Thank you for your article. It’s very brave of you to share.
At the risk of either saying the obvious to some people and comically missing the point to others, I should mention that I don’t think the dynamics here plausibly lead to good research progress on AI safety, or indeed good research progress or progress in most intellectual tasks in general. I think this is extremely overdetermined but just to briefly summarize my models:
I’m pretty skeptical that the environment you describe leads to research progress, or long-term positive impact construed broadly
I think some people might counterargue that what MAPLE teaches is “wisdom” or “oneness” or “enlightenment” rather than research skills or outputs
I’m just pretty skeptical that the environment makes people wiser?
the environment you describe just seems like almost the opposite of what I’d expect to yield fruitful research progress?
Directed, unfree, even coerced regimes can sometimes lead to narrow areas of research progress but a) AI alignment probably doesn’t look like that and b) in even those situations operational day-to-day autonomy and content-level autonomy tend to be very high in comparison (you can’t criticize the Party’s politics but you should be able to criticize the Party’s physics)
In general, intellectual progress is made by people who are intellectually free, healthy, sleep well-ish, and have a strong internal locus of agency.
Analogies of high-demand groups to the military or very dictatorial startups don’t move me because the mindsets you need to be a good fighting unit or to move quickly on B2B SaaS Sales are not the same as the ones you need to make important conceptual breakthroughs.
I think there *might* be some difficult intellectual tasks that can be done well on a highly-directed and autonomy-sacrificing regime. Eg maybe some types of engineering, tasks that are very high on pattern recognition like radiology or chess, or “number-go-up” ML. But I really don’t think AI alignment or AI macrostrategy look anything like this.
sometimes research insights are made by whole and healthy people, sometimes by really weird brains with their own idiosyncratic scars, but importantly I think highly locally coerced brilliance rarely yields impressive intellectual outcomes.
Sleep deprivation in general is an obvious own-goal if you’re trying to get people to make research progress.
Occasional sleep deprivation is okay if they’re rare and self-directed, eg if somebody is in the middle of a breakthrough and high-energy.
But there’s no excuse for forcing sleep deprivation on others.
As a prior, people often offer a false dilemma of “you gotta sell your soul because our cause is Good and Just enough.”
In almost all cases this is a false dilemma. Selling your soul doesn’t lead to achieving the goals of your cause.
Be very suspicious of people who demand this.
The idea that “AI safety is important, therefore you should listen to our cult leader, sacrifice your autonomy, and do these insane stereotypically culty things” is risible.
We should have a strong prior against this being true, and I don’t think we have strong direct evidence for this hypothesis being true, and indeed plenty of evidence against.
As a prior, people often offer a false dilemma of “you gotta sell your soul because our cause is Good and Just enough.”
Indeed, this is one of the central engines of abuse / cults. It’s spiritual pyrite: You identify what the mark deeply wants; present yourself / your group as providing it; and then when the mark has any thought patterns you don’t like, you frame those as being against their goal of getting what they deeply want.
This all should be perfectly obvious for everyone, and I weep for the rationalist community that it is not.
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And sorry for saying this over and over again, but religion fucks up your mind, and yes that includes the fucking Buddhism. How much of the abuse described in the article would be tolerated if people didn’t on some level believe that this evil sociopathic fucker has some kind of greater powers or higher wisdom?
If I just introduced myself as a random Joe and demanded your perfect obedience, etc., would you do it just as willingly? (If yes, I should probably quit my job and move to Bay Area.) Why is it different if someone keeps making religious claims, that everyone who had read the Sequences should know are complete bullshit?
There are people in the rationalist community who already meditate for a decade. Have you already achieved your promised mental superpowers? (No, you did not. If you believe you did, show me the results. Any drug junkie can claim to have higher wisdom, but the outside view says the opposite.) If not, how many more decades will it take until you choose to say oops. It does not work. It is a scam, literally older than feudalism. You still keep falling for it. And you call yourself rationalists. Are you people completely nuts? If someone has a bridge to sell you, it doesn’t matter that it is an invisible spiritual bridge, the result is always the same.
And if a guy already tells you that he is evil (calls himself a dictator, requires perfect obedience, tells you that hurting 100% of his followers is acceptable, and dreams about exterminating humanity), why can’t you fucking believe it, if you are so willing to believe everything else that he says?
Oh, and he communicates with a machine god in his dreams. Come on, aspiring rationalists, aspire higher!
EDIT:
Soryu has stated one of the main purposes of MAPLE was to extricate the evil ideologies of humanism and materialism from residents’ minds and replace them with Soryu’s trustworthy ideology.
Nice, Soryu agrees that his ideology is actively hostile to values of the rationalist community.
There’s certainly versions of Buddhism that can fuck up your mind, and Soryu’s version certainly sounds like one, but you’re painting too broad of a brush. Nothing in the Sequences is really an argument against many of the Westernized versions of Buddhism that have had the supernatural stuff stripped out of them. (Or if there’s really fragrantly violating basic rationalist principles there, people haven’t really pointed that out on the various occasions when I’ve posted my interpretations of Buddhist models.)
I find it weird that if I made a similar argument for Christianity (that if we strip it of the supernatural stuff, what remains are often beneficial lessons, therefore rationalists should embrace such version), people would probably start screaming at me that (1) even the non-supernatural parts are a mix of good and bad things, and sorting it out would be too much work, so it is better to start from zero instead and only adopt the provable good stuff, one piece after another, after serious examination, and (2) that human minds do not work that way; that even embracing the Christianity-without-the-supernatural too much will lead you to reading religious texts with certain connotations, and soon you will find yourself believing things that you have no rational reason to believe.
But suggest the same for Buddhism and suddenly it becomes a rational thing to do.
By the way, to get Buddhism-without-the-supernatural, we first have to agree on what the supernatural is. I mean, reincarnation seems like one of the core concepts of Buddhism, so… does your favorite version contain it, or reject it as nonsense? (Or treat it as a metaphor for… genealogy, or something?) Does it not concern you that the other ideas are coming from the same source? Wouldn’t it make more sense to abandon the entire project as hopelessly epistemically contaminated, and start from scratch instead? For example, to experiment with deep breathing, etc., without having the bottom line already written? To embrace evidence with the same lightness whether it agrees or disagrees with the Buddhist scriptures?
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But the thing I was actually trying to do here is something like the “five whys” technique.
So the situation we got here is that there is an organization that seems quite abusive. How do I even know that it exists? Because once in a while someone mentions it on LessWrong.
Okay, so why would anyone mention MAPLE on LessWrong? I mean, there are many religious organizations out there, abusive or not. What makes this one so special that it keeps coming to my attention, even if I am not especially interested in monasteries on the other side of the planet. Seems like the answer is that because some people see it somehow compatible with the rationalist community.
Okay, why, out of all the religious organizations that exist on this planet, some people see specifically MAPLE as somehow related to the rationalist community. (As opposed to e.g. some Hare Krishna group, that I suppose also exist in the Bay Area.) I do not see the details clearly, but seems to me that there basically some members of the rationalist community are vouching for them.
Okay, but why do we take some members of the rationalist community vouching for a Buddhist monastery seriously? I mean, if someone in the community tried to vouch for a Hare Krishna group, the most likely result would be that people would laugh at them, instead of saying “yeah, if these specific Hare Krishna guys says that their prayers can protect us from the apocalypse, I guess their goals are generally compatible with the goals of the rationalist community, even if we disagree on some specific details of their epistemology”. No, people would just laugh. So why are they not laughing at the idea of a Buddhist monastery being somehow rationality-adjacent.
In my opinion… simply because it is Buddhist, and because some people are spreading the meme that Buddhism is somehow rational. More than just “you can abandon 99% of Buddhism and make something rational out of the remaining 1%”, because you could do the same thing with e.g. Freud, but that Buddhism is somehow inherently much closer to rationality. Hare Krishna is low status in the rationalist community, Freud is low status, Christianity is low status, Buddhism is high status… essentially because it is a fargroup instead of outgroup. Christianity is a religion of your boring parents, Buddhism is a religion of your cool friends. (Somewhere on a different part of the planet, people are producing anime that depicts boring Buddhist priests, and a cool Pope who is a young guy with a big sword riding a dragon.)
I try to get to the route of the cause. When a guy comes knocking on your door telling you that he has a deep wisdom that can save the world (as long as you start obeying him and stop questioning him), there is absolutely no reason to assign him higher credibility if he is a Buddhist, than if he was a Hare Krishna or Catholic or Scientologist leader. But the average Bay Area rationalist will take him more seriously, will perceive spiritual claims associated with Buddhism as more plausible, and that makes me endlessly frustrated. This used to be an atheist website, where people were skeptical about things! Including washed-down versions of religion, such as “belief in belief” etc.
