The difference between medicine in poison is the dose ("the dose makes the poison.") Good ideas taken to extreme are often Very Bad, but sometimes a little bit of the idea is exactly what you need.

If you have social anxiety, talking to people through discomfort, or initially treating interactions as a game can help take the pressure off. Treating people as NPCs is unhealthy. Routine exercise is good. Becoming obsessed with how your body looks, living in the gym, taking steroids is bad. A sense of humility, purpose, and devotion in life is generally good. Religious fanaticism is bad. Confidence, which often involves a touch of self-deception, generally is good. Unchecked arrogance is bad.

If I tell you to go for a run or do some push-ups, there's a risk that you'll become totally obsessed with exercise. But going for that run will also help. You need a moderate amount of my advice, not an extreme amount.

This piece resonated with me. When you're stuck in a routine you dislike, being aware that your brain is optimized to stay in its current state (according to the cited research) is good. Going bananas and being "unmoored and open to anything", living every day without any sense of habit or purpose is bad. The dose makes the poison.

I on the side that the complexity is even larger than this. There a lot of other analogies that could apply here, not just the dose/poison one.

Some things are good in small doses on some occasions and in large doses on others. Some things are poison for some people but food for others. Some things are only medicine in very specific circumstances. Some things are placebo.

Anyone can decide if a piece of advice is beneficial to them in what dose. But I agree with the GP that we are too complex for these hacks

Did you know, the brain is hard-wired to be suckered by self-help books? One trick that I personally find very liberating and enlightening is to make a big pile of such material and burn it. It gives me a sense of warmth and inner joy.

Isn't the combustion external? Why would the warmth be internal?

“Burn” is a commonplace synonym for oxidization, that is, adding an electron. Likely the GP is “eating the books, and thus is warmed as a consequence of the Krebs cycle.

We can be glad for GP that these days it is uncommon to encounter a book with a CD or DVD attached. I’m not sure those are safe to eat.

Semantics dear Watson: it's the inner joy that's internal.

Never let an explanation ruin a terrible pun.

I so believe the opposite of this IF you come at the right ones the right way?

Which is to say, once you read (or skimmed) enough of them, it's easy to get a sixth sense of the "intelligence" and "motivation" of the writer, and the sincere ones, even if not smart, are still pretty enjoyable if taken with many salt grains, and I'm a sucker for them (again, not in terms of following exactly what they say to do, but appreciating the motivation and good-intent of the author and possibly picking up something along the way.)

They'll have names like PSYCHO-CYBERNETICS and just be like "try to be nice to people and sit down and be quite a few times a day."

A sort of perfect example would be the fictional "The You You Are" from the TV Show Severance. I hope they actually write it, I know I'd LOVE it.

https://severance.wiki/the_you_you_are_book

Your advice is superb. You can start writing self help books learning people how to make the fire in order for them to achieve the inner joy.

I enjoy reading them, thinking I'll change myself. Then I'm done, I don't apply anything and put the book on the shelf.

It's its own kind of horror for these books.

This is an interesting topic of its own, but there have been a few books/ideas that have made a significant difference on how I operate day-to-day. There are many more books and ideas I nod along to and never implement.

You’ve touched on something profound here—our interaction with knowledge is dynamic, not static. A book that speaks to us today might whisper different wisdom 5 years from now, as we grow and our perspectives shift.

Transitioning to "I know these are good ideas" to things you're doing in practice is much harder than reading, but can happen. Over time, I've come to look at reading these kinds of books like planting seeds. They give my brain ideas and concepts to chew on. Options to apply to situations.

I did wake up one day to the realization that I had up to this point not been willing to take the next steps and put insight into action. And when I realized that, it was like opening floodgates. I started doing the things I had learned about, and they started to change my life. But there is a pretty important and major milestone to make this transition.

I don't think it's necessary or helpful to frame this as a kind of horror. I think it's more helpful to just change how you see the act of reading books. True change still has to start from within. Books in this context are just toolboxes. Toolboxes don't build anything by themselves either.

Over the last few months I've been experimenting with Buddhist meditation, which leans heavily into this metaphor. They phrase the metaphor differently, with a focus on flattening of the grooves in your mind.

