Meditation has been practiced for many centuries and millions practice it currently.
Please list 3 people who got deeply into meditation, then went on to change the world in some way, not counting people like Alan Watts who changed the world by promoting or teaching meditation.
I think there are many cases of reasonably successful people who often cite either some variety of meditation, or other self-improvement regimes / habits, as having a big impact on their success. This random article I googled cites the billionaires Ray Dalio, Marc Benioff, and Bill Gates, among others. (https://trytwello.com/ceos-that-meditate/)
Similarly you could find people (like Arnold Schwarzenegger, if I recall?) citing that adopting a more mature, stoic mindset about life was helpful to them—Ray Dalio has this whole series of videos on “life principles” that he likes. And you could find others endorsing the importance of exercise and good sleep, or of using note-taking apps to stay organized.
I think the problem is not that meditation is ineffective, but that it’s not usually a multiple-standard-deviations gamechanger (and when it is, it’s probably usually a case of “counting up to zero from negative”, as TsviBT calls it), and it’s already a known technique. If nobody else in the world meditated or took notes or got enough sleep, you could probably stack those techniques and have a big advantage. But alas, a lot of CEOs and other top performers already know to do this stuff.
(Separately from the mundane life-improvement aspects, some meditators claim that the right kind of deep meditation can give you insight into deep philosophical problems, or the fundamental nature of conscious experience, and that this is so valuable that achieving this goal is basically the most important thing you could do in life. This might possibly even be true! But that’s different from saying that meditation will give you +50 IQ points, which it won’t. Kinda like how having an experience of sublime beauty while contemplating a work of art, might be life-changing, but won’t give you +50 IQ points.)
To compare to the obvious alternative, is the evidence for meditation stronger than the evidence for prayer? I assume there are also some religious billionaires and other successful people who would attribute their success to praying every day or something like that.
Maybe other people have a very different image of meditation than I do, such that they imagine it as something much more delusional and hyperreligious? Eg, some religious people do stuff like chanting mantras, or visualizing specific images of Buddhist deities, which indeed seems pretty crazy to me.
But the kind of meditation taught by popular secular sources like Sam Harris’s Waking Up app, (or that I talk about in my “Examining The Witness” youtube series about the videogame The Witness), seems to me obviously much closer to basic psychology or rationality techniques than to religious practices. Compare Sam Harris’s instructions about paying attention to the contents of one’s experiences, to Gendlin’s idea of “Circling”, or Yudkowsky’s concept of “sit down and actually try to think of solutions for five minutes”, or the art of “noticing confusion”, or the original Feynman essay where he describes holding off on proposing solutions. So it’s weird to me when people seem really skeptical of meditation and set a very high burden of proof that they wouldn’t apply for other mental habits like, say, CFAR techniques.
I’m not like a meditation fanatic—personally I don’t even meditate these days, although I feel bad about not doing it since it does make my life better. (Just like how I don’t exercise much anymore despite exercise making my day go better, and I feel bad about that too...) But once upon a time I just tried it for a few weeks, learned a lot of interesting stuff, etc. I would say I got some mundane life benefits out of it—some, like exercise or good sleep, that only lasted as long as I kept up the habit. and other benefits were more like mental skills that I’ve retained to today. I also got some very worthwhile philosophical insights, which I talk about, albeit in a rambly way mixed in with lots of other stuff, in my aforementioned video series. I certainly wouldn’t say the philosophical insights were the most important thing in my whole life, or anything like that! But maybe more skilled deeper meditation = bigger insights, hence my agnosticism on whether the more bombastic metitation-related claims are true.
So I think people should just download the Waking Up app and try meditating for like 10 mins a day for 2-3 weeks or whatever—way less of a time commitment than watching a TV show or playing most videogames—and see for themselves if it’s useful or not, instead of debating.
Anyways. For what it’s worth, I googled “billionares who pray”. I found this article (https://www.beliefnet.com/entertainment/5-christian-billionaires-you-didnt-know-about.aspx), which ironically also cites Bill Gates, plus the Walton Family and some other conservative CEOs. But IMO, if you read the article you’ll notice that only one of them actually mentions a daily practice of prayer. The one that does, Do Won Chang, doesn’t credit it for their business success… seems like they’re successful and then they just also pray a lot. For the rest, it’s all vaguer stuff about how their religion gives them a general moral foundation of knowing what’s right and wrong, or how God inspires them to give back to their local community, or whatever.
