CEO & Founder at White Rabbit Express and Blackship.com
Max Hodges
Karma: 32
thought of you!
Why would the meditator not want to admit that they wasted their time? Often if people feel they wasted their time watching some stupid movie or TV program they have no issue at all complaining about it. Or if they went on a cruise and didn’t have a good time they are often completely open about the reality of the experience. When I read what you wrote I can’t help but think you have some strong bias against statements people make about meditation. If what you say is true, and people feel like they wasted their time meditating, then why would they continue doing it? Your logic just doesn’t add up.
Meditation skill: Surfing the Urge
...provides no more benefit than any other religious program would provide
What makes you call meditation a religious program?
Where is the religion in this practice:
Practice: Mindfulness of Breathing
Find a quiet place, and sit on either a chair or cushion. Choose a chair with a firm, flat seat, and hold your back upright (although not stiffly so). Let the soles of your feet meet the ground, and bring your hands on to your lap. If you sit on a cushion, you can be cross-legged. Let your body be untensed, inviting openness and confidence.
Decide how long to practice for. Your session can be as short as five minutes, or longer. You may find it useful to set an alarm to tell you when to stop, so you don’t have to think about it.
Bring attention to the sensations of breath in your belly. Let go of thinking about or analyzing the breath. Just feel it. Follow its natural rhythms gently with attention: in and out, rising and falling. Let thoughts, emotions, body sensations, and sounds be as they are—you don’t need to follow them or push them away. Just allow them to happen, without interference, as you direct gentle attention to the breath.
When you notice that your mind has wandered, as it likely will often, acknowledge that this has happened, with kindness. Remember, as soon as you’re aware of the wandering, bring your attention back to the breath, and continue to follow it, in and out, moment by moment, with friendly interest.
Continue with steps three and four until it’s time to stop.
===
Clearly you have some interest since you’re here reading and responding to a rather long series of articles on meditation. But it seems you may also harbor a lot of misunderstandings. What’s meditation in your mind? And why are you convinced it’s “a waste of time” when hundreds of millions of people are doing it?
Out of curiosity, is there anything that might change your mind? Scientific papers? Meta-analysis studies? Perhaps testimonials of people’s positive experience? Hundreds of testimonials? Thousands? Tens of thousands? Or is your decision based on some kind of dogma, moral principle, or fear?
I’m not particularly trying to change your mind, I’m just wondering how someone here on a “rationalist”-themed site ended up so blinded by their biases.
I wrote up something on a meditation technique I used as a freediver.
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/ieMQHkLuYXND8Yohn/meditation-skill-surfing-the-urge
Maybe it’ll give you a new perspective; if not, I’d be happy to understand what makes this a “religious program.”
Many people are in fact choosing to not have sex with humans, instead simulating interaction with a human while self-stimulating. If your criticism here is based on an assumption that such choice is somehow invalid or worse, it would be great if you could support that.
I thought that was probably not a choice for most people. Perhaps a result of society getting so obese that no one finds each other attractive anymore? For me, it’s like the difference between riding (preferably racing) a motorcycle vs playing a motorcycle video game. I can’t imagine why anyone who has experienced the former would prefer the latter.
The OP conceded my points were valid btw, but thanks for weighing in with your profound personal insights!
> I believe this is mostly a waste of time.
oh well!
>there are a lot of people on Less Wrong in particular are—for good reason—skeptical about whether or not there is actually anything worthwhile going on in this space.
if the goal is, in part, to get more people to try meditation, you could also 1) cite the scientific literature on the benefits, 2) maybe encourage them to try (if only for 10 minutes a day, but should be for at least 6-8 weeks in my opinion), 3) compile personal testimonials about the benefits (and perhaps your own story).
A lot has been written about the basic idea. I imagine the type of people who are most interested in a more academic “model” are probably the type who would be more inclined to debate the “ontological problems” with your “pedagogical assumptions” and your “lexical fallacies” blah blah lol You know the types. Arguments, I’ve found, rarely shift intuitions.
I think some simple metaphors are probably even more effective than a complex model of the mind that people are going to have many reasons to disagree with. This 60-second video gets the point across without so many fancy words:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qxyVCjp48S4
My multiagent model of mind
I have been calling my interpretation of those models a “multiagent model of mind”.