I am curious about your answer to why would ever a rationalist consider a group such as MAPLE to be somehow more credible than… an analogical organization of a different religion.
EDIT:
To put it shortly: What kind of mental gymnastics makes people in the rationalist community believe that “I should join a religious monastery for a few weeks” is a rational course of action?
My answer: because we are taught by association that things related to Buddhism are somehow adjacent to rationality. I want to push back against that.
For example, to experiment with deep breathing, etc., without having the bottom line already written? To embrace evidence with the same lightness whether it agrees or disagrees with the Buddhist scriptures?
Well, that was kind of the route that got me convinced there is something to Buddhism. The exact events happened too long ago for me recall accurately, but at some point the state of my beliefs was something like…
“Well, there seems to be science saying that meditation is beneficial. But all of these Buddhist claims about our suffering being created by a belief in a self and so on are weird. They seem like the claims of a weird religion with no understanding of psychology. But I’m told meditation is beneficial, so let me try it.”
So I did do something relatively neutral like following the breath that did not obviously seem related to those weird claims at all. But when I did that, I noticed stuff in my mind that seemed like the kind of thing that the Buddhists had been talking about, and I was like “huh, maybe they’re not totally crazy”.
And then there were various events like “my friend who I’d known since we were both teenagers and who was always quite rational and sensible found a book describing something called jhanas that was derived from old Buddhist teaching, and then he told me that he followed the meditation instructions there and started getting the kinds of mind-states that were described there, so I concluded that apparently this checks out and then later I became friends with many other people who could do jhanas as well”. (And even managed a jhana a couple of times myself, though I seem to have various psychological blockers around it that make it hard for me personally.)
And at some point if you repeatedly have the experience of “hey, there’s this Buddhist-influenced writing that claims that you can achieve an X type of mind state by doing these specific kinds of practices, and then eventually you either have that mind state yourself or talk to trustworthy-seeming people who vouch that the descriptions are legit and might also demonstrate it behaviorally”… then at some point it seems to make sense to update to “okay so maybe I should just assume that the Buddhists are correct in their claims about how the mind works and how it can be transformed”.
Could one do the same without looking into Buddhist writing? Sure, and not every Buddhist sect will even give you any theory, preferring to just have you do the meditation practices yourself! But for any skill, it’s usually beneficial to have guidance from someone more experienced who can point out what you’re doing wrong, suggest remedial techniques to fix your weak points, keep you motivated by letting you know what the fruits of the practice might be, etc. Also some practices are more risky than others, so it’s good to have someone who can make sure you’re not hurting yourself, or to warn you about any practices or stages in the process that are known to be rough.
Kind of like exercise, where you can totally just do running etc. on your own without consulting any accumulated knowledge, but many people still find beneficial to consult some physical trainer sometimes. And if they wanted to train really seriously, then it would probably be risky to never consult anyone with more accumulated knowledge.
Also, if you are interested in figuring out a serious understanding of the mind and you feel that your experienced repeatedly comes to agree with Buddhist models of the mind, then it makes sense to try to look at some of those models and see if they could improve your own theoretical understanding.
As for reincarnation, there’s some things that I could treat it as an analogy for, but mostly none of the meditation instructions I’ve found to make sense nor the teachers who I trust ever mention it. So the concept of it seems irrelevant to me and my interpretation of Buddhism.
And all of this seems pretty disanalogous to Christianity. Lots of atheists have the experience of meditating and finding that oh, this seems to trigger stuff exactly like the kind of thing that’s described in various Buddhist sources. Not many atheists, say, try to pray and find that God is answering those prayers by sending miracles their way. (Though, some Christian mystical traditions do have practice instructions and maps of progress that are quite similar to the Buddhist ones, and produce similar results.)
You seem to reduce Christianity to praying, and Buddhism to exploring mental states, which is basically comparing a layman’s version of Christianity to a nerdy version of Buddhism… and of course, in such comparison, Buddhism comes out as the intellectual one.
But there is also a layman’s version of Buddhism, which includes praying “Namo Amida Butsu” a lot, and giving money to monks in order to gain merit. And there is also a nerdy version of Christianity, containing self-exploration and self-improvement, such as the writings of the Desert Fathers, or the spiritual exercises of St. Ignatius of Loyola; the seven capital (mental) sins, and how to overcome them.
(Perhaps some rationalists should participate in a Jesuit retreat, to learn how to overcome procrastination, so that they can become more productive at saving the world from the AI.)
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In the things that you describe, it seems to me like you are mixing together two different kinds of statements… not entirely unrelated, but also not one straightforwardly implying the other.
One claim is that the Buddhist tradition has accumulated a lot of expertize at exploring mental states. People who can sit motionless for hours without getting bored, and who can summon feelings of great bliss on command just by using the right kind of mental muscles. I do not doubt that. And it’s cool.
My skepticism is about the implied claim that this is a good use of one’s time. For the religious kind of Buddhist, the math would be obvious—you leave your previous life as a peasant, which probably sucked; you spend your remaining days begging and meditating; and if you do it right, you can save yourself countless reincarnations, many of them extremely unpleasant—yep, totally worth it.
For an atheist from a first-world country, the math is different. Your life is probably kinda okay, you do not believe in afterlife or magic superpowers, so the benefits include cool insights, a form of therapy, maybe a productivity boost; and the cost is the amount of time you have to spend meditating. For some people it is still worth it, but I expect that for some it is not, even if they did everything exactly the right way—the therapy they could receive elsewhere (if we assume a highly competent meditation teacher, we might as well assume a highly competent therapist), the productivity boost is balanced by the time spent meditating and at retreats, and the cool insights...
Well, this is the other group of claims, that the accumulated expertize of Buddhism makes its psychological claims trustworthy (unlike their claims about reincarnation, sex advice, etc). That if you achieve experimental outcomes, then the underlying theory must be correct. Empiricism, isn’t it?
My problem with this is that I also know people who claim getting experimental results from praying to God, or doing magic. Not in the sense of “a miracle happened, and a pile of money appeared on my table”, but in the sense of “God gave me the ability to persevere where otherwise I would have given up” or “God gave me the strength to overcome my bad habits” or “I kept visualizing the success and doing the rituals, and I also worked hard on my project, and after a few years I have succeeded”.
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One more thing that rubs me the wrong way is that I do not remember seeing anyone put an upper bound to the benefits of meditation (and Buddhism in general). I would like to see someone in the rationalist community say “meditation can help you do X, Y, Z, and that is all it is good for”, and other rationalists agree with it. Make the list of the claims as long as you want, but make it finite. A finite list can be explored, one item at a time. I am not comfortable with keeping the list unbounded.
Why is this so important for me? First, if you make it a ratchet, if it is socially okay to make claims of “meditation helps at X” but not claims of “meditation does not help at Y”, then the list of claims will only grow after time, as the people get used to the old ones, and won’t object too hard against the new ones that are only one step further away. Specifically, I would be happy to hear at least one statement of the kind “Buddhists used to believe, a decade or two ago, that meditation helps at Z, but science shows that it is not true”. Because I find it unlikely that they never make a mistake, which makes it suspicious that I never hear about one when Buddhism/meditation is discussed among the rationalists.
Second, you can’t do the math for “is spending 1000 or 10000 hours meditating worth the results?” properly, if the cost is finite, but the benefits are potentially unlimited.
(And you can notice how for people who still on some level believe in magic, the math comes out systematically better than for people who don’t. So you should expect them to be overrepresented.)
EDIT:
Doing the math properly becomes more important when you include the probability of ending up in an abusive group. Even if most Buddhist groups are harmless, their intensity probably correlates with the harm they can do, and the taking-ideas-seriously rationalists may be more attracted to those.
Yes, if we’re talking about some of the more mystical practices within Christianity, then many of those do seem potentially valuable to explore. Many of the Christian mystic practices converge with ones from Buddhism and other religions, which is nice independent validation that they seem to be doing something beneficial and also a sign that you can just adopt the practices without any of the more religious metaphysics, given that religions with drastically differing metaphysics have similar practices.
My skepticism is about the implied claim that this is a good use of one’s time. [...] For some people it is still worth it, but I expect that for some it is not, even if they did everything exactly the right way—the therapy they could receive elsewhere (if we assume a highly competent meditation teacher, we might as well assume a highly competent therapist), the productivity boost is balanced by the time spent meditating and at retreats, and the cool insights...
