Seven Weird Ideas Worth Hearing Out On

TL;DR

This selection expands on concepts from a Reddit post asking “What weird thing should I hear you out on?” I liked the most.

Made with Gemini, added here for a better discoverability.

1. Slowing Down Time Through Variety

The Core Idea: That nagging feeling of time speeding up as we age isn’t an unavoidable law of nature. It’s potentially a consequence of our routines becoming predictable, blurring our memories together. By injecting variety into our days, we can create more distinct memories, making it feel like time is passing more slowly.

How It Works (Theoretically): Our brains form memories more readily when experiencing novel situations. When our days are filled with the same routines, our memory encoding becomes less efficient, leaving us with fewer distinct markers of time. By actively seeking out new experiences, we force our brains to pay attention and encode memories in greater detail. This makes the days feel longer in retrospect because there’s more to remember.

Actionable Steps:

• Escape the Home: Make a conscious effort to spend less time at home. Work from a café, read a book in a park, eat takeout in a different location – anything to break the monotony of your usual environment.
• Errand Roulette: Instead of sticking to the closest laundromat, grocery store, or other service provider, venture out and try new places. This not only adds variety but also helps you discover hidden gems in your city.
• Omega-3 Boost: While the exact mechanism is unclear, some people find that Omega-3 supplements seem to enhance memory formation and recall. It’s a relatively low-risk experiment worth trying.
• Journaling: Even a few sentences summarizing your day can help solidify memories. Regularly revisiting old journal entries can also reinforce those memories, making the past feel more vivid and less compressed.
• Travel and Exploration: Prioritize travel to new places and make an effort to truly engage with your surroundings. Avoid mindlessly scrolling through your phone and instead focus on observing, interacting, and creating lasting memories.

The Counterpoint: Some argue that the feeling of time speeding up is simply a trick of memory. Long-term memory, they claim, isn’t designed to distinguish between different time intervals, making events from a year ago feel as distant as those from twenty years ago. In this view, our perception of time is distorted, not the actual passage of time.

2. Happiness Through Controlled Depersonalization

The Core Idea: Controlled depersonalization, a state of detachment from your usual sense of self, can be a potent tool for achieving greater happiness. This involves intentionally distancing yourself from your ego and the narratives it weaves about your suffering.

Mechanisms:

• Meditation: Mindfulness meditation practices can train you to observe your thoughts and emotions without identifying with them. This detachment can lessen their grip on your well-being.
• Ego Death: Certain meditation techniques and psychedelic experiences can induce a temporary dissolution of the ego, allowing you to experience a sense of interconnectedness and liberation from self-centered concerns.
• Psychedelics: Substances like psilocybin (magic mushrooms) can facilitate ego death and depersonalization, offering insights into the constructed nature of the self and the impermanence of suffering.

How It Leads to Happiness: By detaching from your internal narratives of suffering, you become less emotionally invested in your problems and hardships. This allows you to approach challenges with greater equanimity and enjoy life’s pleasures more fully.

Caveats:

• Control is Key: Uncontrolled depersonalization, often associated with trauma or mental health conditions, can be distressing and disruptive. The key is to cultivate a sense of agency and control over these states, entering and exiting them at will.
• Not a Constant State: Controlled depersonalization is best used as a temporary tool, offering a break from the intensity of the ego. It’s not meant to be a permanent state of detachment from life’s experiences.
• Professional Guidance: If you’re struggling with mental health issues or have a history of trauma, exploring depersonalization should be done with the guidance of a qualified therapist or mental health professional.

An Alternative Path: While depersonalization focuses on detachment, some argue that serving others and focusing on their needs is a more direct route to happiness. This perspective emphasizes the fulfillment that comes from contributing to something larger than yourself.

3. The Elo System for Better Product Reviews

The Core Idea: Product and service reviews are often unreliable, plagued by bias, limited experience, and a tendency for politeness over honesty. Implementing an Elo rating system, like that used in chess, could make reviews significantly more accurate and useful.

How Elo Works:

• Comparative Reviews: Instead of assigning arbitrary star ratings, reviewers would compare two products or services directly, indicating their preference or a draw.
• Dynamic Ranking: The Elo system would dynamically adjust the ratings of products based on these comparisons. Products that consistently win in head-to-head matchups would climb the rankings, while those that lose would fall.

Benefits of an Elo System:

• Reduced Bias: The comparative nature of Elo reviews would minimize the influence of biased reviewers who might consistently rate their favorite products highly regardless of their actual quality.
• Experienced Comparisons: Elo rankings would reflect the opinions of those who have actually used both products being compared, providing more meaningful insights than reviews based on limited experience.
• Honesty Over Politeness: By focusing on relative comparisons, the Elo system would encourage reviewers to be more honest in their assessments, rather than feeling pressured to give high ratings out of politeness.

4. Nicotine: The Underrated Nootropic?

The Core Idea: Nicotine, when used responsibly and in controlled doses, might be an effective nootropic, enhancing cognitive function and focus. This view challenges the overwhelmingly negative perception of nicotine fueled by its association with smoking.

