Whenever someone wants to convince me of the value or promise of some meditationy thing by making strong sweeping claims about mental benefits, I simply ask them “Can you name someone who’s done some practice like this, and then subsequently done something that I’d recognize as both good and impressive, and then somewhat attributed the latter to the former?”. I’m sure there must be some good answers to this question, on baserates if nothing else, but no one has ever (N=10ish?) named an example.
One confounder here is that if meditation really does give you vastly increased well-being, then one of the most useful things one can do is to help others learn to meditate, but probably “they had a long and successful career as a meditation teacher afterward” wouldn’t be something that you’d recognize as both good and impressive.
Whenever someone wants to convince me of the value or promise of some meditationy thing by making strong sweeping claims about mental benefits, I simply ask them “Can you name someone who’s done some practice like this, and then subsequently done something that I’d recognize as both good and impressive, and then somewhat attributed the latter to the former?”. I’m sure there must be some good answers to this question, on baserates if nothing else, but no one has ever (N=10ish?) named an example.
One confounder here is that if meditation really does give you vastly increased well-being, then one of the most useful things one can do is to help others learn to meditate, but probably “they had a long and successful career as a meditation teacher afterward” wouldn’t be something that you’d recognize as both good and impressive.