Yes. Haven’t tried SSRIs yet. Really I just need a regular meditation practice, but there’s a chicken and egg problem of course. Or a prefrontal cortex and prefrontal cortex exercise problem. The solution is obviously “USE MOAR WILLPOWER” but I always forget that or something. Lately I’ve been thinking about simply not sinning, it’s way easier for me to not do things than do things. This tends to have lasting effects and unintended consequences of the sort that have gotten me this far, so I should keep doing it, right? More problems more meta.
IME, more willpower works really poorly as a solution to pretty much anything, for much the same reason that flying works really poorly as a way of getting to my roof. I mean, I suspect that if I could fly, getting to my roof would be very easy, but I can’t fly.
I also find that regular physical exercise and adequate sleep do more to manage my anxiety in the long term (that is, on a scale of months) than anything else I’ve tried.
Have you tried yoga or tai chi as meditation practices? They may be physically complex/challenging enough to distract you (some of the time) from verbally-driven distraction.
I suspect that “not sinning” isn’t simple. How would you define sinning?
Verbally-driven distraction isn’t much of an issue, it’s mostly just getting to the zafu. Once there then even 5 minutes of meditation is enough to calm me down for 30 minutes, which is a pretty big deal. I’m out of practice; I’m confident I can get back into the groove, but first I have actually make it to the zafu more than once every week or two. I think I want to stay with something that I already identify with really powerful positive experiences, i.e. jhana meditation. I may try contemplative prayer at some point for empiricism’s sake.
Re sinning… now that I think about it I’m not sure that I could do much less than I already do. I read a lot and think a lot, and reflectively endorse doing so, mostly. I’m currently writing a Less Wrong comment which is probably a sin, ‘cuz there’s lots of heathens ’round these parts among other reasons. Huh, I guess I’d never thought about demons influencing norms of discourse on a community website before, even though that’s one of the more obvious things to do. Anyway, yah, the positive sins are sorta simplistically killed off in their most obvious forms, except pride I suppose, while the negative ones are endless.
I do meditate at home! “Zafu” means “cushion”. Yeah, I have trouble remembering to walk 10 feet to sit down in a comfortable position on a comfortable cusion instead of being stressed about stuff all day. Brains...
Not sure what the question mark is for. Heathens are bad, it’s probably bad to hang out with them, unless you’re a wannabe saint and are trying to convert them, which I am, but only half-heartedly. Sin is all about contamination, you know? Hence baptism and stuff. Brains...
trying to convert them, which I am, but only half-heartedly.
You are not doing this in any way, shape, or form, unless I missed some post-length or sequence-length argument of yours. (And I don’t mean a “hint” as to what you might believe.) If you have something to say on the topic, you clearly can’t or won’t say it in a comment.
I have to tentatively classify your “trying” as broken signaling (though I notice some confusion on my part). If you were telling the truth about your usual mental state, and not deliberately misleading the reader in some odd way, you’ve likely been trying to signal that you need help.
Sorry, wait, maybe there’s some confusion? Did you interpret me saying “convert” as meaning “convert them to Christianity”? ’Cuz what I meant was convert people to the side of reason more generally, e.g. by occasionally posting totally-non-trolling comments about decision theory and stuff. I’m not a Christian. Or am I misinterpreting you?
I’m not at all trying to signal that I need help, if I seem to be signaling that then it’s an accidental byproduct of some other agenda which is SIGNIFICANTLY MORE MANLYYYY than crying for help.
I’m not at all trying to signal that I need help, if I seem to be signaling that then it’s an accidental byproduct of some other agenda which is SIGNIFICANTLY MORE MANLYYYY than crying for help.
Love the attitude. And for what it’s worth I didn’t infer any signalling of need for help.
Quick response: I saw that you don’t classify your views as Christianity. I do think you classify them as some form of theism, but I took the word “convert” to mean ‘persuade people of whatever the frak you want to say.’
Sorry for the misunderstanding about where you meditate—I’m all too familiar with distraction and habit interfering with valuable self-maintenance.
As for heathens, you’re from a background which is very different from mine. My upbringing was Jewish, but not religiously intense. My family lived in a majority Christian neighborhood.
I suppose it would have been possible to avoid non-Jews, but the social cost would have been very high, and in any case, it was just never considered as an option. To the best of my knowledge, I wasn’t around anyone who saw religious self-segregation as a value. At all. The subject never came up.
I hope I’m not straying into other-optimizing, but I feel compelled to point out that there’s more than one way of being Christian, and not all of them include avoiding socializing with non-Christians.
