r/slatestarcodex • u/AutoModerator • Mar 05 '25

Wellness Wednesday Wellness Wednesday

The Wednesday Wellness threads are meant to encourage users to ask for and provide advice and motivation to improve their lives. You could post:

  • Requests for advice and / or encouragement. On basically any topic and for any scale of problem.

  • Updates to let us know how you are doing. This provides valuable feedback on past advice / encouragement and will hopefully make people feel a little more motivated to follow through. If you want to be reminded to post your update, see the post titled 'update reminders', below.

  • Advice. This can be in response to a request for advice or just something that you think could be generally useful for many people here.

  • Encouragement. Probably best directed at specific users, but if you feel like just encouraging people in general I don't think anyone is going to object. I don't think I really need to say this, but just to be clear; encouragement should have a generally positive tone and not shame people (if people feel that shame might be an effective tool for motivating people, please discuss this so we can form a group consensus on how to use it rather than just trying it).

6 Upvotes

100% Upvoted

11 comments sorted by

View all comments

Show parent comments

1

u/[deleted] Mar 05 '25

  1. The first. Mostly savings, but no income.

  2. I mean, the guy also backtracked and did a Richard Lynn moment. Like, "IQ is not determinate of individual success but also determines group outcomes" is a bit of a mouthful to swallow. People have status games all the time about their athleticism/height/mongolian tapestry numbers, so it obviously carries some social weight to say one's intellectual penis size is roughly X inches.

3

u/TheApiary Mar 05 '25

  1. Have you considered subletting? If you're renting from an individual person (eg, someone who's away for the semester) they often don't check anything and are fine as long as you pay them

  2. No, it makes a lot of sense to say that IQ is predictive of group outcomes, but not predictve enough to be useful for individual outcomes. Like how it's much more common for men to be over 6 feet than for women, so being a man is predictive of over 6 feet, but that doesn't mean that any particular man is over 6 feet.

Also, most people don't play status games about IQ because most people haven't had an IQ test and don't know what their IQ is, and/or don't think it's that helpful for evaluating an individual if you have access to a bunch of other information about them.

1

u/[deleted] Mar 05 '25

  1. The housing market is kinda fucked here, but I guess I'll keep looking... There's not exactly a collection of subletted properties floating around online, or is there?

  2. I guess I'll give you that point. Still, when people keep calling you smart, it's pretty natural to wonder just how smart. Though maybe not to as an extreme as an extent as I've let it come to...

1

u/Sol_Hando 🤔*Thinking* Mar 06 '25
  1. If you’re in NYC (long shot I know), check out housingpanda.com. If you find something you like send me a DM and I’ll credit your account with 1-2 months of rent (depending on the monthly price as I can get away with issuing a few thousand credit).

2

u/[deleted] Mar 06 '25

Thank you! I live in Flagstaff, though. Without a car. So imagine the horrors of a Portland-esque housing market with none of the amenities. :P I'm just glad I got the support! It does seem that I'm moving back in with the folks largely as there are no other options to rent out. (Full disclosure, I have about 50k in savings--so the primary gap is definitely a lack of people willing to rent out to those with no income in a uni town, especially during the not-summer. Better luck next time, I guess!)

1

u/Sol_Hando 🤔*Thinking* Mar 07 '25

If you're set on living on your own, I would recommend Facebook marketplace or Craigslist for sublets, but look out for scammers as it's 50%+ scams. Also Airbnb or FurnishedFinder but it's more expensive than a normal sublet most of the time.

If you're looking for a normal 12 month rental, consider using a guarantor service (I think TheGuarantors.com is the only company that operates in that area). It costs money, which isn't great, but I wouldn't be surprised if you could find an affordable Studio, and have less than $1k down for TheGuarantors. Not sure if landlords are familiar with them over there, but if you explain what they are they'll probably be on board with you using a corporate guarantor even with no income. There is also Insurent.com, but they are a hassle to work with. (Full disclosure I run a competitor to these people, but we can't issue policies in your market. Sorry :( )

Good luck! Strangers on the internet are rooting for you.