I have never seriously meditated. Being understimulated is intolerable to me, and I also have various practical and physical reasons to avoid holding still in one position for longer than a couple minutes at a time.
How can something intolerable be understimulating? Sure, I’m equivocating on the type of stimulation you’re referring to here, but in the spirit of luminosity, shouldn’t we be interested in exploring the places in our minds that we’re afraid to go? I’m not recommending you step into a sensory deprivation chamber (or have your brain emulated without hooking up the inputs and outputs), but experimenting with meditation seems like a potentially luminous activity, even if you did it with the modest goal of simply getting a peek into what it’s about.
P.S. Nice post; I also enjoyed some of the earlier posts in the sequence; I think at times I wanted to see a concrete application of the abstractions, which this post did.
How can something intolerable be understimulating?
When I’m in a room where you’re ostensibly supposed to be listening to someone talk—a lecture, a sermon, etc. -- I can’t properly stop listening. So if the speaker is really boring, I will try to zone out, but usually with very little success. It combines the worst parts of being with other people with the worst parts of being alone, for an experience that is both understimulating and agonizing.
I once had to sit through a two-hour Southern Baptist church service. There was one guy who delivered a long, rambling, over-excited monologue about “casting out demons and devils”, sounding exactly like a random street lunatic, and then another guy who spoke in a more sedate tone for about an hour on how evolution is false, society is being corrupted, and how “we did not come from monkeys!!”. And then there was one man whose job appeared to be simply to sit in a chair next to whoever was speaking and periodically agree with whatever was being said. Whenever there was a pause, this guy would jump in with a “YES!” or an “AMEN!”. I think the funniest thing that happened was when somebody mentioned Jesus and then stopped to inhale, and this guy blurted out “THAT’S HIM, THAT’S HIM!!”.
At first it was morbidly fascinating, in a mentally painful sort of way. But as time wore on, it just became excruciatingly boring, as they covered the same ground again and again, as if their target audience was suffering from profound mental retardation. I tried to think about something else to escape from the dull horror of my surroundings, but the preacher’s delusional ravings just kept impinging on my train of thought, inescapable.
So, yes, it’s entirely possible to be intolerably understimulated. (I enjoy meditation, though. It’s quiet enough that I don’t get bored, if that makes any sense.)
It’s not like I never tried it because I was like, “Oh, that sounds understimulating”. I’ve tried meditating, and it was understimulating and I was in a bad mood for a considerable period afterwards trying to get the crick out of my back and haul my brain back into a more suitable level of interaction with the world.
Unless you count things like “on top of stalagmites” as sitting methods.
From Blackadder:
Aunt: ‘Chair’? You have chairs in your house? Edmund: Oh, yes. Aunt: [slaps him twice] Wicked child!!! Chairs are an invention of Satan! In our house, Nathaniel sits on a spike! Edmund: …and yourself...? Aunt: I sit on Nathaniel—two spikes would be an extravagance.
For me, sitting in seiza is more comfortable for the upper body (compared to sitting cross-legged), but less comfortable for the lower body. The latter has been less of an issue as I’ve had more practice.
When I meditate I sit in a chair. I find the standard postures highly
uncomfortable, and they cut off my circulation. My body had never been very
flexible, and I broke my back a couple decades ago, an injury which still
somewhat limits what I’m capable of.
I don’t meditate regularly but I have done a fair amount at various times.
(About half of my immediate family is buddhist.) The idea of calming down the
internal monologue is attractive to me, but meditation has never put me in a
noticeably different state of mind. I feel the same an hour into it as I do
right when I sit down.
Tentatively offered, but there are methods of physical luminosity (Alexander Technique, Feldenkrais, Cheng Hsin) which might be useful. They’re all based on making the best use of the body you’ve got, and especially the first two are very clear about not fitting your body into a predetermined shape, but instead getting better access to your innate ability for self-organization.
I’ve done a little with IntuFlow and it looks very good to me—I intend to do more with it. However, it doesn’t strike me as much like Alexander Technique.
Feldenkrais is the easiest one to check out cheaply because there are huge quantities of solo awareness through movement exercises available.