So, personally I’d consider this duel of first-page-google-results to be a win for meditation versus prayer, since the meditators are describing a more direct relationship between scheduling time to regularly meditate and the assorted benefits they say it brings, while the prayer people are more describing how they think it’s valuable to be christian in an overall cultural sense. Although I’m sure with more effort you could find lots of assorted conservatives claiming that prayer specifically helps them with their business in some concrete way. (I’m sure there are many people who “pray” in ways that resemble meditation, or resemble Yudkowsky’s sitting-down-and-trying-to-think-of-solutions-for-five-minutes-by-the-clock, and find these techniques helpful!)
IMO, probably more convincing than dueling dubious claims of business titans, is testimony from rationalist-community members who write in detail about their experiences and reasoning. Alexey Guzey’s post here is interesting, as he’s swung from being vocally anti-meditation, to being way more into it than I ever was. He seems to still generally have his head on straight (ie hasn’t become a religious fanatic or something), and says that meditation seems to have been helpful for him in terms of getting more things done: https://guzey.com/2022-lessons/
Thanks for answering my question directly in the second half.
I find the testimonies of rationalists who experimented with meditation less convincing than perhaps I should, simply because of selection bias. People who have pre-existing affinity towards “woo” will presumably be more likely to try meditation. And they will be more likely to report that it works, whether it does or not. I am not sure how much should I discount for this, perhaps I overdo it. I don’t know.
A proper experiment would require a control group—some people who were originally skeptical about meditation and Buddhism in general, and only agreed to do some exactly defined exercises, and preferably the reported differences should be measurable somehow. Otherwise, we have another selection bias, that if there are people for whom meditation does nothing, or is even harmful, they will stop trying. So at the end, 100% of people who tried will report success (whether real or imaginary), because those who didn’t see any success have selected themselves out.
I approve of making the “secular version of Buddhism”, but in a similar way, we could make a “secular version of Christianity”. (For example, how is gratitude journaling significantly different from thanking God for all his blessing before you go sleep?) And yet, I assume that the objection against “secular Christianity” on Less Wrong would be much greater than against “secular Buddhism”. Maybe I am wrong, but the fact that no one is currently promoting “secular Christianity” on LW sounds like weak evidence. I suspect, the relevant difference is that for an American atheist, Christianity is outgroup, and Buddhism is fargroup. Meditation is culturally acceptable among contrarians, because our neighbors don’t do it. But that is unrelated to whether it works or not.
Also, I am not sure how secular the “secular Buddhism” actually is, given that people still go to retreats organized by religious people, etc. It feels too much for me to trust that someone is getting lots of important information from religious people, without unknowingly also getting some of their biases.
Re: successful people who meditate, IIRC in Tim Ferriss’ book Tools of Titans, meditation was one of the most commonly mentioned habits of the interviewees.
Are these generally CEO-ish-types? Obviously “sustainably coping with very high pressure contexts” is an important and useful skill, and plausibly meditation can help a lot with that. But it seems pretty different from and not that related to increasing philosophical problem solving ability.
This random article I found repeats the Tim Ferriss claim re: successful people who meditate, but I haven’t checked where it appears in the book Tools of Titans:
In his best-selling book Tools of Titans: The Tactics, Routines, and Habits of Billionaires, Icons, and World-Class Performers, Tim Ferriss interviews more than 200 executives, leaders, and world-class performers. He found that more than 80 percent practiced some form of mindfulness or meditation. Among some of the most successful people in the world, Ferriss uncovered the Most Consistent Pattern Of All, connecting world-class athletes with billionaire investors: meditation.
Other than that, I don’t see why you’d relate meditation just to high-pressure contexts, rather than also conscientiousness, goal-directedness, etc. To me, it does also seem directly related to increasing philosophical problem-solving ability. Particularly when it comes to reasoning about consciousness and other stuff where an improved introspection helps most. Sam Harris would be kind of a posterchild for this, right?
