I’m about ready to propose a group norm against having any subgroups or leaders who tell other people they should take psychedelics. Maybe they have individually motivated uses—though I get the impression that this is, at best, a high-variance bet with significantly negative expectation. But the track record of “rationalist-adjacent” subgroups that push the practice internally and would-be leaders who suggest to other people that they do them seems just way too bad.
I’m also about ready to propose a similar no-such-group policy on ‘woo’, tarot-reading, supernaturalism only oh no it’s not really supernaturalism I’m just doing tarot readings as a way to help myself think, etc. I still think it’s not our community business to try to socially prohibit things like that on an individual level by exiling individuals like that from parties, I don’t think we have or should have that kind of power over individual behaviors that neither pick pockets nor break legs. But I think that when there’s anything like a subgroup or a leader with those properties we need to be ready to say, “Yeah, that’s not a group in good standing with the rest of us, don’t go there.” This proposal is not mainly based on the advance theories by which you might suspect or guess that subgroups like that would end badly; it is motivated mainly by my sense of what the actual outcomes have been.
Since implicit subtext can also sometimes be bad for us in social situations, I should be explicit that concern about outcomes of psychedelic advocacy includes Michael Vassar, and concern on woo includes the alleged/reported events at Leverage.
Copying over a related Oct. 13-17 conversation from Facebook:
(context: someone posted a dating ad in a rationalist space where they said they like tarot etc., and rationalists objected)
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Marie La: As a cultural side note, most of my woo knowledge (like how to read tarot) has come from the rationalist community, and I wouldn’t have learned it otherwise
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Eliezer Yudkowsky: @Marie La Any ideas how we can stop that?
(+1 from Rob B)
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Marie La: Idk, it’s an introspective technique that works for some people. Doesn’t particularly work for me. Sounds like the concern is bad optics / PR rather than efficacy
(+1 from Rob B)
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Shaked Koplewitz: @Marie La optics implies that the concern is with the impression it makes on outsiders, my concern here is the effect on insiders (arguably this is optics too, but a non-central example)
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Rob Bensinger: If the concern is optics, either to insiders or outsiders, then it seems vastly weaker to me than if the concern is about epistemic methods or conclusions. (Indeed, it might flip the sign for me.)
The rationality community should be about truth and winning, not about linking ourselves up to whatever is culturally associated with the word “rationality”.
The first-order argument for trying weird things and seeing if they work (or just doing them for fun as a sort of game, etc.) makes sense. I’d rather focus on the question of whether that first-order case fails epistemically and/or instrumentally. Also: what does it fail for? Just saying ‘woo’ doesn’t tell us whether, e.g., we should stop using IFS because it isn’t normal-sounding enough.
(+1 from Marie L)
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Marie La: When we come across someone using weird mind trick X, we should figure out what it does and if we want the results. Being skilled at sorting out good weird mind tricks from bad, regardless of cultural coding, feels like an important rationalist skill.
Tarot is set of fancy art cards can be used in many ways, some that encourage magical thinking and some that provide useful introspective access
For the latter, I’d guess it’s somewhat useful to some people, similar to the skill of flipping a coin and doing what you want anyway
(+1 from Rob B)
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Eliezer Yudkowsky: @Marie La I disagree and think the woo has proven in empirical practice to be sufficiently destructive to people who can’t see the destruction, to reach a level where it should not be tolerated by this group as a future subgroup norm, same as LSD use shouldn’t be tolerated by us as a subgroup norm.
(+1 from Rob B, Marie L)
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Marie La: I’m interested in seeing more of your reasoning on this. Pointing out the harm model sounds useful to people who can’t easily see it (or to the people around them) to help avoid further harm in the future
(+1 from Rob B)
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Eliezer Yudkowsky: The #1 reason why I think it’s harmful isn’t a theory by which I divined it in advance. Though there sure is a very obvious theory whereby the path of sanity is a narrow one and people who step a bit off it in what they fondly imagine to be a controlled way, fall quite a lot further once they’re hanging around with crazier people, crazier ideas, and have already decided to let themselves go a little.
The #1 reason why I think it’s harmful is the number of times you hear about somebody, or worse, some subgroup, that pushed a little woo on somebody, or offered them some psychedelics, and a few years later you’re hearing about how far they went off the deep end. It seems to be destructive in practice and that’s a far stronger reason to be wary than the obvious-seeming ways it could be destructive in principle.
(+1 from Anonymous, Rob B)
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Anonymous: Agree with this but surely it also matters how often that action seems to have that effect *out of the times it’s done* - noting this because my impression (which however I don’t have data for) is that psychedelic use might be locally common enough that it’s only a small proportion of “rationalists who try LSD” who end up “going off the deep end”. Whereas experimenting with woo-y beliefs seems more strongly associated with that kind of trajectory and for that I endorse your conclusion.
(+1 from Eliezer Y)
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Aella: @Eliezer Yudkowsky On phone so thumb words but I notice I have a belief that this is predictable, and thus not dangerous? or rather, it’s something like if you’re religious and noticed some ppl have been drinking alcohol and then eventually losing their faith, you might be right to be wary of alcohol, but if you know that it’s actually the doubt of their faith that *causes* the alcohol drinking, then you wouldn’t be concerned if someone drinks alcohol but also isn’t doubting their faith.
similarly I have some intuition here that the woo stuff is a symptom and not the cause, and that it’s very possible to engage harmlessly with the symptom alone, and is a fine social norm if people can distinguish the alcoholism from doubting your faith.
I do agree seeing woo belief does up my probability they might end up going off the deep end tho
(+1 from Rob B, Eliezer Y)
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Eliezer Yudkowsky: My sense of “this seems to be ending very poorly on average” is much stronger for situations in which there’s a Leader or a Discernible Subgroup has formed, that are going up to others and saying “why, you really should try some psychedelics / woo”. Or where they wander up to individuals trying that, and put their arm around their shoulders all friendly-like.
Though I suppose that could also be because I’m much less likely to hear about the individual non-social cases even if they end poorly. And indeed, my sense of the individual cases, is that I have heard of a lot more individuals who took psychedelics a few times in a situation devoid of Leaders and Subgroups and nothing bad happened to them; compared to the case with woo, where it feels like I’m more likely to have heard that an individual who tried woo even in a situation without Leaders or Subgroups later went further off the deep end. Which has the very obvious explanation that some people ever do benefit from psychedelics and they are plausibly interesting to a healthy mind willing to risk itself, you can be sane and still try shrooms ever; while the woo thing requires a larger, more willing step off the strict rails of sanity.
But in the case of Subgroups or Leaders, neither woo nor psychedelics seems to end well.
And to be clear that this isn’t just disguised “boo subgroups and leaders”, let’s be clear that, say, OpenPhil is for these purposes a Subgroup and Holden Karnofsky is a Leader, as are MIRI and myself; they are just Subgroups and Leaders which have not, to my knowledge, ever advocated LSD or tarot readings.
(+1 from Rob B, Anonymous, Marie L)
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Marie La: @Eliezer Yudkowsky Strong agree that psychedelics + a strong leader context can enable great harm quickly.
It tends to make people vulnerable, and if there’s a bad actor around this can be dangerous. This has been plenty weaponized for controlling people in cult-like groups.
I’d expand this to include most drugs, but especially classical psychs and mdma.
Here I’d blame the leader for seeking out vulnerable psychedelic users or encouraging people under them to use psychedelics, rather than the drugs themselves
(I can’t say much about weaponized woo, don’t know what that looks like as much)
This seems maybe much worse for people whose starting priors are quite good. If your life is a wreck and you’re terrible at figuring out what’s true, then yeah, shaking things up might be great. But if rationalists are selected for having unusually *good* priors, then shaking things up will cause regression to the mean.
Cf. Jim Babcock’s argument that you shouldn’t be experimenting with new diets if you’re already an unusually awesome, productive, etc. person, since then you risk breaking a complex system that’s working well. It’s the people whose status quo sucks who should be experimenting.
(+1 from Jim B, Eliezer Y, Anonymous, Marie L)
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Jim Babcock: My own impression is that the effect of LSD is not primarily a regression to the mean thing, but rather, that it temporarily enables some self-modification capabilities, which can be powerfully positive but which require a high degree of sanity and care to operate safely. When I see other people using psychedelics, very often I see them acting like Harry Potter experimenting with transfiguration, or worse, treating it as *entertainment*. And I want to yell at them, and point them at the scene in Dumbledore’s laboratory where Dumbledore and Minerva go through a checklist and have a levels-of-precaution framework and have a step where they actually stop and think before they begin.
(+1 from Rob B, Marie L)
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Eliezer Yudkowsky: I worry that we’re shooting ourselves in the foot by telling ourselves that psychedelics “temporarily enable some self-modification capabilities” rather than doing shit to the brain that we don’t understand, and we know a bunch of people who seemed a lot more promising and sane before they did some psychedelics, and now they’re not the people they were anymore and not in a good way, and there is not in fact any good way to be sure of who that happens to because it did not seem very predictable in advance at the time, and maybe you can roll the dice on that if you’re tired of being yourself and want to take a bet with high variance and negative expected value, but you sure don’t do it in little subgroups that put an arm around somebody’s shoulder and make helpful offers.
(+1 from Rob B, Marie L, Jim B)
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Jim Babcock: I suspect you may be underestimating the base rate of people using psychedelics discretely and having a neutral or mild-positive effect that they don’t talk about, and also underestimating the degree of stupidity that people bring to bear in their drug use.
At Burning Man, I saw a lot of stuff like: making dosing and mixing decisions while not sober; taking doses without a scale, not beig justifiably confident that the dose is the right order of magnitude; taking their epistemically-untrustworthy friend’s word that a substance they’ve never heard of before is safe for them. That sort of thing. And that’s before even getting into the social stuff, where eg people really shouldn’t be having conversations about crazymaking topics while high. And the legitimately hard stuff, like it’s important to have a tripsitter who will break thought loops if you step on a trauma trigger, but also important that that tripsitter not be a significant other or cult leader and not be someone who will talk to you about crazymaking topics.
Meanwhile nearly everyone has been exposed to extremely unsubtle and substantially false anti-drug propaganda, which fails to survive contact with reality. So it’s unfortunate but also unsurprising that the how-much-caution pendulum in their heads winds up swinging too far to the other side. The ideal messaging imo would leave most people feeling like planning an acid trip is more work than they personally will get around to, plus mild disdain towards impulsive usage and corner-cutting.
Jim Babcock’s stance here is the most sensible one I’ve seen in this thread:
My own impression is that the effect of LSD is not primarily a regression to the mean thing, but rather, that it temporarily enables some self-modification capabilities, which can be powerfully positive but which require a high degree of sanity and care to operate safely.
...
Meanwhile nearly everyone has been exposed to extremely unsubtle and substantially false anti-drug propaganda, which fails to survive contact with reality. So it’s unfortunate but also unsurprising that the how-much-caution pendulum in their heads winds up swinging too far to the other side. The ideal messaging imo would leave most people feeling like planning an acid trip is more work than they personally will get around to, plus mild disdain towards impulsive usage and corner-cutting.
Somehow this reminds me of the time I did a Tarot reading for someone, whose only previous experience had been Brent Dill doing a Tarot reading, and they were… sort of shocked at the difference. (I prefer three card layouts with a simple context where both people think carefully about what each of the cards could mean; I’ve never seen his, but the impression I got was way more showmanship.)
If it works as a device to facilitate sub-conscious associations, then maybe an alternative should be designed that sheds the mystical baggage and comes with clear explanations of why and how it works.
I’m generally very anti-woo, but I expect presenting it clearly and without baggage would make it stop working because the participant would be in a different mental state.
No greater sign that Eliezer isn’t leading a cult than that my first reaction to this was “pfft, good luck”, even when I misread it as “we should shame individuals for doing these things Elizabeth finds valuable” and not the more reasonable “leaders pushing this are suspect”
”People shouldn’t do psychedelics” is highly debatable and has to argue against a lot of research demonstrating their efficacy for improving mental wellness and treating psychiatric disorders.
”Leaders & subgroups shouldn’t push psychedelics on their followers” seems straightforwardly correct.
I haven’t taken any psychedelics myself. I have the impression that best practice with LSD is not to take it alone but to have someone skillful as a trip sitter. I imagine having a fellow rationalist as a trip sitter is much better then having some one agey person with sketchy epistemics.
I wonder where the line will be drawn with regards to the { meditation, Buddhism, post-rationality, David Chapman, etc. } cluster. On one hand, meditation—when done without all the baggage, hypothetically—seems like a useful tool. On the other hand, it simply invites all that baggage, because that is in the books, in the practicing communities, etc. Also, Christianity is an outgroup, but Buddhism is a fargroup, so people seem less averse to religious connotations; in my opinion, it’s just the different flavor of the same poison. Buddhism is sometimes advertized as a kind of evidence-based philosophy, but then you read the books and they discuss the supernatural and describe the miracles done by Buddha. Plus the insights into your previous lives, into the ultimate nature of reality (my 200 Hz brain sees the quantum physics, yeah), etc.
Also, somewhat ironically...
Marcello and I developed a convention in our AI work: when we ran into something we didn’t understand, which was often, we would say “magic”—as in, X magically does Y”—to remind ourselves that here was an unsolved problem, a gap in our understanding. It is far better to say “magic” than “complexity” or “emergence”; the latter words create an illusion of understanding. Wiser to say “magic,” and leave yourself a placeholder, a reminder of work you will have to do later.
This made perfect sense in 2007, because whoever was reading these words, they knew you didn’t mean “magic” literally. But now I see Anna’s recent comment:
For example, once I came to believe that an acquaintance was having a psychotic episode and suggested he see a psychiatrist; the psychiatrist agreed. A friend who’d observed most of the same data I had asked me how I’d known. I said it was several things, but that the bit where our acquaintance said God was talking to him through his cereal box was one of the tip-offs from my POV. My friend’s response was “oh, I thought that was a metaphor.” I know several different stories like this one, including a later instance where I was among those who missed what in hindsight was fairly blatant evidence that someone was psychotic, none of which involved weird group-level beliefs or practices.
...and I am not sure what we can and what we can’t jokingly countersignal anymore, even within the supposed rationalist (-adjacent) community. Especially with people in the neighborhood exorcising demons and clearing bad energy using crystals. Like, what the fuck happened to the sanity waterline; this feels like walking across a desert.
Maybe the extraordinary times require extraordinary care at using metaphors, because someone (perhaps someone hanging out with rationalists, and then blogging about their experience) will take them literally.
Or maybe you should move out of the Bay Area, a.s.a.p. (Like, half seriously, I wonder how much of this epistemic swamp is geographically determined. Not having the everyday experience, I don’t know.)
Western Buddhism tends to be more of a bag of wellness tricks than a religion, but it’s worth sharing that Buddhism proper is anti-life. It came out of a Hindu obsession with ending the cycle of reincarnation. Nirvana means “cessation.” The whole idea of meditation is to become tolerant of signals to action so you can let them pass without doing the things that replicate them or, ultimately, propagate any life-like process. Karma is described as a giant wheel that powers reincarnation and gains momentum whenever you act unconsciously. The goal is for the wheel to stop moving and the way is to unlearn your habit of kicking it. When the Buddha became enlightened under the Bodhi tree, it wasn’t actually complete enlightenment. He was “enlightened with residues”— he stopped making new karma but he was still burning off old karma. He achieved actual cessation when he died. To be straight up enlightened, you stop living. The whole project of enlightenment is to end life.
It’s a sinister and empty philosophy, IMO. A lot of the insights and tools are great but the thrust of (at least Theravada) Buddhism is my enemy.
