DRMacIver's Notebook

Censored solutions

Published: 2025-03-27

I’ve got twoActually far more than two, but two that are relevant things here. big things I care about:

Solving problems people have
Saying things that “everybody knows” but nobody says

Which is why it’s particularly interesting to me that there are certain classes of solution that are broadly known but almost never mentioned.

I first started noticing this because of insomnia advice. I don’t have major insomnia, but I do suffer from it a bit, and many people I know have it about as bad or worse.

Here’s the NHS’s advice for what to do about it:

Do:

go to bed and wake up at the same time every day

relax at least 1 hour before bed, for example, take a bath or read a book

make sure your bedroom is dark and quiet – use curtains, blinds, an eye mask or ear plugs if needed

exercise regularly during the day

make sure your mattress, pillows and covers are comfortable

Don’t:

do not smoke or drink alcohol, tea or coffee at least 6 hours before going to bed

do not eat a big meal late at night

do not exercise at least 4 hours before bed

do not watch television or use devices, like smartphones, right before going to bed, because the blue light makes you more awake

do not nap during the day

do not drive when you feel sleepy

do not sleep in after a bad night’s sleep and stick to your regular sleeping hours instead

They then go on to mention that you can get sleep aids, either mild ones from a pharmacist or stronger ones from a GP.

I don’t perfectly agree with all of this, but it’s all perfectly standard sensible advice, of the sort you’ll get from any reasonable person when you ask for insomnia advice.

It’s so standard and reasonable that I don’t know if you even noticed that it omits one of the more widely deployed insomnia solutions. There’s a reliable, widely known, and commonly used, solution which helps take your mind off the racing thoughts that cause insomnia and relax your body, and is very effective and helps you fall asleep: Masturbating.Or having sex, but in some ways masturbating is more effective as a sleep aid than partnered sex. You are, after all, as Kant would put it, using yourself as an means, not an end. Also when you’re lying awake frustrated by insomnia, hopefully your partner is already asleep and you’re unlikely to be feeling particularly sexy anyway.

I am reasonably sure, through various discussions, memes, and general logical inferences, that this is not news to most people. I’m pretty sure you’ve heard of masturbating, and most people seem to figure out that it helps them sleep.

But it can still be useful to give advice that most people already know. It’s remarkably common for people to either not know or forget common every day knowledge, and also insomnia is often when you’re feeling least reasonable, so it’s useful to have a reminder. I bet at least one person with insomnia will read this and go “Oh! I hadn’t thought of that!”.And as a result there will be some random person out there masturbating because I told them to, and that’s weird, which is one of the reasons why people don’t casually give advice like this.

It’s also not just insomnia. Another of my big things is that if you’ve got a tool that works in one problem, maybe try it in others? Someone was asking the other day about tension headaches, and writing this I belatedly realised that actually if you’ve got a problem caused by the level of physical stress you’re carrying, maybe doing something that relaxes your body would be a good idea… I’ve definitely solved things in the headache / general malaise category this way from time to time.

Still, masturbating is a relatively special purpose tool. You’re both limited in how often you can use it, and while it’s very useful for a small category of problems, it certainly can’t solve everything. For some things you need drugs!To the best of my knowledge, nobody is censoring themselves from recommending rock and roll as a solution to their problems.

I wrote a while ago about how people don’t work as much as you think and one of the common responses is “OK, but some people do. How can I be more like them?”. The easy answer is amphetamines. Or maybe modafinil if you can’t get a prescription and would rather something with less legal consequences for getting caught.

Not that stimulants are necessary for working longer. I’ve actually found my working hours have gone up a bit since quitting caffeine. Also, many people are just naturally like that because of some mix of obsession and good health. But, among the people who might need advice on this subject, the most effective (and widely deployed) solution to this is that you take strong stimulants and that lets you work more.

People are a little more willing to give this category of advice, because it doesn’t feel so weird, but there are certainly broad categories of places where it would be inappropriate or unacceptable. Your boss might give you all sorts of helpful feedback on how to improve your productivity, but they will (or should) never say “BTW, I know a guy who can get you some black market ritalin.”

I struggle to come up with too many more examples that aren’t straight up unethical.YMMV about whether the drugs one is or not. Perhaps another example is piracy, but I think we’re at the stage where the degree to which you don’t tell people to pirate things is that your university lectures stand up and very sternly tell you about how piracy is bad and here is a list of the sites you definitely shouldn’t go to because they might tempt you into piracy.

Maybe one other category is that people prefer to offer advice that makes them look better than they are. e.g. if you ask how to do somethign, you’ll often be told how to do it Properly - don’t skip any steps, make sure you check for problems, etc. - when in reality the advice giver will often do things far more sloppily. This isn’t necessarily bad, but you also can’t necessarily trust their judgement as to whether it is or not.

It’s also possible that I’m struggling to come up with other examples because there are other examples that I don’t know about because nobody talks about them and I’m the one being clueless! That’s the problem with ghost knowledge. If you’re not inside the network, you don’t know what’s going on!

Anyway, there are good reasons why people don’t offer this sort of advice too often. I can’t be bothered to enumerate them, but they do exist. I’m not making this post to chastise for people for not saying “Have you tried masturbating about the problem?”, merely to point out the more general phenomenon:

All advice you get is censored to be the sort of advice that the advice-giver is comfortable giving, and there are often good solutions outside of that space. If you’re stuck, and none of the suggestions people are making are working, it’s worth considering whether there are things that they wouldn’t suggest but would do, and seeing if any of those work for you instead.