I agree that a universal claim of “this is worth everyone’s time” is wrong, and that it’s worth it for some people and not others. I myself haven’t spend very much time meditating in the last several years, because other things have felt more valuable for me right now.
That if you achieve experimental outcomes, then the underlying theory must be correct
Well, that’s a bit strong—I wouldn’t say it must be correct, any experimental outcome is compatible with an infinite number of explanatory theories. But it’s certainly evidence in favor of the underlying theory being correct enough to be useful.
My problem with this is that I also know people who claim getting experimental results from praying to God, or doing magic. Not in the sense of “a miracle happened, and a pile of money appeared on my table”, but in the sense of “God gave me the ability to persevere where otherwise I would have given up” or “God gave me the strength to overcome my bad habits” or “I kept visualizing the success and doing the rituals, and I also worked hard on my project, and after a few years I have succeeded”.
I’m not sure I understand what connection you’re drawing. Are these people also saying that their experiences vindicate some particular theory about how the mind works?
One more thing that rubs me the wrong way is that I do not remember seeing anyone put an upper bound to the benefits of meditation (and Buddhism in general). I would like to see someone in the rationalist community say “meditation can help you do X, Y, Z, and that is all it is good for”, and other rationalists agree with it. Make the list of the claims as long as you want, but make it finite. A finite list can be explored, one item at a time. I am not comfortable with keeping the list unbounded.
That’s fair. I don’t want to commit to a definite list on the spot, but things that I’d personally say off the top of my head:
Things meditation can do:
Make you happier
Give you a source of okayness/pleasure that’s independent of circumstances
Make you more aware of subconscious motivations and other subconscious material
Align your behavior more with your endorsed values rather than momentary feelings/cravings
Also, meditation can fuck you up in various ways, but I assume you’re more interested in me listing the positives.
Things meditation can’t do:
Give you supernatural powers
Give you any knowledge that isn’t otherwise causally available for your mind (if you never studied physics, you’re not going to learn it by meditating)
Generally affect anything outside your mind that your mind doesn’t have an effect on (so it might make people like you more—or less! - by changing your behavior and demeanor, but it won’t affect people who never interact with you, nor inanimate objects that are the same regardless of how your mind is)
Fix all of your psychological problems
Eliminate negative feelings
Eliminate pain
Raise your general intelligence to any significant extent
Make you entirely free of bias
Make you always follow ethics perfectly
Make you into a pure saint who never experiences one selfish thought
Give you certainty about metaphysical claims
Let you know the fully correct action for some situation (except for some non-standard definitions of “fully correct”)
Substitute for your reasoning
Make you reason fully correctly
Make you aware of all your mental processes
Make you aware of all your motivations
Tell you what you want
Be able to observe pure reality without it being filtered through any concepts
Make you aware of certain dormant but easily wake-up-able motor pathways like the ones controlling the muscles around your ears.
This happened to me when I was 17ish, after a few years of playing around with meditation-y things, and in particular trying to focus my attention in the middle of my skull.
I’m not sure I understand what connection you’re drawing. Are these people also saying that their experiences vindicate some particular theory about how the mind works?
People who attribute their success to the Law of Attraction believe that it makes the Law of Attraction the correct theory about how the mind works. (The theory does not have many gears, but it is a theory.)
Thank you for the lists!
I notice that for some items in the list, I have also heard opposite evidence… I can’t find a link now, but someone complained that meditation reduced their ability to feel love and joy, so they stopped. I find it plausible that the practice has different people on different people, the question is how many of which. The list could in theory be a starting point to a series of experiments, if we could operationalize the statements.
People who attribute their success to the Law of Attraction believe that it makes the Law of Attraction the correct theory about how the mind works. (The theory does not have many gears, but it is a theory.)
I’d assume that the theory by itself is either so simple as to potentially be true (“visualizing my success will make more likely to work for it”—yeah sounds plausible?) or to have claims that seem implausible for some reason (“visualizing my success will cause magic to bring me what I want”—requires a supernatural magic so seems sus) . The Buddhist teachings I’m talking about don’t have anything that’d sound obviously implausible in the same way, they largely only talk about things that you can directly experience in your own mind.
I find it plausible that the practice has different people on different people
Oh definitely, and different techniques also have different effects—I included stuff from a number of different practices and I’d expect very few people to get all of these. You may not get much in the way of extra visualization abilities if you don’t do any visualization practices, for instance.
even the non-supernatural parts are a mix of good and bad things, and sorting it out would be too much work, so it is better to start from zero instead and only adopt the provable good stuff
Yeah, rationalists are liable to say this sort of thing, but I’m not so sanguine about their ability to avoid generating quite a few more piles of skulls given enough power. That’s not to say that I think that any other way forward commonly advocated these days is particularly promising either.
A general issue with the intense versions of Buddhist practices is that very often they are aimed at detaching / deconstructing / destroying / disavowing various elements of one’s mind / agency / values. Often these are important elements, and don’t necessarily automatically stay intact / regenerate themselves. This can have various good consequences, but also obviously by default has a bunch of bad consequences. Maybe there are good ways to do that (for example, by giving these elements space and other resources needed to reconfigure / regrow / reinterface / etc., in an appropriate dovetail with deconstruction). But my overwhelming impression, admittedly in most cases from shallow exposure, is that these practitioners either do not understand what they are doing, or think that this is a good thing to do, which it very obviously isn’t (similar to how suicide is very obviously not a good thing to do, with similar exceptions). (In defense of my conclusions even given shallow exposure: when I have tried engaging a bit more deeply, the background assumptions seem to be blatant, explicit, and strongly conditioning everything else; and the fruit of the tree seems often bad, ~never super impressive, and only mildly good when done in a non-standard, non-pressured, a la carte way.) Spiritual and social pressure towards these practices seems to be very often carried by unspoken assumptions of the obvious desirability of these things, preying on people’s desire for relief / escape / growth / evolution / self-understanding / calmness / etc.
(Not accusing you in particular of any of that, and I haven’t engaged with your work; it’s plausible to me you’re doing a thing that works well for you, and that others have similar results. But I do want to point at intense versions, including probably “Westernized versions of Buddhism that have had the supernatural stuff stripped out of them”.)
A general issue with the intense versions of Buddhist practices is that very often they are aimed at detaching / deconstructing / destroying / disavowing various elements of one’s mind / agency / values. Often these are important elements, and don’t necessarily automatically stay intact / regenerate themselves. This can have various good consequences, but also obviously by default has a bunch of bad consequences.
I think this is already latent in the entire concept of “liberation from suffering”. Pain is the signal of your body being damaged, to remove it is to invite the decay of accumulated unnoticed and unavoided damage. There’s a nearby thing that is good, which is to remove excessive pain which does not actually serve its purpose.
Likewise, suffering is the signal of your soul being damaged, and success inherently invites the decay of accumulated unnoticed and unavoided damage to your mind / agency / values and other parts of your soul. There’s again a nearby good thing, but it does not seem that Buddhism is aware of or aiming for it.
This is a known risk that comes up in the discussions of many Buddhist communities; “spiritual bypassing” is the standard term.
I think that suffering is a signal of internal conflict and that something is subtly (or not-so-subtly) going wrong in the mind’s internal processing; your soul being damaged, as you put it. Done well, Buddhist practices eliminate suffering not by interfering with that signal but paying attention to it such that the mind comes to see what exactly it’s doing to hurt itself and stops doing so.
So it’s less about “you stop suffering because you stop noticing when your soul is getting damaged” and more “you stop suffering because your soul stops damaging itself”.
But the mind is messy and refactoring fundamental parts of its operation can go wrong, and even if things go right there are phases where you may go backwards before you go forward again, and sometimes a person can get stuck in such a phase. So bad outcomes are certainly possible.
There will always be damage to your soul from living in the world (for at least as long as we are ordinary humans, and probably much beyond then). This is the primary purpose of suffering. The frame that suffering is always due to self-caused damage is part of the toxicity.
Things which damage your ability to act in the world, or your ability to maintain your body/self/character/values/image/environment. In my experience, suffering seems to be caused by the perception that damage of this nature is happening (particularly noticeable by paying attention to the sorts of things that are painful but do not cause suffering).
Hmm. Resolving this disagreement might require digging more deeply into our models of suffering than is worth going into, but it seems like a relevant data point that some advanced meditators report losing their ability to do things that could be interpreted as selling their soul. Which would seem to me at least compatible with a “meditation stops you from suffering by stopping the things that damage the soul” model (I expect that these people might suffer if they then were somehow forced to act against their values anyway).
