Richard_Kennaway’s summary of the PNSE paper on the Kensho thread is the most valuable thing I’ve ever read about meditation. However, it’s critical of meditation. If Valentine had specified a comment policy saying “please don’t be critical of meditation, we are looking for 201 level discussions and beyond”, Richard might have written a top-level post instead. But Richard has zero top-level posts to date, so it’s more likely that he just wouldn’t bother.
the most valuable thing I’ve ever read about meditation.However, it’s critical of meditation.
Possibly obvious, but seems worth noting explicitly: that paper discusses the result of some very advanced meditative states, which usually need to be pursued with serious intent. It shouldn’t be considered a criticism of meditation as a whole, given that there are a lot of benefits that typically show up much before one gets to the realm of non-symbolic stuff and which are more objectively verifiable. Also, not all meditative practices even have non-symbolic states as their goal.
Note also that even in that paper, the disconnect between internal experience and actual externally-reported signs of bodily/emotional awareness was only reported in three interviewees out of 50, and that the memory loss stuff only started showing up around the last stage, which several traditions were noted to stop short of.
(I also suspect that there may have been a bit of a disconnect in the language used by the interviewer and the interviewees: I think I might have had a few brief glimpses of what a non-symbolic state feels like, and one thing in particular that I would still have emotions as normal, but I’d just be less bothered by negative ones. When the researcher quoted an interviewee saying that he felt calm, but his partner reported him to be obviously stressed, he wasn’t necessarily mistaken, just talking about a different thing: he could have been aware of all of his actual reactions, just feeling calm in a different sense, as he didn’t feel bad over feeling bad. Hoping to elaborate on that in a future post, once I manage to finish it.)
Yep, I think this is a valid point against stronger moderation guidelines.
Though I think it’s a bit less bad than you said: While I am unsure whether Richard might have written a top-level post, it only has to be the case that any other person would create a top-level post on which Richard would feel comfortable commenting, and that seems a lot more likely to me. When I am honest, if there had not been enough discussion of a bunch of my concerns about circling on the circling thread, I would have probably written a top-level posts with my concerns at some point in the next few weeks.
FWIW, I don’t consider this a nitpicky comment, and my model of Val would not have censored it (although the relevant question is whether Richard_Kennaway’s model of Val would have censored it). But a tradeoff is being made here, and I’m personally willing to trade off potentially not getting to see this kind of detailed criticism in comments in exchange for people like Eliezer and Conor writing more top-level posts.
Yeah. The chilling effect is almost entirely (I think) about people worrying they will be censored, rather than actual censorship. I have full ability on my blog to delete comments, have used it only for removing typo/duplicate comments, and felt vaguely bad about even doing that. Val censoring that comment would be a huge surprise and forced update for me, but Richard thinking he might censor it seems a reasonable thing to worry about.
Of course, if it was censored, there’s nothing to stop someone from then posting it elsewhere or as its own post, if they think it’s valuable, and presumably the system will save the comment so you can copy it. Given that, this circles back to the general case of The Fear people have around posting and commenting, as if negative feedback of any sort was just awful. If you get censored, it’s not that big a deal. Might even be good, now you know where the line is and not to do that again!
Richard_Kennaway’s summary of the PNSE paper on the Kensho thread is the most valuable thing I’ve ever read about meditation. However, it’s critical of meditation. If Valentine had specified a comment policy saying “please don’t be critical of meditation, we are looking for 201 level discussions and beyond”, Richard might have written a top-level post instead. But Richard has zero top-level posts to date, so it’s more likely that he just wouldn’t bother.
the most valuable thing I’ve ever read about meditation. However, it’s critical of meditation.
Possibly obvious, but seems worth noting explicitly: that paper discusses the result of some very advanced meditative states, which usually need to be pursued with serious intent. It shouldn’t be considered a criticism of meditation as a whole, given that there are a lot of benefits that typically show up much before one gets to the realm of non-symbolic stuff and which are more objectively verifiable. Also, not all meditative practices even have non-symbolic states as their goal.
Note also that even in that paper, the disconnect between internal experience and actual externally-reported signs of bodily/emotional awareness was only reported in three interviewees out of 50, and that the memory loss stuff only started showing up around the last stage, which several traditions were noted to stop short of.
(I also suspect that there may have been a bit of a disconnect in the language used by the interviewer and the interviewees: I think I might have had a few brief glimpses of what a non-symbolic state feels like, and one thing in particular that I would still have emotions as normal, but I’d just be less bothered by negative ones. When the researcher quoted an interviewee saying that he felt calm, but his partner reported him to be obviously stressed, he wasn’t necessarily mistaken, just talking about a different thing: he could have been aware of all of his actual reactions, just feeling calm in a different sense, as he didn’t feel bad over feeling bad. Hoping to elaborate on that in a future post, once I manage to finish it.)
Yep, I think this is a valid point against stronger moderation guidelines.
Though I think it’s a bit less bad than you said: While I am unsure whether Richard might have written a top-level post, it only has to be the case that any other person would create a top-level post on which Richard would feel comfortable commenting, and that seems a lot more likely to me. When I am honest, if there had not been enough discussion of a bunch of my concerns about circling on the circling thread, I would have probably written a top-level posts with my concerns at some point in the next few weeks.
Also, had I read that paper and seen it mostly go ignored, I probably would’ve made a link post for it.
FWIW, I don’t consider this a nitpicky comment, and my model of Val would not have censored it (although the relevant question is whether Richard_Kennaway’s model of Val would have censored it). But a tradeoff is being made here, and I’m personally willing to trade off potentially not getting to see this kind of detailed criticism in comments in exchange for people like Eliezer and Conor writing more top-level posts.
+1
Yeah. The chilling effect is almost entirely (I think) about people worrying they will be censored, rather than actual censorship. I have full ability on my blog to delete comments, have used it only for removing typo/duplicate comments, and felt vaguely bad about even doing that. Val censoring that comment would be a huge surprise and forced update for me, but Richard thinking he might censor it seems a reasonable thing to worry about.
Of course, if it was censored, there’s nothing to stop someone from then posting it elsewhere or as its own post, if they think it’s valuable, and presumably the system will save the comment so you can copy it. Given that, this circles back to the general case of The Fear people have around posting and commenting, as if negative feedback of any sort was just awful. If you get censored, it’s not that big a deal. Might even be good, now you know where the line is and not to do that again!