There are two things that I really like about this post; being somewhat self-aware about the type of work that it’s trying to do, and also this specific attempt.
That is, contra nsheppard, I do see this as trying to do the hard work of translation, not in the sense of demonstrating that the original author meant what is rendered here in English (as, say, lsusr’s translation of ‘Sunzi’s <<Methods of War>>’ tries to do), but in the sense of attempting to regenerate the same underlying concept in a new environment. What dependencies can be used, and which can’t? romeostevensit doesn’t attempt to explain causation, locus of control, or cognitive behavior therapy, and just causally refers to them, as they are assumable here, and he carefully spells out the phrase “unpleasant mental contents that don’t seem to serve any purpose.” Perhaps it should be called something like ‘recompilation’ instead of ‘translation’, but I think this sort of thing is an important method of rationality [like moses’s comment here, I think one of the ways in which rationalists are better than skeptics is in having less of their allergy to woo].
My personal relationship to meditation is somewhat strange—lifelong sleep onset insomnia gave me something like an involuntary self-taught meditation practice. So not only am I unfamiliar with many of the traditional meditation terms, I’m also unfamiliar with many of the experiences of problems of the normal student or avoider of meditation. This makes it hard for me to tell whether or not this post helped anyone defragment their minds; for me, it mostly helped me frame why I hadn’t gotten much out of my few attempts to deliberately meditate, by giving me a clearer conceptualization of what that meditation was supposed to do.
There are two things that I really like about this post; being somewhat self-aware about the type of work that it’s trying to do, and also this specific attempt.
That is, contra nsheppard, I do see this as trying to do the hard work of translation, not in the sense of demonstrating that the original author meant what is rendered here in English (as, say, lsusr’s translation of ‘Sunzi’s <<Methods of War>>’ tries to do), but in the sense of attempting to regenerate the same underlying concept in a new environment. What dependencies can be used, and which can’t? romeostevensit doesn’t attempt to explain causation, locus of control, or cognitive behavior therapy, and just causally refers to them, as they are assumable here, and he carefully spells out the phrase “unpleasant mental contents that don’t seem to serve any purpose.” Perhaps it should be called something like ‘recompilation’ instead of ‘translation’, but I think this sort of thing is an important method of rationality [like moses’s comment here, I think one of the ways in which rationalists are better than skeptics is in having less of their allergy to woo].
My personal relationship to meditation is somewhat strange—lifelong sleep onset insomnia gave me something like an involuntary self-taught meditation practice. So not only am I unfamiliar with many of the traditional meditation terms, I’m also unfamiliar with many of the experiences of problems of the normal student or avoider of meditation. This makes it hard for me to tell whether or not this post helped anyone defragment their minds; for me, it mostly helped me frame why I hadn’t gotten much out of my few attempts to deliberately meditate, by giving me a clearer conceptualization of what that meditation was supposed to do.