What’s hard now is doing work I am not emotionally aligned with.It just doesn’t happen, and projects that aren’t aligned have fallen away from my life. In light of this, I’m lucky to have constructed a quirky professional life around my skills. If I hadn’t, then this could have been pretty disruptive.
It’s not that I don’t have the will to do things. It’s that my will is different. I feel plural, like my consciousness is an ongoing system, and that decisions arise from that system, rather than being dictated by a controlling ego. This is not so strange—it’s the loveliness of a normal flow state, when the human system is trusting itself rather than monitoring itself. But having it as the baseline—experiencing flow as your basic state, regardless of the simplicity or complexity of the task you’re engaged in—is wild.
I also recall reports from various people I know that they’ve lost the ability to tell lies (might say that their tongue would just freeze up) or to act in ways they feel are unethical.
I agree that there are techniques that have bad effects if used in the wrong or careless ways, as well as schools/teachers who might even endorse some of those wrong ways.
My experience, and the experience of various people I know who’ve done similar practices, is that the kinds of things that get destroyed are mostly just ones that are messing up the mind. And that many of the practices are essentially about enhancing the information that’s going into the brain’s existing processes for learning and reorganizing itself from feedback signals, so that it can better refactor and optimize its own activity.
This can certainly lead to some desires or values being changed or reprioritized. But the way I view it is that it’s less about deep values changing, and more about improved information processing changing things that were actually suboptimal or needlessly greedy strategies for trying to fulfill the deep values.
A shallow example would be the experience of many advanced meditators who end up drinking less alcohol as the experience of it becomes less pleasant. A practice like body scanning might train the brain to better process sensory information from different parts of the body, so that the negative effects of alcohol on the body are felt more strongly, so the brain starts downweighting the desire to drink in response to those feedback signals.
I think there are certainly some schools within Buddhism that fit the sutric description, but Chapman’s description of schools of Buddhism outside his own tends to feel a little strawmannish and tribalish to me.
I do agree that some, perhaps very significant, degree of renunciation is involved in advanced practice, but at least none of the teachers I follow have a “you should renounce the world because the world is bad and sensual pleasures are horrible” undertone to it. (For what it’s worth, Claude also flags those bits of Chapman’s “sutra vs. tantra” comparison table as ideologically motivated.)
My own interpretation is that many things are worth renouncing simply because they do not actually make you better off in the long term, and because there are states of mind that you can try to cultivate that feel better both for you and others. E.g. being filled with an experience of love toward all existence and that feeling drawing you to help others out of a genuine delight for their well-being feels ultimately more satisfying than spending the evening browsing Facebook.
Yeah, I wouldn’t expect his position to be popular, because he’s basically saying that in order to improve its marketability western Buddhism has discarded the “vibe” of total renunciation, while essentially maintaining the system of practices that had been developed with renunciative ends in mind. I don’t suppose that there’s an objective way to resolve this until substantial studies of the effects of these practices are conducted.
At least some things seem objectively checkable, e.g. Claude’s criticism of the elements of this page that say sutra considers pleasure bad and the body disgusting cites various existing Buddhist writings saying the opposite, and holds that these are practices sometimes given to correct specific problems, not general vibes or cosmology:
The ascetic strand is real, but it’s a prescription rather than a cosmology.
Aśubha-bhāvanā, the thirty-two parts of the body, the nine charnel-ground contemplations — these are all in the Pali canon, and they’re as unpleasant as advertised. But in their canonical setting they’re an antidote (Skt. pratipakṣa), prescribed for a specific ailment. The standard Theravāda pedagogy pairs temperament with technique: someone of lustful temperament gets the repulsiveness practices, someone of hating temperament gets mettā, and giving them the wrong one makes things worse. That’s a clinical logic, not a metaphysical one. The corresponding Abhidharma analysis of the world doesn’t say phenomena are corrupt; it says they’re conditioned, impermanent, and not-self. “Corrupt” imports a moral valence — a fallenness — that the Pali material doesn’t quite carry, which is telling given that the table’s ethics row explicitly reaches for Christianity as the comparison.
There’s also a striking bit of internal self-correction. The Vinaya (Pārājika 3) records that after the Buddha taught corpse contemplation to a group of monks and went into seclusion, a number of them became so disgusted with their bodies that they killed themselves or had themselves killed. On returning he replaced the instruction with ānāpānasati. Whatever the historicity, the tradition preserved a story in which the ascetic technique is explicitly marked as overdosable.
On pleasure specifically, the texts are more discriminating than “bad.”
There’s a formula that recurs constantly in the Nikāyas: for any object, the Buddha claims to understand its assāda (gratification), its ādīnava (danger), and the nissaraṇa (escape). The gratification is affirmed as real. The critique isn’t that sensual pleasure is illusory or wicked; it’s that it’s unreliable, self-renewing, and binding — you don’t get out by the door you came in.
And then the jhānas explicitly rehabilitate a class of pleasure. In the standard autobiographical passage, the Bodhisatta recalls the absorption he fell into as a child under the rose-apple tree and asks himself why he should be afraid of that pleasure — a pleasure with nothing to do with sensuality or unwholesome states — and concludes he shouldn’t be. Pīti and sukha are path factors, not fetters. The operative distinction is between kāma-sukha and nekkhamma-sukha, sensual versus renunciate happiness, not between pleasure and its absence. A tradition that considered pleasure simply bad would not have built its central meditative architecture out of graded degrees of bliss.
In Mahāyāna sūtra the shift is much larger.
Here the ascetic material is retained but demoted to neyārtha — provisional teaching, given to particular people in particular states. The Vimalakīrtinirdeśa has the Buddha touch the ground with his toe to reveal that this world already is a pure land and that the defect was in the seeing, not the seen. Nāgārjuna’s identification of the limit of saṃsāra with the limit of nirvāṇa is in the Mūlamadhyamakakārikā, not a tantra. The Lotus’s upāya framework makes the whole renunciate presentation a stage of instruction rather than a description of reality. Tathāgatagarbha literature locates the buddha in the being as it stands. None of this needs tantra to arrive.
Two qualifications, in fairness to Chapman.
First, some sutric traditions really do fit his column. Classical Pure Land runs on precisely the contrast between this defiled world and the pure one elsewhere; the Japanese term edo, “the defiled land,” is not a caricature of anything. That’s a major, populous, unambiguously sutric tradition whose whole affective register is world-weariness.
Second, my counter-examples from East Asia are partly compromised as evidence. Tendai hongaku thought — original enlightenment, the affirmation of phenomena as already the absolute — developed in a Japanese milieu saturated with mikkyō, and Tiantai/Tendai institutionally absorbed esoteric practice. So when Zen or Tendai sounds world-affirming, a defender of the table could reasonably say that’s tantric influence leaking into a nominally sutric container rather than sutrayāna generating the view on its own. I think Vimalakīrti and Nāgārjuna are cleaner cases, since they predate the tantras outright.
So the corrected version of the row would be something like: sutric traditions contain a large body of world-renouncing and body-disgust practice, deployed as a targeted corrective and grounded in impermanence rather than in the world’s inherent badness, alongside — in Mahāyāna especially — a countervailing set of teachings that locate awakening in the world as it is. Which is a much less quotable table cell, and a lot less useful if what you’re building is an argument that the other side has nothing you need.
I don’t think Chapman would disagree with this. According to the “yanas” page Buddhism-at-large in some sense allows several fundamentally contradictory worldviews without a firm commitment to an overarching cosmology. The free version of Claude says that this framework is pretty much standard Tibetan Buddhism.
Your Claude link doesn’t work for me, I think you haven’t remembered to share it (or at least that’s not the share URL).
If he agrees that it’s a practice rather than a part of the sutta worldview, then I think it’s pretty misleading to have a table that has these kinds of rows:
Your Claude link doesn’t work for me, I think you haven’t remembered to share it (or at least that’s not the share URL).
Sorry, should be fixed now.
If he agrees that it’s a practice rather than a part of the sutta worldview, then I think it’s pretty misleading to have a table that has these kinds of rows:
AIUI his point is that the worldview and practice are supposed to be a congruent package. Since renunciation is the fundamental principle of Sutra, the practitioner should occupy a state of mind where it makes sense to renounce undesirable stuff. I wouldn’t be surprised that various traditional Sutra schools significantly differ in their presentation, and agree that it’s misleading to imply homogeneity.