Ah, I’m not a Christian, and it’s not non-Christians that bother me so much as people who think they know something about how the world works despite, um, not actually knowing much of anything. Inadvertent trolls. My hometown friends are agnostic with one or two exceptions (a close friend of mine is a Catholic, she makes me so proud), my SingInst-related friends are mostly monotheists these days whether they’d admit to it or not I guess but definitely not Christians. I don’t think of for example you as a heathen; there are a lot of intelligent and thoughtful people on this site. I vaguely suspect that they’d fit in better in an intellectual Catholic monastic order, e.g. the Dominicans, but alas it’s hard to say. I’m really lucky to know a handful of thoughtful SingInst-related folk, otherwise I’d probably actually join the Dominicans just to have a somewhat sane peer group. Maybe. My expectations are probably way too high. I might try to convince the Roman Catholic Church to take FAI seriously soon; I actually expect that this will work. They’re so freakin’ reasonable, it’s amazing. Anyway I’m not sure but my point might be that I’m just trying to stay away from people with bad epistemic habits for fear of them contaminating me, like a fundamentalist Christian trying to keep his high epistemic standards amidst a bunch of lions and/or atheists. Better to just stay away from them for the most part. Except hanging out with lions is pretty awesome and saint-worthy whereas hanging out with atheists is just kinda annoying.
Because I’m sinful? And not all of them are heathens, I’m just prone to exaggeration. I think this new AspiringKnitter person is cool, for example; likelihood-ratio-she apparently can supernaturally tell good from bad, which might make my FAI project like a billion times easier, God willing. NancyLebovitz is cool. cousin it is cool. cousin it I can interact with on Facebook but not all of the cool LW people. People talk about me here, I feel compelled to say something for some reason, maybe ’cuz I feel guilty that they’re talking about me and might not realize that I realize that.
Please don’t consider this patronizing but… the writing style of this comment is really cute.
I think you broke whatever part of my brain evaluates people’s signalling. It just gave up and decided your writing is really cute. I really have no idea what impression to form of you; the experience was so unusual that I felt I had to comment.
Thanks to your priming now I can’t see “AspiringKnitter” without mentally replacing it with “AspiringKittens” and a mental image of a Less Wrong meetup of kittens who sincerely want to have better epistemic practices. Way to make the world a better place.
Yes. Haven’t tried SSRIs yet. Really I just need a regular meditation practice, but there’s a chicken and egg problem of course. Or a prefrontal cortex and prefrontal cortex exercise problem. The solution is obviously “USE MOAR WILLPOWER” but I always forget that or something. Lately I’ve been thinking about simply not sinning, it’s way easier for me to not do things than do things. This tends to have lasting effects and unintended consequences of the sort that have gotten me this far, so I should keep doing it, right? More problems more meta.
IME, more willpower works really poorly as a solution to pretty much anything, for much the same reason that flying works really poorly as a way of getting to my roof. I mean, I suspect that if I could fly, getting to my roof would be very easy, but I can’t fly.
I also find that regular physical exercise and adequate sleep do more to manage my anxiety in the long term (that is, on a scale of months) than anything else I’ve tried.
Have you tried yoga or tai chi as meditation practices? They may be physically complex/challenging enough to distract you (some of the time) from verbally-driven distraction.
I suspect that “not sinning” isn’t simple. How would you define sinning?
Verbally-driven distraction isn’t much of an issue, it’s mostly just getting to the zafu. Once there then even 5 minutes of meditation is enough to calm me down for 30 minutes, which is a pretty big deal. I’m out of practice; I’m confident I can get back into the groove, but first I have actually make it to the zafu more than once every week or two. I think I want to stay with something that I already identify with really powerful positive experiences, i.e. jhana meditation. I may try contemplative prayer at some point for empiricism’s sake.
Re sinning… now that I think about it I’m not sure that I could do much less than I already do. I read a lot and think a lot, and reflectively endorse doing so, mostly. I’m currently writing a Less Wrong comment which is probably a sin, ‘cuz there’s lots of heathens ’round these parts among other reasons. Huh, I guess I’d never thought about demons influencing norms of discourse on a community website before, even though that’s one of the more obvious things to do. Anyway, yah, the positive sins are sorta simplistically killed off in their most obvious forms, except pride I suppose, while the negative ones are endless.
I gather that meditating at home is either too hard or doesn’t work as well?
?
I do meditate at home! “Zafu” means “cushion”. Yeah, I have trouble remembering to walk 10 feet to sit down in a comfortable position on a comfortable cusion instead of being stressed about stuff all day. Brains...
Not sure what the question mark is for. Heathens are bad, it’s probably bad to hang out with them, unless you’re a wannabe saint and are trying to convert them, which I am, but only half-heartedly. Sin is all about contamination, you know? Hence baptism and stuff. Brains...