Somatics is good, and the whole book (except for the pictures, which may not be essential) is free at google books.
Ruthy Alon’s Mindful Sponteneity is excellent—only partially available online, but there should be enough for you to see whether you’re interested.
On the occasion I most clearly remember, I was on a field trip to a Buddhist temple, where we sat on cushions with our backs painfully straight, inhaled nasty incense-saturated air, and repeatedly vowed to save all sentient beings.
That response to under-stimulation interests me—what was it? it doesn’t sound like usual boredom. My own experience is that exposure to an interesting stimulus stops boredom like turning out a light. So I’m curious what kind of a response you had that you actually had a lag time making it go away.
My response to understimulation is isomorphic to overload, which happens if I am overstimulated because I’m autistic. “Underload” occurs when I have no interesting sensory or conceptual data to process. I haven’t unpacked it completely, but it feels sort of like my brain decides it’s not wanted and it shuts down to save energy, and then takes a long time to boot back up, during which period I don’t have it handy to help me do things. Having a mostly-asleep brain is not at all fun. Boredom is not like underload because boredom stimulates a search pattern to find an activity, while underload usually doesn’t stimulate anything at all, and if it does, it’s not for an activity I find “interesting”.
I can usually avoid “underloading” myself via fairly simple mechanisms like playing with my own hair, so it’s not a huge problem—it only comes up in contexts where any of the things I’d normally do are proscribed by the circumstance, like if I’m supposed to be meditating.
but it feels sort of like my brain decides it’s not wanted and it shuts down to save energy
is the state that meditation is supposed to induce. In other words, a controlled shutdown of certain parts of the brain. Julie Taylor’s description of how it feels to have a stroke is pretty much exactly the same as Sam Harris’s description of how it feels to meditate.
And in that moment, my brain chatter, my left hemisphere brain chatter went totally silent. Just like someone took a remote control and pushed the mute button and—total silence.
And at first I was shocked to find myself inside of a silent mind. But then I was immediately captivated by the magnificence of energy around me. And because I could no longer identify the boundaries of my body, I felt enormous and expansive. I felt at one with all the energy that was, and it was beautiful there.
Then all of a sudden my left hemisphere comes back online and it says to me, “Hey! we got a problem, we got a problem, we gotta get some help.” So it’s like, OK, OK, I got a problem, but then I immediately drifted right back out into the consciousness, and I affectionately referred to this space as La La Land. But it was beautiful there. Imagine what it would be like to be totally disconnected from your brain chatter that connects you to the external world. So here I am in this space and any stress related to my, to my job, it was gone. And I felt lighter in my body. And imagine all of the relationships in the external world and the many stressors related to any of those, they were gone. I felt a sense of peacefulness. And imagine what it would feel like to lose 37 years of emotional baggage! I felt euphoria. Euphoria was beautiful—and then my left hemisphere comes online and it says “Hey! you’ve got to pay attention, we’ve got to get help,” and I’m thinking, “I got to get help, I gotta focus.”
because I’m autistic
Have you mentioned that before? Because I didn’t know that about you until now. I’m just guessing, but not being neurotypical may have something to do with your reaction to meditation.
When did you switch from saying Asperger’s to saying autism? Does it mean much? eg, did you learn something about yourself, neuro-typicals, or common usage? DSM-V?
I say “autistic” because a) the word is more aesthetically pleasant, b) it has better general recognition (same reason I say I’m a vegetarian than being specific and saying “pescetarian”), and c) it acknowledges for solidarity-ish reasons that it’s all one spectrum.
Since Alicorn has politely asked that I not respond to her comments, I will reply to yours and speak in general terms:
Autism is marked by inability to pick up on social cues and form relationships that neurotypicals do naturally.
If someone repeatedly gave sincere advice on social skills which assumed away such problems, and required constant re-clarification (“just get out of the house”, “strike up a conversation with random people”, “meet local people on the internet—I did, it’s not hard”, “just get your friends to introduce you to others”), that, to me, looks like strong advice that the person is not autistic.
Those of you who have seen me post can make your own guesses about my autism status. And, FWIW, when meditating, I’ve never been able to get my inner voice to shut down for more than a few seconds. The best I can do is to replace it with non-thinking thoughts (counting, observing my breathing, etc) and even then only for a short while.
