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Virtue garnish: A mental hack to short-circuit bad habits

ledgeroflife.blog

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Re: Virtue garnish: A mental hack to short-circuit bad habits

#21

Post by mpnsk1 »

redcobra762 wrote: post #8
blitzpoet wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

g: Criticism is the price for success?

Sorry to be clear: I want to reinforce my belief that this ad you've posted is profoundly stupid. What would my virtue garnish be for that?

If you want to reinforce your current beliefs do the opposite. Write nothing down. Do what comes to your mind first. You do you.

If I had a garnish that turned anything objectively stupid into something that has objective value it would probably revolutionize chain-of-thought reasoning.

Re: Virtue garnish: A mental hack to short-circuit bad habits

#22

Post by leptons »

blitzpoet wrote: post #4

I find the military saying "pain is weakness leaving the body" effective for workouts. The slogan is short and sticky, and I tend to exercise harder when I think of it.

That's the kind of toxic masculinity platitude that causes men to not seek medical help when they are in pain, which causes worse outcomes for things that are preventable.

Re: Virtue garnish: A mental hack to short-circuit bad habits

#23

Post by dr_kiszonka »

ModernMech wrote: post #17

This seems like a chat GPT authored blog post that's trying to sell what I can only assume is a chat GPT authored self-help ebook.

It annoys me when people are not upfront about wanting to sell me stuff and just waste my time.

The article itself is not that bad, but it is surprising that it received nearly 50 upvotes in two hours.

Anyway, instead of buying yet another journal, `w:` could be made into a handy keyboard shortcut to open a certain file in your favorite editor so that you can write your "whisper" with current datetime. One could also LLM it to automatically provide the "garnish". And BOOM a new AI start-up! The first 10 garnishes a month are free. Above that you have choice of slow garnishes and premium garnishes (36c per garnish). Email me directly for BYOK and enterprise deployments. YC, yes, I am looking for investors. This could be big. Let's do this!

Re: Virtue garnish: A mental hack to short-circuit bad habits

#24

Post by mpnsk1 »

jbotz wrote: post #19

That "gap between stimulus and response" is in some circles known as "mindfulness". And meditation is an effective exercise for building and strengthening that gap.

That seems to fly over a lot of heads. Anyone who actually meditated will tell you the process of fixing yourself through meditation is painstakingly slow, you mostly become aware of how your mind does not do what it is supposed to, and if you stop meditating you quickly lose all progress.

What the post describes is essentially some form of micro journaling to build a cached hashmap of the thought patterns you want your mind to have.

Re: Virtue garnish: A mental hack to short-circuit bad habits

#25

Post by mpnsk1 »

What I like about this approach is that it goes back to looking at what your problems actually are. A lot of self help and social media sells you virtues in the form of solutions looking for a problem. It makes people go around with hammers of virtue seeing everything as a viceful nail they can hammer down. And of course they see the nail in other people first.

Re: Virtue garnish: A mental hack to short-circuit bad habits

#27

Post by monodeldiablo »

This is just repackaged cognitive or dialectical behavioral therapy, with cutesy names like "whisper" and "virtue garnish" to make it seem novel. But if it speaks to people, I see no harm in that.

If you're genuinely interested in changing your habits, I recommend investigating these therapies, as they're backed by decades of research and results.

And if you want to tune in to these "whispers" in the first place, there's really no substitute for meditation and mindfulness practice.

Re: Virtue garnish: A mental hack to short-circuit bad habits

#28

Post by seanhunter »

In what sense is the platitude you’re supposed to think of in crucial moments a garnish? “Garnish” has two meanings: Firstly a decoration or embellishment, especially for food. Secondly it can mean to deduct something (eg garnish someone’s wages to pay child maintenance or a fine of some kind). So is the dumbass saying supposed to be a decoration for your virtue or is it supposed to be reducing your virtue?

I certainly feel that the overall quality of hackernews has been garnished by having this drivel on the front page. Unfortunately in the second sense of the word, not the first.

Re: Virtue garnish: A mental hack to short-circuit bad habits

#29

Post by evertedsphere »

Another day, another LLM-generated blog post on the front page about a deeply human topic. Do others not detect the tells, or do you not care?

(And, no, there is no "respond to content rather than style" issue here. There is no meaningful content here. That would be the prompt, but of course the author doesn't want to just post that.)

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