What I can’t see meditation doing is to provide the kind of multiple SD intelligence amplification you’re interested in, plus it has other issues like taking a lot of time (though a “meditation pill” would resolve that) and potential value drift.
Meditation has been practiced for many centuries and millions practice it currently.
Please list 3 people who got deeply into meditation, then went on to change the world in some way, not counting people like Alan Watts who changed the world by promoting or teaching meditation.
I think there are many cases of reasonably successful people who often cite either some variety of meditation, or other self-improvement regimes / habits, as having a big impact on their success. This random article I googled cites the billionaires Ray Dalio, Marc Benioff, and Bill Gates, among others. (https://trytwello.com/ceos-that-meditate/)
Similarly you could find people (like Arnold Schwarzenegger, if I recall?) citing that adopting a more mature, stoic mindset about life was helpful to them—Ray Dalio has this whole series of videos on “life principles” that he likes. And you could find others endorsing the importance of exercise and good sleep, or of using note-taking apps to stay organized.
I think the problem is not that meditation is ineffective, but that it’s not usually a multiple-standard-deviations gamechanger (and when it is, it’s probably usually a case of “counting up to zero from negative”, as TsviBT calls it), and it’s already a known technique. If nobody else in the world meditated or took notes or got enough sleep, you could probably stack those techniques and have a big advantage. But alas, a lot of CEOs and other top performers already know to do this stuff.
(Separately from the mundane life-improvement aspects, some meditators claim that the right kind of deep meditation can give you insight into deep philosophical problems, or the fundamental nature of conscious experience, and that this is so valuable that achieving this goal is basically the most important thing you could do in life. This might possibly even be true! But that’s different from saying that meditation will give you +50 IQ points, which it won’t. Kinda like how having an experience of sublime beauty while contemplating a work of art, might be life-changing, but won’t give you +50 IQ points.)
To compare to the obvious alternative, is the evidence for meditation stronger than the evidence for prayer? I assume there are also some religious billionaires and other successful people who would attribute their success to praying every day or something like that.
Maybe other people have a very different image of meditation than I do, such that they imagine it as something much more delusional and hyperreligious? Eg, some religious people do stuff like chanting mantras, or visualizing specific images of Buddhist deities, which indeed seems pretty crazy to me.
But the kind of meditation taught by popular secular sources like Sam Harris’s Waking Up app, (or that I talk about in my “Examining The Witness” youtube series about the videogame The Witness), seems to me obviously much closer to basic psychology or rationality techniques than to religious practices. Compare Sam Harris’s instructions about paying attention to the contents of one’s experiences, to Gendlin’s idea of “Circling”, or Yudkowsky’s concept of “sit down and actually try to think of solutions for five minutes”, or the art of “noticing confusion”, or the original Feynman essay where he describes holding off on proposing solutions. So it’s weird to me when people seem really skeptical of meditation and set a very high burden of proof that they wouldn’t apply for other mental habits like, say, CFAR techniques.
I’m not like a meditation fanatic—personally I don’t even meditate these days, although I feel bad about not doing it since it does make my life better. (Just like how I don’t exercise much anymore despite exercise making my day go better, and I feel bad about that too...) But once upon a time I just tried it for a few weeks, learned a lot of interesting stuff, etc. I would say I got some mundane life benefits out of it—some, like exercise or good sleep, that only lasted as long as I kept up the habit. and other benefits were more like mental skills that I’ve retained to today. I also got some very worthwhile philosophical insights, which I talk about, albeit in a rambly way mixed in with lots of other stuff, in my aforementioned video series. I certainly wouldn’t say the philosophical insights were the most important thing in my whole life, or anything like that! But maybe more skilled deeper meditation = bigger insights, hence my agnosticism on whether the more bombastic metitation-related claims are true.
So I think people should just download the Waking Up app and try meditating for like 10 mins a day for 2-3 weeks or whatever—way less of a time commitment than watching a TV show or playing most videogames—and see for themselves if it’s useful or not, instead of debating.
