I think you may have just sold me “by demonstration” :-)
You took my references to “sunk costs” through to mercilessly harsh criticism of yourself (yes, kind of to the point of a strawman) without apparently flinching at all. And when you quoted my numbered arguments that amounted to “pretend these appeals won’t move me, then what?” (nailing me on the fourth noble truth with respect to other people in the process), I sort of cringed in precisely the way that I imagine you’re talking about when you said:
My former self of two year ago continuously looks like an elephant in porcelain store (Dutch idiom; don’t remember if American use it). I can expect to cringe at the blind, egoistic sinner I am now if I keep up meditation.
Except, of course, my “self-reflective cringe-inducing period length” was a day (plus you holding up the mirror) rather than the two year period that you mentioned. The implication seems to be that I’m not self reflective enough to avoid cringe-inducing stumbles on even this small length of time :-/
At this point I have one more question (plus I’ll send to a PM after this): How do you pragmatically handle being surrounded by people with substantially less emotional and intellectual self control than yourself?
I imagine that your self control lets you, to some degree, decide how to feel about social interactions, but I would guess that many people could be annoyed by your unflappability unless you did something weird like “pretending to lose control” every so often. I’d be worried that if I developed a similar ability, people might interpret my equanimity as arrogance, or something similar.
Or another potential social hiccup: The “honest judgment of your eyes” seems like something that might cause people with poor self esteem or a measure of guilt to avoid you (as though you radiated an ugh field?) because your presence leads them to imagine themselves as they imagine that you see them, while not feeling that they even have the ability to repair the flaws thereby revealed. If they avoid you, the data wouldn’t be in front of you to detect or fix.
Or another way of getting at the concern would be to ask how—if you successfully hold yourself to a standard that prevents you from retrospectively cringing at years distant behavior—how do you deal with the implicit threat to other people via the logic of social loafing?
These kinds of social difficulties seem like major worries when I ponder the kinds of self improvement that you are displaying. If I infer that several years of vipassana meditation could help to develop similar levels of self control, I would want to know before beginning that I wasn’t setting myself up for some kind of social pariah status from which I may not be able to retreat.
These kinds of social difficulties seem like major worries when I ponder the kinds of self improvement that you are displaying. If I infer that several years of vipassana meditation could help to develop similar levels of self control, I would want to know before beginning that I wasn’t setting myself up for some kind of social pariah status from which I may not be able to retreat.
If you are worried that improving your mental functioning could impose costs you do not want to pay, should you not also at least be asking yourself whether your present mental functioning is already too far advanced beyond optimum, and whether you should be taking some equivalent of stupid pills to dumb yourself down to such optimal level? How likely is it that you just happen to right now be at the optimal point without ever having tried to optimise for it?
ETA: Personally, I’m with Stefan King on this. More clarity and damn the consequences.
I still sort of feel like I’m hunting for a really practical “cashing out” of the benefits I guess.
My turn to list some benefits:
A sense that more is possible: a greater appreciation of mindspace, and better knowing what it’s like to not have all of your thoughts and emotions bent by needless affective judgment.
Being more the person I want to be. (Especially for the 30 minutes after meditating, but also in life generally; though I’ve been leveling up pretty fast lately so it’s hard to attribute my better general dispositions to meditation per se.)
As a cause and effect of both points above, wanting to be more the person I want to be: trying harder to be awesome. No, not trying: just being awesome. Actually thinking hard for hours at a time instead of just having my thoughts lazily drift around hypothetical scenarios or transient environmental factors. Actually striking up conversations with cute girls when I go out. Creating a framework for reasoning about the effective acquisition of meta-level dispositions for acquiring new and awesome skills and dipositions. Establishing goals and targets, creating a path for myself so that I can keep my growth going, hopefully in recursive fashion. Fluidly and reliably going meta and then connecting my meta-optimizations to my actual next action. (I think telling people to ‘just fucking do it’ as a general rule is damaging: a lot of effort is wasted on suboptimal work. Meta-optimization is always a better call if you can do it right.)
Not flinching away from thoughts or ideas. Internalizing the Litany of Tarski. (Not entirely; I think that’s an Enlightenment thing. But still, I’ve improved.)
Gaining an appreciation of the cognitively low-level existence of confirmation bias.
Gaining an appreciation of the constance and strength of affective bias.
I’ve noticed that going meta (which I take to mean thinking or intuiting about whether what I’m doing makes sense in terms of my goals in such as way as to lead to appropriate action) is a distinct mental state.