My impression from reading meditation and doing some of it is that shutting down one’s internal monologue is something that happens after a practicing for quite a while. (Months? Years?) It isn’t an initial goal.
It’s not a binary thing, either. One common technique is to be aware of one’s internal monologue without investing emotionally in it or trying to suppress it; (this is described in lots of different language) this tends to reduce its intensity and ubiquity over time.
From my limited reading on meditation, I gather that one of the things you’re supposed to avoid is getting dull, dopey and zoned out. Meditation is supposed to involve ongoing concentration, rather than shutdown. Were you trying to maintain concentration? What CronoDAS said aside, I’m not sure you got the intended result.
I think I have a similar thing, only in my case it activates when I’m trapped in a vehicle on a long journey. I find it hard to resist “sleep”—it isn’t regular sleep, because I can “wake” on a whim, but it leaves me dopey and zoned out for a bit, although I can reduce it by deep-breathing after I wake. It feels like “nothing to do, brain shutting down now”.
Possibly relevant is that I find it virtually impossible to single-task in general. I am massively parallel, and I’m accustomed to being aware of several processors at once. I can shut one down without it being a big deal; trying to do it to all of them simultaneously gets the result I described.
Possibly relevant is that I find it virtually impossible to single-task in general. I am massively parallel, and I’m accustomed to being aware of several processors at once. I can shut one down without it being a big deal; trying to do it to all of them simultaneously gets the result I described.
Meditation isn’t about “shutting down” anything, or at least certain types of zen meditation aren’t. They’re about shifting your awareness to a third-party perspective on those processes, rather than identifying with them as “self”.
So for example, if you have a thought that comes up that the situation is intolerable and you can’t handle it, then you notice it in the way you might notice that an update message has popped up on your computer, or that you’ve just received some email or something. Like, “Ah, that’s nice.”
You notice your brain’s activity (and anything else happening around you) as merely information, rather than as reality. Zen meditators are advised to treat everything in this way, whether it’s a vision of Hell or a glimpse into Heaven, and not to be distracted even if they seem to be growing psychic powers or having meetings with the Buddha.
The objective is both the active realization that your thoughts and experiences are neither as truthful nor urgent as they appear, and the development of your ability to act from centered awareness, rather than being tugged this way and that by your cached thoughts.
That’s nifty and interesting too - can you identify the “processors”? What threads are you running?
I can’t multitask worth a damn on anything but one conscious thread and N unconscious threads—and those tend to drag to a crawl if one of them is important and needs monitoring.
Luminosity in general lets me drag the “unconscious threads” into consciousness and control them better. But even before that I needed to be doing lots of things. I don’t know how many processors I have and they don’t have all the same features; my guess is I have two or three main ones that can do most things and another three or four that are very limited in what tasks they can do (these handle things like dealing with my sensory input). I have to do a lot of conscious handling of sensory input, which makes this less impressive than it would be.
That particular theory, no. I don’t think I’ve mentioned it online before.
I grant that my theory would be rather hard to prove or disprove. If you want to argue that something is absolutely safe, you’d probably be giving a bunch of caveats about proper use and suitable people to use it. If you want to argue that something isn’t absolutely safe, you’ll be bringing up sloppy use and side effects.
Meditation is very commonly recommended as good for people. Alicorn is the first person I’ve heard of who reacted that badly to it.
The practical application of my theory is to take some care in how you make general recommendations of what seems like it should be good for everyone, and pay attention if something which is supposed to be good for everyone seems to be going wrong on you.
I think your response, especially the last paragraph, sums up what is good about your idea (and I agree somewhat with CronoDAS in principle that it is well-motivated). I hope that you enjoyed spelling it out explicitly in the same way that I enjoyed seeing it in more detail.
You did come across as picking on me—I saw your question as meaning that you didn’t agree with me and that you thought worse of me for what I’d said. It was possible to deduce what you were disagreeing with, but the emotional noise made it more difficult, and left me disinclined to pursue the matter.
I was only mildly upset, but it took me a while to decide it was worth trying to address what seemed to be your point.