I agree this is pretty sinister and empty. Traditional samsara includes some pretty danged nice places (the heavens), not just things that have Earth-like quantities or qualities of flourishing; so rejecting all of that sounds very anti-life.
Some complicating factors:
It’s not clear (to put it lightly) what parinirvana (post-death nirvana / escape from samsara) entails. Some early Buddhists seem to have thought of it as more like oblivion/cessation; others seem to have thought of it as more like perfectly blissful experience.
(Obviously, this becomes more anti-life when you get rid of supernaturalism—then the only alternative to ‘samsara’ is oblivion. But the modern Buddhist can retreat to various mottes about what ‘nirvana’ is, such as embracing living nirvana (sopadhishesa-nirvana) while rejecting parinirvana.)
The Buddhists have a weird psychological theory according to which living in samsara inherently sucks. Liking or enjoying things is really just another species of bad.
The latter view is still pretty anti-life, but notably, it’s a psychological claim (‘this is what it’s really like to experience things’), not a normative claim that we should reject life a priori. If a Buddhist updates away from thinking everything is dukkha, they aren’t necessarily required to reject life anymore—the life-rejection wasn’t was contingent on the psych theory.
There are also versions of the psychological theory in which dukkha is not associated with all motivation, just the craving-based system, which is in a sense “extra”; it’s a layer on top of the primary motivation system, which would continue to operate even if all craving was eliminated. Under that model (which I think is the closest to being true), you could (in principle) just eliminate the unpleasant parts of human motivation, while keeping the ones that don’t create suffering—and probably get humans who were far more alive as a result, since they would be far more willing to do even painful things if pain no longer caused them suffering.
Pain would still be a disincentive in the same way that a reinforcement learner would generally choose to take actions that brought about positive rather than negative reward, but it would make it easier for people to voluntarily choose to experience a certain amount of pain in exchange for better achieving their values afterwards, for instance.
Related to this (?) is the notion that ‘wanting’ and ‘liking’ are separate systems. For instance, from a random paper:
Incentive salience or ‘wanting’, a form of motivation, is generated by large and robust neural systems that include mesolimbic dopamine. By comparison, ‘liking’, or the actual pleasurable impact of reward consumption, is mediated by smaller and fragile neural systems, and is not dependent on dopamine. The incentive-sensitization theory posits the essence of drug addiction to be excessive amplification specifically of psychological ‘wanting’, especially triggered by cues, without necessarily an amplification of ‘liking’. This is due to long-lasting changes in dopamine-related motivation systems of susceptible individuals, called neural sensitization.
In this perspective, a philosophy can say that ‘wanting’ is psychologically unhealthy while ‘liking’ is fine. I’m not sure if this is what Buddhists actually believe, but it is how I’ve interpreted notions like “desire leads to suffering”, “letting go”, “ego death”, etc.
There’s that, but I think it would also be misleading to say that (all) Buddhists consider desire/wanting to be bad! (Though to be clear, it does seem like some of them do.)
I also sometimes wonder whether it would help to distinguish more cleanly and explicitly between caring and clinging as different dimensions of experience. I, at least, have found it clarifying (who knows if it’s exegetically accurate) to think of the Buddha as centrally advocating that you let go of clinging, as understood above; and of many contemporary Buddhist practices and ideas as oriented towards this goal. That is, the aim is not, centrally, to care less about anything (though sometimes that’s appropriate too). Rather, the aim (or at least, one aim) is to care differently — without a certain kind of internal, experiential contraction. To untie a certain kind of knot; to let go of a certain type of denial/resistance towards what is or could be; and in doing so, to step more fully into the real world, and into a kind of sanity.
The Buddhists have a weird psychological theory according to which living in samsara inherently sucks. Liking or enjoying things is really just another species of bad
I don’t think this is true, at leas not insofar as it describes the original philosophy. You may be thinking about the first noble truth “The truth of Dukkha”, but Dukkha is not correctly translated as suffering. A better translation is “unsatisfactoriness”. For example, even positive sensations are Dukkha, according to the Buddha. I think the intention of the first noble truth is to say that worldly sensations, positive and negative, are inherently unsatisfactory.
The Buddha has also said pretty explicitly that a great happiness can be achieved through the noble path, which seems to directly contradict the idea that life inherently sucks, and that suffering can be overcome.
(However, there may be things he’s said that support the quote; I’m definitely not claiming to have a full or even representative view.)
I don’t think this is true, at leas not insofar as it describes the original philosophy. You may be thinking about the first noble truth “The truth of Dukkha”, but Dukkha is not correctly translated as suffering. A better translation is “unsatisfactoriness”. For example, even positive sensations are Dukkha, according to the Buddha. I think the intention of the first noble truth is to say that worldly sensations, positive and negative, are inherently unsatisfactory.
Bhikkhu Bodhi: In the Pali suttas, the discourses of the Buddha, the word dukkha is used in at least three senses. One, which is probably the original sense of the word dukkha and was used in conventional discourse during the Buddha’s time, is pain, particularly painful bodily feelings. The Buddha also uses the word dukkha for the emotional aspect of human existence. There are a number of synonyms that comprise this aspect of dukkha: soka, which means sorrow; aryadeva, which is lamentation; dolmenasa, which is sadness, grief, or displeasure; and upayasa, which is misery, even despair. The deepest, most comprehensive aspect of dukkha is signified by the term samkara-dukkha, which means the dukkha that is inherent in all conditioned phenomena simply by virtue of the fact that they are conditioned.
Followed by:
Konin Cardenas: In the Zen tradition, dukkha is often translated as “suffering,” although more often it means dissatisfaction or the nagging sense that something is off, or sometimes even existential angst. It seems that dukkha is discussed more explicitly in American Zen than it commonly has been elsewhere in the Zen world. In my experience, Japanese Zen tends to assume that people come to practice seeking enlightenment—I can’t think of a single time I heard the word “dukkha” used during my Japanese training.
I could buy that early Buddhists were using a word that basically meant ‘suffering’ or ‘pain’ metaphorically, but what’s the argument that this wasn’t the original word meaning at all? (I’m not a specialist on this topic, I’m just wary of ‘rationalizing’ tendencies for modern readers to try to retranslate concepts in ways that make them sound more obvious/intuitive/modern.)
The Buddha has also said pretty explicitly that a great happiness can be achieved through the noble path, which seems to directly contradict the idea that life inherently sucks, and that suffering can be overcome.
If you think great happiness can be achieved through the Noble Path and you should leave samsara anyway, that’s an even more extreme anti-life position, because you’re rejecting the best life has to offer.
I do agree that Buddhism claims you can get tons of great conventional bliss-states on the road to nirvana (see also the potential to reincarnate in the various heavens); but then it rejects those too, modulo the complications I noted in my upthread comment.
I 100% grant that you can find people, including Buddhist scholars, who will translate dukkha that way. I would generally trust Wikipedia to get a reasonable consensus on this, but in this case, it is also inconsistent, e.g. this quote from the article about Buddhism
The truth of dukkha is the basic insight that life in this mundane world, with its clinging and craving to impermanent states and things[53] is dukkha, and unsatisfactory.[55][66][web 1] Dukkha can be translated as “incapable of satisfying,”[web 5] “the unsatisfactory nature and the general insecurity of all conditioned phenomena”; or “painful.”[53][54] Dukkha is most commonly translated as “suffering,” but this is inaccurate, since it refers not to episodic suffering, but to the intrinsically unsatisfactory nature of temporary states and things, including pleasant but temporary experiences.[note 9] We expect happiness from states and things which are impermanent, and therefore cannot attain real happiness.
Duḥkha (/ˈduːkə/; Sanskrit:दुःख; Pāli: dukkha) is an important concept in Hinduism and Buddhism, commonly translated as “suffering”, “unhappiness”, “pain”, “unsatisfactoriness” or “stress”.[1][2][3][4][5][6] It refers to the fundamental unsatisfactoriness and painfulness of mundane life.
I guess I have a strong opinion on this much like someone could have a strong opinion on what the bible says about abortion even if there are scholars on both sides. My main point is that [the idea that there is a path to overcome suffering in this life] is * not * a western invention. The Buddha may have also talked about rebirth and karma and stuff, but he has made this much clear at several points in pretty direct language, and he even talked about lasting happiness that can be achieved through the noble path. (I know he e.g. endorsed the claim that this kind of happiness has “no drawbacks”). Bottom line, I think it requires a very tortured reading of his statements to reconcile this with the idea that life on earth is necessarily negative well-being.
There’s also the apparent contradiction in just the noble truths (“the truth of dukkha”, “the origin of dukkha”, “the end of dukkha”, “the path to the end of dukkha”) because (1) is usually phrased as “dukkha is an inherent part of the world”, which would then contradict (3), unless you read (3) as only referring to the end via escaping the cycle of rebirth (which again I don’t think can be reconciled with what the Buddha actually said). It’s annoying, but you have to read dukkha as referring to different things if you want to make sense of this.
If you think great happiness can be achieved through the Noble Path and you should leave samsara anyway, that’s an even more extreme anti-life position, because you’re rejecting the best life has to offer.
Agreed. (And I would agree that this is more than enough reason not to defend original Buddhism as a philosophy without picking and choosing.)
It makes sense to me to use dukkha as “unsatisfactoriness” because it emphasizes that the issue is resisting the way things are or needing things to be different.
I think it makes Buddhism higher-probability to translate dukkha that way. This on its own doesn’t immediately make me confident that the original doctrines had that in mind.
For that, I’d want to hear more from Pāli experts writing articles that discuss standard meanings for dukkha at the time, and asks questions like “If by ‘dukkha’ early Buddhists just meant ‘not totally satisfactory’, then why did they choose that word (apparently mainly used for physical pain...?) rather than some clearer term? Were there no clearer options available?”
If by ‘dukkha’ early Buddhists just meant ‘not totally satisfactory’, then why did they choose that word (apparently mainly used for physical pain...?) rather than some clearer term?
Note that Wikipedia gives the word’s etymology as being something that actually does seem pretty analogous to ‘not totally satisfactory’;
The word is commonly explained as a derivation from Aryan terminology for an axle hole, referring to an axle hole which is not in the center and leads to a bumpy, uncomfortable ride. According to Winthrop Sargeant,
The ancient Aryans who brought the Sanskrit language to India were a nomadic, horse- and cattle-breeding people who travelled in horse- or ox-drawn vehicles. Su and dus are prefixes indicating good or bad. The word kha, in later Sanskrit meaning “sky,” “ether,” or “space,” was originally the word for “hole,” particularly an axle hole of one of the Aryan’s vehicles. Thus sukha … meant, originally, “having a good axle hole,” while duhkha meant “having a poor axle hole,” leading to discomfort.[12]
The word dukkha is made up of the prefix du and the root kha. Du means “bad” or “difficult”. Kha means “empty”. “Empty”, here, refers to several things—some specific, others more general. One of the specific meanings refers to the empty axle hole of a wheel. If the axle fits badly into the center hole, we get a very bumpy ride. This is a good analogy for our ride through saṃsāra.
As I heard one meditation teacher put it, the modern analogy to this would be if you had one of those shopping carts where one of the wheels is stuck and doesn’t quite go the way you’d like it—doesn’t exactly kill you or cause you enormous suffering, but it’s not a totally satisfactory shopping cart experience, either.
I find arguments by analogy etymology almost maximally unconvincing here, unless dukkha was a neologism? Like, those arguments make me update away from your conclusion, because they seem so not-of-the-correct-type. Normally, word etymologies are a very poor guide to meaning compared to looking at usage—what do other sources actually mean when they say “dukkha” in totally ordinary contexts?
There’s a massive tradition across many cultures of making sophistical arguments about words’ ‘true’ or ‘real’ meaning based on (real or imagined) etymologies. This is even dicier when the etymology is as vague/uninformative as this one—there are many different ways you can spin ‘bad axle hole’ to give exactly opposite glosses of dukkha.
I still don’t find this 100% convincing/exacting, but the following account at least doesn’t raise immediate alarm bells for me:
According to Pali-English Dictionary, dukkha (Sk. duḥkha) means unpleasant, painful, causing misery.[4] [...]
The other meaning of the word dukkha, given in Venerable Nyanatiloka written Buddhist Dictionary, is “ill”. As the first of the Four Noble Truths and the second of the three characteristics of existence (tilakkhaṇa), the term dukkha is not limited to painful experience (as “pain”, “painful feeling”, which may be bodily and mental), but refers to the unsatisfactory nature and the general insecurity of all conditioned phenomena which, on account of their impermanence, are all liable to suffering, and this includes also pleasurable experience. Hence “unsatisfactoriness” or “liability to suffering” would be more adequate renderings, if not for stylistic reasons.[6] Therefore, it can be said that dukkha is the lack of satisfaction.
Our modern words are too specialized, too limited, and usually too strong. Sukha and dukkha are ease and dis-ease (but we use disease in another sense); or wealth and ilth from well and ill (but we have now lost ilth); or wellbeing and ill-ness (but illness means something else in English). We are forced, therefore, in translation to use half synonyms, no one of which is exact. Dukkha is equally mental and physical. Pain is too predominantly physical, sorrow too exclusively mental, but in some connections they have to be used in default of any more exact rendering. Discomfort, suffering, ill, and trouble can occasionally be used in certain connections. Misery, distress, agony, affliction and woe are never right. They are all much too strong & are only mental.[7] As there is no word in English covering the same ground as dukkha does in Pali, I believe, the most appropriate translation equivalent of dukkha could be ‘stress’ (as distress and eustress).
Distress is a term of modern psychology which implies ‘great pain, anxiety, or sorrow; acute physical or mental suffering; affliction or trouble; that which causes pain, suffering, trouble, danger, etc.’ ‘It is state of extreme necessity or misfortune’, liability or exposure to pain, suffering, trouble, etc.; or danger’.[8]
The antonym of dukkha is sukha, which is agreeable, pleasant, blest. In Buddhist usage it is not merely sensual pleasure, it is the happy feeling in ordinary sense. But it is also used to convey an ethical import of doctrinal significance. The concept of dukkha necessarily includes the general insecurity of the whole of our experience.[9]
Using psychological terminology, it can be said that, sukha is the equivalent of eustress, which means a so-called positive tension or ‘good stress’. Eustress is derived from the ‘Greek eu ‘well, good’ + stress’ and means ‘stress that is deemed healthful or giving one the feeling of fulfillment[ ]’[10] or other positive feelings.
[...]
Dukkha in non-Buddhist belief-systems
Two ideas of great significance developed between the ninth and sixth centuries BCE, namely that beings are reincarnated into the world (saṃsāra) over and over again and that the result of action (karma) are reaped in future lives. This process rebirth is one of suffering (duḥkha), escape from which can be achieved through the minimizing of action and through spiritual knowledge. Patañjali (second century BCE), a systematizer of yoga practice and philosophy, states that all is suffering to the spiritually discriminating person (vivekin). This doctrine that all life is suffering is common to renouncer tradition.[13]
[...] Hinduism expects of followers accepting suffering as inevitable and inescapable consequence and as an opportunity for spiritual progress. Thus the soul or true self, which is eternally free of any suffering, may come to manifest itself in the person, who then achieves liberation (moksha).
As I have already mentioned above, that Hinduism is a complex mixture of religious movements. Concerning the relation between Ultimate Reality and evil, there are at least three major perspectives, given by (1) Vedas, (2) Upanishads and the whole corpus of pantheistic writings and (3) Epics and Puranas.
