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?
.
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.)
.
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”.
.
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.
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?
.
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.)
.
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”.
.
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.