By the time I’d gotten to my last paragraph, I was enjoying laying things out, but other than that, not especially fun. Neither was writing this reply.
I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to be picking on you so and it sounds like when I tried to be a little friendlier in my later comment I didn’t succeed very well.
I do think that it is important to register when a theory fails as well as when it succeeds, but I wish I had said that in a way that was less snarky.
I don’t think I’m doing a very good job of being friendly in this post either so I guess I’ll leave it at that.
I don’t think I’m doing a very good job of being friendly
I have been somewhat intrigued to observe that attempts to be friendly or conciliatory in comments seem to backfire more often than not. The dynamics are counter-intuitive.
I forgot to mention that another implication is to pay attention if someone tells you that something which is supposed to be good for everyone is going wrong on them.
That backs my theory that anything which is strong enough to do good is strong enough to do harm.
I think that is related to the theory of why idiot-proofing is misguided. If you want to make something completely idiot-proof, you have to make it impossible to make a bad decision, which, in practice, means taking away the ability to make any decisions at all—meaning that anything idiot-proof is also pretty much guaranteed to be completely useless. If something is powerful enough to do good, it has to be powerful enough to change something, and, as in the case of idiot-proofing, it’s really, really hard to prevent every possible bad change without preventing all change whatsoever.
I think that is related to the theory of why idiot-proofing is misguided.
Good theory, but I also quite like the more traditional theory:
Programming today is a race between software engineers striving to build bigger and better idiot- proof programs, and the Universe trying to produce bigger and better idiots. So far, the Universe is winning.
Edit: I am curious if we see the same element, however. It seems to me that that element is aptly summarized as “writing a program that cannot fail spectacularly when used by someone who doesn’t understand it is a tremendous challenge—one which is necessary to face, but one which has stood against the combined best efforts of at least a generation of programmers.”
Not all types of meditation involve sitting still. My preferred meditation type is one that requires you to be walking, instead. (But note that different “meditation types” correspond to very different mental states, and statements about their effects do not transfer.)
I have never seriously meditated. Being understimulated is intolerable to me, and I also have various practical and physical reasons to avoid holding still in one position for longer than a couple minutes at a time.
How can something intolerable be understimulating? Sure, I’m equivocating on the type of stimulation you’re referring to here, but in the spirit of luminosity, shouldn’t we be interested in exploring the places in our minds that we’re afraid to go? I’m not recommending you step into a sensory deprivation chamber (or have your brain emulated without hooking up the inputs and outputs), but experimenting with meditation seems like a potentially luminous activity, even if you did it with the modest goal of simply getting a peek into what it’s about.
P.S. Nice post; I also enjoyed some of the earlier posts in the sequence; I think at times I wanted to see a concrete application of the abstractions, which this post did.
When I’m in a room where you’re ostensibly supposed to be listening to someone talk—a lecture, a sermon, etc. -- I can’t properly stop listening. So if the speaker is really boring, I will try to zone out, but usually with very little success. It combines the worst parts of being with other people with the worst parts of being alone, for an experience that is both understimulating and agonizing.
I once had to sit through a two-hour Southern Baptist church service. There was one guy who delivered a long, rambling, over-excited monologue about “casting out demons and devils”, sounding exactly like a random street lunatic, and then another guy who spoke in a more sedate tone for about an hour on how evolution is false, society is being corrupted, and how “we did not come from monkeys!!”. And then there was one man whose job appeared to be simply to sit in a chair next to whoever was speaking and periodically agree with whatever was being said. Whenever there was a pause, this guy would jump in with a “YES!” or an “AMEN!”. I think the funniest thing that happened was when somebody mentioned Jesus and then stopped to inhale, and this guy blurted out “THAT’S HIM, THAT’S HIM!!”.
At first it was morbidly fascinating, in a mentally painful sort of way. But as time wore on, it just became excruciatingly boring, as they covered the same ground again and again, as if their target audience was suffering from profound mental retardation. I tried to think about something else to escape from the dull horror of my surroundings, but the preacher’s delusional ravings just kept impinging on my train of thought, inescapable.
