There are a fuckton of writings on meditation, and the benefit you get from reading them is less than sitting down and practicing.
Which isn’t to say that additional instructions would be useless. That basic instruction is useful in getting started, but it is also easy to stall and stop making progress when those instructions prove inadequate (this happened to me until I found better, and much more detailed, instructions).
Additionally, it helps to have pointers to what you should be looking for. IME, the work on the couch is what gets my mind sharp and provides some useful insights, but the real benefit comes from applying that sharpness and insights off the couch. But then there are a lot of different things that you can investigate off the couch—and investigating different things may also bring different results, so having theory to act as a guide is useful (not to mention motivational).
So I’d say that practice & reading beats practice alone and practice alone beats reading alone.
That basic instruction is useful in getting started
I disagree, I think it’s useless even for the very first session. The one who receives such instruction will
immediately shoot themselves in the foot by beating themselves up for forgetting the breath and pretty much plateau from there onward
not understand the relationship between awareness and attention, rendering the practice useless for building mindfulness (and they will probably fall asleep)
not understand the process and not be guided to develop joy in the practice, therefore not be motivated to practice consistently and dilligently, therefore probably drop the whole thing soon
Which isn’t to say that additional instructions would be useless.
Like. I’ll maybe do a top level post about all this?
Anyways, Kaj, I remember the post on your blog where you said, that you had reached a bit of apathy through meditation, and you were having a bit of trouble finding meaning. The way you put it resonated with me, as I’ve had the same problem recently. Like, enough that I appreciated it. So you’re one of the people here I’m willing to engage with on this.
But, for fuck’s sakes, philosophizing serves the role of masturbation. This is an endemic problem for LW adjacent people, because you all enable each other! There’s a culture of it here. Which is why the sentence I quoted, “which… useless”, is fake, because the intent behind it is to make it socially okay to explore this shit. Fuck that. It’s more effective to practice more, and you’re promoting the culture that’s undermining that.
...
I actually agree that 0.1xreading + 0.9xpractice beats 1.0xpractice. Your motivations for saying so are wrong, and that this is the problem.
I don’t think LessWrong as a website is the best place for telling people to meditate. It’s generally good for people who meditate a lot to have a local community where they can ask for guidance when they have trouble.
That said I think you underrate the importance of high status people saying that meditation is okay for getting skeptical people to be open for meditations.
I have frequently lead meditations for rationalists. I have seen people leaves the room when I lead a meditation at an LW meetup without coming back.
Lastly, LessWrong exists as a foundation for thinking about how to build friendly AGI. Theoretical discussion about the nature of meditation helps for discussing the nature of cognition that’s important for AGI. Even when a discussion about meditation has no practical use for it’s participants it can still lead to theoretic progress at understanding cognition that’s helpful for AGI.
But, for fuck’s sakes, philosophizing serves the role of masturbation. This is an endemic problem for LW adjacent people, because you all enable each other!
I agree that this is a problem here.
I don’t agree that the solution to it is to shut up and go practice more. Or rather, it may help the individual who makes that choice, but it doesn’t help the community in general. It just means that in the absence of that one person, the other people will shift their philosophizing to other topics.
But if the topic of e.g. meditation keeps getting consistently brought up, and its benefits analyzed in a way that makes it seem understandable and valuable to the community, then that might eventually cause people to give it a shot.
This was in fact what convinced me to originally start meditating. I read Ken Wilber and was convinced by some of his arguments on an intellectual level, but also recognized that it was only an intellectual understanding, and that I would probably need to meditate to turn it into a more experiental understanding. Then I also heard a bunch of stuff about the more conventional psychological benefits of meditation, as well as some neuroscience papers about the proposed mechanisms. Those together convinced me to actually start practicing.
I’m pretty convinced that a lot of people here would also be willing to give it a shot, if they were given a sensible explanation of why it might have benefits and what the mechanism for that would be.
And yes, there will also be some people who read the arguments, find them intellectually plausible, and then never try to practice and instead just go back to philosophizing. But at least some people will have found a better direction, while the pure philosophizers would have kept doing their thing anyway.
it may help the individual who makes that choice [to shut up and go practice more]
I’ll just reiterate that I think this is wrong. Correct instruction (and sufficient amount of it!) not only makes the practice much more productive, it results in much higher chance of the person actually sticking to the practice, because they are more motivated, because they understand what they’re doing and exactly how it will lead to progress.