Sure, but my point is that renunciation with a world-hating vibe and renunciation with a world-loving vibe are very different! It’s “I will let go of pleasures that don’t serve me or the world because I’m in deep love with the world and its people and want to be a better vessel for universal love” versus “the world and everything in it sucks, ideally I’d commit suicide but my religion says that’s bad so instead I’ll go sit in a monastery to meditate for the rest of my existence”, and Chapman’s presentation strongly implies that all sutra would be the latter kind.
If he just said that “sutra is about renunciation” without trying to imply that sutric practice also has to be fundamentally anti-life and anti-pleasure, then that I wouldn’t object to.
Thank you for your article. It’s very brave of you to share.
At the risk of either saying the obvious to some people and comically missing the point to others, I should mention that I don’t think the dynamics here plausibly lead to good research progress on AI safety, or indeed good research progress or progress in most intellectual tasks in general. I think this is extremely overdetermined but just to briefly summarize my models:
I’m pretty skeptical that the environment you describe leads to research progress, or long-term positive impact construed broadly
I think some people might counterargue that what MAPLE teaches is “wisdom” or “oneness” or “enlightenment” rather than research skills or outputs
I’m just pretty skeptical that the environment makes people wiser?
the environment you describe just seems like almost the opposite of what I’d expect to yield fruitful research progress?
Directed, unfree, even coerced regimes can sometimes lead to narrow areas of research progress but a) AI alignment probably doesn’t look like that and b) in even those situations operational day-to-day autonomy and content-level autonomy tend to be very high in comparison (you can’t criticize the Party’s politics but you should be able to criticize the Party’s physics)
In general, intellectual progress is made by people who are intellectually free, healthy, sleep well-ish, and have a strong internal locus of agency.
Analogies of high-demand groups to the military or very dictatorial startups don’t move me because the mindsets you need to be a good fighting unit or to move quickly on B2B SaaS Sales are not the same as the ones you need to make important conceptual breakthroughs.
I think there *might* be some difficult intellectual tasks that can be done well on a highly-directed and autonomy-sacrificing regime. Eg maybe some types of engineering, tasks that are very high on pattern recognition like radiology or chess, or “number-go-up” ML. But I really don’t think AI alignment or AI macrostrategy look anything like this.
sometimes research insights are made by whole and healthy people, sometimes by really weird brains with their own idiosyncratic scars, but importantly I think highly locally coerced brilliance rarely yields impressive intellectual outcomes.
Sleep deprivation in general is an obvious own-goal if you’re trying to get people to make research progress.
Occasional sleep deprivation is okay if they’re rare and self-directed, eg if somebody is in the middle of a breakthrough and high-energy.
But there’s no excuse for forcing sleep deprivation on others.
As a prior, people often offer a false dilemma of “you gotta sell your soul because our cause is Good and Just enough.”
In almost all cases this is a false dilemma. Selling your soul doesn’t lead to achieving the goals of your cause.
Be very suspicious of people who demand this.
The idea that “AI safety is important, therefore you should listen to our cult leader, sacrifice your autonomy, and do these insane stereotypically culty things” is risible.
We should have a strong prior against this being true, and I don’t think we have strong direct evidence for this hypothesis being true, and indeed plenty of evidence against.
Indeed, this is one of the central engines of abuse / cults. It’s spiritual pyrite: You identify what the mark deeply wants; present yourself / your group as providing it; and then when the mark has any thought patterns you don’t like, you frame those as being against their goal of getting what they deeply want.
This all should be perfectly obvious for everyone, and I weep for the rationalist community that it is not.
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And sorry for saying this over and over again, but religion fucks up your mind, and yes that includes the fucking Buddhism. How much of the abuse described in the article would be tolerated if people didn’t on some level believe that this evil sociopathic fucker has some kind of greater powers or higher wisdom?
If I just introduced myself as a random Joe and demanded your perfect obedience, etc., would you do it just as willingly? (If yes, I should probably quit my job and move to Bay Area.) Why is it different if someone keeps making religious claims, that everyone who had read the Sequences should know are complete bullshit?
There are people in the rationalist community who already meditate for a decade. Have you already achieved your promised mental superpowers? (No, you did not. If you believe you did, show me the results. Any drug junkie can claim to have higher wisdom, but the outside view says the opposite.) If not, how many more decades will it take until you choose to say oops. It does not work. It is a scam, literally older than feudalism. You still keep falling for it. And you call yourself rationalists. Are you people completely nuts? If someone has a bridge to sell you, it doesn’t matter that it is an invisible spiritual bridge, the result is always the same.
And if a guy already tells you that he is evil (calls himself a dictator, requires perfect obedience, tells you that hurting 100% of his followers is acceptable, and dreams about exterminating humanity), why can’t you fucking believe it, if you are so willing to believe everything else that he says?
Oh, and he communicates with a machine god in his dreams. Come on, aspiring rationalists, aspire higher!
EDIT:
Nice, Soryu agrees that his ideology is actively hostile to values of the rationalist community.
There’s certainly versions of Buddhism that can fuck up your mind, and Soryu’s version certainly sounds like one, but you’re painting too broad of a brush. Nothing in the Sequences is really an argument against many of the Westernized versions of Buddhism that have had the supernatural stuff stripped out of them. (Or if there’s really fragrantly violating basic rationalist principles there, people haven’t really pointed that out on the various occasions when I’ve posted my interpretations of Buddhist models.)
I find it weird that if I made a similar argument for Christianity (that if we strip it of the supernatural stuff, what remains are often beneficial lessons, therefore rationalists should embrace such version), people would probably start screaming at me that (1) even the non-supernatural parts are a mix of good and bad things, and sorting it out would be too much work, so it is better to start from zero instead and only adopt the provable good stuff, one piece after another, after serious examination, and (2) that human minds do not work that way; that even embracing the Christianity-without-the-supernatural too much will lead you to reading religious texts with certain connotations, and soon you will find yourself believing things that you have no rational reason to believe.
But suggest the same for Buddhism and suddenly it becomes a rational thing to do.
By the way, to get Buddhism-without-the-supernatural, we first have to agree on what the supernatural is. I mean, reincarnation seems like one of the core concepts of Buddhism, so… does your favorite version contain it, or reject it as nonsense? (Or treat it as a metaphor for… genealogy, or something?) Does it not concern you that the other ideas are coming from the same source? Wouldn’t it make more sense to abandon the entire project as hopelessly epistemically contaminated, and start from scratch instead? For example, to experiment with deep breathing, etc., without having the bottom line already written? To embrace evidence with the same lightness whether it agrees or disagrees with the Buddhist scriptures?
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But the thing I was actually trying to do here is something like the “five whys” technique.
So the situation we got here is that there is an organization that seems quite abusive. How do I even know that it exists? Because once in a while someone mentions it on LessWrong.
Okay, so why would anyone mention MAPLE on LessWrong? I mean, there are many religious organizations out there, abusive or not. What makes this one so special that it keeps coming to my attention, even if I am not especially interested in monasteries on the other side of the planet. Seems like the answer is that because some people see it somehow compatible with the rationalist community.
Okay, why, out of all the religious organizations that exist on this planet, some people see specifically MAPLE as somehow related to the rationalist community. (As opposed to e.g. some Hare Krishna group, that I suppose also exist in the Bay Area.) I do not see the details clearly, but seems to me that there basically some members of the rationalist community are vouching for them.
Okay, but why do we take some members of the rationalist community vouching for a Buddhist monastery seriously? I mean, if someone in the community tried to vouch for a Hare Krishna group, the most likely result would be that people would laugh at them, instead of saying “yeah, if these specific Hare Krishna guys says that their prayers can protect us from the apocalypse, I guess their goals are generally compatible with the goals of the rationalist community, even if we disagree on some specific details of their epistemology”. No, people would just laugh. So why are they not laughing at the idea of a Buddhist monastery being somehow rationality-adjacent.
In my opinion… simply because it is Buddhist, and because some people are spreading the meme that Buddhism is somehow rational. More than just “you can abandon 99% of Buddhism and make something rational out of the remaining 1%”, because you could do the same thing with e.g. Freud, but that Buddhism is somehow inherently much closer to rationality. Hare Krishna is low status in the rationalist community, Freud is low status, Christianity is low status, Buddhism is high status… essentially because it is a fargroup instead of outgroup. Christianity is a religion of your boring parents, Buddhism is a religion of your cool friends. (Somewhere on a different part of the planet, people are producing anime that depicts boring Buddhist priests, and a cool Pope who is a young guy with a big sword riding a dragon.)