No credit to Marvin Minsky for your model? He pioneered the multi-agent model in his 1986 book “Society of Mind.”
http://aurellem.org/society-of-mind/som-1.html
The global workspace can only hold a single piece of information at a time. At any given time, multiple different subsystems are trying to send information into the workspace, or otherwise modify its contents.
The exact process by which this happens is not completely understood,
That sounds lifted wholly from Dennett’s work. The similarities are striking:
According to the Multiple Drafts model, perception is accomplished in the brain by parallel, multi-track processes of interpretation and elaboration of sensory inputs. These content discriminations produce something like a narrative stream. Probing this stream at different places and times produces different effects and precipitates different narratives. There are many small agents screaming for attention. What we experience is a product of many processes of interpretation.
Frustratingly, Dennett has very little to say about how these content discriminations work and it is unclear what governs the modules.
Basically you’ve constructed a dumbed down version with a Cartesian Theater. One of Dennett’s aims is to get rid of this notion of a centralized place of processing in the brain in order to escape Cartesian materialism. For him, there is no single brain area in which it all comes together. With this decentralized notion of consciousness, there is no need for a Theater and no need for a homunculus to live inside our brains. Dennett’s Multiple Drafts model of consciousness must first be understood as an alternative for Cartesian materialism.
So far it seem highly problematic and appallingly inauthentic.
I recommend Minsky’s “The Emotion Machine.” He offers a much more compelling notion of how things like recent memories, serial processes, symbolic descriptions, and self-models conspire to create an illusion of immanence.
But nothing beats the Monkey Mind analogy in terms of bang for your buck!
> If you’re planning on spending two months improving the revenue created by feature X by 3%, do the napkin math to see if existing revenue coming from X justifies two months salary.
How do you know they didn’t? That deck is just a summary of years of work. Perhaps reach out to Dan McKinley for further discussion. I’m afraid we’ve both just making a lot of speculation at this point. Talk to Dan.
When your revenue is 7-8 digits, 3% can add up! Sometimes it’s such a no-brainer that it’s not worth opening Excel over. Last week I had my devs spend a few days implementing a way to create DHL labels using an API. We didn’t do any cost-benefit analysis because it was so clearly something that needed to be done. Today we shipped 147 packages by DHL. That would have taken about 5m each to do the old manual way, so in one day it saved 9.5 hours of staff time. Over one-year that’s an entire salary.
But I think the presentation tells you why they weren’t doing that stuff:
And you know what, if the site’s growth is really insane, it looks like it’s working. You can release things and as long as they don’t completely destroy everything it will look like you’re a genius. All the graphs will go up and to the right.
You can read in the Farnum St. interview with Tobias Lutke, CEO at Shopify, how it held back Shopify’s growth. I’ve met Tobias and he’s a brilliant, level-headed engineer and CEO, but if you read that you’d probably conclude he’s irrational, stupid, and not ambitious enough for not relentlessly maximizing growth for that period. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Regarding testing and validation, of course there are exceptions, but generally speaking, it still looks like they got it backwards to me. You’re free to disagree. I’m running multiple companies and have produced many products and services—only one big failure. I’ve tried a lot of approaches and still mix and match many ideas, but can solidly endorse making the prototype in get the feedback.
Maybe you misunderstand how we think about prototyping. A realistic façade is all you need to test with customers. The prototype give you something concrete to put in front of customers for rich feedback and insights. But think lightweight (dirty) version of key aspects of a product or experience. The prototype only needs to be good enough to test out a hypothesis and nothing more. It’s all about testing big ideas with minimal upfront investment.
I recommend the design thinking methodology presented in “Sprint: How to Solve Big Problems and Test New Ideas in Just Five Days.” Invented at Google by Jake Knapp, perfected with more than 150 startups at Google Ventuer (GV).
Prototype comes before Test.
https://www.thesprintbook.com/how
Cheers,
Thanks! Was there any requirement that it needed to be a physical set? I assumed the AI would probably be interested in a digital environment.
The set could have a bunch of “cards” to start; or maybe the whole thing is open-sourced if you’re philosophically opposed to the idea of people making their own decisions about trading money for things they find valuable. But those issues seem rather secondary to the spirit of the challenge here.
I’m not sure exactly what you disagree about, but thanks for the comparisons.