This is true not only of meditation, but from my experience e.g. of weightlifting. Anecdote time: When I started weightlifting, I spent about three minutes on research, picked up the first beginner routine that seemed to make sense, and followed it for ~two years with minor adjustments here and there. Only then I seeked detailed understanding of what I’m doing, the anatomy and the science behind resistance training etc. After that, my practice became much more productive, much more enjoyable, and therefore much more consistent. I now understand what the fuck I’m doing.
Because the instruction I followed in the beginning was a bit more detailed than what J- gives for meditation, I was able to make some progress—I imagine that if I received instruction from someone who viewed weightlifting like J- views meditation, I wouldn’t get anywhere and I would get myself seriously injured—but if I had in the beginning the level of instruction I have now, I would look like fucking Schwarzenegger by now. I wasted a lot of time in the gym by not operating with correct instruction.
And exactly the same goes for my personal experience with meditation: I started off my practice with one of those 10-day Goenka retreats, so I had some instruction, so I made some progress, but only after I started reading The Mind Illuminated did I start practicing consistently, diligently, with joy, and making steady progress.
I mean, sure, the Mind and its incessant thinking gets in the way of living and doing and Being, but the answer is not to go do things with improper instruction. That’s not even overcorrecting; that’s just trying to solve the problem at the wrong level and in a wrong way.
I interpreted J-’s comments to be criticism of this post in particular (and some other meditation discussion on LW in general), in that this post isn’t giving much in the way of correct instruction; it’s giving a very general model of what’s happening, but it’s not saying what one actually needs to do.
I definitely agree that it’s better to have a good theoretical model combined with good concrete instructions of what to do; that’s why I recommend The Mind Illuminated so widely. But I didn’t read J- to be disputing that; in fact, they seemed to agree. Rather I thought J- to feel that “learning to actually become better at meditation” wasn’t the motive for why people post meditation stuff on LW, and that people were actually optimizing for something like “seeming smart and getting to philosophize around an interesting topic”, which doesn’t get anyone to actually practice.
If everyone is just doing intellectual analysis all the time and never practicing, then shutting up about it for a while and going to do some practice is in fact the thing to do; but this is compatible with also reading up on how and why you should do it, if you haven’t already done that reading.
Ah, I see. I read J-’s instruction paragraph as “here’s all the instruction you need to start meditating, now go meditate”, which stirred up agitation in me because I see many people waste their time acting on too little instruction.[1]
Possibly, in the context of the OP, it is better read as general frustration: “Ugh, you guys keep overthinking everything, just go do X instead of talking about X all the time, for all X.”
Maybe J- sees many people wasting their time intellectualizing and overthinking; the two of us draw from different experiences, so we have different triggers and even perceive the entire situation through a different lens.
So let’s go back to this:
But, for fuck’s sakes, philosophizing serves the role of masturbation. This is an endemic problem for LW adjacent people, because you all enable each other! There’s a culture of it here.
I agree that rationality (just like all intellectual communities) select heavily for the type of a person who overthinks everything, but I don’t really see the content on LW enabling this. Or—hmm—maybe it depends on how you see LW. I see LW as a place where I come to read Insight Porn and have intellectual discussion, because it is pleasant and entertaining. If someone sees LW as a place which serves up self-help advice, then, necessarily, just as roughly all self-help advice in existence, this would be viewed as enabling intellectualization-as-psychological-defence-against-change.
Apart from meditation and weightlifting, learning to code comes to mind. I see people-who-self-study struggle needlessly for months, because an online course explains how to write functions and how to write ifs and whiles and whatnot, but doesn’t explain what happens under the hood. Way too little instruction.
No, you’re missing my point. Idk if we disagree on anything concrete, the issue is that you’re both Fluttershys or something. Kaj, you say,
Or rather, it may help the individual who makes that choice, but it doesn’t help the community in general.
How do you go from “help the community” back to “oh, what we’re doing is great”? THIS is the problem; if help the community was your goal, you’d go about nudging norms to encourage “meditate more, read less”. But that’s not what you’re doing; instead, you’re throwing your emotional support behind the status quo.
This is one of those things where you won’t change what you’re doing, because you don’t want to, deep down. You’d rather have a nice happy community.
Your first step is to stop being fake, and gaslighting us about how much you want to help. Do you think I believe for one second you don’t know how to do better?
This is the point where we accuse each other of arguing in bad faith. No amount of politicking is going to change us, and the only way communities like LW change is when people start getting banned.
