Here is why most advice you hear that seems good, but "just doesn’t work" from my unique perspective as a data scientist, as well as some that should actually work.

Here is why most advice you hear that seems good, but "just doesn’t work" from my unique perspective as a data scientist, as well as some that should actually work. You may have heard the brain consists of neurons, and it works by "firing" in some way. This sort of tells you something, but doesn’t really give you a good picture of what it’s actually doing, and here is a much better way to visualize it. If you can remember in high school math class you probably would have studied a graph with data points on it and how you can use math to create a "line of best fit" on the data points. Your brain works exactly the same way. Your beliefs about the world are basically data points in a graph, in a higher number of dimensions, and when you are thinking you create different shapes to fit the data points in your brain. Most advice basically tells people to "think rational" to improve their motivation, not to lose their temper, stop your anxiety etc. For example, cognitive behavioural therapy teaches you to identify a negative emotion, work out why you think you are feeling this emotion, and realise there is no reason to think this emotion, and understand that it is "irrational". Another example is in meditation, you have a desire, realise it is just a desire, and then you attempt to try and detach from it. This advice works sort of well for some people because it changes the data points of the conscious mind and can actually stop you feeling that emotion, but if you still feel that emotion, you just accept it as "being irrational", and think it is impossible to fix, and don’t know you can fix what’s causing these irrational emotions to be triggered. Visualization techniques such as Neurolinguistic programming is another type of advice, but it isn’t really possible to trick yourself, but it can be useful because it works out some of your motivations that you aren’t aware of and changes some of the data points. The reason why you feel like you haven’t really fixed your problems is because there is a conscious mind, and an unconscious mind. You have conscious motivations, and unconscious motivations. This idea became popularized by Carl Jung who called the unconscious mind the shadow. Unless you are using primitive parts of your brain, such as when you are extremely hungry, when you are feeling an irrational emotion, it is because you are fitting to the data points that you are unconscious of. This is triggering you to feel an irrational emotion, as well as change your personality to think and behave irrationally. How to fix these irrational emotions is to work out your unconscious motivations, and work out what your brain is thinking unconsciously, and examining it with your conscious mind, so your brain can fix these data points that are incorrect, and therefore fix many problems you may have within your brain called neurosis. You don’t need to have experienced any major trauma to have these problems. These may not just be mental/​emotional problems/​diseases, but physical ones as well. You can treat fixing the unconscious mind sort of like going to a doctor and getting a routine health checkup. Carl Jung called this integrating the shadow, but I feel like he didn’t really explain how to do it, and most people who try this aren’t doing it correctly, or wanted to try, but didn’t really know how. The best way to start becoming aware of your unconscious mind is to try work out your unconscious motivations in your every day actions, thoughts, and conversations, as well as your hobbies and interests. I feel many people represented the shadow as a dark side, but I think that is an oversimplification. A lot of your motivations stem down to some kind of insecurity, or wanting to be liked or perceived in a certain way, and then you can try and work out why you have these motivations, which I think many are sublimated from the need of love from your mother. I feel like Carl Jung mistook how to make your unconscious mind conscious by working out some complex motivation like your dark side, then visualizing /​ extrapolating some kind of scenario and working out your motives, but that doesn’t really give you any useful information because you are extrapolating from what you are visualizing, with the motive of a dark side. It’s much more efficient if you just work out your drives from extrapolating backwards of what you are already doing. Everyone is sort of aware how afraid they are of dying, but what about if you are unconsciously motivated to die and you just can’t see it from how the need of love from your mother then sublimates and you aren’t getting it and want to die because you wish you could be reborn as a child and get that love again. If he figured that out, and we could some how optimize it that way, who knows what potential effects that would have on the distribution of age related illness and how that is entangled with the life expectancy distribution and what that is entangled with. I think the most important part of making your unconscious mind conscious is to work out what your needs are and work out how to satisfy them in an easy way to stop being depressed and ill. A lot of advice to improve your charisma/​personality, is greatly overestimated. When you are given advice such as to use peoples names more often when speaking to them, you are creating a sort of simulation in your brain and then seeing that as being useful in enough situations to consider it to be useful to remember, but you are completely underestimating the intricacy of situations, and the number of situations where that advice wouldn’t be useful, as well as overestimating how many situations you will find yourself in that it will be useful to remember. I feel like people try too hard to learn more advice and just try to remember all the advice they think is useful and not try to understand how the advice is useful. A lot of advice seems to conflict such as the idea "just be yourself" because it seems like good advice but sort of isn’t because they haven’t tried to extract what the good part of the idea is, which in this case is basically just stand out by being different, but you have to be different in a predictable way. If you start being unpredictable people don’t like you because they can’t understand your intentions. When you can understand your motivations more deeply, you can see them more easily in others, and this helps you to navigate social situations with much more intuition, because it generalizes far better. What is also really useful to know, is your thoughts work in exactly the same way, and I am hypothesizing you can become more conscious of how you reason, and then prime yourself to actually come up with better ideas and have higher quality thoughts, and so far has seemed to work from trying it. I’m pretty sure we actually have the hardware and software to become way fucking smarter, we are just bottle-necked by confirmation bias, which you can train your brain to not do. I am making this claim because I spent some time trying to correct it and feel like I can see much deeper patterns and relationships, and even at a higher order between things through using my intuition, and that my brain just couldn’t see deeply enough into things before, not from laziness, but because it got stuck from this bottleneck. Im guessing we evolved to have it because it improved our pattern recognition abilities across generations, and may have been useful when younger to learn things easier. I’m also hypothesizing making your unconscious mind conscious, will help you to also think more rationally, but it is hard to see if there is a causal relationship as I am trying to do both of these things at once.