Here’s a nice comparison on Quora from someone “Practicing Yoga & Meditation since 2001”
Zen is a school of “sudden enlightenment”. You “just sit” on the cushion for a million years and with shear mind force destroy your ego and then you suddenly “get” it. Or (in the Rinzai school) you are given an absurd puzzle called Koan to solve. It throws your ego from its normal course that you reach Satori. Hence all the strange and crazy stories of Zen masters.
Vipassana is a school of “gradual enlightenment”. First you learn how to focus on a single object or awareness for extended period of time. Then with non-judgmental awareness you observe. With long enough practice your mental obstructions or “fetters” as Buddhism calls them are broken—one by one. When all the ten fetters are broken, you have reached.
I have tried Zen in a monastery setting and quickly found that its not my cup of tea. People’s temperaments are different. Some people may find Zen to be more appealing than the traditional Vipassana.
I would suggest you try out both a see which works for you. Its one thing to intellectually understand meditation and a totally different thing to sit in a cushion for 8-hours and watch your breath hit the tip of your nostrils.
Have you looked at the work of Sara Lazer PhD?
We study the impact of yoga and meditation on various cognitive and behavioral functions. Our results suggest that meditation can produce experience-based structural alterations in the brain. We also found evidence that meditation may slow down the age related atrophy of certain areas of the brain.
https://scholar.harvard.edu/sara_lazar/publications
And that’s just from one researcher.
A Systematic Review and Meta-analysis of the Effects of Meditation on Empathy, Compassion, and Prosocial Behaviors
“Clinicians and meditation teachers should be aware that meditation can improve positive prosocial emotions and behaviors.”
I’m not sure I understand. Are you saying, “It’s dishonest to tell people that 10 minutes of daily meditation has worthwhile benefits”? Are you speaking from personal experience with meditation? Are you aware of the many benefits supported the scientific literature? Are you aware of any research that establishes necessary timelines or “ROI” estimates for those benefits? Do you think there might be a lot of individual variability around the benefits of meditation?
I’ve elaborated on my position here. Happy to hear your thoughts!
I read the first ~100 pages of “Why Buddhism is True”, but . . .
That’s hardly 1⁄3 of the way in; not very “deep.” ;)
Robert Wright is quite well-regarded for his writing on science, history, politics, and religion. His skeptical, non-mystical stance toward meditation sounds like just the thing you’d be keenly interested in. He argues the modern psychological idea of the modularity of mind resonates with the Buddhist teaching of no-self (anatman). One would think that’s precisely the kind of thing you are trying to get at!
I admit the book is a bit clumsy, tedious and dull in places (aren’t most books?), and Wright certainly isn’t the last word on meditation, but if you want to understand this stuff more deeply like you say, perhaps try and be a little less hyper-focused on your mission to “dissolve the algorithm” see what else he has to say in the final two-thirds of his book. Maybe you’re depriving yourself of the opportunity to discover some additional nuance, aspects, and features of meditation you may be overlooking.
I trace myself back through the labyrinth of my brain, through the innumerable turns by which I have ringed myself off and, by perpetual circling, obliterated the original trail whereby I entered this forest. Back through the tunnels—through the devious status-and-survival strategy of adult life, through the interminable passages which we remember in dreams—all the streets we have ever traveled, the corridors of schools, the winding pathways between the legs of tables and chairs where one crawled as a child, the tight and bloody exit from the womb, the fountainous surge through the channel of the penis, the timeless wanderings through ducts and spongy caverns. Down and back through ever-narrowing tubes to the point where the passage itself is the traveler—a thin string of molecules going through the trial and error of getting itself into the right order to be a unit of organic life. Relentlessly back and back through endless and whirling dances in the astronomically proportioned spaces which surround the original nuclei of the world, the centers of centers, as remotely distant on the inside as the nebulae beyond our galaxy on the outside.
Down and at last out—out of the cosmic maze to recognize in and as myself, the bewildered traveler, the forgotten yet familiar sensation of the original impulse of all things, supreme identity, inmost light, ultimate center, self more me than myself. Standing in the midst of Ella’s garden I feel, with a peace so deep that it sings to be shared with all the world, that at last I belong, that I have returned to the home behind home, that I have come into the inheritance unknowingly bequeathed from all my ancestors since the beginning. Plucked like the strings of a harp, the warp and woof of the world reverberate with memories of triumphant hymns. The sure foundation upon which I had sought to stand has turned out to be the center from which I seek. The elusive substance beneath all the forms of the universe is discovered as the immediate gesture of my hand. But how did I ever get lost? And why have I traveled so far through these intertwined tunnels that I seem to be the quaking vortex of defended defensiveness which is my conventional self?