Suffering in Vedas also refers to theory of moral law of cause and effect. [...] In the hymns addressed to Varuna (Vedic god) evil is a matter of humans not fulfilling his laws or not performing the ritual properly. Often it has a moral significance, in that people are evil-minded or commit adultery. Those who commit evil deeds must repent before Varuna and try to repair their evil deeds through ritual sacrifices. In other hymns addressed to Indra, suffering or evil is personified by demons. Thus the fight against evil is a perpetual combat between personalized good and evil forces.[17]
The Upanishads ground a pantheistic perspective on Ultimate Reality and introduce karma as the explanation of evil in the world. Ignorance launches karma into action and karma brings suffering. As the manifestations and dissolutions of the world have no beginning and no end, so is karma, meaning that suffering is a part of the eternal cosmic cycle. Suffering in the present life is the natural consequence of past lives’ ignorance and it has to be endured without questioning.[18]
Hinduism holds that suffering is the fruit of karma, which goes accompanied by the inevitable shadow from personal unwholesome actions in one’s current life or in a past life. The monotheistic faiths must contemplate the problems of suffering, ill or evil within the context of god’s authority and mercy.
[...]
More detailed overview of dukkha [in Buddhism]
More comprehensive overview of what the term dukkha implies, is given in Saccavibhaṅga sutta (An Analysis of the Truths) by Sāriputta:
“Now what, friends, is the noble truth of stress? Birth is stressful, aging is stressful, death is stressful; sorrow, lamentation, pain, distress, & despair are stressful; association with the unbeloved is stressful; separation from the loved is stressful; not getting what is wanted is stressful. In short, the five clinging-aggregates are stressful.
And what is birth (jāti)? Whatever birth, taking birth, descent, coming-to-be, coming-forth, appearance of aggregates, & acquisition of [sense] spheres of the various beings in this or that group of beings, that is called birth.
And what is aging (jāra)? Whatever aging, decrepitude, brokenness, graying, wrinkling, decline of life-force, weakening of the faculties of the various beings in this or that group of beings, that is called aging.
And what is death (maraṇa)? Whatever deceasing, passing away, breaking up, disappearance, dying, death, completion of time, break up of the aggregates, casting off of the body, interruption in the life faculty of the various beings in this or that group of beings, that is called death.
And what is sorrow (soka)? Whatever sorrow, sorrowing, sadness, inward sorrow, inward sadness of anyone suffering from misfortune, touched by a painful thing, that is called sorrow.
And what is lamentation (parideva)? Whatever crying, grieving, lamenting, weeping, wailing, lamentation of anyone suffering from misfortune, touched by a painful thing, that is called lamentation.
And what is pain (dukkha)? Whatever is experienced as bodily pain, bodily discomfort, pain or discomfort born of bodily contact, that is called pain.
And what is distress (domanassa)? Whatever is experienced as mental pain, mental discomfort, pain or discomfort born of mental contact, that is called distress.
And what is despair (upāyāsa)? Whatever despair, despondency, desperation of anyone suffering from misfortune, touched by a painful thing that is called despair.
And what is the stress of association with the unbeloved? There is the case where undesirable, unpleasing, unattractive sights, sounds, aromas, flavors, or tactile sensations occur to one; or one has connection, contact, relationship, interaction with those who wish one ill, who wish for one’s harm, who wish for one’s discomfort, who wish one no security from the yoke. This is called the stress of association with the unbeloved.
And what is the stress of separation from the loved? There is the case where desirable, pleasing, attractive sights, sounds, aromas, flavors, or tactile sensations do not occur to one; or one has no connection, no contact, no relationship, no interaction with those who wish one well, who wish for one’s benefit, who wish for one’s comfort, who wish one security from the yoke, nor with one’s mother, father, brother, sister, friends, companions, or relatives. This is called the stress of separation from the loved.
And what is the stress of not getting what is wanted (yam pi icchaṃ na labbati)? In beings subject to birth, the wish arises, ‘O, may we not be subject to birth, and may birth not come to us.’ But this is not to be achieved by wanting. This is the stress of not getting what is wanted. In beings subject to aging… illness… death… sorrow, lamentation, pain, distress, & despair, the wish arises, ‘O, may we not be subject to aging… illness… death… sorrow lamentation, pain, distress, & despair, and may aging… illness… death… sorrow, lamentation, pain, distress, & despair not come to us.’ But this is not to be achieved by wanting. This is the stress of not getting what is wanted.”[32]
The bailey of dukkha is that it’s really bad—like physical pain. And the older texts seem to generally embrace, indeed presuppose, this bailey—the whole reason these sentences sound radical, revolutionary, concerning, is that they’re saying something not-obvious and seemingly extreme about all ordinary experience. Not that it’s literally physical pain, sure; but there’s a deliberate line being drawn between physical pain, illness, dysfunction, suffering, badness, etc. and many other things.
My intuition is that these lines would have hit very differently if their first-pass meaning in the eyes of Sanskrit- or Pali-speakers had been “Birth isn’t totally satisfying, aging isn’t totally satisfying, death isn’t totally satisfying...”
(I can much more easily buy that ‘physical pain’ is the obvious surface meaning for initiates, the attention-grabbing Buzzfeed headline; and something like ‘not perfectly satisfying’ is the truly-intended motte, meant for people to come to understand later. But in that case the etymology arguments are totally backwards, since etymology relates to common usage and not ‘weird new esoteric meaning our religion is inventing here’.)
If by ‘dukkha’ early Buddhists just meant ‘not totally satisfactory’, then why did they choose that word (apparently mainly used for physical pain...?
I’m willing to believe, based on the totality of the Buddha’s message, that he meant dukkha as “resisting how things are/wanting them to be different,” i.e. being unsatisfied with reality. Look at our own word “suffering” in English. Today it connotes anguish, but it also means “enduring” or “putting up with.” A word like “unsatisfied” in English has a mild connotation, but we could also say something like “tormented by desire” to ramp up the intensity without fundamentally changing the meaning.
I think even in current english there is an idiom for pain. Ie “”It pains me that I don’t have food” vs “I am hungry”. One variant of the claims is that there is way to be food-poor that is positive “It delights me that I don’t have food” or just “I don’t have food”.
I think it would pretty hard to translate words like “annoying,” “irritating,” etc to a very foreign audience without making reference to physical pain. It’s hard to infer connotations or intensity when looking at those older writings.
The set of metaphors that have come to the west are dominated by the early transmission of Buddhism which occurred in the late 1800′s, and was carried out by Sanskrit scholars translating from Sanskrit sources. The Buddha specifically warned people against translating his teachings into Sanskrit for pretty much the sorts of reasons being passed off as genuine Buddhism here.
The whole idea of meditation is to become tolerant of signals to action so you can let them pass without doing the things that replicate them or, ultimately, propagate any life-like process.
I’m willing to grant that there are certain interpretations of Buddhism that take this view, but object pretty strongly to depicting it as the idea of meditation. Especially since there are many different varieties of meditation, with varying degrees of (in)compatibility with this goal; something like loving-kindness or shi-ne meditation seem both more appropriate for creating activity, for instance.
In my view, there are so many varieties and interpretations of Buddhism that pointing to some of them having an anti-life view always seems like a weird sleight of hand to me. By saying that Buddhism originates as an anti-life practice, one can then imply that all of its practices also tend to lead towards that goal, without needing to establish that that’s actually the case.
After all, just because some of the people who developed such techniques wanted to create an anti-life practice doesn’t mean that they actually succeeded in developing techniques that would be particularly well-suited for this goal. I agree that it’s possible to use them for such a goal, especially if they’re taught in the context of an ideology that frames the practice that way, but I don’t think them to be very effective for that goal even then.
I think if rationalists are interested in Buddhism as part of their quest to find truth, they should know that it has, at the very least, deathist origins.
I agree that it’s valuable to be aware of the life-denying aspects of the tradition, since those mindsets do affect some teachings of it and it’s good to be able to notice them and filter them out rather than accidentally absorbing them.
I do however object to characterizing “Buddhism proper” anti-life, as it implies that any proper attempt to delve into or practice Buddhism will eventually just lead you into deathism.
Consciousness is one of the Five Aggregates, and the Cessation of the Aggregates is final nirvana: consciousness, at least in this sense, cannot exist in nirvana.
[...] But for Buddhism, ‘does not exist’ is one of the four possibilities for the state of an enlightened person after his or her nirvanizing that are explicitly rejected. On the conceptual level there is an impasse, at least in the articulation of systematic thought: nirvana is the cessation of the consciousness Aggregate, but that is not equivalent to becoming non-existent: it is beyond designation.
[...] One might be tempted to say, as has indeed sometimes been said, in quasi-Buddhist terms, that apropos the Enlightened person ‘in’ nirvana, existence and non-existence here are two extremes, between which Buddhism proposes the Middle Way. But for a scholar to say only that would do no more than reproduce a cliche, putting on a Buddhist disguise and pretending to say something illuminating from a scholarly perspective. A better interpretive strategy, I suggest, is to see this as an example of the way silences within discourse are themselves part of the production of meaning.
[...] One can say that it is not non-existence, and it is a timeless bliss; to say more would be to rush in where Buddhas fear to tread.
Happiness
Since final nirvana is the cessation of the Aggregates, it is clear that just as there can be no consciousness in that sense, so there can be no Feeling, and no determinate Perception or Ideation, and so no happiness in any ordinary sense. At the same time, however, it is said to be a form of happiness, one of the standard list of three: those of mankind, of the gods, and of nirvana. Nirvana is repeatedly said to be the highest happiness. A passage repeated (with some variations) in a number of commentaries cites different canonical phrases to show that sukha can be used variously: inter alia, it denotes
(i) pleasurable feeling(s);
(ii) the ‘roots of happiness’, as in the phrase ‘happy is the arising of Buddhas’, or the ‘cause of happiness’, as in the phrase ‘the accumulation of merit is [i.e., brings] happiness’; and
(iii) nirvana, as in the phrase ‘nirvana is the highest happiness’.
[...] Commentaries explain:
“Here from the fourth Level onwards the feeling of neither suffering nor happiness (that occurs) is also said to be happiness in the sense that it is peaceful and sublime. Cessation [the ninth level] occurs as happiness in that it is the kind of happiness which is not a matter of feeling. For happiness that is a matter of feeling (occurs) through the five strands of sense-pleasure and through the eight (Meditation Level) attainments [i.e., as a feeling of happiness in nos. 1-3 and as the peaceful and sublime feeling of neither suffering nor happiness in nos. 4-8]. Cessation is (an example of) happiness that is not a matter of feeling. Whether the happiness be a matter of feeling or not, it is all happiness in that it is taken to be a state of non-suffering … [The phrase in the texts] ‘happiness exists’ means that there exists either the happiness that is a matter of feeling or that which is not a matter of feeling. [The phrase] ‘the Tathagata (the Buddha) assigns this or that to (The category of “happiness”’ means that he assigns to happiness everything which is non-suffering.”
But for Buddhism, ‘does not exist’ is one of the four possibilities for the state of an enlightened person after his or her nirvanizing that are explicitly rejected. On the conceptual level there is an impasse, at least in the articulation of systematic thought: nirvana is the cessation of the consciousness Aggregate, but that is not equivalent to becoming non-existent: it is beyond designation.
This section seems to say it well, highlighted bits in bold for easier reading.
There is nothing pro-”nonexistence” in Buddhism. There is nothing pro-”ending or annihilating life.” These takes are explicitly rejected in the Pali canon.
It is very easy to misunderstand what Buddhism is saying, and the inferential gap is larger than I think most people imagine. The words / phrases do not have direct translations into common English.
When someone claims something to be “beyond designation” or “beyond categorization” or any such thing, it’s a sure bet that they’re trying to slip one by you; in fact, the given thing belongs to a category which, if you recognized that membership, would lead you to reject it—and rightly.
I think this is not true in full generality—I think meditation does give people insights that are hard to verbalize, and does make some common verbal distinctions feel less joint-carving, so it makes sense for a tradition of meditators to say a lot in favor of ‘things that are hard to verbalize’ and ‘things that can’t be neatly carved up in the normal intuitive ways’.
I do think that once you have those insights, there’s a strong temptation to lapse into sophistry or doublethink to defend whatever silly thing you feel like defending that day—if someone doubts your claim that the Buddha lives on like a god or ghost after death, you can say that the Buddha’s existence-status after death transcends concepts and verbalization.
When in fact the honest thing to say if you believed in immaterial souls would be ‘I don’t know what happened to the Buddha when he died’, and the honest thing to say if you’re an educated modern person is ‘the Buddha was totally annihilated when he died, the exact same as anyone else who dies.’
I think meditation does give people insights that are hard to verbalize
What would the world look like if meditation only made people feel like they had insights that were hard to verbalize, without actually giving them any new insights?
(But also, “thing X is beyond designation” and “some fact(s) about thing X are hard to verbalize” are not the same thing.)
If the world was one where meditation only made people feel like they had insights that were hard to verbalize, then I probably wouldn’t have figured out ways to verbalize some of them (mostly due to having knowledge of neuroscience etc. stuff that most historical Buddhists haven’t had).
I admire koan practice in Zen as an attempt to make sure people are reaching genuine insights without being able to fully capture them in explicit words.
Koans are “riddles” that are supposed to only be understandable by “insight,” a non-cognitive form of knowledge attained by entering “don’t know mind.” Meditating on koans “confuses the rational mind” so that it is easier to enter “don’t know mind.” Koan training consists of being given a koan by a master (the first one I ever received was “what is the meaning of [smacks hand into ground]?”), letting the koan confuse you and relaxing into that feeling, letting go of all the thoughts that try to explain, and then one day having the answer pop into your awareness (some schools have people concentrate on the koan, others say to just create the conditions for insight and it will come). If you explain your insight to a master and they think you’ve figured it out (they often say “used up”) that koan, they give you a new one that’s even further from everyday thinking. And so it continues until you’ve gone through enough of the hundreds of koans in that lineage.
It’s a cool system because “getting” your koan is an objectively observable indicator of progress at meditation, which is otherwise quite difficult to assess.
Ok, but how exactly does “make sure people are reaching genuine insights”? Are there canonical correct answers to koans? (But that would seem to violate the “without being able to fully capture them in explicit words” clause…)
In other words, how do you know when you’ve correctly understood a koan? (When an answer pops into your awareness, how do you know it’s the right one?) And, what does it mean to correctly understand a koan? (What’s the difference between correctly understanding a koan and incorrectly understanding it?)
It’s a cool system because “getting” your koan is an objectively observable indicator of progress at meditation, which is otherwise quite difficult to assess.
Could you elaborate on this? I am confused by this point.
Masters have an oral tradition of assessing the answers to koans and whether they reflect genuine insight. They use the answers people give to guide their future training.
Having used up a few koans, I’d say the answers come to you pretty clearly. You get to a certain point in meditation and the koan suddenly makes sense in light of that.
By what means do the masters assess whether the answers reflect “genuine insight”?
Is there a way for a non-master to evaluate whether a given answer to a koan is correct, or to show that the ostensibly-correct answer is correct? (Analogously to P vs. NP—if the correct answer is difficult to determine, is it nonetheless straightforward to verify?)
If the answer to the previous question is “no”, then how is one to know whether the ostensibly-correct answer is, in fact, actually correct?
It’s not really a question of factually correct. The koan is designed to make sense on a non-cognitive, non-rational level. My experience was that I would have a certain insight on my own when I was meditating and then I would realize that that’s what the koan was talking about. What makes a good koan is that you’re totally stumped when you first hear it, but when it clicks you know that’s the right answer. That’s why one English translation is “riddle.” Some riddles have correct answers according to the terms they lay out, but really what makes a riddle is the recognition of a lateral thinking move, even if it’s as simple as a pun. Koans are “riddles” that require don’t-know mind.
The koan is designed to make sense on a non-cognitive, non-rational level.