So, yes, it’s entirely possible to be intolerably understimulated. (I enjoy meditation, though. It’s quiet enough that I don’t get bored, if that makes any sense.)
I sometimes meditate when I’m being forced to listen to a boring lecture.
It’s not like I never tried it because I was like, “Oh, that sounds understimulating”. I’ve tried meditating, and it was understimulating and I was in a bad mood for a considerable period afterwards trying to get the crick out of my back and haul my brain back into a more suitable level of interaction with the world.
This won’t help with the understimulation, but to avoid the crick in your back you can try sitting in seiza.
Seiza has got to be one of the least comfortable possible ways to sit. Unless you count things like “on top of stalagmites” as sitting methods.
From Blackadder:
Aunt: ‘Chair’? You have chairs in your house?
Edmund: Oh, yes.
Aunt: [slaps him twice] Wicked child!!! Chairs are an invention of Satan! In our house, Nathaniel sits on a spike!
Edmund: …and yourself...?
Aunt: I sit on Nathaniel—two spikes would be an extravagance.
I think I smell a generalization...
For me, sitting in seiza is more comfortable for the upper body (compared to sitting cross-legged), but less comfortable for the lower body. The latter has been less of an issue as I’ve had more practice.
When I meditate I sit in a chair. I find the standard postures highly uncomfortable, and they cut off my circulation. My body had never been very flexible, and I broke my back a couple decades ago, an injury which still somewhat limits what I’m capable of.
I don’t meditate regularly but I have done a fair amount at various times. (About half of my immediate family is buddhist.) The idea of calming down the internal monologue is attractive to me, but meditation has never put me in a noticeably different state of mind. I feel the same an hour into it as I do right when I sit down.
I get a crick in my back when I try to do anything that could be described as “sitting up straight”.
Tentatively offered, but there are methods of physical luminosity (Alexander Technique, Feldenkrais, Cheng Hsin) which might be useful. They’re all based on making the best use of the body you’ve got, and especially the first two are very clear about not fitting your body into a predetermined shape, but instead getting better access to your innate ability for self-organization.
You’re the second person to recommend Alexander Technique; if I run into a non-expensive way to try it, I shall.
Not AT but something similar and free online vids is “Intuflow”, for example http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bsMPqP7hxRk
I’ve done a little with IntuFlow and it looks very good to me—I intend to do more with it. However, it doesn’t strike me as much like Alexander Technique.
Feldenkrais is the easiest one to check out cheaply because there are huge quantities of solo awareness through movement exercises available.
Somatics is good, and the whole book (except for the pictures, which may not be essential) is free at google books.
Ruthy Alon’s Mindful Sponteneity is excellent—only partially available online, but there should be enough for you to see whether you’re interested.
Was this Vipassana meditation or Hindu/mantra meditation? Or something else?
On the occasion I most clearly remember, I was on a field trip to a Buddhist temple, where we sat on cushions with our backs painfully straight, inhaled nasty incense-saturated air, and repeatedly vowed to save all sentient beings.
That response to under-stimulation interests me—what was it? it doesn’t sound like usual boredom. My own experience is that exposure to an interesting stimulus stops boredom like turning out a light. So I’m curious what kind of a response you had that you actually had a lag time making it go away.
My response to understimulation is isomorphic to overload, which happens if I am overstimulated because I’m autistic. “Underload” occurs when I have no interesting sensory or conceptual data to process. I haven’t unpacked it completely, but it feels sort of like my brain decides it’s not wanted and it shuts down to save energy, and then takes a long time to boot back up, during which period I don’t have it handy to help me do things. Having a mostly-asleep brain is not at all fun. Boredom is not like underload because boredom stimulates a search pattern to find an activity, while underload usually doesn’t stimulate anything at all, and if it does, it’s not for an activity I find “interesting”.
I can usually avoid “underloading” myself via fairly simple mechanisms like playing with my own hair, so it’s not a huge problem—it only comes up in contexts where any of the things I’d normally do are proscribed by the circumstance, like if I’m supposed to be meditating.
From what I’ve read,
is the state that meditation is supposed to induce. In other words, a controlled shutdown of certain parts of the brain. Julie Taylor’s description of how it feels to have a stroke is pretty much exactly the same as Sam Harris’s description of how it feels to meditate.