--Alan Watts
If you’re going to double-down on the idea of “deep” meditation, would it be unreasonable to ask for some disambiguation? What are the key differences between “deep meditation vs. plain old meditation” in your “model”? Or are there more than two types? Are there 20 types? 200 types?
I don’t mean to be pedantic, but I think this notion of “deep,” or “serious,” or “real” meditation vs. some false, light, or non-serious practice is dubious at best.
Sure, someone may be more likely to experience the benefits of meditation faster if she takes a 10-day retreat compared to 10-days of ten-minute practice. Or maybe not. She might just reject the experience as overwhelming, tedious and painful. Would you agree that someone who consistently runs for 10 minutes, three times a week, is going to realize greater long-term health benefits than someone who only run-walks one marathon a year? Furthermore, telling people that to do it right, physical fitness “requires a huge investment of time and effort” is more likely to discourage anyone from getting up off their ass. I appreciate that you raise awareness of potential risks, but your notion of the time required for “deep” meditation is curiously out of step with what leading meditation instructors advocate.
More importantly, this whole notion of “optimizing returns” is antithetical to the whole practice of meditation! More on this in a moment.
If I cook for only 10 minutes, am I not really “deep cooking”? If I read for 5 minutes, am I only “shallow reading”? How long do I need to exercise before I’m “deep” exercising? Or does this whole idea of “deep vs. shallow” only apply to meditation and not to aerobic sports, weightlifting, or other activities?
“Deep vs shallow (non-deep? light?)” smells like a dumbbell theory—an attempt to explain the world in terms of opposing forces or principles:
Good vs Evil
Conscious vs Unconscious
Intentional vs Unintentional
Thoughts vs Feelings
Enlightenment vs Non-Enlightenment
Self vs No-Self
Whenever I see such a two-part distinction, I try to see if I can separate things into three or four parts instead. If I cannot, then I suspect what we have isn’t two things at all, but two extremes along a single continuum.
Sure, I’ll grant that putting a frozen meal in the microwave barely counts as cooking. But when someone sets aside a specific amount of time to deliberately practice an established Vipassana meditation technique, even if for only 10 minutes, it seems wrong, and pretentious, to discredit that as insufficient and somehow fails to qualify as “real” hardcore meditation.
Joseph Goldstein is one of the first American vipassana teachers. He’s led meditation retreats worldwide since 1974. He is a co-founder of the Insight Meditation Society (est. 1975). Joseph has conducted and produced countless short meditation sessions. Do you take the position that he’s effectively wasting (quite a lot of) people’s time with his “softcore” approach to meditation?
What if, in your quest to “dissolve the algorithm” you only succeed to dumb things down and distill away much of the nuance, subtlety, and non-obvious aspects of meditations effects before you even had a chance to notice some of them? Perhaps it’s too much to hope that when Eastern philosophy encounters Western culture, it could ever result in the Easternization of the West and survive distortion and corruption by Western psychopathologies.
Imagine for a moment if we were talking about sex instead of meditation. Sex encompasses a pretty complex, wide-ranging set of experiences. It arouses intense physical and emotional responses. It’s one of the most intimate experiences one can have with another person. It encompasses the ego dissolution of orgasm, the removal of barriers toward bonding with another person more closely, elements of risk and danger, vulnerability, a playful exploration of sensations and personal boundaries—giving and taking, connecting and disconnecting, tension and dissolution. And it can result in long-lasting physical, emotional, and cathartic benefits.
Now, say someone comes along and says they aren’t happy with these loosely vague, poetic, romantic notions. They want to distill the sexual experience into “straightforward terms” and come up with a “precise” language to “correctly capture the essentials” and make an “unambiguous model” that any educated person would understand. Sorry, but I’m afraid to succeed in that endeavor is to fail. You’ll end up with something, but I think you’ll be leaving a lot out. It might even satisfy someone who has never had sex and therefore doesn’t know what they are missing—like using a diagram to describe a J. S. Bach two-part Invention to someone who’s never heard a performance.
Why stop there! Maybe we can patent the “algorithm” and commodify it as a sort of Mindfulness Porn. Perhaps we could build an “enlightenment machine.” Something akin to one of those Electrical Muscle Stimulation devices for people who want to short circuit a proper weightlifting routine. Who needs sex when you can have an Autoblow 2?