You are not doing this in any way, shape, or form, unless I missed some post-length or sequence-length argument of yours. (And I don’t mean a “hint” as to what you might believe.) If you have something to say on the topic, you clearly can’t or won’t say it in a comment.
I have to tentatively classify your “trying” as broken signaling (though I notice some confusion on my part). If you were telling the truth about your usual mental state, and not deliberately misleading the reader in some odd way, you’ve likely been trying to signal that you need help.
Sorry, wait, maybe there’s some confusion? Did you interpret me saying “convert” as meaning “convert them to Christianity”? ’Cuz what I meant was convert people to the side of reason more generally, e.g. by occasionally posting totally-non-trolling comments about decision theory and stuff. I’m not a Christian. Or am I misinterpreting you?
I’m not at all trying to signal that I need help, if I seem to be signaling that then it’s an accidental byproduct of some other agenda which is SIGNIFICANTLY MORE MANLYYYY than crying for help.
Love the attitude. And for what it’s worth I didn’t infer any signalling of need for help.
Quick response: I saw that you don’t classify your views as Christianity. I do think you classify them as some form of theism, but I took the word “convert” to mean ‘persuade people of whatever the frak you want to say.’
Sorry for the misunderstanding about where you meditate—I’m all too familiar with distraction and habit interfering with valuable self-maintenance.
As for heathens, you’re from a background which is very different from mine. My upbringing was Jewish, but not religiously intense. My family lived in a majority Christian neighborhood.
I suppose it would have been possible to avoid non-Jews, but the social cost would have been very high, and in any case, it was just never considered as an option. To the best of my knowledge, I wasn’t around anyone who saw religious self-segregation as a value. At all. The subject never came up.
I hope I’m not straying into other-optimizing, but I feel compelled to point out that there’s more than one way of being Christian, and not all of them include avoiding socializing with non-Christians.
Ah, I’m not a Christian, and it’s not non-Christians that bother me so much as people who think they know something about how the world works despite, um, not actually knowing much of anything. Inadvertent trolls. My hometown friends are agnostic with one or two exceptions (a close friend of mine is a Catholic, she makes me so proud), my SingInst-related friends are mostly monotheists these days whether they’d admit to it or not I guess but definitely not Christians. I don’t think of for example you as a heathen; there are a lot of intelligent and thoughtful people on this site. I vaguely suspect that they’d fit in better in an intellectual Catholic monastic order, e.g. the Dominicans, but alas it’s hard to say. I’m really lucky to know a handful of thoughtful SingInst-related folk, otherwise I’d probably actually join the Dominicans just to have a somewhat sane peer group. Maybe. My expectations are probably way too high. I might try to convince the Roman Catholic Church to take FAI seriously soon; I actually expect that this will work. They’re so freakin’ reasonable, it’s amazing. Anyway I’m not sure but my point might be that I’m just trying to stay away from people with bad epistemic habits for fear of them contaminating me, like a fundamentalist Christian trying to keep his high epistemic standards amidst a bunch of lions and/or atheists. Better to just stay away from them for the most part. Except hanging out with lions is pretty awesome and saint-worthy whereas hanging out with atheists is just kinda annoying.
Is this meant to be ironic?
Half-ironic, yeah.
Then upvoted.
So why are you hanging out with them?
Because I’m sinful? And not all of them are heathens, I’m just prone to exaggeration. I think this new AspiringKnitter person is cool, for example; likelihood-ratio-she apparently can supernaturally tell good from bad, which might make my FAI project like a billion times easier, God willing. NancyLebovitz is cool. cousin it is cool. cousin it I can interact with on Facebook but not all of the cool LW people. People talk about me here, I feel compelled to say something for some reason, maybe ’cuz I feel guilty that they’re talking about me and might not realize that I realize that.
Please don’t consider this patronizing but… the writing style of this comment is really cute.
I think you broke whatever part of my brain evaluates people’s signalling. It just gave up and decided your writing is really cute. I really have no idea what impression to form of you; the experience was so unusual that I felt I had to comment.
Thanks to your priming now I can’t see “AspiringKnitter” without mentally replacing it with “AspiringKittens” and a mental image of a Less Wrong meetup of kittens who sincerely want to have better epistemic practices. Way to make the world a better place.
That’s what the SF Less Wrong meetups are missing: Kittens.
Just make sure you don’t have anyone with bad allergies...
Independently of you, I PM’d her the exact same thing. Well, guess I’m in good company.
Are you AspiringKnitter, or the author of AspiringKnitter?
Not as far as I know, but you seemed pretty confident in that hypothesis so maybe you know something I don’t.