From a transcript of Julie Taylor’s TED talk:
Have you mentioned that before? Because I didn’t know that about you until now. I’m just guessing, but not being neurotypical may have something to do with your reaction to meditation.
Interesting. So I get the right result and instead of going “aaaaahhhh...” I go “AAAAAHHHH!”
I’m pretty sure I’ve mentioned it. I’m not extremely autistic, but people who know what to look for spot it.
When did you switch from saying Asperger’s to saying autism? Does it mean much? eg, did you learn something about yourself, neuro-typicals, or common usage? DSM-V?
I say “autistic” because a) the word is more aesthetically pleasant, b) it has better general recognition (same reason I say I’m a vegetarian than being specific and saying “pescetarian”), and c) it acknowledges for solidarity-ish reasons that it’s all one spectrum.
Since Alicorn has politely asked that I not respond to her comments, I will reply to yours and speak in general terms:
Autism is marked by inability to pick up on social cues and form relationships that neurotypicals do naturally.
If someone repeatedly gave sincere advice on social skills which assumed away such problems, and required constant re-clarification (“just get out of the house”, “strike up a conversation with random people”, “meet local people on the internet—I did, it’s not hard”, “just get your friends to introduce you to others”), that, to me, looks like strong advice that the person is not autistic.
Those of you who have seen me post can make your own guesses about my autism status. And, FWIW, when meditating, I’ve never been able to get my inner voice to shut down for more than a few seconds. The best I can do is to replace it with non-thinking thoughts (counting, observing my breathing, etc) and even then only for a short while.
My impression from reading meditation and doing some of it is that shutting down one’s internal monologue is something that happens after a practicing for quite a while. (Months? Years?) It isn’t an initial goal.
It’s not a binary thing, either. One common technique is to be aware of one’s internal monologue without investing emotionally in it or trying to suppress it; (this is described in lots of different language) this tends to reduce its intensity and ubiquity over time.
several times, notably here
Well yeah, but which parts of the brain? The difference in the two stories suggest very different parts of the brain were inactive.
From my limited reading on meditation, I gather that one of the things you’re supposed to avoid is getting dull, dopey and zoned out. Meditation is supposed to involve ongoing concentration, rather than shutdown. Were you trying to maintain concentration? What CronoDAS said aside, I’m not sure you got the intended result.
I think I have a similar thing, only in my case it activates when I’m trapped in a vehicle on a long journey. I find it hard to resist “sleep”—it isn’t regular sleep, because I can “wake” on a whim, but it leaves me dopey and zoned out for a bit, although I can reduce it by deep-breathing after I wake. It feels like “nothing to do, brain shutting down now”.
Possibly relevant is that I find it virtually impossible to single-task in general. I am massively parallel, and I’m accustomed to being aware of several processors at once. I can shut one down without it being a big deal; trying to do it to all of them simultaneously gets the result I described.
Meditation isn’t about “shutting down” anything, or at least certain types of zen meditation aren’t. They’re about shifting your awareness to a third-party perspective on those processes, rather than identifying with them as “self”.
So for example, if you have a thought that comes up that the situation is intolerable and you can’t handle it, then you notice it in the way you might notice that an update message has popped up on your computer, or that you’ve just received some email or something. Like, “Ah, that’s nice.”
You notice your brain’s activity (and anything else happening around you) as merely information, rather than as reality. Zen meditators are advised to treat everything in this way, whether it’s a vision of Hell or a glimpse into Heaven, and not to be distracted even if they seem to be growing psychic powers or having meetings with the Buddha.
The objective is both the active realization that your thoughts and experiences are neither as truthful nor urgent as they appear, and the development of your ability to act from centered awareness, rather than being tugged this way and that by your cached thoughts.
That’s nifty and interesting too - can you identify the “processors”? What threads are you running?
I can’t multitask worth a damn on anything but one conscious thread and N unconscious threads—and those tend to drag to a crawl if one of them is important and needs monitoring.