What is the content of whatever “insight” or “sense” it is that’s gained when you “get the right answer” to a koan? I do not see what it could mean to say that one has gained such an insight…
Some questions:
Does it ever happen that someone “gets” a koan—it “clicks” for them, and they “know” that the answer they’ve got is “the right answer”—but actually, their differs from the canonically “correct” answer?
Alternatively: does it ever happen that two different people both “get” a koan—it “clicks” for them both—but their answers differ?
Do Zen teachers/masters ever disagree on what the “right” answer to a koan is? If so—how do they resolve this disagreement?
Suppose I were to say to a Zen teacher: you say the answer to this koan is X, but I think it is actually Y. Please demonstrate to me that it is as you say, and not as I say. How might they do this?
The awareness belonging to Buddha, then, is free from construction. But what, positively, could such awareness be like?
The digests are concerned to eliminate a number of possible errors in thinking about awareness without construction. The first of these is the error of judging such awareness to be identical with simple unconsciousness, a simple absence of mental activity. If it were, such absence would be easy to attain: a sharp blow to the head produces unconsciousness; and there are various meditational practices that dispose of many kinds of mental activity at an early stage of the practice of the path. But it is obvious that the absence of constructive activity that characterizes Buddha’s awareness is not so easily attained. Neither is it the case, according to the digests, that Buddha’s awareness is epistemically, phenomenally, or soteriologically as uninteresting as deep sleep or a drunken stupor.
More interestingly, the digests also negate the idea that unconstructed awareness is to be identified with a much more exalted meditative state called the ‘attainment of cessation’ (nirodhasamapatti) or the ‘cessation of sensation and conceptualization’ (samjnaveditanirodha). This is a condition attained by complex and difficult meditational practice, a condition wherein there are no mental events of any kind. It is not death; but it is not distinguishable from death by any phenomenal properties. The only difference between the two is that the attainment of cessation can be emerged from, while death cannot (not, at least, without various complications caused by the need to take on a new body and the like, complications that need not detain us here).
Buddha’s construction-free awareness is distinct even from this exalted condition, and the digests put this in formal terms by denying that Buddha’s awareness could be identified with the attainment of cessation, because if it were it would not be an instance of awareness (jnana) at all, which its name requires it to be, for awareness cannot occur where there are no mental events of any kind. The point here is the simple logical one that awareness is a species of mental event, from which it follows that no instance of awareness can be identified with a condition in which there are no mental events.
[… The digests negate] the claim that this awareness comprises any volitional turning of the mind toward its objects (alambanabhisamskara). This is not the same as denying that Buddha’s awareness has content, or consists of events with phenomenal properties; it is simply a denial that the phenomenal properties of its apparent objects are, or can be, things with which it can be involved in a sustained and intentional way. In so far as what appears in the mind does so with phenomenal properties, those properties do not lead the Buddha-mind to fasten upon them, to follow after them, or to make judgments that a particular thing with particular properties is now being experienced.
For example, suppose Buddha sees a blue pot. One way of reading the negation described in the preceding paragraph is to say that Buddha has a spontaneous (that is, effortless, nonvolitional) moment of awareness (jnana) consisting of a mental object or image (alambana, nimitta) whose phenomenal properties (akara) consist of a complex list of things such as ‘transient-blue-pot-here-now’; in English such an occurrence is best described adverbially by saying that Buddha is appeared to transient-blue-pot-here-now-ly.
[… T]he important distinction between Buddha’s blue-pot awareness and mine is that Buddha neither does nor can judge that it is being appeared to blue-pot-ly, whereas I, other things being equal, inevitably do. Buddha, moreover, does not engage in the constructive activity of manipulating and massaging its mental images; it has no affective response to them, and, above all, no concern for their endurance, cessation, or repetition. The digests sometimes express this by saying that Buddha does not behave like an artist toward the objects of its awareness.[.]
[...] If, in order to have phenomenal properties or modes of appearance, awareness must be characterized by effortful acts of attention toward specific objects (as it certainly must in most instances of ordinary awareness), then it is proper to say that Buddha’s awareness is nirakara, ‘free from modes of appearance.’ But if possessing modes of appearance can be understood through the simile of reflections on the surface of a mirror, then it is reasonable to say that Buddha’s awareness does have them—for a mirror, like Buddha’s awareness, does not engage itself with or focus upon specific ‘reflectables’; it simply reflects, spontaneously, perfectly, and without distortion, everything that passes before it.
[...] The thrust of the digests toward presenting the Buddha as maximally great requires the scope of Buddha’s awareness to be maximized: if it is good to have unconstructed awareness, then the temporal and spatial range of this awareness cannot be restricted or limited in Buddha’s case: it must be, as the digests claim it to be, strictly universal in scope. Buddha must therefore be, in some important sense, omniscient[.]
[...] The digests generally agree that Buddha’s universal awareness is not brought about by causes, since this would entail its contingency: if the proper causes had not obtained, its universal awareness would not have obtained. And this cannot be correct: Buddha’s awareness has always (sada) and necessarily (avasyam) existed.
[… Many similar passages link] Buddha’s permanence closely with its salvific actions. The limitless and perfect salvific efficacy that Buddha, understood as maximally great, must necessarily possess, requires that Buddha be present and active everywhere and at all times. Hence, Buddha must be permanent, without beginning or end in time.
The digests thus refuse to predicate any temporal properties of Buddha considered in se. Buddha is not earlier or later than anything, not temporally related to anything in any way. All Buddha’s temporal properties are of the kind described in chapters four and five: seems to S to be P at t. Correlated with this refusal is a denial to Buddha of causal properties: Buddha is not caused to do anything, nor does Buddha cause any non-Buddha to do anything. Buddha is, metaphysically speaking, simply identical with all atemporal states of affairs.
Regarding meditation, Kevin Fischer reported a surprising-to-me anecdote on FB yesterday:
I had one conversation with Soryu [the head of Monastic Academy / MAPLE] at a small party once. I mentioned that my feeling about meditation is that it’s really good for everyone when done for 15 minutes a day, and when done for much more than that forever, it’s much more complicated and sometimes harmful.
He straightforwardly agreed, and said he provides the environment for long term dedication to meditation because there is a market demand for that product. 🤷
He straightforwardly agreed, and said he provides the environment for long term dedication to meditation because there is a market demand for that product. 🤷
FWIW as a resident of MAPLE, my sense is Soryu believes something like:
“Smaller periods of meditation will help you relax/focus and probably have only a very small risk of harm. Larger/longer periods of meditation come with deeper risks of harm, but are also probably necessary to achieve awakening, which is important for the good of the world.”
But I am a newer resident and could easily misunderstanding here.
The correspondent’s reply here is helpful color on how things can get more complicated (e.g. shifts in how you perceive the actions/intentions of yourself & others) and sometimes harmful (e.g. extended stays in Dark Night).
On one hand, meditation—when done without all the baggage, hypothetically—seems like a useful tool. On the other hand, it simply invites all that baggage, because that is in the books, in the practicing communities, etc.
I think meditation should be treated similarly to psychedelics—even for meditators who don’t think of it in terms of anything supernatural, it can still have very large and unpredictable effects on the mind. The more extreme the style of meditation (e.g. silent retreats), the more likely this sort of thing is.
Any subgroups heavily using meditation seem likely to have the same problems as the ones Eliezer identified for psychedelics/woo/supernaturalism.
I have pointed out the risks of meditation and meditation-like practices before. The last time was on the Shoulder Advisors which does seem to fall on the boundary. I have experience with meditation and have been to extended silent meditation retreats with only positive results. Nonetheless, bad trips are possible—esp. without a supportive teacher and/or community.
But I wouldn’t make a norm against groups fostering meditation. Meditation depends on groups for support (though the same might be said about psychedelics). Meditation is also a known way to gain high levels of introspective awareness and to have many mental health benefits (many posts about that on LW I’m too lazy to find). The group norm about these things should be to require oversight by a Living Tradition of Knowledge in the relevant area (for meditation e.g. an established—maybe even Buddhist—meditation school).
Psychedelics, woo, and meditation are very separate stuff. They are often used in conjunction with each other due to popularity and the context some of these things are discussed along with each other. Buddhism has incorporated meditation into its woo while other religions have mostly focused on group based services in terms of talking about their woos.
I like how some commenters have grouped psychedelics and meditation separate of the woo stuff, but it was a bit surprising to me to see Eliezer dismissing psychedelics along with woo in the same statements. He probably hasn’t taken psychedelics before. Meditation is quite different as in it’s more of a state of mind as opposed to an altered mentality. With psychedelics there is a clear distinction between when you are tripping and when you aren’t tripping. With meditation, it’s not so clear when you are meditating and when you aren’t. Woo is just putting certain ideas into words, which has nothing to do with different mindset/mentalities.
Meditation is quite different as in it’s more of a state of mind as opposed to an altered mentality. With psychedelics there is a clear distinction between when you are tripping and when you aren’t tripping.
However, according to some, even meditation done properly can have negative effects, which would be similar to psychedelics but manifesting slower and through your own effort. Quoted from the book review:
Once you have meditated enough to reach the A&P Event, you’re stuck in the (very unpleasant) Dark Night Of The Soul until you can meditate your way out of it, which could take months or years.
Even in the case of Sam Harris, who seems relatively normal, he lost a decade of his life pursuing “enlightenment” though meditation—also notable is this was spurred on by psychedelic use. Though I am sure he would not agree with the frame that it was a waste, I read his *Waking Up* as a bit of a horror story. For someone without his high IQ and indulgent parents, you could imagine more horrible ends.
I know of at least one person who was bright, had wild ambitious ideas, and now spends his time isolated from his family inwardly pursuing “enlightenment.” And this through the standard meditation + psychedelics combination. I find it hard to read this as anything other than wire-heading, and I think a good social norm would be one where we consider such behavior as about as virtuous as obsessive masturbation.
In general, for any drug that produces euphoria, especially spiritual euphoria, the user develops an almost romantic relationship with their drug, as the feelings they inspire are just as intense (and sometimes more so) as familial love. One should at least be slightly suspicious of the benefits propounded by their users, who in many cases literally worship their drugs of choice.
fwiw as a data point here, I spent some time inwardly pursuing “enlightenment” with heavy and frequent doses of psychedelics for a period of 10 months and consider this to be one of the best things I’ve ever done. I believe it raised my resting set point happiness, among other good things, and I am still deeply altered (7 years later).
I do not think this is a good idea for everyone and lots of people who try would end up worse off. But I strongly object to this being seen as virtuous as obsessive masturbation. Sure, it might not be your thing, but this frame seriously misses a huge amount of really important changes in my experience. And I get you might think I’m… brainwashed or something? by drugs? So I don’t know what I could say that would convince you otherwise.
But I did have concrete things, like solving a pretty big section of childhood trauma (like; I had a burning feeling of rage in my chest before, and the burning feeling was gone afterwards), I had multiple other people comment on how different I was now (usually in regards to laughing easier and seeming more relaxed), I lost my anxiety around dying, my relationship to pain altered in such a way that I am significantly more mentally able to endure it than I was before, I also had a radically altered relationship to the physical environment (my living space looked very different before and after), and I produced a lot of art that I hadn’t been producing before. Maybe this one is less concrete, but some part of me feels really deeply at peace, always, like it knows everything is going to be ok and I didn’t have that before.
There’s a way in which I consider what I did wireheading, like really successful wireheading, but I think people often… fail to imagine wireheading properly? And the husk of wireheading, where you’re sort of less of a person, is really terrifying. I agree that the husk-of-wireheading view makes psychedelics seem more sinister.
In my culture, it’s easy to look at “what happens at the ends of the bell curves” and “where’s the middle of the bell curve” and “how tight vs. spread out is the bell curve (i.e. how different are the ends from the middle)” and “are there multiple peaks in the bell curves” and all of that, separately.
Like, +1 for the above, and I join the above in giving a reminder that rounding things off to “thing bad” or “thing good” is not just not required, it’s actively unhelpful.
Policies often have to have a clear answer, such as the “blanket ban” policy that Eliezer is considering proposing. But the black-or-white threshold of a policy should not be confused with the complicated thing underneath being evaluated.
And I get you might think I’m… brainwashed or something? by drugs?
I’m not sure what you find implausible about that. Drugs do not literally propagandize the user, but they can hijack the reward system, in the case of many drugs, and in the case of psychedelics they seem to alter beliefs in reliable ways. Psychedelics are also taken in a memetic context with many crystalized notions about what the psychedelic experience is, what enlightenment is, that enlightenment itself is a mysterious but worthy pursuit.
The classic joke about psychedelics is they provide the feelings associated with profound insights without the actual profound insights. To the extent this is true, I feel this is pretty dangerous territory for a rationalist to tread.
In your own case unless I am misremembering, I believe on your blog you discuss LSD permanently lowering yourmathematical abilities degrading your memory. This seems really, really bad to me…
Maybe this one is less concrete, but some part of me feels really deeply at peace, always, like it knows everything is going to be ok and I didn’t have that before.
I’m glad your anxiety is gone, but I don’t think everything is going to be alright by default. I would not like to modify myself to think that. It seems clearly untrue.
Perhaps the masturbation line was going too far. But the gloss of virtue that “seeking enlightenment” has strikes me as undeserved.
Also fwiw, I took psychedelics in a relatively memetic-free environment. I’d been homeschooled and not exposed to hippie/drug culture, and especially not significant discussion around enlightenment. I consider this to be one of the reasons my experience was so successful; I didn’t have it in relationship to those memes, and did not view myself as pursuing enlightenment (I know I said I was inwardly pursuing enlightenment in my above comment, but I was mostly riffing off your phrasing; in some sense I think it was true but it wasn’t a conscious thing.)
LSD did not permanently lower my mathematical abilities, and if I suggested that I probably misspoke? I suspect it damaged my memory, though; my memory is worse now than before I took LSD.
And sorry; by ‘everything being ok’ I didn’t mean that I literally think that situation will end up being the ones I want; I mean that I know I will be okay with whatever happens. Very related to my endurance of pain going up by quite a lot, and my anxiety of death disappearing.
Separately, I do think that a lot of the memes around psychedelics are… incomplete? It’s hard to find a good word. Naive? Something around the difference between the aesthetic of a thing and the thing itself? And in that I might agree with you somewhere that “seeking enlightenment” isn’t… virtuous or whatever.
LSD did not permanently lower my mathematical abilities, and if I suggested that I probably misspoke? I suspect it damaged my memory, though; my memory is worse now than before I took LSD.
7 years seem to be a long time and most people get worse memory as they age. Was it also significantly worse directly aften the 10 months of you being on that quest then before those 10 months.?
LSD did not permanently lower my mathematical abilities, and if I suggested that I probably misspoke? I suspect it damaged my memory, though; my memory is worse now than before I took LSD.
Thanks. Corrected; I probably conflated the two. But my feeling towards that change are the same so the line otherwise remains unchanged. I should probably organize my opinons/feelings on this topic and write an effortpost or something rather than hash it out in the comments.
This is an interesting class of opinions; I wonder if believing the following:
I’m glad your anxiety is gone, but I don’t think everything is going to be alright by default. I would not like to modify myself to think that. It seems clearly untrue.
is at all correlated with also having this belief:
The classic joke about psychedelics is they provide the feelings associated with profound insights without the actual profound insights. To the extent this is true, I feel this is pretty dangerous territory for a rationalist to tread.
“Everything is not going to be alright by default” is sort of a vague belief to have, so is it worth having? I don’t think this is necessarily either an anomalous belief nor a common-place belief. Admittedly, I have a hard time figuring out how I would modify myself to have this belief. I guess I am not that way by nature, but others can be. It would be interesting to find out what accounts for that difference. Ultimately, if it’s more of an axiomatic belief, it would require a lot of argument about what kinds of other beliefs it leads to that are more beneficial for one to use over their lifetimes.
