I don’t think Less Wrong would be an appropriate place for this. If you really want to do it, maybe /r/unsong or /r/slatestarcodex.

Man, I don’t know. I think during that scene I was thinking that I would leave without the watch, then have a friend get it a few weeks later and mail it to me. I know that’s a cop-out answer, but cop-out answers are all I’ve got.

But if I did, I definitely wouldn’t stay around to make Pop-Tarts.

I think many people have gotten to a point where they have one thing figured out and limit themselves to doing that one thing.

I feel pretty safe and happy as long as I am allowed to just keep doing the job I have been doing for a few years, and live in my house, and not get exposed to any weird and challenging situations. I am very lucky that I have a job I can keep doing indefinitely, and some friends and partners I really like so I don’t need to worry about finding more. Having a job and a partner seems to be all society really demands of me, so as long as neither of those things implode I feel pretty happy and able-to-handle-stuff. If either of them ever disappeared or something out of the ordinary happened, I would definitely be panicking and flopping around like a fish out of water.

I don’t know if there are people who just feel completely secure in general and ready for everything. I assume that there are. People’s minds seem to differ a lot and it would be weird if nobody wasn’t neurotic. As attractive as it is to imagine Genghis Khan riding into every battle thinking “OH GOD OH GOD I HAVE NO IDEA WHAT I’M DOING”, it seems easier to believe he was calm and composed than that he was a really good faker.

Hard to say and depends on variability among doctors. If you’re trying to get them to prescribe you that same drug, maybe not the best idea.

I have had a lot of patients ask for Adderall on the grounds that “I took one of my brother’s Adderalls and it really helped”, and I don’t hold it against them, but I can’t promise nobody will.

Request fewer of these “you are wrong and bad but I will not explain why” asks.

Sorry I took so long to answer this, but I feel like the intervening time really clarified my opinion on the matter.

Yes, but make sure they take your insurance first. You can also just call your insurance and ask them which psychiatrists in the area they work with and recommend.

I think you’re right to ask “Is there a sense?”

That is, the naive answer is like the story of the economists in the bar. Bill Gates walks in, and the economists start dancing and cheering, shouting “Hooray! On average, everyone in this bar is really rich right now!”

A lot of worries about immigration sound kind of like economists in a bar, and then a homeless guy walks in, and then they start crying and sobbing because now on average the people in the bar are poorer.

I think there are some people kind of developing the intellectual work it would take to be more sophisticated than this - like Garett Jones - but I’m not convinced that actual immigration opponents have read them or are familiar with them.

The studies show that the death spike is the same in northerly cold latitudes vs. southerly warm latitudes, so probably not.

I didn’t define them that way, I just explained that that’s the accepted definition. As you point out, autism is an edge case.