The Case for Nicotine:

• Enhanced Cognition: Studies have shown that nicotine can improve attention, working memory, and cognitive flexibility.
• Habit-Building: Nicotine’s stimulating effects can make it easier to initiate and maintain productive activities, particularly for individuals with ADHD or other attentional challenges.
• Alternatives to Smoking: Nicotine can be consumed through less harmful methods like patches, gum, or lozenges, minimizing the health risks associated with smoking.

Important Caveats:

• Addiction Risk: Nicotine is highly addictive, especially when consumed through smoking or vaping.
• Dosage Control: Using nicotine as a nootropic requires careful dosage control to avoid dependence and minimize side effects.
• Public Perception: The stigma surrounding nicotine makes open discussion and research challenging, hindering its potential as a legitimate cognitive enhancer.

5. Avoiding Activities That Cultivate Bad Character

The Core Idea: We often engage in activities that, while seemingly harmless or even enjoyable, can subtly reinforce negative character traits. By identifying and minimizing these activities, we can create a more conducive environment for personal growth.

Examples of Character-Eroding Activities:

• Driving: The anonymity and frustration of driving can trigger aggression, impatience, and a disregard for rules.
• Social Media: The constant comparison and negativity inherent in some forms of social media can foster envy, self-doubt, and a distorted view of reality.
• Gaming: Certain types of video games, particularly those involving competition and violence, can desensitize players to aggression and promote a win-at-all-costs mentality.

Identifying the Culprits: Pay attention to how certain activities make you feel. Do they regularly leave you feeling impatient, anxious, angry, or morally compromised? Do you find yourself making excuses for these negative feelings or behaviors? These are signs that an activity might be undermining your character.

The Importance of Character: Good character isn’t just about being nice; it’s about cultivating virtues that allow us to live meaningful and fulfilling lives. These virtues include honesty, compassion, integrity, resilience, and self-control. When we habitually engage in activities that undermine these virtues, we make it harder to live up to our own values and contribute positively to the world.

6. Condorcet Voting: Towards a More Representative Democracy

The Core Idea: Condorcet voting, a system that determines the winner based on pairwise comparisons between all candidates, offers a potentially fairer and more accurate alternative to traditional voting methods.

How Condorcet Voting Works:

1. Ranked Ballots: Voters rank all candidates in order of preference.
2. Pairwise Comparisons: The system analyzes all possible head-to-head matchups between candidates. For example, if there are three candidates (A, B, and C), the system would determine who would win in a two-candidate election between A and B, A and C, and B and C.
3. Condorcet Winner: The candidate who would win against every other candidate in a pairwise comparison is declared the winner.

Advantages of Condorcet Voting:

• Majority Rule: Condorcet winners represent the preferences of the majority, even in elections with multiple candidates.
• Reduced Spoiler Effect: Third-party candidates are less likely to “spoil” elections by siphoning votes away from more popular candidates.
• Strategic Voting Alignment: Condorcet encourages strategic voting that aligns with broader voter preferences rather than simply voting for one’s top choice.

Challenges:

• Complexity: Condorcet voting can be more complex to explain and implement than traditional voting systems.
• Condorcet Paradox: In some cases, a clear Condorcet winner may not exist due to cyclical preferences (e.g., a majority prefers A to B, B to C, and C to A). Various methods exist to address this paradox.

Alternative: Approval Voting: While Condorcet offers theoretical advantages, Approval Voting, where voters simply approve or disapprove of each candidate, is simpler and may be more practical for widespread adoption.

7. The Non-Uniqueness of Personal Identity: You Are Dying Every Second

The Core Idea: The idea of a continuous, unchanging self might be an illusion. Personal identity, in this view, is not a singular, forward-moving entity but rather a series of discrete moments of consciousness, each connected to the past but not inherently bound to the future.

The Argument:

• Backward, Not Forward: We can easily trace our sense of self back through memory. We remember being conscious in the past, and this backward chain creates the illusion of a continuous self. However, there’s no equivalent forward chain guaranteeing that any particular future person is the “real” continuation of our current consciousness.
• Multiple Valid Continuations: This opens up the possibility that multiple versions of “you” could exist in the future, each with equally valid claims to being the continuation of your current identity. This dissolves paradoxes like the teletransportation problem, where a perfect copy of you is created while the original is destroyed.
• You Are Dying, Constantly: From this perspective, it could be argued that “you” are dying multiple times per second, with a new “you” arising in each moment, inheriting the memories and experiences of the previous moment.

Implications:

• Death Redefined: This challenges our conventional understanding of death as a singular event.
• Moral Considerations: Raises questions about responsibility and the ethical treatment of copies or future versions of ourselves.
• Dzogchen Meditation: This perspective aligns with certain Buddhist meditation practices, particularly those within the Dzogchen tradition, which focus on cultivating an awareness of the present moment and the impermanence of the self.