The question of whether meditation works for everyone is a contention between schools spanning thousands of years. The strong version of the claim ‘it works if you do it right’ is obviously unfalsifiable for no true Scotsman fallacy reasons. There are heavy selection effects on what you hear about meditation, so backing good data out of that shouldn’t be assumed. I don’t think people who aren’t getting anything out of it should force themselves to do it ‘virtuously’, insight meditation is not a case of grinding it out ime. No regular insights, try something else, maybe something that looks a lot more like western psychotherapy if that’s getting you better results per unit of investment.
Buddhism doesn’t engage directly much with a bunch of epistemic and ontological questions that are raised if we assume that it works the way the people it works for say it does (disclaimer: for those unfamiliar I am such a person). This includes things like whether the mental events in question are created vs discovered. Buddhism generally presents these things as discovery of pre existing patterns, but it’s not clear how one would occupy an epistemic position to distinguish that. There are also correlations that are concerning whereby it’s difficult to tell if on average such practices actually make people’s epistemics worse as it seems to have the ‘excessive openness’ side effect hallmarks that we also see with a substantial number of psychedelic users. At the very least it doesn’t seem to make people’s epistemics notably better, which I consider a direct problem for some common claims about insights leading one to a ‘more true understanding of reality.’
Meditation is not a panacea in the same way that unsupported psychedelic use is not, despite similar claims by users of each that it is. I generally support treating them similarly, ie this is something that will create some plasticity along some surprising dimensions, this is not an unalloyed/fully asymmetric or monotonic good. You should, again similarly to psychedelics, expect people pushing it as such to have agendas ranging from the deluded but mostly harmless to active cult recruitment.
All that said, I would be incredibly happy to see more epistemically grounded discussion of such practices occurring. I’m looking to record more conversations and am especially interested in what sorts of discussion topics and questions people would most like to see. I think critical takes are often much more interesting and generative to think about.
Some miscellaneous maybe useful things:
The question of whether meditation works for everyone is a contention between schools spanning thousands of years. The strong version of the claim ‘it works if you do it right’ is obviously unfalsifiable for no true Scotsman fallacy reasons. There are heavy selection effects on what you hear about meditation, so backing good data out of that shouldn’t be assumed. I don’t think people who aren’t getting anything out of it should force themselves to do it ‘virtuously’, insight meditation is not a case of grinding it out ime. No regular insights, try something else, maybe something that looks a lot more like western psychotherapy if that’s getting you better results per unit of investment.
Buddhism doesn’t engage directly much with a bunch of epistemic and ontological questions that are raised if we assume that it works the way the people it works for say it does (disclaimer: for those unfamiliar I am such a person). This includes things like whether the mental events in question are created vs discovered. Buddhism generally presents these things as discovery of pre existing patterns, but it’s not clear how one would occupy an epistemic position to distinguish that. There are also correlations that are concerning whereby it’s difficult to tell if on average such practices actually make people’s epistemics worse as it seems to have the ‘excessive openness’ side effect hallmarks that we also see with a substantial number of psychedelic users. At the very least it doesn’t seem to make people’s epistemics notably better, which I consider a direct problem for some common claims about insights leading one to a ‘more true understanding of reality.’
Meditation is not a panacea in the same way that unsupported psychedelic use is not, despite similar claims by users of each that it is. I generally support treating them similarly, ie this is something that will create some plasticity along some surprising dimensions, this is not an unalloyed/fully asymmetric or monotonic good. You should, again similarly to psychedelics, expect people pushing it as such to have agendas ranging from the deluded but mostly harmless to active cult recruitment.
All that said, I would be incredibly happy to see more epistemically grounded discussion of such practices occurring. I’m looking to record more conversations and am especially interested in what sorts of discussion topics and questions people would most like to see. I think critical takes are often much more interesting and generative to think about.