I've found these ideas helpful, but they're hardly novel. The Buddha lived over 2000 years ago. One big difference the objective. Most of these blogs are about hacking your mind to be more successful, whereas religions aim to make you more comfortable with your life as it currently is.

I think if you're going to experiment with upgrading your wetware, then you could do worse than look at Buddhism, or any other practice that encourages deep contemplation and promotes kindness. I have my issues with organised religion, but why not at least consider the thousands of years of prior art?

It is also a folly to equate Buddhist traditions with Self help book sellers. Siddhartha Gautam Buddha was just one of the 6 other prevalent Dharmic masters and there enough original material from many of those traditions. The Dharmic traditions arose over centuries through a healthy collaboration of diverse set of people over a vast geography.

True, the Dharmic masters didn't have printing presses.

Or late stage capitalism

I appreciate the point you're trying to make. However, my general experience of attempts to take "useful" parts of of religion and then sanitise them for secular mass consumption is that they're at best useless and at worst harmful.

Sure, there might be some proximal benefits to (say) meditation but these are things that were done in a larger (often spiritual) context and I'm not sure that pulling them out of that is wise.

Effects of meditation are there regardless of the religious context.

Although you are right in that the deeper stages (say as described in "The Mind Illuminated") may not make much sense without at least some spiritual foundation.

Don't kill and don't steal seem pretty useful and are embedded within many if not all secular laws.

Sometimes with massive caveats like stone adulterers and homosexuals.

I sympathize. As someone who used to hold essentially fundamentalist views, I'm now deeply suspicious of anything supernatural. When I left, I didn't even try to smuggle out any of the good parts.

However, there's now tons of secular support for meditation. Sam Harris, a neuroscientist and one of the most anti-religion and anti-supernatural people out there, is basically leading the charge. I think that says something.

Interestingly, my main disagreements with the approach came primarily from the way Harris (and to a smaller degree Alain deBotton) attempted this.

My perspective on this is one of a person who underwent years of complex trauma in childhood and my stuck-ness was a series of overly sensitive protective mechanisms that had been built up by the experience.

“The illusion of being stuck” also sounds a lot like “Learned Helplessness”, which is a maladaptive conditioning of the brain to strongly believe that not doing something is the best option because doing something won’t make a difference anyway, despite this not being true at all. Like drowning in two feet of water because it didn’t occur to the person to just stand up.

The reason I’m pointing at trauma is that we all come from a wide spectrum of experiences, which result in a wide spectrum of stuckness (or lack thereof).

The book “Learned Optimism” (written by Martin Seligman, one of the original researchers who discovered the learned helplessness phenomenon) first describes how animals (not just humans) arrive in these maladaptive states, and then provides worksheets to help people who are currently deeply biased towards a pessimistic world view learn techniques to reframe and ultimately rewire these biases, and I can attest to the life changing improvements this kind of work can bring without my brain falling out.

More broadly, it’s worth considering the fact that we’re all running firmware that evolved during a very different era of human existence, and is often poorly tuned for modern reality.

Using what we know about the brain and how it is conditioned to adapt ourselves to modern situations seems pretty critical.

> I'm not convinced that this is generally a good idea. It makes a person unmoored and open to anything ("so open minded that your brains fall out"). It's also often amoral. The only metric that's maximised is utility regardless of other more subtle consequences.

This seems like a pretty major jump to a conclusion that would require far more to back it up.

I don’t think this is about mucking with firmware as much as it is about correcting model weights. Our firmware seems to be what it is. Our environment and conditioning is what embeds certain biases and resulting behaviors.

Human experience is certainly more complex than just a few hacks, but I don’t think that discounts the value that certain kinds of exercises can bring.

We’re continually working against our default modes of operation when we adhere to principles of rational thought and logic. Emotional responses like anger discard these higher modes of thinking. I see these “hacks” as something similar: methods of helping us move beyond the less adaptive parts of our brains based on a growing understanding of the world around us.

That's a very nuanced take. I dont take offense to using "techniques" to fix "problems".

I'm more annoyed by the usual phrasing of these things as life changing and revelatory.

> I'm more annoyed by the usual phrasing of these things as life changing and revelatory.

Maybe it's time to unstick yourself from these patterns. Life changing and revelatory can be as much evolutionary as revolutionary. There's no need to narrow them down to their extremes.

