't understand yet. I can't offer answers at to how we should define mental illness because that's a question that would take years to answer. And it seems like one of those questions no one will ever agree on, either. As a utilitarian, I think mental illness is a thinking pattern that causes unhappiness or harm over a period of time, or that blocks someone from being able to view the world realistically. Someone else might have a different set of values that has an entirely different set of "bad thinking patterns."
But people ARE suffering, we know that there ARE diseased thinking patterns, and we know that people want help. Maybe "mental illness" is a bad frame, but at the moment, do we really have another to work with? I don't think so, which is why I think that this is an important question. All of the answers we're getting are mysterious, and thus not answers.
Yes, I want to do change work, and I think that it's impossible to do anything if we refuse to start helping because we don't have a good frame yet. Sometimes you have to explore a problem for a while to even start to figure it out. We have an extremely flawed and basic understanding, and saying, "well, what can we do then?" is like throwing out a hypothesis because of one inconclusive experiment.
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.
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.
Semantics matter to the extent that everyone is on the same page. Mental illness is pretty clearly defined.
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.
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 a complex thing, and everyone who has one is complex in a different way. That's why mental illness is so hard to treat. Most of the theories about what the causes are (genetics, brain chemistry, etc.) aren't supported well enough by science to help. It can take years to find the right cocktail of drugs to fight a specific mental illness a person has, and that same cocktail won't work for someone else with the same problem. LW sort of has a talent for sorting out bad science.
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.
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 considering it was only used statistics based on diagnostics, it seems pretty clear to me that a LOT of people got left out. Many people can't get help. This also only covered the U.S.A., and statistics could vary widely in other areas of the world and based on methods.
If you like, we can taboo the "mental illness" phrase and instead use something like "badly defined and illogically based thinking patterns." That would cover the schizophrenic fantasy/reality disconnect, anxiety, depression, etc. Then it becomes pretty clear that "badly defined and illogically based thinking patterns" are really common and often not as specific as biases. I don't think anyone would claim mental illness is rare. According to the American Foundation for Suicide Prevention, 12.6 people out of 100,000 successfully committed suicide in 2013. That means over 41,000 people died, in one year, in the U.S. alone, not counting the suicides ruled as accidents or disappearances. The AFSP says it's not easy to get a good number for suicide attempts, but they believe based on self-harm caused hospitalizations that it easily exceeds 600,000 people a year. And that's just the people who want to die. Eating disorders are gaining attention as one of the more common kinds. Addictive disorders are so common almost everyone knows one or more people struggling. Depression, the same. There's a trend among students where anxiety and stress are causing serious issues.
Also, there's a difference between commonality and normality. Urine fetishes, for instance, are considered abnormal and uncommon. BDSM would be considered normal but uncommon (though 50 Shades of Grey seems to be making it a more common thing.) The urge to eat is normal and common. Mental illness, I would say, are considered common but abnormal.
Honestly, I can't think of a single definition of mental illness that would say it's uncommon. I may be misinterpreting your meaning, but it kind of seems like you're focusing on semantics when the problem here is that common diseased thinking patterns are killing, sickening, and limiting lives.
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.
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 illness. I don't think we should ignore the skewed thinking of mental illness even if the ratio of metally ill to mentally normal people is exactly the same in average versus above average populations. The statistic I'm finding there is 1 in 5. I'm not finding anywhere that's properly sourcing that statistic, though. The article I read sourced the older report (in 2012) but didn't link to the newer one.
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.
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.
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.
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.