For what it’s worth, meditation (vaguely vipassana-oriented but I’m not too picky) has anecdotally-without-clear-metrics increased my introspective awareness of emotional incentives, and said awareness is a load bearing component in the mindware I installed from LW and academic psychology towards maintaining goal-vs-preference alignment and avoiding addictions to external substances/activities.
Separately, I‘ve observed increased persistence-of-focus and slightly-reduced need for sleep for a few hours after a meditation session; that’s actually what started me on doing it rather than idly reading when it came up. Again-anecdotally, the baselines of doing absolutely nothing, napping, and/or idly reading/browsing don’t have the same consistent effect on focus, not sure if need-for-sleep is the same.
I don’t think widely-publicized traditional meditations are designed to improve general epistemology, so they generally don’t, and the instrumental benefits to health and productivity are also (to my understanding) coincidences from their actual goals of generating persistent internal thought-patterns matching some specific ’enlightenment’ criteria. If we think of it as an OS update, meditation (at the kind/degree I’m accustomed to) is an update to specific portions of the built-in processes, whereas broad-ranging productivity bonuses would need to be either specially targeted for that purpose and/or modifications to the core kernel and process-management model.
I can’t comment on whether directly-productive meditations exist; they certainly seem possible to design, though, and in the meanwhile meditation can be used to strengthen dependencies of the mindware you use to directly do things, as above. (Assuming you ease yourself in and/or engage in effective therapy first to minimize the chance of negative side effects.)
For what it’s worth, meditation (vaguely vipassana-oriented but I’m not too picky) has anecdotally-without-clear-metrics increased my introspective awareness of emotional incentives, and said awareness is a load bearing component in the mindware I installed from LW and academic psychology towards maintaining goal-vs-preference alignment and avoiding addictions to external substances/activities.
Separately, I‘ve observed increased persistence-of-focus and slightly-reduced need for sleep for a few hours after a meditation session; that’s actually what started me on doing it rather than idly reading when it came up. Again-anecdotally, the baselines of doing absolutely nothing, napping, and/or idly reading/browsing don’t have the same consistent effect on focus, not sure if need-for-sleep is the same.
I don’t think widely-publicized traditional meditations are designed to improve general epistemology, so they generally don’t, and the instrumental benefits to health and productivity are also (to my understanding) coincidences from their actual goals of generating persistent internal thought-patterns matching some specific ’enlightenment’ criteria. If we think of it as an OS update, meditation (at the kind/degree I’m accustomed to) is an update to specific portions of the built-in processes, whereas broad-ranging productivity bonuses would need to be either specially targeted for that purpose and/or modifications to the core kernel and process-management model.
I can’t comment on whether directly-productive meditations exist; they certainly seem possible to design, though, and in the meanwhile meditation can be used to strengthen dependencies of the mindware you use to directly do things, as above. (Assuming you ease yourself in and/or engage in effective therapy first to minimize the chance of negative side effects.)