I suspect they're taking issue with the implication that these things are universally life changing, not that they can be meaningful at all. I have no doubt the author of this article uncovered personal truths, but the whole thing is framed as if they become an expert on everyone else's mental health by breaking free from their own depression.

Personally for navel-gazy articles like this I think it's more useful to focus on telling one's own story instead of making broad edicts and sprinkling in some science in an effort to lend legitimacy to them. What works for one person won't work for everyone, but "I was in X situation and did Y and it helped me" is far more likely to be helpful for someone else than simply "Do Y", especially when you're writing for a wide audience.

Thank you for your insight. I completely agree—my journey and the lessons I’ve learned are deeply personal and not one-size-fits-all solutions. Embracing imperfect action has been a significant step for me, far better than letting procrastination have control. Sharing my experiences and receiving feedback is how I hope to grow and refine my understanding over time. And truly, when I write, I'm mainly holding a mirror to myself, navigating my thoughts and discoveries. Your feedback is invaluable in this process.

> I'm more annoyed by the usual phrasing of these things as life changing and revelatory.

But when they work for someone, they can and do lead to important revelations and/or life changes.

I'm a firm believer in one's ability to "reprogram" themselves, having done it to varying degrees across the span of my life. Perhaps it doesn't work for everyone. It doesn't always work for myself, especially when life makes the required self-discipline hard to maintain.

I'm biased by my own success, obviously.

Learned helplessness was disproved, by the way. If I remember correctly, there is even a recent paper from the original authors confirming this.

Helplessness isn't learned, it's a result of not knowing how to deal with the situation. So, try new things, search for the solutions and don't give up — that's the recipe.

Thanks for pointing this out - I was not aware of the recent new findings. After reading through some of the recent updates my understanding is that the recommended reframing exercises (the “Learned Optimism” part) are still effective, even if the original understanding of why helplessness occurs biologically was backwards in the original research. So perhaps a better descriptor now is just “helplessness”.

From a practical standpoint, this is critical to note because if someone is trying to address their stuck-ness, this book is still an excellent resource that is not affected by this detail and is focused on learning new skills to move forward.

I think this also underscores the importance of taking active steps to retrain our brains when necessary.

>It makes a person unmoored and open to anything ("so open minded that your brains fall out")

I agree with your assumptions, but not your conclusion. When I was at my very lowest I took pretty high doses of acid for my first time on psychedelics. The point was that I was starting from a long time experiencing daily mental anguish and physical pain being treatment resistant, ideating suicide but not completing it. I thought if I became more "open minded", either I'd get better or I'd off myself and I really preferred both over the status quo. The former happened.

Being open minded is a bad thing only if you like how your mind how it is.

Yes, it’s very like meditate your way out of pain to point you don’t feel when you are actually burning. Which actually happens IRL more often then what you would assume.

Honestly, the centerpiece of the article is this:

> In plain, simple terms, you need to: do the uncomfortable thing.

That’s what the advice boils down to, and it works, and it’s not a hack. It’s growth. There are lots of sophisticated techniques to help you actually do “the thing,” but if your best judgment is that the thing is the right course of action, then you ultimately do need to violate your feeling that it is wrong/dangerous/scary and let your feelings catch up later.

I think that's fair, but there's also value in describing what is being stuck. It's important being able to identify feelings and put words on it. It also helps to see this is something other people go through, so as to feel less alone

You seem to have experience in this. Could you recommend or share any alternative approaches?

> I've come across these kinds of articles before and they always seem to suggest that you rewrite the metaphorical firmware of your brain so that it operates in a way that is advantageous to you. There's some notion of self discovery from first principles.

> I'm not convinced that this is generally a good idea. It makes a person unmoored and open to anything ("so open minded that your brains fall out"). It's also often amoral. The only metric that's maximised is utility regardless of other more subtle consequences.

I'd say you could benefit from a firmware rewrite yourself, because it isn't possible for you to know these things, because they are unknowable.

> As I grow older, i think the human experience is more complex than can be captured by a few "hacks" like this.

Or yours.

As Terence McKenna liked to say:

- Reality is not only stranger than we imagine, it's stranger than we CAN imagine.

- What we call reality is in fact nothing more than a culturally sanctioned and linguistically reinforced hallucination. (A bit off, but close enough.)