I try to get to the route of the cause. When a guy comes knocking on your door telling you that he has a deep wisdom that can save the world (as long as you start obeying him and stop questioning him), there is absolutely no reason to assign him higher credibility if he is a Buddhist, than if he was a Hare Krishna or Catholic or Scientologist leader. But the average Bay Area rationalist will take him more seriously, will perceive spiritual claims associated with Buddhism as more plausible, and that makes me endlessly frustrated. This used to be an atheist website, where people were skeptical about things! Including washed-down versions of religion, such as “belief in belief” etc.
I am curious about your answer to why would ever a rationalist consider a group such as MAPLE to be somehow more credible than… an analogical organization of a different religion.
EDIT:
To put it shortly: What kind of mental gymnastics makes people in the rationalist community believe that “I should join a religious monastery for a few weeks” is a rational course of action?
My answer: because we are taught by association that things related to Buddhism are somehow adjacent to rationality. I want to push back against that.
Well, that was kind of the route that got me convinced there is something to Buddhism. The exact events happened too long ago for me recall accurately, but at some point the state of my beliefs was something like…
“Well, there seems to be science saying that meditation is beneficial. But all of these Buddhist claims about our suffering being created by a belief in a self and so on are weird. They seem like the claims of a weird religion with no understanding of psychology. But I’m told meditation is beneficial, so let me try it.”
So I did do something relatively neutral like following the breath that did not obviously seem related to those weird claims at all. But when I did that, I noticed stuff in my mind that seemed like the kind of thing that the Buddhists had been talking about, and I was like “huh, maybe they’re not totally crazy”.
And then there were various events like “my friend who I’d known since we were both teenagers and who was always quite rational and sensible found a book describing something called jhanas that was derived from old Buddhist teaching, and then he told me that he followed the meditation instructions there and started getting the kinds of mind-states that were described there, so I concluded that apparently this checks out and then later I became friends with many other people who could do jhanas as well”. (And even managed a jhana a couple of times myself, though I seem to have various psychological blockers around it that make it hard for me personally.)
And at some point if you repeatedly have the experience of “hey, there’s this Buddhist-influenced writing that claims that you can achieve an X type of mind state by doing these specific kinds of practices, and then eventually you either have that mind state yourself or talk to trustworthy-seeming people who vouch that the descriptions are legit and might also demonstrate it behaviorally”… then at some point it seems to make sense to update to “okay so maybe I should just assume that the Buddhists are correct in their claims about how the mind works and how it can be transformed”.
Could one do the same without looking into Buddhist writing? Sure, and not every Buddhist sect will even give you any theory, preferring to just have you do the meditation practices yourself! But for any skill, it’s usually beneficial to have guidance from someone more experienced who can point out what you’re doing wrong, suggest remedial techniques to fix your weak points, keep you motivated by letting you know what the fruits of the practice might be, etc. Also some practices are more risky than others, so it’s good to have someone who can make sure you’re not hurting yourself, or to warn you about any practices or stages in the process that are known to be rough.
Kind of like exercise, where you can totally just do running etc. on your own without consulting any accumulated knowledge, but many people still find beneficial to consult some physical trainer sometimes. And if they wanted to train really seriously, then it would probably be risky to never consult anyone with more accumulated knowledge.
Also, if you are interested in figuring out a serious understanding of the mind and you feel that your experienced repeatedly comes to agree with Buddhist models of the mind, then it makes sense to try to look at some of those models and see if they could improve your own theoretical understanding.
As for reincarnation, there’s some things that I could treat it as an analogy for, but mostly none of the meditation instructions I’ve found to make sense nor the teachers who I trust ever mention it. So the concept of it seems irrelevant to me and my interpretation of Buddhism.
And all of this seems pretty disanalogous to Christianity. Lots of atheists have the experience of meditating and finding that oh, this seems to trigger stuff exactly like the kind of thing that’s described in various Buddhist sources. Not many atheists, say, try to pray and find that God is answering those prayers by sending miracles their way. (Though, some Christian mystical traditions do have practice instructions and maps of progress that are quite similar to the Buddhist ones, and produce similar results.)
You seem to reduce Christianity to praying, and Buddhism to exploring mental states, which is basically comparing a layman’s version of Christianity to a nerdy version of Buddhism… and of course, in such comparison, Buddhism comes out as the intellectual one.
But there is also a layman’s version of Buddhism, which includes praying “Namo Amida Butsu” a lot, and giving money to monks in order to gain merit. And there is also a nerdy version of Christianity, containing self-exploration and self-improvement, such as the writings of the Desert Fathers, or the spiritual exercises of St. Ignatius of Loyola; the seven capital (mental) sins, and how to overcome them.
(Perhaps some rationalists should participate in a Jesuit retreat, to learn how to overcome procrastination, so that they can become more productive at saving the world from the AI.)
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In the things that you describe, it seems to me like you are mixing together two different kinds of statements… not entirely unrelated, but also not one straightforwardly implying the other.
One claim is that the Buddhist tradition has accumulated a lot of expertize at exploring mental states. People who can sit motionless for hours without getting bored, and who can summon feelings of great bliss on command just by using the right kind of mental muscles. I do not doubt that. And it’s cool.
My skepticism is about the implied claim that this is a good use of one’s time. For the religious kind of Buddhist, the math would be obvious—you leave your previous life as a peasant, which probably sucked; you spend your remaining days begging and meditating; and if you do it right, you can save yourself countless reincarnations, many of them extremely unpleasant—yep, totally worth it.
For an atheist from a first-world country, the math is different. Your life is probably kinda okay, you do not believe in afterlife or magic superpowers, so the benefits include cool insights, a form of therapy, maybe a productivity boost; and the cost is the amount of time you have to spend meditating. For some people it is still worth it, but I expect that for some it is not, even if they did everything exactly the right way—the therapy they could receive elsewhere (if we assume a highly competent meditation teacher, we might as well assume a highly competent therapist), the productivity boost is balanced by the time spent meditating and at retreats, and the cool insights...
Well, this is the other group of claims, that the accumulated expertize of Buddhism makes its psychological claims trustworthy (unlike their claims about reincarnation, sex advice, etc). That if you achieve experimental outcomes, then the underlying theory must be correct. Empiricism, isn’t it?
My problem with this is that I also know people who claim getting experimental results from praying to God, or doing magic. Not in the sense of “a miracle happened, and a pile of money appeared on my table”, but in the sense of “God gave me the ability to persevere where otherwise I would have given up” or “God gave me the strength to overcome my bad habits” or “I kept visualizing the success and doing the rituals, and I also worked hard on my project, and after a few years I have succeeded”.
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One more thing that rubs me the wrong way is that I do not remember seeing anyone put an upper bound to the benefits of meditation (and Buddhism in general). I would like to see someone in the rationalist community say “meditation can help you do X, Y, Z, and that is all it is good for”, and other rationalists agree with it. Make the list of the claims as long as you want, but make it finite. A finite list can be explored, one item at a time. I am not comfortable with keeping the list unbounded.
Why is this so important for me? First, if you make it a ratchet, if it is socially okay to make claims of “meditation helps at X” but not claims of “meditation does not help at Y”, then the list of claims will only grow after time, as the people get used to the old ones, and won’t object too hard against the new ones that are only one step further away. Specifically, I would be happy to hear at least one statement of the kind “Buddhists used to believe, a decade or two ago, that meditation helps at Z, but science shows that it is not true”. Because I find it unlikely that they never make a mistake, which makes it suspicious that I never hear about one when Buddhism/meditation is discussed among the rationalists.
Second, you can’t do the math for “is spending 1000 or 10000 hours meditating worth the results?” properly, if the cost is finite, but the benefits are potentially unlimited.
(And you can notice how for people who still on some level believe in magic, the math comes out systematically better than for people who don’t. So you should expect them to be overrepresented.)
EDIT:
Doing the math properly becomes more important when you include the probability of ending up in an abusive group. Even if most Buddhist groups are harmless, their intensity probably correlates with the harm they can do, and the taking-ideas-seriously rationalists may be more attracted to those.
Yes, if we’re talking about some of the more mystical practices within Christianity, then many of those do seem potentially valuable to explore. Many of the Christian mystic practices converge with ones from Buddhism and other religions, which is nice independent validation that they seem to be doing something beneficial and also a sign that you can just adopt the practices without any of the more religious metaphysics, given that religions with drastically differing metaphysics have similar practices.
