Enlightenment Now

This is a good trick, simply stop trying to make the best decision. To quote Mark Twain (I think): Good decisions come from experience; experience comes from bad decisions. To take this deeper, indecisiveness is often caused by anxiety. And it's usually not anxiety about the decision, but anxiety in general (or generalized anxiety). It may be helpful to consider what issues in your life are causing anxiety and how you are avoiding them.

True, in humanity there is no such thing as alpha or beta. As opposed to chimps, for example. Their alphas have physically distinct characteristics. Though humans can have alpha and beta attributes, which are mostly under our control.

Right, but he has insecurities that keep him from "letting the losers play dumb games." Nothing wrong with working on insecurities.

Objectivism would say love is a response to virtue. It may not be a virtue to be bossy, but it is a virtue to be comfortable around other men, comfortable enough to be unaffected by their status play. So I say this is a legitimate question. From a guy who's been through this, here are a few tips: Give yourself a few verbal salvos to use when in these situations and you're uncomfortable. Maybe something like, "here's [this guy] acting all cool for the ladies" Get in it and play the status game. It's fun if nothing else. You'll probably get burned and lose a few times but it's no big deal and you're more likely to do better next time; Get into fighting like jiu jitsu to get comfortable with conflict; How are you with your father? If you're uncomfortable with him you're going to be more likely to be uncomfortable with other (stronger, more powerful, older, richer) men. Improve your relationship with him and other relationships will improve. Hope this helps.

True. Psychologists hate to admit this but we're personal trainers. Instead of getting the patients body to handle heavier weight, we get them to handle heavier emotion. Biologically, the process is similar. A barbell and emotion are both neurological strain.

Smart people tend to turn in on themselves when facing psychological issues. This is how they solve calculus or o-chem problems, but it doesn't work so well with emotions. One problem is, in our culture, talking about emotions is conflated with indulging emotions. It's rare to meet someone who can discuss their emotions without feeling gross, but it's not only possible it's necessary for self-awareness.

Atlas Shrugged, We the Living, Virtue of Selfishness. I was a philosophy student in undergrad and Intro to Objectivist Epistemology was a game-changer for me. I inadvertently based my thesis on it---since psychology has been dominated by either Rationalism or Empiricism. I wouldn't be a good psychologist without it.

Hey guys, I've considered myself at least a student of Objectivism since reading The Fountainhead in high school. I'm a psychologist so I'll mostly spend my time in that area of the forum. Hopefully this will be better for my sanity than getting into arguments in my head while scrolling through Twitter.

The most accurate way to test your IQ online is to take the wonderlic and compare your score to the IQ distribution. Other than that, what I've seen of online IQ tests is they're nothing like a real IQ test. For instance, an IQ test requires each question to be timed, which is an important part of calculating the final score. Though to echo others on this thread, IQ doesn't matter that much for personal happiness and living a good life. The only way it would negatively impact an individual is if they wanted to a career their lower IQ couldn't justify, but I've almost never seen this. If we're too dumb for a profession, then chances are we wouldn't be interested in it. Interest in a field indicates the capacity to participate in it.

I'm a psychologists so here's a few points about addiction: it's not a choice the way we'd typically think of it; rather it's a response to evaded anxiety; to overcome an addiction, we must first confront the anxiety that we've been avoiding; if we make it a habit of evading anxiety, then our brain's survival mechanisms get warped and used incorrectly; instead of avoiding real threats we avoid perceived threats, which creates stress on the brain that is easiest relieved (temporarily) through compulsively using substances. the main point, however, is that the manifestation of addiction is the effect of a maladaptive relationship with anxiety. Hope this helps.

The first step, though perhaps not the last step, in overcoming depression is listing what you need. Right on a sheet of paper. That's the cause of depression, an unmet need, and oftentimes they've been unmet for such a long time we come to accept them as such. Then take your list of needs and talk about them with at least one other person as though you're taking responsibility for them. Simply getting the unmet needs off your chest in a mature way in the context of another human face gives us the emotional fluidity to figure out what to do next.