About the profound insights, the way to check to see if they are actually profound is:
Can it be articulated?
Can you explain it in further detail from subsequent experiences?
Does it remain with you even once the psychedelics or the “elevated” experience has worn off?
From personal experience, there are insights you can have which satisfy all three. I think lessened anxiety (which will be accompanied with reasons, though too long for this comment) is one of them.
Even in the case of Sam Harris, who seems relatively normal, he lost a decade of his life pursuing “enlightenment” though meditation
What kind of a cost-benefit analysis is this?
if you start from the assumption that something isn’t useful, of course spending time on that thing is a waste. As far as I can see, this is the totality of your argument. You can do this for just about anyone, e.g.:
Even in the case of Scott Garrabrant who seems relatively normal, he lost a decade of his life pursuing “AI alignment” through the use of mathematics.
I happen to think that Scott did amazing work at Miri, but objectively speaking, it is significantly harder to justify his time spent doing research at Miri than that of Sam Harris pursuing englightenment in India. Sam has released the Waking Up app, which is effectively a small company making a ton of money, donating 10% of its income to the most effective charities (arguably that alone is more than enough to pay for one decade of Sam’s time) and has thousands of people reporting enormous psychological benefits. I’m one of them; in terms of productivity alone, I’d say my time working as increased by at least 20% and has gotten at least 10% more effective at a fairly low cost of time, negligible cost of money, and no discernible downside or risk. (I’ve never taken psychedelics.)
I get that you think Enlightenment is bullshit. (Or at least I assume that’s what you think, correct me if this is wrong.) I strongly sympathize with this position because I think it’s the logical conclusion if you evaluate the question via pattern matching. But the person you just cited is enormously successful & personally credits his decade in meditation for that, and he created a product directly causally upstream of that decade which has thousands of more people reporting similar things. (And makes a ton of money.) I don’t fault you for still thinking that the entire project is bullshit, but obviously his case is Bayesian evidence against your position.
Or maybe you should move out of the Bay Area, a.s.a.p. (Like, half seriously, I wonder how much of this epistemic swamp is geographically determined. Not having the everyday experience, I don’t know.)
I wonder what the rationalist community would be like if, instead of having been forced to shape itself around risks of future superintelligent AI in the Bay Area, it had been artificial computing superhardware in Taiwan, or artificial superfracking in North Dakota, or artificial shipping supercontainers in Singapore, or something. (Hypothetically, let’s say the risks and opportunities of these technologies were equally great and equally technically and philosophically complex as those of AI in our universe.)
I’m also about ready to propose a similar no-such-group policy on ‘woo’, tarot-reading, supernaturalism only oh no it’s not really supernaturalism I’m just doing tarot readings as a way to help myself think, etc.
Hmm. I can’t tell if the second half is supposed to be pointing at my position on Tarot, or the thing that’s pretending to be my position but is actually confused?
Like, I think the hitrate for ‘woo’ is pretty low, and so I spend less time dredging there than I do other places which are more promising, but also I am not ashamed of the things that I’ve noticed that do seem like hits there. Like, I haven’t delivered on my IOU to explain ‘authenticity’ yet, but I think Circling is actually a step above practices that look superficially similar in a way we could understand rigorously, even if Circling is in a reference class that is quite high in woo, and many Circlers like the flavor of woo.
That said, I could also see an argument that’s like “look, we really have to implement rules like this at a very simple level or they will get bent to hell, and it’s higher EV to not let in woo.”
Would it be acceptable to regard practices like self-reflective tarot and circling and other woo-adjacent stuff as art rather than an attempt at rationality? I think it is a danger sign when people are claiming those highly introspective and personal activities as part of their aspiring to rationality. Can we just do art and personal emotional and creative discovery and not claim that it’s directly part of the rationalist project?
I mean, I also do things that I would consider ‘art’ that I think are distinct from rationality. But, like, just like I wouldn’t really consider ‘meditation’ an art project instead of ‘inner work’ or ‘learning how to think’ or w/e, I wouldn’t really consider Circling an art project instead of those things.
I would consider meditation and circling to have the same relationship to “discovering the truth” as art. The insights can be real and profound but are less rigorous and much more personal.
I think we need more than two categories here. We can’t allocate credit for input, only output. People can learn things by carefully observing stuff, but we shouldn’t get to mint social capital as rationalists for hours meditating any more than Darwin’s reputation should depend directly on time spent thinking about tortoises.
Discerning investors might profit by recognizing leading indicators of high productivity, but that only works if incentives are aligned, which means, eventually, objective tests. In hindsight it seems very unfortunate that MIRI was not mostly funded by relevant-to-its-expertise prediction markets.
Good art seems like it should make people sexy, not credible.
Instead of declaring group norms I think it would be worth it to have posts that actually lay out the case in a convincing manner. In general there are plenty of contrarian rationalists for whom “it’s a group norm” is not enough to not do something. Declaring it as a drug norm might get them to be more secretive about it which is bad.
Trying to solve issues about people doing the wrong things with group norms instead of with deep arguments doesn’t seem to be the rationalist way.
Have the important conversations about why you shouldn’t take drugs / engage in woo openly on LessWrong instead only having them only privately where it doesn’t reach many people. Then confront people who suggest something in that direction with those posts.
There are some potential details that might swing one way or the other (Vaniver’s comment points at some), but as-written above, and to the best of my ability to predict what such a proposal would actually look like once Eliezer had put effort into it:
I expect I would wholeheartedly and publicly endorse it, and be a signatory/adopter.
Umm To relay a trad Buddhist perspective, you’re not (traditionally) supposed to make a full-blown attempt for ‘enlightenment’ or ‘insight’ until you’ve spent a fairly extensive time working on personal ethics & discipline. I think an unnamed additional step is to establish your basic needs, like good community, health, food, shelter, etc. It’s also recommended that you avoid drugs, alcohol, and even sex.
There’s also an important sense I get from trad Buddhism, which is: If you hold a nihilistic view, things will go sideways. A subtle example of nihilism is the sense that “It doesn’t matter what I do or think because it’s relatively inconsequential in the scheme of things, so whatever.” or a deeper hidden sense of “It doesn’t really matter if everyone dies.” or “I feel it might be better if I just stopped existing?” or “I can think whatever I want inside my own head, including extensive montages of murder and rape, because it doesn’t really affect anything.”
These views seem not uncommon among modern people, and subtler forms seem very common. Afaict from reading biographies, modern people have more trouble with nihilistic or self-hating views like these than people who grew up in e.g. Thai forest villages 100+ years ago. Because of this, I recommend a lot more caution with meditation and similar things.
Modern westerners and their flavors of non-trad Buddhism is more Wild West. Maybe not surprising. They don’t really like the traditional, renunciate, careful, slow aspects. They add in the drugs and the spirit of ‘move fast, break things’. They get addicted to the sense of progress and acceleration.
I would… personally… warn against that. Although… it’s complicated, since it does seem helpful to various people. People also seem really into their drugs, sex, and alcohol. ^_^;
I get … mildly squicked out by people trying to get enlightened using lots of drugs. I get squicked out if people seem pressured or anxious about trying to get enlightened asap. I have good friends who are in these categories. I am not qualified to know what’s truly good for them. But I’d personally feel a bit more comfortable if they eventually moved off of drug use.
While I personally strive for enlightenment in my own meditation practice at MAPLE, I am coming to realize the folly of “trying to make it happen as quickly as possible.” I am very wary of using drugs as a way to try to speed up “the process”. I am also wary of using pressure or brute force as a way to speed up “the process”. Seems like a form of hubris.
Rationalists seem… susceptible?… to hubris. :/ and… nihilism :\ :/ :\ I consider myself an example. !
I guess I’d suggest thinking about targets carefully. A lot of people are going to experiment with psychedelics anyway and it’s safer for people to do so within a group, assuming the group is actually trustworthy and not attempting to brainwash people.
OTOH a significant amount of (seemingly sane) people credit psychedelics for important personal insights and mental health/trauma healing. Psychedelics seem to be showing enough promise for that for the psychiatric establishment to be getting interested in them again [1, 2] despite them having been stigmatized for decades, and AFAIK the existing medical literature generally finds them to be low-risk [3, 4].
It’s interesting that a lot of the discussion about psychedelics here is arguing from intuitions and personal experience, rather than from the trial results that have been coming out.
I do think that psychedelic experiences vary a lot from person-to-person and trip-to-trip, and that psychedelics aren’t for everyone. (This variability probably isn’t fully captured by the trial results because study participants are carefully screened for lots of factors that may be contraindicated.)
Psilocybin-based psychedelics are indeed considered low-risk both in terms of addiction and overdose. This chart sums things up nicely, and is a good thing to ‘pin on your mental fridge’:
EDIT: while I still think this is true for most people, I want to contextualize this by saying that people should always practice harm-reduction when taking psychedelics, do their own research, consider their own history and risk profile, start with a low dose. I don’t mean to make anyone feel threatened by arguing in favor of psychedelic use. Your boundaries are sacred and my opinion is just an opinion.
Psychedelics don’t have any inherent positive or negative effect, they just make you more open to suggestion. They increase your learning rate. New evidence (i.e. your current lifestyle) will start weighing more on you than your prior (i.e. everything you’ve learned since you were a child).
If you are in a context that promotes healthy ideas, then psychedelics will help you absorb them faster. If you are in a cult, they’ll make you go off the rails faster.
I take them all the time and I’m better for it, but I would never take them in Berkeley.
This is not true. Some people are significantly less robust to the effects of psychedelics. Even a meditation retreat was enough to make me go off the rails— I would never take psychedelics. But some people can’t feel anything at those retreats and seem like psychedelics just open them up a bit. The same predispositions that lead people to develop schizophrenia and bipolar make them vulnerable to destabilization from psychedelics.
I wanted to dig up some numbers that put your claim in context. I have also seen a small minority of people that respond badly to psychedelics and even to meditation retreats (especially vipassana). But the first few studies did not find a connection between psychedelic use and mental health issues. I still feel this needs to be investigated.
However, I insist that my claim is true for a large majority, and an overcorrection of universally recommending against psychedelics would be net-negative (yes really). Instead we should be investigating how to ensure that these negative responses don’t happen.
I’ll make my model more precise: besides increasing your learning rate, psychedelics open you up to negative emotional stimuli that are being habitually suppressed because they would otherwise destabilize you. Naturally this opening up brings some destabilization along with it, which requires some skill to navigate. A good shaman or teacher will be able to teach you those skills, but a bunch of videos (like in vipassana) or just drinking the kool-aid with a bunch of friends won’t do.
If I may ask (you don’t have to answer): what retreat did you go to and how did you go off the rails?
It’s definitely overconfident. Source: twenty years of listening to a wide range of stories from my mother’s experiences as a mental health nurse in a psychiatric emergency room. Some of those psychedelic-related cases involved all sorts of confounding factors, and some of them just didn’t.
I want to second this. I worked for an organization where one of key support people took psychedelics and just...broke from reality. This was both a personal crisis for him and an organizational crisis for the company to deal with the sudden departure of a bus factor 1 employee.
I suspect that psychedelic damage happens more often than we think because there’s a whole lobby which buys the expand-your-mind narrative.
The most horrific case I know of LSD being involved in a group’s downward spiral from weird and kinda messed up to completely disconnected from reality and really fucking scary is the Manson family, but that’s far from a typical example. But if you do want to be a cult leader, LSD does seem to do something that makes the job a lot easier.
One takeaway I got from this when combined with some other stuff I’ve read:
Don’t do psychedelics. Seriously, they can fuck up your head pretty bad and people who take them and organizations that encourage taking them often end up drifting further and further away from normality and reasonableness until they end up in Cloudcuckooland.
I’m about ready to propose a group norm against having any subgroups or leaders who tell other people they should take psychedelics. Maybe they have individually motivated uses—though I get the impression that this is, at best, a high-variance bet with significantly negative expectation. But the track record of “rationalist-adjacent” subgroups that push the practice internally and would-be leaders who suggest to other people that they do them seems just way too bad.
I’m also about ready to propose a similar no-such-group policy on ‘woo’, tarot-reading, supernaturalism only oh no it’s not really supernaturalism I’m just doing tarot readings as a way to help myself think, etc. I still think it’s not our community business to try to socially prohibit things like that on an individual level by exiling individuals like that from parties, I don’t think we have or should have that kind of power over individual behaviors that neither pick pockets nor break legs. But I think that when there’s anything like a subgroup or a leader with those properties we need to be ready to say, “Yeah, that’s not a group in good standing with the rest of us, don’t go there.” This proposal is not mainly based on the advance theories by which you might suspect or guess that subgroups like that would end badly; it is motivated mainly by my sense of what the actual outcomes have been.
Since implicit subtext can also sometimes be bad for us in social situations, I should be explicit that concern about outcomes of psychedelic advocacy includes Michael Vassar, and concern on woo includes the alleged/reported events at Leverage.
Copying over a related Oct. 13-17 conversation from Facebook:
(context: someone posted a dating ad in a rationalist space where they said they like tarot etc., and rationalists objected)
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Marie La: As a cultural side note, most of my woo knowledge (like how to read tarot) has come from the rationalist community, and I wouldn’t have learned it otherwise
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Eliezer Yudkowsky: @Marie La Any ideas how we can stop that?
(+1 from Rob B)
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Marie La: Idk, it’s an introspective technique that works for some people. Doesn’t particularly work for me. Sounds like the concern is bad optics / PR rather than efficacy
(+1 from Rob B)
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Shaked Koplewitz: @Marie La optics implies that the concern is with the impression it makes on outsiders, my concern here is the effect on insiders (arguably this is optics too, but a non-central example)
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Rob Bensinger: If the concern is optics, either to insiders or outsiders, then it seems vastly weaker to me than if the concern is about epistemic methods or conclusions. (Indeed, it might flip the sign for me.)
The rationality community should be about truth and winning, not about linking ourselves up to whatever is culturally associated with the word “rationality”.
The first-order argument for trying weird things and seeing if they work (or just doing them for fun as a sort of game, etc.) makes sense. I’d rather focus on the question of whether that first-order case fails epistemically and/or instrumentally. Also: what does it fail for? Just saying ‘woo’ doesn’t tell us whether, e.g., we should stop using IFS because it isn’t normal-sounding enough.
(+1 from Marie L)
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Marie La: When we come across someone using weird mind trick X, we should figure out what it does and if we want the results. Being skilled at sorting out good weird mind tricks from bad, regardless of cultural coding, feels like an important rationalist skill.
Tarot is set of fancy art cards can be used in many ways, some that encourage magical thinking and some that provide useful introspective access
For the latter, I’d guess it’s somewhat useful to some people, similar to the skill of flipping a coin and doing what you want anyway
(+1 from Rob B)
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Eliezer Yudkowsky: @Marie La I disagree and think the woo has proven in empirical practice to be sufficiently destructive to people who can’t see the destruction, to reach a level where it should not be tolerated by this group as a future subgroup norm, same as LSD use shouldn’t be tolerated by us as a subgroup norm.
(+1 from Rob B, Marie L)
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Marie La: I’m interested in seeing more of your reasoning on this. Pointing out the harm model sounds useful to people who can’t easily see it (or to the people around them) to help avoid further harm in the future
(+1 from Rob B)
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Eliezer Yudkowsky: The #1 reason why I think it’s harmful isn’t a theory by which I divined it in advance. Though there sure is a very obvious theory whereby the path of sanity is a narrow one and people who step a bit off it in what they fondly imagine to be a controlled way, fall quite a lot further once they’re hanging around with crazier people, crazier ideas, and have already decided to let themselves go a little.
