Carl-Richard

Imagination is imaginary.

I actually don't believe you. No university has a "completely dead" social scene or no parties, just varying quantities of it. And that quantity doesn't actually mean anything, unless you plan on going to multiple parties at the same time (which is just not a thing). There are social people at every university, and they will find a way to party, and there is no way you can stop them. You just need to find them. You need to stop comparing yourself to some Nirvanic standard of what you think college should be and actually have the college experience. You're going to waste your college experience, but it's not because of your university: it's because of your attitude. Change your attitude.

Are you currently experiencing writing this post ("Are there conscious bubbles independent of mine?")? Nope, you're not currently experiencing writing this post. Then did you not experience writing it? Well, yes you did? You certainly did experience writing this post. Ok, then how could God create an experiential bubble that is separate from your current experiential bubble? Well duh, that is what God is doing all the time. Every single nanosecond of your existence, your experience is being dissociated from another experience. So is God capable of it? Of course. The evidence is abundant.

Is that true; that 140 bpm for 30 min leads to less fatigue than sprinting 20 secs x 4 with 4 minutes rest in-between? And are the cardiovascular effects comparable?

But it goes to show that choosing sprint as your choice of cardio at least wouldn't counteract getting jacked, meanwhile choosing a form of training where the top atheletes associated with that training look like twigs would, no? I'm not thinking about using sprinting as a sole method for getting jacked. I just want my cardio to go well with my already well-established weight training habit.

Maybe that is why sprinters are so jacked? I'm not sedentary btw 😆

Drink some milk.

@The0Self Ok, now let's say I also want to optimize testosterone levels. Does that lean more in favor of incline treadmill walking or sprints?

If there was a best way to train, would you not choose that way? Let's say I want to optimize blood flow to the brain at rest. How should I train?

This is one of the ways that (some) dopamine neurons work: unexpected rewards are much more rewarding than expected rewards. In other words, if the “reward prediction error” is positive (the outcome of the reward minus the expected reward is positive), then you’ll experience an increase in dopamine. Therefore, if you expect the worst outcome for something (e.g. if you’re extremely anxious about talking to a girl), then there is an even greater reason to do the thing, because the odds are that, at some point, given enough tries, you’ll experience some positive outcome that you didn’t expect, and you’ll experience that outcome as extremely positive, and thus you’ll be more likely to seek out that experience again (because that is how reinforcement works). This doesn’t just apply to talking to girls. It generally makes the case for the virtue of courage. If you do things that you expect to be extremely hard or expect to certainly contain bad outcomes (and we know that such extreme expectations are generally exaggerated), when you get on the other side, the odds are that your perspective will change for the better. So get out there and do the hard thing! :>

@Loveeee That was just a bit of a fun coincidence, but regardless of that, I still don't believe that the fact of reality being a dream eliminates any suffering. We seem to be talking about different kinds of dreams.

That's funny, because I seriously entertain the idea that people in your nightly dreams are just as real as people in real life.

I used to be extremely afraid of public speaking all since high school, then I practiced like a madman for one of my presentations in university, and it went unexpectedly really well. That single experience transformed my view of public speaking. I was actually excited for when I could do it again.

Why are you glad it's all relative?

What does that have to do with Gaza?

Yes. I think if you expect your first cold approach to go super smooth, that would certainly make you less likely to do cold approaches again, because as you say, it's more likely for a cold approach to go poorly than go well. On the other hand, as I pointed out in the thread, if you keep doing cold approaches despite your negative expectation, the times it does end up going kind of well, that will be immensely reinforcing. And I think for most people, in the context of cold approaches, unexpected negative outcomes is not really a problem, as people are generally more overly anxious than overly confident. And if you are overly confident; 1. why are you doing cold approaches?; and 2. you would probably handle rejections better just in general. This negative reinforcement mechanism you're pointing to is thought to be why for example naltrexone therapy seems to work for quitting certain addictive substances (e.g. alcohol or opioids). The therapy consists of pairing the intake of the addictive drug with the intake of naltrexone, which is an opioid receptor antagonist, meaning it inhibits and produces the opposite effect of the desired response associated with the addictive drug. When your brain realizes that the familiar stimulus (the act of taking the drug) is not just no longer paired with the desired response, but with a response of opposite valence (an aversive response), your dopamine system updates its responses to the stimulus, meaning it will no longer associate it with the desired response and trigger cravings in the same way.