Anyways. For what it’s worth, I googled “billionares who pray”. I found this article (https://www.beliefnet.com/entertainment/5-christian-billionaires-you-didnt-know-about.aspx), which ironically also cites Bill Gates, plus the Walton Family and some other conservative CEOs. But IMO, if you read the article you’ll notice that only one of them actually mentions a daily practice of prayer. The one that does, Do Won Chang, doesn’t credit it for their business success… seems like they’re successful and then they just also pray a lot. For the rest, it’s all vaguer stuff about how their religion gives them a general moral foundation of knowing what’s right and wrong, or how God inspires them to give back to their local community, or whatever.
So, personally I’d consider this duel of first-page-google-results to be a win for meditation versus prayer, since the meditators are describing a more direct relationship between scheduling time to regularly meditate and the assorted benefits they say it brings, while the prayer people are more describing how they think it’s valuable to be christian in an overall cultural sense. Although I’m sure with more effort you could find lots of assorted conservatives claiming that prayer specifically helps them with their business in some concrete way. (I’m sure there are many people who “pray” in ways that resemble meditation, or resemble Yudkowsky’s sitting-down-and-trying-to-think-of-solutions-for-five-minutes-by-the-clock, and find these techniques helpful!)
IMO, probably more convincing than dueling dubious claims of business titans, is testimony from rationalist-community members who write in detail about their experiences and reasoning. Alexey Guzey’s post here is interesting, as he’s swung from being vocally anti-meditation, to being way more into it than I ever was. He seems to still generally have his head on straight (ie hasn’t become a religious fanatic or something), and says that meditation seems to have been helpful for him in terms of getting more things done: https://guzey.com/2022-lessons/
Thanks for answering my question directly in the second half.
I find the testimonies of rationalists who experimented with meditation less convincing than perhaps I should, simply because of selection bias. People who have pre-existing affinity towards “woo” will presumably be more likely to try meditation. And they will be more likely to report that it works, whether it does or not. I am not sure how much should I discount for this, perhaps I overdo it. I don’t know.
A proper experiment would require a control group—some people who were originally skeptical about meditation and Buddhism in general, and only agreed to do some exactly defined exercises, and preferably the reported differences should be measurable somehow. Otherwise, we have another selection bias, that if there are people for whom meditation does nothing, or is even harmful, they will stop trying. So at the end, 100% of people who tried will report success (whether real or imaginary), because those who didn’t see any success have selected themselves out.
I approve of making the “secular version of Buddhism”, but in a similar way, we could make a “secular version of Christianity”. (For example, how is gratitude journaling significantly different from thanking God for all his blessing before you go sleep?) And yet, I assume that the objection against “secular Christianity” on Less Wrong would be much greater than against “secular Buddhism”. Maybe I am wrong, but the fact that no one is currently promoting “secular Christianity” on LW sounds like weak evidence. I suspect, the relevant difference is that for an American atheist, Christianity is outgroup, and Buddhism is fargroup. Meditation is culturally acceptable among contrarians, because our neighbors don’t do it. But that is unrelated to whether it works or not.
Also, I am not sure how secular the “secular Buddhism” actually is, given that people still go to retreats organized by religious people, etc. It feels too much for me to trust that someone is getting lots of important information from religious people, without unknowingly also getting some of their biases.
Re: successful people who meditate, IIRC in Tim Ferriss’ book Tools of Titans, meditation was one of the most commonly mentioned habits of the interviewees.
Are these generally CEO-ish-types? Obviously “sustainably coping with very high pressure contexts” is an important and useful skill, and plausibly meditation can help a lot with that. But it seems pretty different from and not that related to increasing philosophical problem solving ability.
This random article I found repeats the Tim Ferriss claim re: successful people who meditate, but I haven’t checked where it appears in the book Tools of Titans:
Other than that, I don’t see why you’d relate meditation just to high-pressure contexts, rather than also conscientiousness, goal-directedness, etc. To me, it does also seem directly related to increasing philosophical problem-solving ability. Particularly when it comes to reasoning about consciousness and other stuff where an improved introspection helps most. Sam Harris would be kind of a posterchild for this, right?
What I can’t see meditation doing is to provide the kind of multiple SD intelligence amplification you’re interested in, plus it has other issues like taking a lot of time (though a “meditation pill” would resolve that) and potential value drift.