The #1 reason why I think it’s harmful is the number of times you hear about somebody, or worse, some subgroup, that pushed a little woo on somebody, or offered them some psychedelics, and a few years later you’re hearing about how far they went off the deep end. It seems to be destructive in practice and that’s a far stronger reason to be wary than the obvious-seeming ways it could be destructive in principle.
(+1 from Anonymous, Rob B)
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Anonymous: Agree with this but surely it also matters how often that action seems to have that effect *out of the times it’s done* - noting this because my impression (which however I don’t have data for) is that psychedelic use might be locally common enough that it’s only a small proportion of “rationalists who try LSD” who end up “going off the deep end”. Whereas experimenting with woo-y beliefs seems more strongly associated with that kind of trajectory and for that I endorse your conclusion.
(+1 from Eliezer Y)
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Aella: @Eliezer Yudkowsky On phone so thumb words but I notice I have a belief that this is predictable, and thus not dangerous? or rather, it’s something like if you’re religious and noticed some ppl have been drinking alcohol and then eventually losing their faith, you might be right to be wary of alcohol, but if you know that it’s actually the doubt of their faith that *causes* the alcohol drinking, then you wouldn’t be concerned if someone drinks alcohol but also isn’t doubting their faith.
similarly I have some intuition here that the woo stuff is a symptom and not the cause, and that it’s very possible to engage harmlessly with the symptom alone, and is a fine social norm if people can distinguish the alcoholism from doubting your faith.
I do agree seeing woo belief does up my probability they might end up going off the deep end tho
(+1 from Rob B, Eliezer Y)
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Eliezer Yudkowsky: My sense of “this seems to be ending very poorly on average” is much stronger for situations in which there’s a Leader or a Discernible Subgroup has formed, that are going up to others and saying “why, you really should try some psychedelics / woo”. Or where they wander up to individuals trying that, and put their arm around their shoulders all friendly-like.
Though I suppose that could also be because I’m much less likely to hear about the individual non-social cases even if they end poorly. And indeed, my sense of the individual cases, is that I have heard of a lot more individuals who took psychedelics a few times in a situation devoid of Leaders and Subgroups and nothing bad happened to them; compared to the case with woo, where it feels like I’m more likely to have heard that an individual who tried woo even in a situation without Leaders or Subgroups later went further off the deep end. Which has the very obvious explanation that some people ever do benefit from psychedelics and they are plausibly interesting to a healthy mind willing to risk itself, you can be sane and still try shrooms ever; while the woo thing requires a larger, more willing step off the strict rails of sanity.
But in the case of Subgroups or Leaders, neither woo nor psychedelics seems to end well.
And to be clear that this isn’t just disguised “boo subgroups and leaders”, let’s be clear that, say, OpenPhil is for these purposes a Subgroup and Holden Karnofsky is a Leader, as are MIRI and myself; they are just Subgroups and Leaders which have not, to my knowledge, ever advocated LSD or tarot readings.
(+1 from Rob B, Anonymous, Marie L)
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Marie La: @Eliezer Yudkowsky Strong agree that psychedelics + a strong leader context can enable great harm quickly.
It tends to make people vulnerable, and if there’s a bad actor around this can be dangerous. This has been plenty weaponized for controlling people in cult-like groups.
I’d expand this to include most drugs, but especially classical psychs and mdma.
Here I’d blame the leader for seeking out vulnerable psychedelic users or encouraging people under them to use psychedelics, rather than the drugs themselves
(I can’t say much about weaponized woo, don’t know what that looks like as much)
(+1 from Anonymous)
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Rob Bensinger: https://slatestarcodex.com/2019/09/10/ssc-journal-club-relaxed-beliefs-under-psychedelics-and-the-anarchic-brain suggests that psychedelics permanently “relax” people’s perceptual and epistemic priors, and that this is maybe why they can cause hallucinogen persisting perceptual disorder and crazy beliefs.
This seems maybe much worse for people whose starting priors are quite good. If your life is a wreck and you’re terrible at figuring out what’s true, then yeah, shaking things up might be great. But if rationalists are selected for having unusually *good* priors, then shaking things up will cause regression to the mean.
Cf. Jim Babcock’s argument that you shouldn’t be experimenting with new diets if you’re already an unusually awesome, productive, etc. person, since then you risk breaking a complex system that’s working well. It’s the people whose status quo sucks who should be experimenting.
(+1 from Jim B, Eliezer Y, Anonymous, Marie L)
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Jim Babcock: My own impression is that the effect of LSD is not primarily a regression to the mean thing, but rather, that it temporarily enables some self-modification capabilities, which can be powerfully positive but which require a high degree of sanity and care to operate safely. When I see other people using psychedelics, very often I see them acting like Harry Potter experimenting with transfiguration, or worse, treating it as *entertainment*. And I want to yell at them, and point them at the scene in Dumbledore’s laboratory where Dumbledore and Minerva go through a checklist and have a levels-of-precaution framework and have a step where they actually stop and think before they begin.
(+1 from Rob B, Marie L)
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Eliezer Yudkowsky: I worry that we’re shooting ourselves in the foot by telling ourselves that psychedelics “temporarily enable some self-modification capabilities” rather than doing shit to the brain that we don’t understand, and we know a bunch of people who seemed a lot more promising and sane before they did some psychedelics, and now they’re not the people they were anymore and not in a good way, and there is not in fact any good way to be sure of who that happens to because it did not seem very predictable in advance at the time, and maybe you can roll the dice on that if you’re tired of being yourself and want to take a bet with high variance and negative expected value, but you sure don’t do it in little subgroups that put an arm around somebody’s shoulder and make helpful offers.
(+1 from Rob B, Marie L, Jim B)
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Jim Babcock: I suspect you may be underestimating the base rate of people using psychedelics discretely and having a neutral or mild-positive effect that they don’t talk about, and also underestimating the degree of stupidity that people bring to bear in their drug use.
At Burning Man, I saw a lot of stuff like: making dosing and mixing decisions while not sober; taking doses without a scale, not beig justifiably confident that the dose is the right order of magnitude; taking their epistemically-untrustworthy friend’s word that a substance they’ve never heard of before is safe for them. That sort of thing. And that’s before even getting into the social stuff, where eg people really shouldn’t be having conversations about crazymaking topics while high. And the legitimately hard stuff, like it’s important to have a tripsitter who will break thought loops if you step on a trauma trigger, but also important that that tripsitter not be a significant other or cult leader and not be someone who will talk to you about crazymaking topics.
Meanwhile nearly everyone has been exposed to extremely unsubtle and substantially false anti-drug propaganda, which fails to survive contact with reality. So it’s unfortunate but also unsurprising that the how-much-caution pendulum in their heads winds up swinging too far to the other side. The ideal messaging imo would leave most people feeling like planning an acid trip is more work than they personally will get around to, plus mild disdain towards impulsive usage and corner-cutting.
(+1 from Rob B, Marie L)
Jim Babcock’s stance here is the most sensible one I’ve seen in this thread:
Somehow this reminds me of the time I did a Tarot reading for someone, whose only previous experience had been Brent Dill doing a Tarot reading, and they were… sort of shocked at the difference. (I prefer three card layouts with a simple context where both people think carefully about what each of the cards could mean; I’ve never seen his, but the impression I got was way more showmanship.)
If it works as a device to facilitate sub-conscious associations, then maybe an alternative should be designed that sheds the mystical baggage and comes with clear explanations of why and how it works.
I’m generally very anti-woo, but I expect presenting it clearly and without baggage would make it stop working because the participant would be in a different mental state.
Well, if that is true then that would be another avenue to research mental states. Something that is clearly needed.
But what I really wanted to say: You shouldn’t do it if you can’t formulate hypotheses and do experiments for it.
No greater sign that Eliezer isn’t leading a cult than that my first reaction to this was “pfft, good luck”, even when I misread it as “we should shame individuals for doing these things Elizabeth finds valuable” and not the more reasonable “leaders pushing this are suspect”
Big +1.
Really important to disambiguate the two:
”People shouldn’t do psychedelics” is highly debatable and has to argue against a lot of research demonstrating their efficacy for improving mental wellness and treating psychiatric disorders.
”Leaders & subgroups shouldn’t push psychedelics on their followers” seems straightforwardly correct.
I haven’t taken any psychedelics myself. I have the impression that best practice with LSD is not to take it alone but to have someone skillful as a trip sitter. I imagine having a fellow rationalist as a trip sitter is much better then having some one agey person with sketchy epistemics.
Thank you for saying this!
I wonder where the line will be drawn with regards to the { meditation, Buddhism, post-rationality, David Chapman, etc. } cluster. On one hand, meditation—when done without all the baggage, hypothetically—seems like a useful tool. On the other hand, it simply invites all that baggage, because that is in the books, in the practicing communities, etc. Also, Christianity is an outgroup, but Buddhism is a fargroup, so people seem less averse to religious connotations; in my opinion, it’s just the different flavor of the same poison. Buddhism is sometimes advertized as a kind of evidence-based philosophy, but then you read the books and they discuss the supernatural and describe the miracles done by Buddha. Plus the insights into your previous lives, into the ultimate nature of reality (my 200 Hz brain sees the quantum physics, yeah), etc.
Also, somewhat ironically...
This made perfect sense in 2007, because whoever was reading these words, they knew you didn’t mean “magic” literally. But now I see Anna’s recent comment:
...and I am not sure what we can and what we can’t jokingly countersignal anymore, even within the supposed rationalist (-adjacent) community. Especially with people in the neighborhood exorcising demons and clearing bad energy using crystals. Like, what the fuck happened to the sanity waterline; this feels like walking across a desert.
Maybe the extraordinary times require extraordinary care at using metaphors, because someone (perhaps someone hanging out with rationalists, and then blogging about their experience) will take them literally.
Or maybe you should move out of the Bay Area, a.s.a.p. (Like, half seriously, I wonder how much of this epistemic swamp is geographically determined. Not having the everyday experience, I don’t know.)
Western Buddhism tends to be more of a bag of wellness tricks than a religion, but it’s worth sharing that Buddhism proper is anti-life. It came out of a Hindu obsession with ending the cycle of reincarnation. Nirvana means “cessation.” The whole idea of meditation is to become tolerant of signals to action so you can let them pass without doing the things that replicate them or, ultimately, propagate any life-like process. Karma is described as a giant wheel that powers reincarnation and gains momentum whenever you act unconsciously. The goal is for the wheel to stop moving and the way is to unlearn your habit of kicking it. When the Buddha became enlightened under the Bodhi tree, it wasn’t actually complete enlightenment. He was “enlightened with residues”— he stopped making new karma but he was still burning off old karma. He achieved actual cessation when he died. To be straight up enlightened, you stop living. The whole project of enlightenment is to end life.
It’s a sinister and empty philosophy, IMO. A lot of the insights and tools are great but the thrust of (at least Theravada) Buddhism is my enemy.
I agree this is pretty sinister and empty. Traditional samsara includes some pretty danged nice places (the heavens), not just things that have Earth-like quantities or qualities of flourishing; so rejecting all of that sounds very anti-life.
Some complicating factors:
It’s not clear (to put it lightly) what parinirvana (post-death nirvana / escape from samsara) entails. Some early Buddhists seem to have thought of it as more like oblivion/cessation; others seem to have thought of it as more like perfectly blissful experience.
(Obviously, this becomes more anti-life when you get rid of supernaturalism—then the only alternative to ‘samsara’ is oblivion. But the modern Buddhist can retreat to various mottes about what ‘nirvana’ is, such as embracing living nirvana (sopadhishesa-nirvana) while rejecting parinirvana.)
The Buddhists have a weird psychological theory according to which living in samsara inherently sucks. Liking or enjoying things is really just another species of bad.
The latter view is still pretty anti-life, but notably, it’s a psychological claim (‘this is what it’s really like to experience things’), not a normative claim that we should reject life a priori. If a Buddhist updates away from thinking everything is dukkha, they aren’t necessarily required to reject life anymore—the life-rejection
wasn’twas contingent on the psych theory.There are also versions of the psychological theory in which dukkha is not associated with all motivation, just the craving-based system, which is in a sense “extra”; it’s a layer on top of the primary motivation system, which would continue to operate even if all craving was eliminated. Under that model (which I think is the closest to being true), you could (in principle) just eliminate the unpleasant parts of human motivation, while keeping the ones that don’t create suffering—and probably get humans who were far more alive as a result, since they would be far more willing to do even painful things if pain no longer caused them suffering.
Pain would still be a disincentive in the same way that a reinforcement learner would generally choose to take actions that brought about positive rather than negative reward, but it would make it easier for people to voluntarily choose to experience a certain amount of pain in exchange for better achieving their values afterwards, for instance.
Related to this (?) is the notion that ‘wanting’ and ‘liking’ are separate systems. For instance, from a random paper:
In this perspective, a philosophy can say that ‘wanting’ is psychologically unhealthy while ‘liking’ is fine. I’m not sure if this is what Buddhists actually believe, but it is how I’ve interpreted notions like “desire leads to suffering”, “letting go”, “ego death”, etc.
There’s that, but I think it would also be misleading to say that (all) Buddhists consider desire/wanting to be bad! (Though to be clear, it does seem like some of them do.)
I liked this article’s take on the issue.
I don’t think this is true, at leas not insofar as it describes the original philosophy. You may be thinking about the first noble truth “The truth of Dukkha”, but Dukkha is not correctly translated as suffering. A better translation is “unsatisfactoriness”. For example, even positive sensations are Dukkha, according to the Buddha. I think the intention of the first noble truth is to say that worldly sensations, positive and negative, are inherently unsatisfactory.
The Buddha has also said pretty explicitly that a great happiness can be achieved through the noble path, which seems to directly contradict the idea that life inherently sucks, and that suffering can be overcome.
(However, there may be things he’s said that support the quote; I’m definitely not claiming to have a full or even representative view.)
From https://www.lionsroar.com/forum-understanding-dukkha/:
Followed by:
I could buy that early Buddhists were using a word that basically meant ‘suffering’ or ‘pain’ metaphorically, but what’s the argument that this wasn’t the original word meaning at all? (I’m not a specialist on this topic, I’m just wary of ‘rationalizing’ tendencies for modern readers to try to retranslate concepts in ways that make them sound more obvious/intuitive/modern.)
If you think great happiness can be achieved through the Noble Path and you should leave samsara anyway, that’s an even more extreme anti-life position, because you’re rejecting the best life has to offer.
I do agree that Buddhism claims you can get tons of great conventional bliss-states on the road to nirvana (see also the potential to reincarnate in the various heavens); but then it rejects those too, modulo the complications I noted in my upthread comment.
I 100% grant that you can find people, including Buddhist scholars, who will translate dukkha that way. I would generally trust Wikipedia to get a reasonable consensus on this, but in this case, it is also inconsistent, e.g. this quote from the article about Buddhism
backs up what I just said, but from the article about dukkha:
I guess I have a strong opinion on this much like someone could have a strong opinion on what the bible says about abortion even if there are scholars on both sides. My main point is that [the idea that there is a path to overcome suffering in this life] is * not * a western invention. The Buddha may have also talked about rebirth and karma and stuff, but he has made this much clear at several points in pretty direct language, and he even talked about lasting happiness that can be achieved through the noble path. (I know he e.g. endorsed the claim that this kind of happiness has “no drawbacks”). Bottom line, I think it requires a very tortured reading of his statements to reconcile this with the idea that life on earth is necessarily negative well-being.