Let's get to the bottom of this: why are you glad that it's all a dream? To me, the fact that it's a dream is completely neutral to whether or not me as a human being should be glad or sad about a certain event in the human realm (e.g. Gaza getting obliterated). So to me, the fact that you seem to take some kind of solace that it's just a dream, means that you completely misunderstand what is meant by it all being a dream. In other words, you seem to conflate personal solipsism (the "dumb" kind) with transpersonal solipsism (the "cool" kind).

I do strength training too. It's the main thing I do. I asked about which type of cardio is best. Certainly, doing the type of cardio that makes you look like a twig (e.g. long-distance running) wouldn't go well with strength training (but apparently sprinting does; just look at sprinters and how buff they are)... or could anybody provide a counterargument?

@UnbornTao Another insight about recontextualizing one's insecurities: It is possible that your insecurities could be based in essentially nothing of substance. For example, imagine the go-to example of an intelligent person (Albert Einstein). Now, despite all the achievements, all the contributions to science, all the praise (generally the substantive evidence of this person's intelligence), you could still imagine a scenario where Einstein in his childhood was for example called stupid by somebody he respects, and ever since then, he carried an insecurity about not being smart enough. Of course, not all your insecurities are based in nothing substantial, but just recognizing the possibility that some of them could be, you could potentially identify such insecurities in your life, or you can put yourself in the mind state as if that was the case for a specific insecurity and see how you would act. This insight and the one above are just ways of peeking behind the curtain of your habitual mind and maybe see things from a different perspective.

There is no dream.

Very few individuals in modern society have zero problems with concentration.

What the heck does this solipsistic bullshit change about Gaza? Nothing! We're all lucky we're not in Gaza. In Gaza, solipsism becomes the last thing your mind could ever think about.

I've heard other people also say this; that it's "too short". Too short for what? It's too short for HIIT, or long-distance cardio, but for sprint training, it's just perfect. If your goal is to run at maximum speed continuously for a short period, 20 seconds is perfect. There is also something very special about sprint training that I haven't mentioned. At the very end of your sprint, the intensity of your breathing skyrockets I think many times higher than the average intensity of long-distance cardio, maybe also HIIT. It's so intense that you have to stop, or else you'll become sick. This level of intensity, even though it's for a short period of time, surely must have interesting benefits for the cardiovascular system. Besides, why should breathing at medium intensity over 20 minutes necessarily produce a stronger/healthier cardiovascular system at baseline than shorter alternatives? Likewise, why should HIIT be better than sprint? It's kind of like saying that you should only lift medium weights with many reps to build a strong body that can support your everyday activities, not heavy weights with few reps. What kind of logic is that? Obviously, heavier weights = stronger body. Does it then not follow that more intense breathing = stronger cardiovascular system? Or is it the case that your lungs have a kind of Goldilocks zone of long-term medium intensity stimulation for maximizing lung capacity?

Yet virtually all the super-geniuses of history received aristocratic tutoring.

I’ve had a suspicion for a while that practicing N-back with multiple stimulus types (especially Quad N-Back) promotes the equivalent of ADHD, because it incentives you to change attention between different stimulus types to get a more even score, because an even score generally feels better than an uneven score (in my opinion). I think the more psychologically healthy option is to choose the amount of stimulus types that gives a roughly even score, across all stimulus types and at all stages of learning at a given N-back level. For example, when advancing from 3-Back to 4-Back, if you for example get 30%-10%-0%-0% on Quad-4-Back, you should lower it down to Triple-4-Back. If it’s still uneven (say 30%-10%-0%), lower it down to Dual-4-Back. I find that Dual with audio and position (but probably any visual alternative could work, e.g. color or shape) is the best (I'm on Dual-4-Back right now), because they seem the least likely to compete for your attention (the audio and visual system seem to operate decently well in parallel). You can still rotate between different Dual combinations (with audio as a constant) if you want to train with other stimuli, which might also train different aspects of your brain and might offload fatigue from other brain areas (plus, more variation means less boredom). That said, the fatigue is probably largely systemic, as N-Back tasks seem to increase integration across brain networks, so rotating stimulus types will probably have limited effectiveness: I’ll maybe experiment with doing 3 sets of each combination in my daily routine of 10 sets to see if there is a decrease in fatigue compared to doing just one combination. My intuition tells me it’s most ideal to practice just one combination each session, kinda like how most bodybuilders split their workouts into chest day, back day, leg day, etc. From that perspective, practicing Quad-N-Backs would be like trying to hit a whole-body workout with the same volume as a weekly 3-way split (which is simply intractable).