I don’t agree that the solution to it is to shut up and go practice more. Or rather, it may help the individual who makes that choice, but it doesn’t help the community in general. It just means that in the absence of that one person, the other people will shift their philosophizing to other topics.
Which isn’t to say that additional instructions would be useless. That basic instruction is useful in getting started, but it is also easy to stall and stop making progress when those instructions prove inadequate (this happened to me until I found better, and much more detailed, instructions).
Additionally, it helps to have pointers to what you should be looking for. IME, the work on the couch is what gets my mind sharp and provides some useful insights, but the real benefit comes from applying that sharpness and insights off the couch. But then there are a lot of different things that you can investigate off the couch—and investigating different things may also bring different results, so having theory to act as a guide is useful (not to mention motivational).
So I’d say that practice & reading beats practice alone and practice alone beats reading alone.
I disagree, I think it’s useless even for the very first session. The one who receives such instruction will
immediately shoot themselves in the foot by beating themselves up for forgetting the breath and pretty much plateau from there onward
not understand the relationship between awareness and attention, rendering the practice useless for building mindfulness (and they will probably fall asleep)
not understand the process and not be guided to develop joy in the practice, therefore not be motivated to practice consistently and dilligently, therefore probably drop the whole thing soon
and so on, and so on.
Like. I’ll maybe do a top level post about all this?
Anyways, Kaj, I remember the post on your blog where you said, that you had reached a bit of apathy through meditation, and you were having a bit of trouble finding meaning. The way you put it resonated with me, as I’ve had the same problem recently. Like, enough that I appreciated it. So you’re one of the people here I’m willing to engage with on this.
But, for fuck’s sakes, philosophizing serves the role of masturbation. This is an endemic problem for LW adjacent people, because you all enable each other! There’s a culture of it here. Which is why the sentence I quoted, “which… useless”, is fake, because the intent behind it is to make it socially okay to explore this shit. Fuck that. It’s more effective to practice more, and you’re promoting the culture that’s undermining that.
...
I actually agree that 0.1xreading + 0.9xpractice beats 1.0xpractice. Your motivations for saying so are wrong, and that this is the problem.
I don’t think LessWrong as a website is the best place for telling people to meditate. It’s generally good for people who meditate a lot to have a local community where they can ask for guidance when they have trouble.
That said I think you underrate the importance of high status people saying that meditation is okay for getting skeptical people to be open for meditations.
I have frequently lead meditations for rationalists. I have seen people leaves the room when I lead a meditation at an LW meetup without coming back.
Lastly, LessWrong exists as a foundation for thinking about how to build friendly AGI. Theoretical discussion about the nature of meditation helps for discussing the nature of cognition that’s important for AGI. Even when a discussion about meditation has no practical use for it’s participants it can still lead to theoretic progress at understanding cognition that’s helpful for AGI.
I agree that this is a problem here.
I don’t agree that the solution to it is to shut up and go practice more. Or rather, it may help the individual who makes that choice, but it doesn’t help the community in general. It just means that in the absence of that one person, the other people will shift their philosophizing to other topics.
But if the topic of e.g. meditation keeps getting consistently brought up, and its benefits analyzed in a way that makes it seem understandable and valuable to the community, then that might eventually cause people to give it a shot.
This was in fact what convinced me to originally start meditating. I read Ken Wilber and was convinced by some of his arguments on an intellectual level, but also recognized that it was only an intellectual understanding, and that I would probably need to meditate to turn it into a more experiental understanding. Then I also heard a bunch of stuff about the more conventional psychological benefits of meditation, as well as some neuroscience papers about the proposed mechanisms. Those together convinced me to actually start practicing.
I’m pretty convinced that a lot of people here would also be willing to give it a shot, if they were given a sensible explanation of why it might have benefits and what the mechanism for that would be.
And yes, there will also be some people who read the arguments, find them intellectually plausible, and then never try to practice and instead just go back to philosophizing. But at least some people will have found a better direction, while the pure philosophizers would have kept doing their thing anyway.
I’ll just reiterate that I think this is wrong. Correct instruction (and sufficient amount of it!) not only makes the practice much more productive, it results in much higher chance of the person actually sticking to the practice, because they are more motivated, because they understand what they’re doing and exactly how it will lead to progress.