I’m sure I’ll get accused of being anti-science or anti-intellectual for my position here. But I only hope to convey that there are limits to reductionism when it comes to complex, multi-dimensional (physical, emotional, mental, and spiritual) aspects of human experience. In a similar vein, it’s well-documented that while the reductionist approach has been successful in the early days of molecular biology, unmitigated reductionism underestimates biological complexity and has had an increasingly detrimental influence on many areas of biomedical research, including drug discovery and vaccine development.
Your focus on “results” and notions of “return on investment” and gamification of meditation by hacking the “algorithm” is profoundly antithetical to the practice and sounds misguided to me.
Abandon all hope of fruition.
--Atisha, an eleventh century Tibetan meditation teacher.
Pema Chodron calls this one of the most powerful teachings of the Buddhist tradition, and she says that as long as you wish for things to change, they never will. As long as you’re wanting yourself to get better, you won’t. As long as you have an orientation toward the future, you can never just relax into what you already have or already are. Pema admitted that she had been unconsciously thinking for decades that she was going to come to a place in the future when she was “really” enlightened. Eventually, she realized that the enlightenment had been happening all along the way, step-by-step, in each moment, and she let go of hoping for some big bang in the future.
The joke in meditation is that we get somewhere by not trying to get anywhere.
“Ten minutes a day toward Enlightenment” is the sort of slogan that has inspired the current generation to unimaginably large numbers of part-time meditators. I think this is something that should be celebrated, not discouraged with artificial notions of status or classes of accomplishment.
To be clear, I don’t accuse you of any ill-intentions, and I write this all in good faith. I just wanted to try and raise awareness of some things you might not be considering.
Cheers!
There are two rules for success in life. First, never tell anyone all that you know.
Just throw away the word “deep”. It’s a dumbbell theory.—an attempt to explain things in terms of opposing pairs of forces or principles. Can you cook, read, or exercise for 10m? Or is anything less than an hour considered “shallow cooking” or “light reading”? .
Ok then what in the world do you mean by “ cosnsciously” or “parts”? And why do you think we can’t make biological organisms? Is there something magical about then?
Google Craig Venter “synthetic life”
So emergence cannot be present in a mechanism if I “deliberately” make something but it can be it I make a mistake? So an emergent property is just anything accidental? Is software made from parts? So if I make a software application that has unexpected properties whether they are emergent or not all depends on how conscious I was of them when I set out?
Getting deep in meditation requires a huge investment of time and effort
Not really. You can start with just 5 or 10 minutes a day. 10 minutes a day for six weeks is just 5 hours (taking weekends off). Not such a huge investment for most. Just cut out a few hours of Netflix over the course of a month-and-a-half.
I think you’ll find some interesting ideas which address your first point in this Tim Keller talk, especially the points about “recipes vs understanding,” seeking first principles, and the point that 99% of what you think is wrong and you only have the remaining 1% to deal with that situation. I see meditation as a process to strength and expand that 1% part.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Nb2tebYAaOA
On the second point, Robert Wright’s book “Why Buddhism is True: The Science and Philosophy of Meditation and Enlightenment” does a pretty good job.
not exactly. I’m fond of @ryleah’s contribution: “Emergence as a term doesn’t add a reason for a thing, but it does rule some out.”
The datasets it was trained on include Wikipedia (English), Common Web Crawl (basically a subset of the Internet), Github, among others.
A team of researchers from OpenAI recently published a paper describing GPT-3, a deep-learning model for natural-language with 175 billion parameters, 100x more than the previous version, GPT-2. The model is pre-trained on nearly half a trillion words and achieves state-of-the-art performance on several NLP benchmarks without fine-tuning.
In paper published on arXiv, a team of over 30 co-authors described the model and several experiments. The researchers’ goal was to produce an NLP system that performs well on a variety of tasks with little or no fine-tuning, and previous work had indicated that larger models might be the solution. To test that hypothesis, the team increased the size of their previous model, GPT-2, from 1.5 billion parameters to 175 billion. For training, the team collected several datasets, including the Common Crawl dataset and the English-language Wikipedia. The model was evaluated against several NLP benchmarks, matching state-of-the-art performance on “closed-book” question-answering tasks and setting a new record for the LAMBADA language modeling task.