I agree that a universal claim of “this is worth everyone’s time” is wrong, and that it’s worth it for some people and not others. I myself haven’t spend very much time meditating in the last several years, because other things have felt more valuable for me right now.
Well, that’s a bit strong—I wouldn’t say it must be correct, any experimental outcome is compatible with an infinite number of explanatory theories. But it’s certainly evidence in favor of the underlying theory being correct enough to be useful.
I’m not sure I understand what connection you’re drawing. Are these people also saying that their experiences vindicate some particular theory about how the mind works?
That’s fair. I don’t want to commit to a definite list on the spot, but things that I’d personally say off the top of my head:
Things meditation can do:
Make you happier
Give you a source of okayness/pleasure that’s independent of circumstances
Help you concentrate
Experience bliss states
Reduce your attentional blink
Increase your sensory resolution
Make you more sensitive to the beauty of art, music, nature, etc.
Reduce or eliminate rumination
Widen the gap between stimulus and response
Increase tolerance for uncertainty and unknowns
Improve your within-mind feedback processes
Increase your emotional range, make you suffer less
Reduce some kinds of cognitive and emotional biases (I’d have to think harder to give a more specific list)
Make you less defensive
Allow you to ignore pain
Reduce internal conflict and increase alignment between your mental subagents
Help you drop bad habits
Allow you to think about unpleasant things without flinching away from them
Make you less defensive/inclined to take things personally
Give you control over physiological processes that are normally outside conscious control
Improve your intuitions of other people (by better processing of subconsciously collected information, not by magic)
Get you to appreciate other people and enjoy their company more
Feel more love
Make you more okay with negative sensations and feelings
Get you to cling things less
Shorten emotional recovery time
Reduce background anxiety
Be able to go on psychedelic journeys without taking any drugs
Improve your ability to visualize or imagine things with other senses
Improve your memory
Slow down age-related decline for some cognitive processes
Heal past traumas
Reduce or eliminate your fear of death
Stop the automatic identification to the contents of your thoughts or to an entity experiencing them
Change your subjective rate of time
Generally transform your consciousness in various weird ways
Make you feel your body more vividly
Make you notice “energy phenomena” in your body
Make you more aware of subconscious motivations and other subconscious material
Align your behavior more with your endorsed values rather than momentary feelings/cravings
Also, meditation can fuck you up in various ways, but I assume you’re more interested in me listing the positives.
Things meditation can’t do:
Give you supernatural powers
Give you any knowledge that isn’t otherwise causally available for your mind (if you never studied physics, you’re not going to learn it by meditating)
Generally affect anything outside your mind that your mind doesn’t have an effect on (so it might make people like you more—or less! - by changing your behavior and demeanor, but it won’t affect people who never interact with you, nor inanimate objects that are the same regardless of how your mind is)
Fix all of your psychological problems
Eliminate negative feelings
Eliminate pain
Raise your general intelligence to any significant extent
Make you entirely free of bias
Make you always follow ethics perfectly
Make you into a pure saint who never experiences one selfish thought
Give you certainty about metaphysical claims
Let you know the fully correct action for some situation (except for some non-standard definitions of “fully correct”)
Substitute for your reasoning
Make you reason fully correctly
Make you aware of all your mental processes
Make you aware of all your motivations
Tell you what you want
Be able to observe pure reality without it being filtered through any concepts
Make you aware of certain dormant but easily wake-up-able motor pathways like the ones controlling the muscles around your ears.
This happened to me when I was 17ish, after a few years of playing around with meditation-y things, and in particular trying to focus my attention in the middle of my skull.
People who attribute their success to the Law of Attraction believe that it makes the Law of Attraction the correct theory about how the mind works. (The theory does not have many gears, but it is a theory.)
Thank you for the lists!
I notice that for some items in the list, I have also heard opposite evidence… I can’t find a link now, but someone complained that meditation reduced their ability to feel love and joy, so they stopped. I find it plausible that the practice has different people on different people, the question is how many of which. The list could in theory be a starting point to a series of experiments, if we could operationalize the statements.
I would guess you mean this (with Kaj’s comment just below the post).
I’d assume that the theory by itself is either so simple as to potentially be true (“visualizing my success will make more likely to work for it”—yeah sounds plausible?) or to have claims that seem implausible for some reason (“visualizing my success will cause magic to bring me what I want”—requires a supernatural magic so seems sus) . The Buddhist teachings I’m talking about don’t have anything that’d sound obviously implausible in the same way, they largely only talk about things that you can directly experience in your own mind.
Oh definitely, and different techniques also have different effects—I included stuff from a number of different practices and I’d expect very few people to get all of these. You may not get much in the way of extra visualization abilities if you don’t do any visualization practices, for instance.
Yeah, rationalists are liable to say this sort of thing, but I’m not so sanguine about their ability to avoid generating quite a few more piles of skulls given enough power. That’s not to say that I think that any other way forward commonly advocated these days is particularly promising either.
A general issue with the intense versions of Buddhist practices is that very often they are aimed at detaching / deconstructing / destroying / disavowing various elements of one’s mind / agency / values. Often these are important elements, and don’t necessarily automatically stay intact / regenerate themselves. This can have various good consequences, but also obviously by default has a bunch of bad consequences. Maybe there are good ways to do that (for example, by giving these elements space and other resources needed to reconfigure / regrow / reinterface / etc., in an appropriate dovetail with deconstruction). But my overwhelming impression, admittedly in most cases from shallow exposure, is that these practitioners either do not understand what they are doing, or think that this is a good thing to do, which it very obviously isn’t (similar to how suicide is very obviously not a good thing to do, with similar exceptions). (In defense of my conclusions even given shallow exposure: when I have tried engaging a bit more deeply, the background assumptions seem to be blatant, explicit, and strongly conditioning everything else; and the fruit of the tree seems often bad, ~never super impressive, and only mildly good when done in a non-standard, non-pressured, a la carte way.) Spiritual and social pressure towards these practices seems to be very often carried by unspoken assumptions of the obvious desirability of these things, preying on people’s desire for relief / escape / growth / evolution / self-understanding / calmness / etc.
(Not accusing you in particular of any of that, and I haven’t engaged with your work; it’s plausible to me you’re doing a thing that works well for you, and that others have similar results. But I do want to point at intense versions, including probably “Westernized versions of Buddhism that have had the supernatural stuff stripped out of them”.)
I think this is already latent in the entire concept of “liberation from suffering”. Pain is the signal of your body being damaged, to remove it is to invite the decay of accumulated unnoticed and unavoided damage. There’s a nearby thing that is good, which is to remove excessive pain which does not actually serve its purpose.
Likewise, suffering is the signal of your soul being damaged, and success inherently invites the decay of accumulated unnoticed and unavoided damage to your mind / agency / values and other parts of your soul. There’s again a nearby good thing, but it does not seem that Buddhism is aware of or aiming for it.
This is a known risk that comes up in the discussions of many Buddhist communities; “spiritual bypassing” is the standard term.
I think that suffering is a signal of internal conflict and that something is subtly (or not-so-subtly) going wrong in the mind’s internal processing; your soul being damaged, as you put it. Done well, Buddhist practices eliminate suffering not by interfering with that signal but paying attention to it such that the mind comes to see what exactly it’s doing to hurt itself and stops doing so.
So it’s less about “you stop suffering because you stop noticing when your soul is getting damaged” and more “you stop suffering because your soul stops damaging itself”.
But the mind is messy and refactoring fundamental parts of its operation can go wrong, and even if things go right there are phases where you may go backwards before you go forward again, and sometimes a person can get stuck in such a phase. So bad outcomes are certainly possible.
There will always be damage to your soul from living in the world (for at least as long as we are ordinary humans, and probably much beyond then). This is the primary purpose of suffering. The frame that suffering is always due to self-caused damage is part of the toxicity.
Can you define “damage to the soul” more specifically?
Things which damage your ability to act in the world, or your ability to maintain your body/self/character/values/image/environment. In my experience, suffering seems to be caused by the perception that damage of this nature is happening (particularly noticeable by paying attention to the sorts of things that are painful but do not cause suffering).
Hmm. Resolving this disagreement might require digging more deeply into our models of suffering than is worth going into, but it seems like a relevant data point that some advanced meditators report losing their ability to do things that could be interpreted as selling their soul. Which would seem to me at least compatible with a “meditation stops you from suffering by stopping the things that damage the soul” model (I expect that these people might suffer if they then were somehow forced to act against their values anyway).
