Gratitude Thread :-)
Hi folks! Building up on the recent experiment and the #LessWrongMoreNice meme, this thread is devoted to any and all expressions of gratitude. Special rules for communication and voting apply here. Please play along!
A lot of research shows that expressing gratitude improves mental and physical health, qualities that most of us want to increase. So in this thread, please express anything you are grateful for, big or small, one-time or continuing, and feel free to post stuff that you would not normally post to Less Wrong. Encourage and support others in what they post in comments, and upvote posts that you like, while downvoting those that don’t express the spirit of this thread.
If you want to discuss this thread, please do so in response to this open thread comment.
I’m grateful to you for following the spirit of this thread!
I’m very grateful that I’ve had a number of pain-free days this past week. I was able to summon up the energy to work on some dormant projects and overall feel much better about life than I did a week ago.
I’m grateful to be born in a time where medicine has the ability to regrow freaking arteries! Seriously, how cool is that?!
Right now, I’m grateful for coffee.
I’m grateful that I was able to help a good friend out make a super-tough choice about whether to keep her child or give him up for adoption. That took a lot of spoons and cycles, but I’m happy to give her those cycles, as it’s one of the toughest choices she’ll ever make in her life. My hope is that my thoughts help her make an optimal decision.
Perhaps the way in which you helped this person would have been valued more strongly in one of the monthly bragging threads? Getting the upvotes you deserve after helping a friend make a tough choice would have merely been an issue of wording, if you had posted there.
Also, many of us who read Hanson will have developed the intuition that gratitude is about giving others status, while bragging is about giving yourself status.
Maybe you’re right… Oh well, lesson learned. Thanks for the feedback!
Two points:
One, in other threads, your cult member meatpuppets are being obnoxious. Ask them to cut it out, if you would, because their low-information comments are trashing your reputation and making you look like a joke who has to pay people for praise (seriously, that’s how it comes across, although most people aren’t so blunt as to tell you, and will just silently let you make a mockery of yourself).
Also, as for a response to this comment, this is transparent self-praise, and insofar as you are actually expressing gratitude, you’re expressing gratitude that somebody else had a shitty choice to make and you got an opportunity to make yourself look good. Either you don’t actually understand what gratitude is—which isn’t necessarily a personal fault, it’s not an emotion I feel either, but I do understand what it is supposed to be—or you’re being oblivious to the idea you’re actually expressing here.
Yes, but how do you really feel?
I’ve already been over that, but if you weren’t around for that: http://lesswrong.com/r/discussion/lw/mz4/link_lifehack_article_promoting_lesswrong/cw8n
I follow Gleb’s posts and the reaction to said posts casually as they come up. It’s entertaining.
Thanks for the feedback about other InIn participants. They’re trying to figure out how to engage with Less Wrong well. I strongly encouraged them previously to make sure to engage with posts by folks other than myself. I just checked it out now, and it looks like they’re doing that, which is good. But you’re right, their comments are relatively low information. I’ll ask them to hold further comments until the newbies section is ready.
I’d appreciate you avoiding trying to mindread my expression of gratitude. This exchange with my friend has been dominating my thinking recently, and I’ve been questioning myself about whether I handled it in the most optimal way. Nonetheless, I am grateful that I had a chance to be there for her in a really rough time of her life. Please avoid straw-manning my expression of gratitude, and thanks :-)
Also, if you would like to engage on this further, I suggest not doing so in this thread, but going to the meta-thread.
Sigh. They are not InIn participants. They are people you pay to “manage” social media and they are bungling the job in a rather spectacular fashion.
Call them off.
The scarier thought is how often we’re manipulated that way when people don’t bungle their jobs. The few heuristics we use to identify such mischief are trivially misled (for example, establishing plausibility by posting on inconsequential other topics (at least on LW that incurs a measurable cognitive footprint, which is however not the case on, say, Reddit), and then there’s always Poe’s law to consider). Shills man, shills everywhere!
As they dictum goes, just cuz you’re paranoid …
Reminds me of Ernest Hemingway’s apparent paranoid delusions of being under FBI surveillance … only eventually it turned out he actually was. Well, at least if my family keep playing their roles well enough, from a functional blackbox perspective the distinction may not matter that much anyways. I wonder how they got the children to be such good actors, though. Mind chip implants?
As an aside, it’s kind of curious that Prof. Tsipursky does his, let’s say “social engineering”, under his real name.
Anyways, good entertainment. Though on this forum, it’s more of a guilty pleasure (drama is but a weed in our garth of rationality).
In the post-Snowden era…
X-/
He is promoting a charity he’s trying to get off the ground, so his options are limited.
Some would say it’s a spice. Or a herb :-)
Interesting that your perspective is that I’m manipulating LWs, as opposed to genuinely trying to get InIn participants engaged in LW.
Let’s imagine two worlds: one where I was, and one where I wasn’t. You have evidence that I have accomplished quite a bit in my activities, which should tell you something about my abilities.
If I was trying to manipulate LWs, I would not do it so obviously. There’s plenty of subtle maneuvers that could be done. But that’s not where my interest lies.
If I was trying to get InIn participants genuinely engaged in LW and getting them trained up in rationality, I would do exactly what I’m doing.
Consider where the evidence points carefully. Don’t go from your desired conclusion.
Since this thread is meant for gratitude, I’m grateful for you sharing your opinion, but would like to avoid discussing this here. As I indicated earlier, the only people who we pay are folks who volunteer about 2/3-3/4 of their time because they want to grow mentally stronger. I’ll ask them to hold further comments until the newbies section is ready in LW 2.0