There’s also the apparent contradiction in just the noble truths (“the truth of dukkha”, “the origin of dukkha”, “the end of dukkha”, “the path to the end of dukkha”) because (1) is usually phrased as “dukkha is an inherent part of the world”, which would then contradict (3), unless you read (3) as only referring to the end via escaping the cycle of rebirth (which again I don’t think can be reconciled with what the Buddha actually said). It’s annoying, but you have to read dukkha as referring to different things if you want to make sense of this.
Agreed. (And I would agree that this is more than enough reason not to defend original Buddhism as a philosophy without picking and choosing.)
It makes sense to me to use dukkha as “unsatisfactoriness” because it emphasizes that the issue is resisting the way things are or needing things to be different.
I think it makes Buddhism higher-probability to translate dukkha that way. This on its own doesn’t immediately make me confident that the original doctrines had that in mind.
For that, I’d want to hear more from Pāli experts writing articles that discuss standard meanings for dukkha at the time, and asks questions like “If by ‘dukkha’ early Buddhists just meant ‘not totally satisfactory’, then why did they choose that word (apparently mainly used for physical pain...?) rather than some clearer term? Were there no clearer options available?”
Note that Wikipedia gives the word’s etymology as being something that actually does seem pretty analogous to ‘not totally satisfactory’;
As I heard one meditation teacher put it, the modern analogy to this would be if you had one of those shopping carts where one of the wheels is stuck and doesn’t quite go the way you’d like it—doesn’t exactly kill you or cause you enormous suffering, but it’s not a totally satisfactory shopping cart experience, either.
(Leigh Brasington also has a fun take.)
I find arguments by
analogyetymology almost maximally unconvincing here, unless dukkha was a neologism? Like, those arguments make me update away from your conclusion, because they seem so not-of-the-correct-type. Normally, word etymologies are a very poor guide to meaning compared to looking at usage—what do other sources actually mean when they say “dukkha” in totally ordinary contexts?There’s a massive tradition across many cultures of making sophistical arguments about words’ ‘true’ or ‘real’ meaning based on (real or imagined) etymologies. This is even dicier when the etymology is as vague/uninformative as this one—there are many different ways you can spin ‘bad axle hole’ to give exactly opposite glosses of dukkha.
I still don’t find this 100% convincing/exacting, but the following account at least doesn’t raise immediate alarm bells for me:
The bailey of dukkha is that it’s really bad—like physical pain. And the older texts seem to generally embrace, indeed presuppose, this bailey—the whole reason these sentences sound radical, revolutionary, concerning, is that they’re saying something not-obvious and seemingly extreme about all ordinary experience. Not that it’s literally physical pain, sure; but there’s a deliberate line being drawn between physical pain, illness, dysfunction, suffering, badness, etc. and many other things.
My intuition is that these lines would have hit very differently if their first-pass meaning in the eyes of Sanskrit- or Pali-speakers had been “Birth isn’t totally satisfying, aging isn’t totally satisfying, death isn’t totally satisfying...”
(I can much more easily buy that ‘physical pain’ is the obvious surface meaning for initiates, the attention-grabbing Buzzfeed headline; and something like ‘not perfectly satisfying’ is the truly-intended motte, meant for people to come to understand later. But in that case the etymology arguments are totally backwards, since etymology relates to common usage and not ‘weird new esoteric meaning our religion is inventing here’.)
I’m willing to believe, based on the totality of the Buddha’s message, that he meant dukkha as “resisting how things are/wanting them to be different,” i.e. being unsatisfied with reality. Look at our own word “suffering” in English. Today it connotes anguish, but it also means “enduring” or “putting up with.” A word like “unsatisfied” in English has a mild connotation, but we could also say something like “tormented by desire” to ramp up the intensity without fundamentally changing the meaning.
I think even in current english there is an idiom for pain. Ie “”It pains me that I don’t have food” vs “I am hungry”. One variant of the claims is that there is way to be food-poor that is positive “It delights me that I don’t have food” or just “I don’t have food”.
I think it would pretty hard to translate words like “annoying,” “irritating,” etc to a very foreign audience without making reference to physical pain. It’s hard to infer connotations or intensity when looking at those older writings.
The set of metaphors that have come to the west are dominated by the early transmission of Buddhism which occurred in the late 1800′s, and was carried out by Sanskrit scholars translating from Sanskrit sources. The Buddha specifically warned people against translating his teachings into Sanskrit for pretty much the sorts of reasons being passed off as genuine Buddhism here.
Quora for the curious: Did the Buddha forbid the translation of his teachings into Sanskrit? If so, did he mention why?
From my quick skim of those answers, it looks like he was more concerned about accessibility of the teachings rather than issues of interpretation.
I’m willing to grant that there are certain interpretations of Buddhism that take this view, but object pretty strongly to depicting it as the idea of meditation. Especially since there are many different varieties of meditation, with varying degrees of (in)compatibility with this goal; something like loving-kindness or shi-ne meditation seem both more appropriate for creating activity, for instance.
In my view, there are so many varieties and interpretations of Buddhism that pointing to some of them having an anti-life view always seems like a weird sleight of hand to me. By saying that Buddhism originates as an anti-life practice, one can then imply that all of its practices also tend to lead towards that goal, without needing to establish that that’s actually the case.
After all, just because some of the people who developed such techniques wanted to create an anti-life practice doesn’t mean that they actually succeeded in developing techniques that would be particularly well-suited for this goal. I agree that it’s possible to use them for such a goal, especially if they’re taught in the context of an ideology that frames the practice that way, but I don’t think them to be very effective for that goal even then.
I think if rationalists are interested in Buddhism as part of their quest to find truth, they should know that it has, at the very least, deathist origins.
I agree that it’s valuable to be aware of the life-denying aspects of the tradition, since those mindsets do affect some teachings of it and it’s good to be able to notice them and filter them out rather than accidentally absorbing them.
I do however object to characterizing “Buddhism proper” anti-life, as it implies that any proper attempt to delve into or practice Buddhism will eventually just lead you into deathism.
This view is disputed and countered in the original texts. It is worth it to me to mention this, but I am not the right one to go into details.
Some good (mainstream, scholarly) books on nirvana and historical Buddhism:
Steven Collins, Nirvana: Concept, Imagery, Narrative
Excerpt (starting p. 69):
This section seems to say it well, highlighted bits in bold for easier reading.
There is nothing pro-”nonexistence” in Buddhism. There is nothing pro-”ending or annihilating life.” These takes are explicitly rejected in the Pali canon.
It is very easy to misunderstand what Buddhism is saying, and the inferential gap is larger than I think most people imagine. The words / phrases do not have direct translations into common English.
When someone claims something to be “beyond designation” or “beyond categorization” or any such thing, it’s a sure bet that they’re trying to slip one by you; in fact, the given thing belongs to a category which, if you recognized that membership, would lead you to reject it—and rightly.
I think this is not true in full generality—I think meditation does give people insights that are hard to verbalize, and does make some common verbal distinctions feel less joint-carving, so it makes sense for a tradition of meditators to say a lot in favor of ‘things that are hard to verbalize’ and ‘things that can’t be neatly carved up in the normal intuitive ways’.
I do think that once you have those insights, there’s a strong temptation to lapse into sophistry or doublethink to defend whatever silly thing you feel like defending that day—if someone doubts your claim that the Buddha lives on like a god or ghost after death, you can say that the Buddha’s existence-status after death transcends concepts and verbalization.
When in fact the honest thing to say if you believed in immaterial souls would be ‘I don’t know what happened to the Buddha when he died’, and the honest thing to say if you’re an educated modern person is ‘the Buddha was totally annihilated when he died, the exact same as anyone else who dies.’
What would the world look like if meditation only made people feel like they had insights that were hard to verbalize, without actually giving them any new insights?
(But also, “thing X is beyond designation” and “some fact(s) about thing X are hard to verbalize” are not the same thing.)
If the world was one where meditation only made people feel like they had insights that were hard to verbalize, then I probably wouldn’t have figured out ways to verbalize some of them (mostly due to having knowledge of neuroscience etc. stuff that most historical Buddhists haven’t had).
I admire koan practice in Zen as an attempt to make sure people are reaching genuine insights without being able to fully capture them in explicit words.
Can you say more about this? I don’t think I quite follow.
Koans are “riddles” that are supposed to only be understandable by “insight,” a non-cognitive form of knowledge attained by entering “don’t know mind.” Meditating on koans “confuses the rational mind” so that it is easier to enter “don’t know mind.” Koan training consists of being given a koan by a master (the first one I ever received was “what is the meaning of [smacks hand into ground]?”), letting the koan confuse you and relaxing into that feeling, letting go of all the thoughts that try to explain, and then one day having the answer pop into your awareness (some schools have people concentrate on the koan, others say to just create the conditions for insight and it will come). If you explain your insight to a master and they think you’ve figured it out (they often say “used up”) that koan, they give you a new one that’s even further from everyday thinking. And so it continues until you’ve gone through enough of the hundreds of koans in that lineage.
It’s a cool system because “getting” your koan is an objectively observable indicator of progress at meditation, which is otherwise quite difficult to assess.
Ok, but how exactly does “make sure people are reaching genuine insights”? Are there canonical correct answers to koans? (But that would seem to violate the “without being able to fully capture them in explicit words” clause…)
In other words, how do you know when you’ve correctly understood a koan? (When an answer pops into your awareness, how do you know it’s the right one?) And, what does it mean to correctly understand a koan? (What’s the difference between correctly understanding a koan and incorrectly understanding it?)
Could you elaborate on this? I am confused by this point.
“The Sound of One Hand: 281 Zen Koans with Answers”
Masters have an oral tradition of assessing the answers to koans and whether they reflect genuine insight. They use the answers people give to guide their future training.
Having used up a few koans, I’d say the answers come to you pretty clearly. You get to a certain point in meditation and the koan suddenly makes sense in light of that.
By what means do the masters assess whether the answers reflect “genuine insight”?
Is there a way for a non-master to evaluate whether a given answer to a koan is correct, or to show that the ostensibly-correct answer is correct? (Analogously to P vs. NP—if the correct answer is difficult to determine, is it nonetheless straightforward to verify?)
If the answer to the previous question is “no”, then how is one to know whether the ostensibly-correct answer is, in fact, actually correct?
It’s not really a question of factually correct. The koan is designed to make sense on a non-cognitive, non-rational level. My experience was that I would have a certain insight on my own when I was meditating and then I would realize that that’s what the koan was talking about. What makes a good koan is that you’re totally stumped when you first hear it, but when it clicks you know that’s the right answer. That’s why one English translation is “riddle.” Some riddles have correct answers according to the terms they lay out, but really what makes a riddle is the recognition of a lateral thinking move, even if it’s as simple as a pun. Koans are “riddles” that require don’t-know mind.
What is the content of whatever “insight” or “sense” it is that’s gained when you “get the right answer” to a koan? I do not see what it could mean to say that one has gained such an insight…
Some questions:
Does it ever happen that someone “gets” a koan—it “clicks” for them, and they “know” that the answer they’ve got is “the right answer”—but actually, their differs from the canonically “correct” answer?
Alternatively: does it ever happen that two different people both “get” a koan—it “clicks” for them both—but their answers differ?
Do Zen teachers/masters ever disagree on what the “right” answer to a koan is? If so—how do they resolve this disagreement?
Suppose I were to say to a Zen teacher: you say the answer to this koan is X, but I think it is actually Y. Please demonstrate to me that it is as you say, and not as I say. How might they do this?
Paul J. Griffiths, On Being Buddha: The Classical Doctrine of Buddhahood
Excerpt (starting p. 155):
Regarding meditation, Kevin Fischer reported a surprising-to-me anecdote on FB yesterday:
FWIW as a resident of MAPLE, my sense is Soryu believes something like:
“Smaller periods of meditation will help you relax/focus and probably have only a very small risk of harm. Larger/longer periods of meditation come with deeper risks of harm, but are also probably necessary to achieve awakening, which is important for the good of the world.”
But I am a newer resident and could easily misunderstanding here.
The correspondent’s reply here is helpful color on how things can get more complicated (e.g. shifts in how you perceive the actions/intentions of yourself & others) and sometimes harmful (e.g. extended stays in Dark Night).
I think meditation should be treated similarly to psychedelics—even for meditators who don’t think of it in terms of anything supernatural, it can still have very large and unpredictable effects on the mind. The more extreme the style of meditation (e.g. silent retreats), the more likely this sort of thing is.
Any subgroups heavily using meditation seem likely to have the same problems as the ones Eliezer identified for psychedelics/woo/supernaturalism.
I have pointed out the risks of meditation and meditation-like practices before. The last time was on the Shoulder Advisors which does seem to fall on the boundary. I have experience with meditation and have been to extended silent meditation retreats with only positive results. Nonetheless, bad trips are possible—esp. without a supportive teacher and/or community.
But I wouldn’t make a norm against groups fostering meditation. Meditation depends on groups for support (though the same might be said about psychedelics). Meditation is also a known way to gain high levels of introspective awareness and to have many mental health benefits (many posts about that on LW I’m too lazy to find). The group norm about these things should be to require oversight by a Living Tradition of Knowledge in the relevant area (for meditation e.g. an established—maybe even Buddhist—meditation school).
Psychedelics, woo, and meditation are very separate stuff. They are often used in conjunction with each other due to popularity and the context some of these things are discussed along with each other. Buddhism has incorporated meditation into its woo while other religions have mostly focused on group based services in terms of talking about their woos.
I like how some commenters have grouped psychedelics and meditation separate of the woo stuff, but it was a bit surprising to me to see Eliezer dismissing psychedelics along with woo in the same statements. He probably hasn’t taken psychedelics before. Meditation is quite different as in it’s more of a state of mind as opposed to an altered mentality. With psychedelics there is a clear distinction between when you are tripping and when you aren’t tripping. With meditation, it’s not so clear when you are meditating and when you aren’t. Woo is just putting certain ideas into words, which has nothing to do with different mindset/mentalities.
However, according to some, even meditation done properly can have negative effects, which would be similar to psychedelics but manifesting slower and through your own effort. Quoted from the book review:
I don’t think I was advocating for either. I apologize if I came off as saying people should try psychedelics and meditation.
Even in the case of Sam Harris, who seems relatively normal, he lost a decade of his life pursuing “enlightenment” though meditation—also notable is this was spurred on by psychedelic use. Though I am sure he would not agree with the frame that it was a waste, I read his *Waking Up* as a bit of a horror story. For someone without his high IQ and indulgent parents, you could imagine more horrible ends.
I know of at least one person who was bright, had wild ambitious ideas, and now spends his time isolated from his family inwardly pursuing “enlightenment.” And this through the standard meditation + psychedelics combination. I find it hard to read this as anything other than wire-heading, and I think a good social norm would be one where we consider such behavior as about as virtuous as obsessive masturbation.
In general, for any drug that produces euphoria, especially spiritual euphoria, the user develops an almost romantic relationship with their drug, as the feelings they inspire are just as intense (and sometimes more so) as familial love. One should at least be slightly suspicious of the benefits propounded by their users, who in many cases literally worship their drugs of choice.
fwiw as a data point here, I spent some time inwardly pursuing “enlightenment” with heavy and frequent doses of psychedelics for a period of 10 months and consider this to be one of the best things I’ve ever done. I believe it raised my resting set point happiness, among other good things, and I am still deeply altered (7 years later).
I do not think this is a good idea for everyone and lots of people who try would end up worse off. But I strongly object to this being seen as virtuous as obsessive masturbation. Sure, it might not be your thing, but this frame seriously misses a huge amount of really important changes in my experience. And I get you might think I’m… brainwashed or something? by drugs? So I don’t know what I could say that would convince you otherwise.
