Lucky OP!

Today is the day that you get to learn about the fact that dietary supplements are not required to have any evidence to back up their claims. They're not regulated that way, like medicines are.

Unfortunately, even in your "dangerous mistake" question, you're still asking for too general an answer. I haven't currently found any, that I think would work as a general rule of thumb. The closest might be to remember that how you think you're impacting other people, and how you're actually impacting them, are not always the same thing.

>but basically you only have so much time in a lifetime so if you spend the whole thing until you're dead and failed that's the extreme

Who cares what you did, at that point? You won't even be around to define success and failure, anymore. So defining success and failure, at that point, doesn't really seem to be a meaningful thing to do, if that makes any sense. I'd maybe set my goals more short/intermediate term.

What is success? What is failure? What is wasting time?

Define dangerous.

Define wasting valuable time. Define too much.

Answers to these questions are situation specific, unfortunately, not generalized.

As to your last question, it unfortunately also depends on the situation, and got much you're over thinking it.

It's tricky. It's really, really, tricky.

Probably the biggest thing to accept is that you can't successfully do it for everything. You just can't. You can learn to avoid the traps of logical fallacies, but cognitive biases are an entirely different story.

I've eventually become convinced that you can't avoid cognitive biases. They're a fundamental feature of how the brain processes information. You can get better at recognizing when a cognitive bias influenced you past or present perspective, but there's no total fix.

What you can do, though, is learn from past mistakes by reflecting on them. If you set aside some time to think about what went wrong, or learn how to seriously entertain the idea that some of your firmly held beliefs/values might not be quite correct, you can slowly discover places where you made mistakes in the past. That can help slowly change your perspective on, and approach to, life. Your perspective is a giant barge of a ship, though. It doesn't like to turn on a dime. Mindfulness, and maybe meditation, can help you to slowly turn that barge onto a new trajectory, but you often won't see results right away. And you won't know what trajectory its putting you on.

It's a bit of a leap of faith. You really just have to experiment, for at least a few weeks/months, and see if you like whatever results you get. One thing I'll ask you to take on faith for now (experiment and see if I was right or wrong), is that sometimes better awareness of the problem is actually enough to fix it. Not always! Not by a long shot. But more often than you'd expect.

There's a lot of trial and error in this. It's a soft science, not a hard one. You'll rarely get concrete or consistent answers.

Be careful not to give yourself too much new anxiety, in the process XD

Sometimes figuring out what's wrong actually does help you fix the problem. That's the whole idea behind mindfulness practices.

You can't fix problems that you don't understand! At least, not very easily.

Sure, but that's trickier.

You can't see what's going on in their head, so it's really difficult to know whether you're actually correct or if you're missing something.

And, even if you are right, it's really tricky to know what you should do with that information. It's probably inadvisable to use it negatively against someone. And, even if you're trying to help, knowing what's wrong is very different than knowing how to effectively help someone fix the problem. Helping is an entirely different skillset than figuring out what's wrong.

So yes, it can be helpful, but analyze/diagnose other people with great caution and at your own peril.

When I was figuring out my life, it helped me to read into these concepts, and try to understand them better.

Almost by definition, you won't be aware when you're doing most of these, at the start. But learning to understand how they work, coupled with a general mindfulness practice, can help you get better at recognizing when you're falling victim to them.

This post isn't a good "how to get started" guide, but it's a nice list of concepts that are worth your time to read up on.

The most effective way to start to overcome these is to realize they're an issue. Even regular people often don't notice when they're falling for these pitfalls. Gaining insight can be very productive.

Of course, not everyone is ready to or going to gain insight here. But it might be helpful for those who are ready, and just need a little direction to get started.

If these problems were easy to fix, we'd have fixed them already. If these problems were easy to fix, this subreddit wouldn't even exist.

Honestly, this might be a more productive starting point than 95% of the rest of the posts here.

Yeah, but this time I'm actually probably right. And this time it's nothing we can affect. Not unless there's some Dr. Evil Doomsday Device I don't know about, doing weird things to the Earth's core.

Humans can do a lot, but modifying the Earth's magnetic field is still currently in the realm of pure science fiction. We can't even drill down to the mantel successfully.

It will have consequences related to the Earth's magnetic field being significantly reduced during the midpoint of the transition.

The process will also probably take 1,000-10,000 years to complete, once it gets started.

There will be consequences, but the risk of you or I having to face any of these consequences, within our lifetimes, is almost nil.

TRT already exists, and can boost testosterone levels for people who really don't want to be physically active. I'd recommend the physically active route, personally, but it still exists and works.

What type of mindset, though? That's pretty important.

>Yeah, they showed a UFO-shaped military aircraft once on AHC. It was designed in the 50s and it was hovering and UFO-shaped.

Are you talking about the sketchy experimental hovercraft, that they were playing around with?

We have publicly available hovercrafts. We've had them for a long time. They're just platforms/vehicles built around giant fans that face downwards.

You gotta get inside the head of the enemy. To chase down the UFOs, we must first learn to become the UFOs!

This Grand Symphony of 1976?

Guess we know which asset doesn't function as a store of value, when times get tough!

The issue with solar panels isn't so much about how much surface you can cover. It's much more about how much you're willing to pay for those solar panels. If these aren't cheap, and at least moderately durable, I don't really see them moving the needle on solar power.

Wikipedia says service cost $8/month

We all know how that one goes over...

I'm not saying more optimization is bad for the body. I'm saying it's a bad idea, from a psychological standpoint, to overthink optimization too much. A lot of those small details don't matter until you get pretty deep into your chosen sport.

The KISS method is a good approach for beginners in weightlifting, and a lot of other sports. Don't worry about stuff that's not worth your energy to worry about, when you're first starting out. You will not notice minute differences in testosterone levels using his method, versus any other halfway decent workout routine.

You sure can overdo attempts at optimization! That's why a lot of people fail drastic life changes. If you go too hard, trying to optimize every little detail to the n-th degree, you tend to crash and burn eventually. It's not sustainable.

Start with the basics, then build on them once they become second nature. Optimization means nothing, if it's not sustained.

Many things also have drastically diminishing returns on investment, the more you optimize them. At some point, the meager results are just not worth all the time and effort you have to put in.

Women need about 1/20th the testosterone that men do, so it's a valid question.

That said, "improve your sleep, diet, and exercise", is great advice for anyone, for a variety of reasons. No need to even narrow in on testosterone specifically.

There's something else, often overlooked when talking about keto.

Being a highly restrictive diet, keto also forces you to cut out most of the highly processed junk food (if you're doing it at all correctly). A low junk food diet is great for improving satiety, regardless of your fat/carb balance.

Meh. That's pretty dependent on the person. Most days, I work out great on an empty stomach.