E.g. Sasha Chapin:
I also recall reports from various people I know that they’ve lost the ability to tell lies (might say that their tongue would just freeze up) or to act in ways they feel are unethical.
I agree that there are techniques that have bad effects if used in the wrong or careless ways, as well as schools/teachers who might even endorse some of those wrong ways.
My experience, and the experience of various people I know who’ve done similar practices, is that the kinds of things that get destroyed are mostly just ones that are messing up the mind. And that many of the practices are essentially about enhancing the information that’s going into the brain’s existing processes for learning and reorganizing itself from feedback signals, so that it can better refactor and optimize its own activity.
This can certainly lead to some desires or values being changed or reprioritized. But the way I view it is that it’s less about deep values changing, and more about improved information processing changing things that were actually suboptimal or needlessly greedy strategies for trying to fulfill the deep values.
A shallow example would be the experience of many advanced meditators who end up drinking less alcohol as the experience of it becomes less pleasant. A practice like body scanning might train the brain to better process sensory information from different parts of the body, so that the negative effects of alcohol on the body are felt more strongly, so the brain starts downweighting the desire to drink in response to those feedback signals.
Hmm. Do you disagree with Chapman that western Buddhism is largely Sutra-derived, and the ultimate goal of Sutra is renunciation of worldly concerns (the stuff that’s considered indispensable in the west)?
I think there are certainly some schools within Buddhism that fit the sutric description, but Chapman’s description of schools of Buddhism outside his own tends to feel a little strawmannish and tribalish to me.
I do agree that some, perhaps very significant, degree of renunciation is involved in advanced practice, but at least none of the teachers I follow have a “you should renounce the world because the world is bad and sensual pleasures are horrible” undertone to it. (For what it’s worth, Claude also flags those bits of Chapman’s “sutra vs. tantra” comparison table as ideologically motivated.)
My own interpretation is that many things are worth renouncing simply because they do not actually make you better off in the long term, and because there are states of mind that you can try to cultivate that feel better both for you and others. E.g. being filled with an experience of love toward all existence and that feeling drawing you to help others out of a genuine delight for their well-being feels ultimately more satisfying than spending the evening browsing Facebook.
Yeah, I wouldn’t expect his position to be popular, because he’s basically saying that in order to improve its marketability western Buddhism has discarded the “vibe” of total renunciation, while essentially maintaining the system of practices that had been developed with renunciative ends in mind. I don’t suppose that there’s an objective way to resolve this until substantial studies of the effects of these practices are conducted.
At least some things seem objectively checkable, e.g. Claude’s criticism of the elements of this page that say sutra considers pleasure bad and the body disgusting cites various existing Buddhist writings saying the opposite, and holds that these are practices sometimes given to correct specific problems, not general vibes or cosmology:
The ascetic strand is real, but it’s a prescription rather than a cosmology.
Aśubha-bhāvanā, the thirty-two parts of the body, the nine charnel-ground contemplations — these are all in the Pali canon, and they’re as unpleasant as advertised. But in their canonical setting they’re an antidote (Skt. pratipakṣa), prescribed for a specific ailment. The standard Theravāda pedagogy pairs temperament with technique: someone of lustful temperament gets the repulsiveness practices, someone of hating temperament gets mettā, and giving them the wrong one makes things worse. That’s a clinical logic, not a metaphysical one. The corresponding Abhidharma analysis of the world doesn’t say phenomena are corrupt; it says they’re conditioned, impermanent, and not-self. “Corrupt” imports a moral valence — a fallenness — that the Pali material doesn’t quite carry, which is telling given that the table’s ethics row explicitly reaches for Christianity as the comparison.
There’s also a striking bit of internal self-correction. The Vinaya (Pārājika 3) records that after the Buddha taught corpse contemplation to a group of monks and went into seclusion, a number of them became so disgusted with their bodies that they killed themselves or had themselves killed. On returning he replaced the instruction with ānāpānasati. Whatever the historicity, the tradition preserved a story in which the ascetic technique is explicitly marked as overdosable.
On pleasure specifically, the texts are more discriminating than “bad.”
There’s a formula that recurs constantly in the Nikāyas: for any object, the Buddha claims to understand its assāda (gratification), its ādīnava (danger), and the nissaraṇa (escape). The gratification is affirmed as real. The critique isn’t that sensual pleasure is illusory or wicked; it’s that it’s unreliable, self-renewing, and binding — you don’t get out by the door you came in.
And then the jhānas explicitly rehabilitate a class of pleasure. In the standard autobiographical passage, the Bodhisatta recalls the absorption he fell into as a child under the rose-apple tree and asks himself why he should be afraid of that pleasure — a pleasure with nothing to do with sensuality or unwholesome states — and concludes he shouldn’t be. Pīti and sukha are path factors, not fetters. The operative distinction is between kāma-sukha and nekkhamma-sukha, sensual versus renunciate happiness, not between pleasure and its absence. A tradition that considered pleasure simply bad would not have built its central meditative architecture out of graded degrees of bliss.
In Mahāyāna sūtra the shift is much larger.
Here the ascetic material is retained but demoted to neyārtha — provisional teaching, given to particular people in particular states. The Vimalakīrtinirdeśa has the Buddha touch the ground with his toe to reveal that this world already is a pure land and that the defect was in the seeing, not the seen. Nāgārjuna’s identification of the limit of saṃsāra with the limit of nirvāṇa is in the Mūlamadhyamakakārikā, not a tantra. The Lotus’s upāya framework makes the whole renunciate presentation a stage of instruction rather than a description of reality. Tathāgatagarbha literature locates the buddha in the being as it stands. None of this needs tantra to arrive.
Two qualifications, in fairness to Chapman.
First, some sutric traditions really do fit his column. Classical Pure Land runs on precisely the contrast between this defiled world and the pure one elsewhere; the Japanese term edo, “the defiled land,” is not a caricature of anything. That’s a major, populous, unambiguously sutric tradition whose whole affective register is world-weariness.
Second, my counter-examples from East Asia are partly compromised as evidence. Tendai hongaku thought — original enlightenment, the affirmation of phenomena as already the absolute — developed in a Japanese milieu saturated with mikkyō, and Tiantai/Tendai institutionally absorbed esoteric practice. So when Zen or Tendai sounds world-affirming, a defender of the table could reasonably say that’s tantric influence leaking into a nominally sutric container rather than sutrayāna generating the view on its own. I think Vimalakīrti and Nāgārjuna are cleaner cases, since they predate the tantras outright.
So the corrected version of the row would be something like: sutric traditions contain a large body of world-renouncing and body-disgust practice, deployed as a targeted corrective and grounded in impermanence rather than in the world’s inherent badness, alongside — in Mahāyāna especially — a countervailing set of teachings that locate awakening in the world as it is. Which is a much less quotable table cell, and a lot less useful if what you’re building is an argument that the other side has nothing you need.
I don’t think Chapman would disagree with this. According to the “yanas” page Buddhism-at-large in some sense allows several fundamentally contradictory worldviews without a firm commitment to an overarching cosmology. The free version of Claude says that this framework is pretty much standard Tibetan Buddhism.
Your Claude link doesn’t work for me, I think you haven’t remembered to share it (or at least that’s not the share URL).
If he agrees that it’s a practice rather than a part of the sutta worldview, then I think it’s pretty misleading to have a table that has these kinds of rows:
Sutta
Tantra
Pleasure
Bad; a fetter to be avoided
Good; a delight to be enjoyed
The body
Source of mental defilements; repulsive rotting sack of shit; to be subjugated
Source of delight; indispensible for compassionate action; to be celebrated
Sorry, should be fixed now.
AIUI his point is that the worldview and practice are supposed to be a congruent package. Since renunciation is the fundamental principle of Sutra, the practitioner should occupy a state of mind where it makes sense to renounce undesirable stuff. I wouldn’t be surprised that various traditional Sutra schools significantly differ in their presentation, and agree that it’s misleading to imply homogeneity.
Sure, but my point is that renunciation with a world-hating vibe and renunciation with a world-loving vibe are very different! It’s “I will let go of pleasures that don’t serve me or the world because I’m in deep love with the world and its people and want to be a better vessel for universal love” versus “the world and everything in it sucks, ideally I’d commit suicide but my religion says that’s bad so instead I’ll go sit in a monastery to meditate for the rest of my existence”, and Chapman’s presentation strongly implies that all sutra would be the latter kind.
If he just said that “sutra is about renunciation” without trying to imply that sutric practice also has to be fundamentally anti-life and anti-pleasure, then that I wouldn’t object to.