I would not call telling people they should meditate (e.g. by teaching it in health class in schools) spreading rationality. Spreading rationality to me is more like giving people the general tools to find out what object-level habits, such as meditating, are worth adopting.
I think it’s an (unanswered) empirical question whether meta-level (or general) or object-level (or specific) instruction is the best way to make people rational. Meditation might be an indispensable part of making people more rational, and it might be more efficient (both for epistemic and instrumental rationality) than teaching people more intellectualized skills or explicit doctrines. Rationality needn’t involve reasoning, unless reasoning happens to be the best way to acquire truth or victory.
On the other hand, if meditation isn’t very beneficial, or if the benefits it confers can be better acquired by other means, or if it’s more efficient to get people to meditate by teaching them metarationality (i.e., teaching them how to accurately assess and usefully enhance their belief-forming and decision-making practices) and letting them figure out meditation’s a good idea on their own, then I wouldn’t include meditation practice in my canonical Rationality Lesson Plan.
But if that’s so it’s just because teaching meditation is (relatively) inefficient for making people better map-drawers and agents. It’s not because meditation is intrinsically unlike the Core Rationality Skills by virtue of being too specific, too non-intellectualized, or too non-discursive.
ETA: Meditation might even be an important metarational skill. For instance, meditation might make us better at accurately assessing our own rationality, or at selecting good rationality habits. Being metarational is just about being good at improving your general truth-finding and goal-attaining practices; it needn’t be purely intellectual either. (Though I expect much more of metarationality than object-level rationality to be intellectualized.)
I think it’s an (unanswered) empirical question whether meta-level (or general) or object-level (or specific) instruction is the best way to make people rational. Meditation might be an indispensable part of making people more rational, and it might be more efficient (both for epistemic and instrumental rationality) than teaching people more intellectualized skills or explicit doctrines. Rationality needn’t involve reasoning, unless reasoning happens to be the best way to acquire truth or victory.
On the other hand, if meditation isn’t very beneficial, or if the benefits it confers can be better acquired by other means, or if it’s more efficient to get people to meditate by teaching them metarationality (i.e., teaching them how to accurately assess and usefully enhance their belief-forming and decision-making practices) and letting them figure out meditation’s a good idea on their own, then I wouldn’t include meditation practice in my canonical Rationality Lesson Plan.
But if that’s so it’s just because teaching meditation is (relatively) inefficient for making people better map-drawers and agents. It’s not because meditation is intrinsically unlike the Core Rationality Skills by virtue of being too specific, too non-intellectualized, or too non-discursive.
ETA: Meditation might even be an important metarational skill. For instance, meditation might make us better at accurately assessing our own rationality, or at selecting good rationality habits. Being metarational is just about being good at improving your general truth-finding and goal-attaining practices; it needn’t be purely intellectual either. (Though I expect much more of metarationality than object-level rationality to be intellectualized.)
Meditation was probably an unusually bad example for me to make the point I wanted with; sorry about that. I’m going to replace it with jogging.