But I did have concrete things, like solving a pretty big section of childhood trauma (like; I had a burning feeling of rage in my chest before, and the burning feeling was gone afterwards), I had multiple other people comment on how different I was now (usually in regards to laughing easier and seeming more relaxed), I lost my anxiety around dying, my relationship to pain altered in such a way that I am significantly more mentally able to endure it than I was before, I also had a radically altered relationship to the physical environment (my living space looked very different before and after), and I produced a lot of art that I hadn’t been producing before. Maybe this one is less concrete, but some part of me feels really deeply at peace, always, like it knows everything is going to be ok and I didn’t have that before.
There’s a way in which I consider what I did wireheading, like really successful wireheading, but I think people often… fail to imagine wireheading properly? And the husk of wireheading, where you’re sort of less of a person, is really terrifying. I agree that the husk-of-wireheading view makes psychedelics seem more sinister.
In my culture, it’s easy to look at “what happens at the ends of the bell curves” and “where’s the middle of the bell curve” and “how tight vs. spread out is the bell curve (i.e. how different are the ends from the middle)” and “are there multiple peaks in the bell curves” and all of that, separately.
Like, +1 for the above, and I join the above in giving a reminder that rounding things off to “thing bad” or “thing good” is not just not required, it’s actively unhelpful.
Policies often have to have a clear answer, such as the “blanket ban” policy that Eliezer is considering proposing. But the black-or-white threshold of a policy should not be confused with the complicated thing underneath being evaluated.
I’m not sure what you find implausible about that. Drugs do not literally propagandize the user, but they can hijack the reward system, in the case of many drugs, and in the case of psychedelics they seem to alter beliefs in reliable ways. Psychedelics are also taken in a memetic context with many crystalized notions about what the psychedelic experience is, what enlightenment is, that enlightenment itself is a mysterious but worthy pursuit.
The classic joke about psychedelics is they provide the feelings associated with profound insights without the actual profound insights. To the extent this is true, I feel this is pretty dangerous territory for a rationalist to tread.
In your own case unless I am misremembering, I believe on your blog you discuss LSD permanently
lowering yourmathematical abilitiesdegrading your memory. This seems really, really bad to me…I’m glad your anxiety is gone, but I don’t think everything is going to be alright by default. I would not like to modify myself to think that. It seems clearly untrue.
Perhaps the masturbation line was going too far. But the gloss of virtue that “seeking enlightenment” has strikes me as undeserved.
Also fwiw, I took psychedelics in a relatively memetic-free environment. I’d been homeschooled and not exposed to hippie/drug culture, and especially not significant discussion around enlightenment. I consider this to be one of the reasons my experience was so successful; I didn’t have it in relationship to those memes, and did not view myself as pursuing enlightenment (I know I said I was inwardly pursuing enlightenment in my above comment, but I was mostly riffing off your phrasing; in some sense I think it was true but it wasn’t a conscious thing.)
LSD did not permanently lower my mathematical abilities, and if I suggested that I probably misspoke? I suspect it damaged my memory, though; my memory is worse now than before I took LSD.
And sorry; by ‘everything being ok’ I didn’t mean that I literally think that situation will end up being the ones I want; I mean that I know I will be okay with whatever happens. Very related to my endurance of pain going up by quite a lot, and my anxiety of death disappearing.
Separately, I do think that a lot of the memes around psychedelics are… incomplete? It’s hard to find a good word. Naive? Something around the difference between the aesthetic of a thing and the thing itself? And in that I might agree with you somewhere that “seeking enlightenment” isn’t… virtuous or whatever.
7 years seem to be a long time and most people get worse memory as they age. Was it also significantly worse directly aften the 10 months of you being on that quest then before those 10 months.?
Thanks. Corrected; I probably conflated the two. But my feeling towards that change are the same so the line otherwise remains unchanged. I should probably organize my opinons/feelings on this topic and write an effortpost or something rather than hash it out in the comments.
This is an interesting class of opinions; I wonder if believing the following:
is at all correlated with also having this belief:
“Everything is not going to be alright by default” is sort of a vague belief to have, so is it worth having? I don’t think this is necessarily either an anomalous belief nor a common-place belief. Admittedly, I have a hard time figuring out how I would modify myself to have this belief. I guess I am not that way by nature, but others can be. It would be interesting to find out what accounts for that difference. Ultimately, if it’s more of an axiomatic belief, it would require a lot of argument about what kinds of other beliefs it leads to that are more beneficial for one to use over their lifetimes.
About the profound insights, the way to check to see if they are actually profound is:
Can it be articulated?
Can you explain it in further detail from subsequent experiences?
Does it remain with you even once the psychedelics or the “elevated” experience has worn off?
From personal experience, there are insights you can have which satisfy all three. I think lessened anxiety (which will be accompanied with reasons, though too long for this comment) is one of them.
What kind of a cost-benefit analysis is this?
if you start from the assumption that something isn’t useful, of course spending time on that thing is a waste. As far as I can see, this is the totality of your argument. You can do this for just about anyone, e.g.:
I happen to think that Scott did amazing work at Miri, but objectively speaking, it is significantly harder to justify his time spent doing research at Miri than that of Sam Harris pursuing englightenment in India. Sam has released the Waking Up app, which is effectively a small company making a ton of money, donating 10% of its income to the most effective charities (arguably that alone is more than enough to pay for one decade of Sam’s time) and has thousands of people reporting enormous psychological benefits. I’m one of them; in terms of productivity alone, I’d say my time working as increased by at least 20% and has gotten at least 10% more effective at a fairly low cost of time, negligible cost of money, and no discernible downside or risk. (I’ve never taken psychedelics.)
I get that you think Enlightenment is bullshit. (Or at least I assume that’s what you think, correct me if this is wrong.) I strongly sympathize with this position because I think it’s the logical conclusion if you evaluate the question via pattern matching. But the person you just cited is enormously successful & personally credits his decade in meditation for that, and he created a product directly causally upstream of that decade which has thousands of more people reporting similar things. (And makes a ton of money.) I don’t fault you for still thinking that the entire project is bullshit, but obviously his case is Bayesian evidence against your position.
I wonder what the rationalist community would be like if, instead of having been forced to shape itself around risks of future superintelligent AI in the Bay Area, it had been artificial computing superhardware in Taiwan, or artificial superfracking in North Dakota, or artificial shipping supercontainers in Singapore, or something. (Hypothetically, let’s say the risks and opportunities of these technologies were equally great and equally technically and philosophically complex as those of AI in our universe.)
Hmm. I can’t tell if the second half is supposed to be pointing at my position on Tarot, or the thing that’s pretending to be my position but is actually confused?
Like, I think the hitrate for ‘woo’ is pretty low, and so I spend less time dredging there than I do other places which are more promising, but also I am not ashamed of the things that I’ve noticed that do seem like hits there. Like, I haven’t delivered on my IOU to explain ‘authenticity’ yet, but I think Circling is actually a step above practices that look superficially similar in a way we could understand rigorously, even if Circling is in a reference class that is quite high in woo, and many Circlers like the flavor of woo.
That said, I could also see an argument that’s like “look, we really have to implement rules like this at a very simple level or they will get bent to hell, and it’s higher EV to not let in woo.”
Would it be acceptable to regard practices like self-reflective tarot and circling and other woo-adjacent stuff as art rather than an attempt at rationality? I think it is a danger sign when people are claiming those highly introspective and personal activities as part of their aspiring to rationality. Can we just do art and personal emotional and creative discovery and not claim that it’s directly part of the rationalist project?
I mean, I also do things that I would consider ‘art’ that I think are distinct from rationality. But, like, just like I wouldn’t really consider ‘meditation’ an art project instead of ‘inner work’ or ‘learning how to think’ or w/e, I wouldn’t really consider Circling an art project instead of those things.
I would consider meditation and circling to have the same relationship to “discovering the truth” as art. The insights can be real and profound but are less rigorous and much more personal.
I think we need more than two categories here. We can’t allocate credit for input, only output. People can learn things by carefully observing stuff, but we shouldn’t get to mint social capital as rationalists for hours meditating any more than Darwin’s reputation should depend directly on time spent thinking about tortoises.
Discerning investors might profit by recognizing leading indicators of high productivity, but that only works if incentives are aligned, which means, eventually, objective tests. In hindsight it seems very unfortunate that MIRI was not mostly funded by relevant-to-its-expertise prediction markets.
Good art seems like it should make people sexy, not credible.
Instead of declaring group norms I think it would be worth it to have posts that actually lay out the case in a convincing manner. In general there are plenty of contrarian rationalists for whom “it’s a group norm” is not enough to not do something. Declaring it as a drug norm might get them to be more secretive about it which is bad.
Trying to solve issues about people doing the wrong things with group norms instead of with deep arguments doesn’t seem to be the rationalist way.
Can you propose a norm that avoids the pitfalls?
Have the important conversations about why you shouldn’t take drugs / engage in woo openly on LessWrong instead only having them only privately where it doesn’t reach many people. Then confront people who suggest something in that direction with those posts.
+1
There are some potential details that might swing one way or the other (Vaniver’s comment points at some), but as-written above, and to the best of my ability to predict what such a proposal would actually look like once Eliezer had put effort into it:
I expect I would wholeheartedly and publicly endorse it, and be a signatory/adopter.
I feel tempted to mostly agree with Eliezer here…
Umm To relay a trad Buddhist perspective, you’re not (traditionally) supposed to make a full-blown attempt for ‘enlightenment’ or ‘insight’ until you’ve spent a fairly extensive time working on personal ethics & discipline. I think an unnamed additional step is to establish your basic needs, like good community, health, food, shelter, etc. It’s also recommended that you avoid drugs, alcohol, and even sex.
There’s also an important sense I get from trad Buddhism, which is: If you hold a nihilistic view, things will go sideways. A subtle example of nihilism is the sense that “It doesn’t matter what I do or think because it’s relatively inconsequential in the scheme of things, so whatever.” or a deeper hidden sense of “It doesn’t really matter if everyone dies.” or “I feel it might be better if I just stopped existing?” or “I can think whatever I want inside my own head, including extensive montages of murder and rape, because it doesn’t really affect anything.”
These views seem not uncommon among modern people, and subtler forms seem very common. Afaict from reading biographies, modern people have more trouble with nihilistic or self-hating views like these than people who grew up in e.g. Thai forest villages 100+ years ago. Because of this, I recommend a lot more caution with meditation and similar things.
Modern westerners and their flavors of non-trad Buddhism is more Wild West. Maybe not surprising. They don’t really like the traditional, renunciate, careful, slow aspects. They add in the drugs and the spirit of ‘move fast, break things’. They get addicted to the sense of progress and acceleration.
I would… personally… warn against that. Although… it’s complicated, since it does seem helpful to various people. People also seem really into their drugs, sex, and alcohol. ^_^;
I get … mildly squicked out by people trying to get enlightened using lots of drugs. I get squicked out if people seem pressured or anxious about trying to get enlightened asap. I have good friends who are in these categories. I am not qualified to know what’s truly good for them. But I’d personally feel a bit more comfortable if they eventually moved off of drug use.
While I personally strive for enlightenment in my own meditation practice at MAPLE, I am coming to realize the folly of “trying to make it happen as quickly as possible.” I am very wary of using drugs as a way to try to speed up “the process”. I am also wary of using pressure or brute force as a way to speed up “the process”. Seems like a form of hubris.
Rationalists seem… susceptible?… to hubris. :/ and… nihilism :\ :/ :\
I consider myself an example. !
I guess I’d suggest thinking about targets carefully. A lot of people are going to experiment with psychedelics anyway and it’s safer for people to do so within a group, assuming the group is actually trustworthy and not attempting to brainwash people.
OTOH a significant amount of (seemingly sane) people credit psychedelics for important personal insights and mental health/trauma healing. Psychedelics seem to be showing enough promise for that for the psychiatric establishment to be getting interested in them again [1, 2] despite them having been stigmatized for decades, and AFAIK the existing medical literature generally finds them to be low-risk [3, 4].
It’s interesting that a lot of the discussion about psychedelics here is arguing from intuitions and personal experience, rather than from the trial results that have been coming out.
I do think that psychedelic experiences vary a lot from person-to-person and trip-to-trip, and that psychedelics aren’t for everyone. (This variability probably isn’t fully captured by the trial results because study participants are carefully screened for lots of factors that may be contraindicated.)
Psilocybin-based psychedelics are indeed considered low-risk both in terms of addiction and overdose. This chart sums things up nicely, and is a good thing to ‘pin on your mental fridge’:
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/a/a5/Drug_danger_and_dependence.svg/1920px-Drug_danger_and_dependence.svg.png
You want to stay as close as possible to the bottom left corner of that graph!
This graph shows death and addiction potential but it doesn’t say anything about sanity
Correct—but they are low-risk for those factors (addiction and/or overdose).
EDIT: while I still think this is true for most people, I want to contextualize this by saying that people should always practice harm-reduction when taking psychedelics, do their own research, consider their own history and risk profile, start with a low dose. I don’t mean to make anyone feel threatened by arguing in favor of psychedelic use. Your boundaries are sacred and my opinion is just an opinion.
Psychedelics don’t have any inherent positive or negative effect, they just make you more open to suggestion. They increase your learning rate. New evidence (i.e. your current lifestyle) will start weighing more on you than your prior (i.e. everything you’ve learned since you were a child).
If you are in a context that promotes healthy ideas, then psychedelics will help you absorb them faster. If you are in a cult, they’ll make you go off the rails faster.
I take them all the time and I’m better for it, but I would never take them in Berkeley.
This is not true. Some people are significantly less robust to the effects of psychedelics. Even a meditation retreat was enough to make me go off the rails— I would never take psychedelics. But some people can’t feel anything at those retreats and seem like psychedelics just open them up a bit. The same predispositions that lead people to develop schizophrenia and bipolar make them vulnerable to destabilization from psychedelics.
I wanted to dig up some numbers that put your claim in context. I have also seen a small minority of people that respond badly to psychedelics and even to meditation retreats (especially vipassana). But the first few studies did not find a connection between psychedelic use and mental health issues. I still feel this needs to be investigated.
However, I insist that my claim is true for a large majority, and an overcorrection of universally recommending against psychedelics would be net-negative (yes really). Instead we should be investigating how to ensure that these negative responses don’t happen.
I’ll make my model more precise: besides increasing your learning rate, psychedelics open you up to negative emotional stimuli that are being habitually suppressed because they would otherwise destabilize you. Naturally this opening up brings some destabilization along with it, which requires some skill to navigate. A good shaman or teacher will be able to teach you those skills, but a bunch of videos (like in vipassana) or just drinking the kool-aid with a bunch of friends won’t do.
If I may ask (you don’t have to answer): what retreat did you go to and how did you go off the rails?
This may be slightly overconfident. My guess is that the effects can vary wildly depending on the individual.
It’s definitely overconfident. Source: twenty years of listening to a wide range of stories from my mother’s experiences as a mental health nurse in a psychiatric emergency room. Some of those psychedelic-related cases involved all sorts of confounding factors, and some of them just didn’t.
I want to second this. I worked for an organization where one of key support people took psychedelics and just...broke from reality. This was both a personal crisis for him and an organizational crisis for the company to deal with the sudden departure of a bus factor 1 employee.
I suspect that psychedelic damage happens more often than we think because there’s a whole lobby which buys the expand-your-mind narrative.
I don’t regret having used psychedelics, though I understand why people might take what I’ve written as a reason not to try psychedelics.
The most horrific case I know of LSD being involved in a group’s downward spiral from weird and kinda messed up to completely disconnected from reality and really fucking scary is the Manson family, but that’s far from a typical example. But if you do want to be a cult leader, LSD does seem to do something that makes the job a lot easier.