Re: “This kind of thing is really harmful to a lot of people” … I agree, but also think I did about as good of a job as possible of being gentle and supportive and open, and at a certain point the responsibility for not getting pressured into insane optimization or Motte/Bailey traps has to fall on the other person. I like you pointing it out as a caveat, on top of my attempts to nudge people away from that attractor in the OP and in my response to lahwran, but also I don’t think it reaches the point of “this post shouldn’t be made” or “this concept shouldn’t be named what it is.”
(I note that you weren’t making such claims, either. I’m not objecting to Zvi-making-such-a-claim so much as to person-who-might-have-interpreted-Zvi-as-making-that-claim.)
Re: everything else … Yeah. I still haven’t managed to get myself all the way through your Slack post, but I paid some people five bucks to give me summaries and highlights, and as best I can tell, the thing-in-my-ontology that corresponds to what you’re pointing at with Slack is the central discriminator when it comes to self-care via things that threaten to become lotus eating.
If I am experiencing a critical deficit of slack, I turn off my “is this lotus eating?” judgment module. Sometimes I have done this by e.g. putting myself in a sufficiently altered state or location that I just can’t do anything productive, and the part of me that boots up scared halfway through draws reassurance from the assessment of past-me. Something like “ah, I find myself here, unable to do trustworthy cognition, unable to do meaningful work. I will infer from this that a recent past version of me thought it was really important that I chill the fuck out for a bit. So I guess I’m going to just do that now.”
Re: “This kind of thing is really harmful to a lot of people” … I agree, but also think I did about as good of a job as possible of being gentle and supportive and open, and at a certain point the responsibility for not getting pressured into insane optimization or Motte/Bailey traps has to fall on the other person. I like you pointing it out as a caveat, on top of my attempts to nudge people away from that attractor in the OP and in my response to lahwran, but also I don’t think it reaches the point of “this post shouldn’t be made” or “this concept shouldn’t be named what it is.”
(I note that you weren’t making such claims, either. I’m not objecting to Zvi-making-such-a-claim so much as to person-who-might-have-interpreted-Zvi-as-making-that-claim.)
Re: everything else … Yeah. I still haven’t managed to get myself all the way through your Slack post, but I paid some people five bucks to give me summaries and highlights, and as best I can tell, the thing-in-my-ontology that corresponds to what you’re pointing at with Slack is the central discriminator when it comes to self-care via things that threaten to become lotus eating.
If I am experiencing a critical deficit of slack, I turn off my “is this lotus eating?” judgment module. Sometimes I have done this by e.g. putting myself in a sufficiently altered state or location that I just can’t do anything productive, and the part of me that boots up scared halfway through draws reassurance from the assessment of past-me. Something like “ah, I find myself here, unable to do trustworthy cognition, unable to do meaningful work. I will infer from this that a recent past version of me thought it was really important that I chill the fuck out for a bit. So I guess I’m going to just do that now.”
And this has always been a good move thus far.