Luminosity in general lets me drag the “unconscious threads” into consciousness and control them better. But even before that I needed to be doing lots of things. I don’t know how many processors I have and they don’t have all the same features; my guess is I have two or three main ones that can do most things and another three or four that are very limited in what tasks they can do (these handle things like dealing with my sensory input). I have to do a lot of conscious handling of sensory input, which makes this less impressive than it would be.
That’s really interesting. Kind of cool that you’re aware of that.
That backs my theory that anything which is strong enough to do good is strong enough to do harm.
Do you comment like this on things which refute your theory?
That particular theory, no. I don’t think I’ve mentioned it online before.
I grant that my theory would be rather hard to prove or disprove. If you want to argue that something is absolutely safe, you’d probably be giving a bunch of caveats about proper use and suitable people to use it. If you want to argue that something isn’t absolutely safe, you’ll be bringing up sloppy use and side effects.
Meditation is very commonly recommended as good for people. Alicorn is the first person I’ve heard of who reacted that badly to it.
The practical application of my theory is to take some care in how you make general recommendations of what seems like it should be good for everyone, and pay attention if something which is supposed to be good for everyone seems to be going wrong on you.
I hope I didn’t come across as picking on you; I just know that when people form pet theories, they have trouble letting them go and this site tends to work towards a bit of nit-picking in that regard.
I think your response, especially the last paragraph, sums up what is good about your idea (and I agree somewhat with CronoDAS in principle that it is well-motivated). I hope that you enjoyed spelling it out explicitly in the same way that I enjoyed seeing it in more detail.
You did come across as picking on me—I saw your question as meaning that you didn’t agree with me and that you thought worse of me for what I’d said. It was possible to deduce what you were disagreeing with, but the emotional noise made it more difficult, and left me disinclined to pursue the matter.
I was only mildly upset, but it took me a while to decide it was worth trying to address what seemed to be your point.
By the time I’d gotten to my last paragraph, I was enjoying laying things out, but other than that, not especially fun. Neither was writing this reply.
I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to be picking on you so and it sounds like when I tried to be a little friendlier in my later comment I didn’t succeed very well.
I do think that it is important to register when a theory fails as well as when it succeeds, but I wish I had said that in a way that was less snarky.
I don’t think I’m doing a very good job of being friendly in this post either so I guess I’ll leave it at that.
Sorry—I should have gotten back to you sooner.
What happened with your comment above was that it seemed like an attempt to take charge of my emotions, and that’s an extreme hot-button issue for me.
Also, my original comment was pushing things a little in the wrong direction—putting too much emphasis on it being my theory.
So, some years later, and I’m surprised I was upset. I consider this to be progress.
I have been somewhat intrigued to observe that attempts to be friendly or conciliatory in comments seem to backfire more often than not. The dynamics are counter-intuitive.
Oh no! I just thought I was having an off day.
Although I guess to be fair I should pose my original question to you as well; have you really been looking at cases where that does not hold?
It certainly seems to be true in this case but “more often than not” makes me fear for the future.
I have tried. But I expect there are cases that didn’t catch my attention at all.
I forgot to mention that another implication is to pay attention if someone tells you that something which is supposed to be good for everyone is going wrong on them.
I think that is related to the theory of why idiot-proofing is misguided. If you want to make something completely idiot-proof, you have to make it impossible to make a bad decision, which, in practice, means taking away the ability to make any decisions at all—meaning that anything idiot-proof is also pretty much guaranteed to be completely useless. If something is powerful enough to do good, it has to be powerful enough to change something, and, as in the case of idiot-proofing, it’s really, really hard to prevent every possible bad change without preventing all change whatsoever.
Good theory, but I also quite like the more traditional theory:
Do you like it, or believe it?
Mostly like it for comedy value, but I think there is an element of truth.
I would agree, on reflection.
Edit: I am curious if we see the same element, however. It seems to me that that element is aptly summarized as “writing a program that cannot fail spectacularly when used by someone who doesn’t understand it is a tremendous challenge—one which is necessary to face, but one which has stood against the combined best efforts of at least a generation of programmers.”
Not all types of meditation involve sitting still. My preferred meditation type is one that requires you to be walking, instead. (But note that different “meditation types” correspond to very different mental states, and statements about their effects do not transfer.)