I’m not sure where to go with that except to ask whether it seems that way to other people, and for any further thoughts on the subject.
That’s interesting; I’ve found myself to be quite groggy for at least the few minutes after meditating. Takes me a little while to get back into the real world. But I’m also still new at this.
del
The American idiom is “bull in a china shop”. I don’t know whether it’s the same in British English.
I think you may have just sold me “by demonstration” :-)
You took my references to “sunk costs” through to mercilessly harsh criticism of yourself (yes, kind of to the point of a strawman) without apparently flinching at all. And when you quoted my numbered arguments that amounted to “pretend these appeals won’t move me, then what?” (nailing me on the fourth noble truth with respect to other people in the process), I sort of cringed in precisely the way that I imagine you’re talking about when you said:
Except, of course, my “self-reflective cringe-inducing period length” was a day (plus you holding up the mirror) rather than the two year period that you mentioned. The implication seems to be that I’m not self reflective enough to avoid cringe-inducing stumbles on even this small length of time :-/
At this point I have one more question (plus I’ll send to a PM after this): How do you pragmatically handle being surrounded by people with substantially less emotional and intellectual self control than yourself?
I imagine that your self control lets you, to some degree, decide how to feel about social interactions, but I would guess that many people could be annoyed by your unflappability unless you did something weird like “pretending to lose control” every so often. I’d be worried that if I developed a similar ability, people might interpret my equanimity as arrogance, or something similar.
Or another potential social hiccup: The “honest judgment of your eyes” seems like something that might cause people with poor self esteem or a measure of guilt to avoid you (as though you radiated an ugh field?) because your presence leads them to imagine themselves as they imagine that you see them, while not feeling that they even have the ability to repair the flaws thereby revealed. If they avoid you, the data wouldn’t be in front of you to detect or fix.
Or another way of getting at the concern would be to ask how—if you successfully hold yourself to a standard that prevents you from retrospectively cringing at years distant behavior—how do you deal with the implicit threat to other people via the logic of social loafing?
These kinds of social difficulties seem like major worries when I ponder the kinds of self improvement that you are displaying. If I infer that several years of vipassana meditation could help to develop similar levels of self control, I would want to know before beginning that I wasn’t setting myself up for some kind of social pariah status from which I may not be able to retreat.
If you are worried that improving your mental functioning could impose costs you do not want to pay, should you not also at least be asking yourself whether your present mental functioning is already too far advanced beyond optimum, and whether you should be taking some equivalent of stupid pills to dumb yourself down to such optimal level? How likely is it that you just happen to right now be at the optimal point without ever having tried to optimise for it?
ETA: Personally, I’m with Stefan King on this. More clarity and damn the consequences.
del
My turn to list some benefits:
A sense that more is possible: a greater appreciation of mindspace, and better knowing what it’s like to not have all of your thoughts and emotions bent by needless affective judgment.
Being more the person I want to be. (Especially for the 30 minutes after meditating, but also in life generally; though I’ve been leveling up pretty fast lately so it’s hard to attribute my better general dispositions to meditation per se.)
As a cause and effect of both points above, wanting to be more the person I want to be: trying harder to be awesome. No, not trying: just being awesome. Actually thinking hard for hours at a time instead of just having my thoughts lazily drift around hypothetical scenarios or transient environmental factors. Actually striking up conversations with cute girls when I go out. Creating a framework for reasoning about the effective acquisition of meta-level dispositions for acquiring new and awesome skills and dipositions. Establishing goals and targets, creating a path for myself so that I can keep my growth going, hopefully in recursive fashion. Fluidly and reliably going meta and then connecting my meta-optimizations to my actual next action. (I think telling people to ‘just fucking do it’ as a general rule is damaging: a lot of effort is wasted on suboptimal work. Meta-optimization is always a better call if you can do it right.)
Not flinching away from thoughts or ideas. Internalizing the Litany of Tarski. (Not entirely; I think that’s an Enlightenment thing. But still, I’ve improved.)
Gaining an appreciation of the cognitively low-level existence of confirmation bias.
Gaining an appreciation of the constance and strength of affective bias.
I’ve noticed that going meta (which I take to mean thinking or intuiting about whether what I’m doing makes sense in terms of my goals in such as way as to lead to appropriate action) is a distinct mental state.
I’m not sure where to go with that except to ask whether it seems that way to other people, and for any further thoughts on the subject.
That’s interesting; I’ve found myself to be quite groggy for at least the few minutes after meditating. Takes me a little while to get back into the real world. But I’m also still new at this.