any time there exists an activity that is (a) often but not always beneficial, (b) the supposed benefit is high status, and (c) the success of which is nontrivial to verify, then there will exist a bunch of people walking around who do the thing, and haven’t actually gained the intended benefit; nonetheless, they go around claiming the status benefits of doing the thing. often, they even genuinely believe they got the benefit. some examples:
reading difficult books can make you more wise and thoughtful, but it’s very easy to do it wrong and not really understand and of it, and so lots of people read difficult books and try to claim the associated status of wisdom without actually gaining any.
doing a college degree can make you more competent, but it’s also very easy to kinda bullshit an entire degree and learn surprisingly little. so there are many people who claim the status of having done a good education who are utterly incompetent.
doing meditation/inner work can make you a more emotionally functional person, or it can just make you really delusional about yourself and make you a still-broken person who identifies as an emotionally intelligent person
even many of the zen koans bemoan practitioners of zen who go through the motions for many years and claim to be enlightened and yet are not truly enlightened
Many instances of this is just Goodhart’s Law—the thing that’s measurable (reading, degree, meditation) is divergent from the actual value (knowledge, wisdom, skills, emotional even-ness).
For any of these examples, how do you distinguish between them and my model of exercise (which you might disagree with and instead say is another example in the above), where just about any non-extreme but existent level of exercise is counterfactually a positive for your health? It’s easy to think of people who read difficult books but aren’t very wise or meditate but aren’t very emotionally stable (or just know you are one from direct experience lol) but the relevant comparator there would be the same person without the activity.
(Obviously there’s the separate issue of fucking yourself up by meditating too hard, or exercising too hard, or basing your entire worldview on exactly one difficult book.)
any time there exists an activity that is (a) often but not always beneficial, (b) the supposed benefit is high status, and (c) the success of which is nontrivial to verify, then there will exist a bunch of people walking around who do the thing, and haven’t actually gained the intended benefit; nonetheless, they go around claiming the status benefits of doing the thing. often, they even genuinely believe they got the benefit. some examples:
reading difficult books can make you more wise and thoughtful, but it’s very easy to do it wrong and not really understand and of it, and so lots of people read difficult books and try to claim the associated status of wisdom without actually gaining any.
doing a college degree can make you more competent, but it’s also very easy to kinda bullshit an entire degree and learn surprisingly little. so there are many people who claim the status of having done a good education who are utterly incompetent.
doing meditation/inner work can make you a more emotionally functional person, or it can just make you really delusional about yourself and make you a still-broken person who identifies as an emotionally intelligent person
even many of the zen koans bemoan practitioners of zen who go through the motions for many years and claim to be enlightened and yet are not truly enlightened
https://ashidakim.com/zenkoans/6noloving-kindness.html
https://ashidakim.com/zenkoans/11thestoryofshunkai.html
Many instances of this is just Goodhart’s Law—the thing that’s measurable (reading, degree, meditation) is divergent from the actual value (knowledge, wisdom, skills, emotional even-ness).
For any of these examples, how do you distinguish between them and my model of exercise (which you might disagree with and instead say is another example in the above), where just about any non-extreme but existent level of exercise is counterfactually a positive for your health? It’s easy to think of people who read difficult books but aren’t very wise or meditate but aren’t very emotionally stable (or just know you are one from direct experience lol) but the relevant comparator there would be the same person without the activity.
(Obviously there’s the separate issue of fucking yourself up by meditating too hard, or exercising too hard, or basing your entire worldview on exactly one difficult book.)