This is true not only of meditation, but from my experience e.g. of weightlifting. Anecdote time: When I started weightlifting, I spent about three minutes on research, picked up the first beginner routine that seemed to make sense, and followed it for ~two years with minor adjustments here and there. Only then I seeked detailed understanding of what I’m doing, the anatomy and the science behind resistance training etc. After that, my practice became much more productive, much more enjoyable, and therefore much more consistent. I now understand what the fuck I’m doing.
Because the instruction I followed in the beginning was a bit more detailed than what J- gives for meditation, I was able to make some progress—I imagine that if I received instruction from someone who viewed weightlifting like J- views meditation, I wouldn’t get anywhere and I would get myself seriously injured—but if I had in the beginning the level of instruction I have now, I would look like fucking Schwarzenegger by now. I wasted a lot of time in the gym by not operating with correct instruction.
And exactly the same goes for my personal experience with meditation: I started off my practice with one of those 10-day Goenka retreats, so I had some instruction, so I made some progress, but only after I started reading The Mind Illuminated did I start practicing consistently, diligently, with joy, and making steady progress.
I mean, sure, the Mind and its incessant thinking gets in the way of living and doing and Being, but the answer is not to go do things with improper instruction. That’s not even overcorrecting; that’s just trying to solve the problem at the wrong level and in a wrong way.
I interpreted J-’s comments to be criticism of this post in particular (and some other meditation discussion on LW in general), in that this post isn’t giving much in the way of correct instruction; it’s giving a very general model of what’s happening, but it’s not saying what one actually needs to do.
I definitely agree that it’s better to have a good theoretical model combined with good concrete instructions of what to do; that’s why I recommend The Mind Illuminated so widely. But I didn’t read J- to be disputing that; in fact, they seemed to agree. Rather I thought J- to feel that “learning to actually become better at meditation” wasn’t the motive for why people post meditation stuff on LW, and that people were actually optimizing for something like “seeming smart and getting to philosophize around an interesting topic”, which doesn’t get anyone to actually practice.
If everyone is just doing intellectual analysis all the time and never practicing, then shutting up about it for a while and going to do some practice is in fact the thing to do; but this is compatible with also reading up on how and why you should do it, if you haven’t already done that reading.
Ah, I see. I read J-’s instruction paragraph as “here’s all the instruction you need to start meditating, now go meditate”, which stirred up agitation in me because I see many people waste their time acting on too little instruction.[1]
Possibly, in the context of the OP, it is better read as general frustration: “Ugh, you guys keep overthinking everything, just go do X instead of talking about X all the time, for all X.”
Maybe J- sees many people wasting their time intellectualizing and overthinking; the two of us draw from different experiences, so we have different triggers and even perceive the entire situation through a different lens.
So let’s go back to this:
I agree that rationality (just like all intellectual communities) select heavily for the type of a person who overthinks everything, but I don’t really see the content on LW enabling this. Or—hmm—maybe it depends on how you see LW. I see LW as a place where I come to read Insight Porn and have intellectual discussion, because it is pleasant and entertaining. If someone sees LW as a place which serves up self-help advice, then, necessarily, just as roughly all self-help advice in existence, this would be viewed as enabling intellectualization-as-psychological-defence-against-change.
Apart from meditation and weightlifting, learning to code comes to mind. I see people-who-self-study struggle needlessly for months, because an online course explains how to write functions and how to write ifs and whiles and whatnot, but doesn’t explain what happens under the hood. Way too little instruction.
No, you’re missing my point. Idk if we disagree on anything concrete, the issue is that you’re both Fluttershys or something. Kaj, you say,
How do you go from “help the community” back to “oh, what we’re doing is great”? THIS is the problem; if help the community was your goal, you’d go about nudging norms to encourage “meditate more, read less”. But that’s not what you’re doing; instead, you’re throwing your emotional support behind the status quo.
This is one of those things where you won’t change what you’re doing, because you don’t want to, deep down. You’d rather have a nice happy community.
How do you suggest I do that? I honestly don’t think I know of a better way than what I’m currently doing.
My strategy is to try to create small exercises that people can try. Experiments or experiences that can show something.
I used to do this for rationality techniques too.
That’s the best way I know how.
Your first step is to stop being fake, and gaslighting us about how much you want to help. Do you think I believe for one second you don’t know how to do better?
This is the point where we accuse each other of arguing in bad faith. No amount of politicking is going to change us, and the only way communities like LW change is when people start getting banned.
A good example of evaporative cooling. :)
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/ZQG9cwKbct2LtmL3p/evaporative-cooling-of-group-beliefs