Accepting that I am just guessing and don’t have any empirical evidence, I do see a worthwhile overlap between Buddhist techniques and rationalist aspirations.
On Hulver’s scoop site I offer a definition of enlightenment.
My apologia for my faith also suggests a large overlap.
For this comment I’ll try to give a conrete example. I’ve noticed that when I ask for advice I have a tendency to accept it if it agrees with what I want to do anyway, and to reject if it warns against what I want ot do. That is pretty useless. Why ask for advice if one is going to reject any that is contrary to ones original plan?
I’m trying to discipline myself to decide in advance whether I really trust the opinion of the person I’m asking, and if I do ask for advice, taking it without demur. This is hard. I think it is hard because my main motivation for asking for advice is so that I can feel good about plans that I have devised that may be foolish. That uncomfortable feeling, that I want to feel better about my planned course of action, is a pretty strong hint that I should abandon the plan if my chosen advisor is reluctant to endorse it.
Well, that is all very good in theory, but how do I follow through? What I hope to gain from meditation techniques such as the Metta-Bhavana is a degree of unconditional happiness. Strangely it is not the happiness that I’m after. What I really what is to sate the gnawing emotional need for happiness that I blame for biasing my judgement.
If I were happy I could straightforwardly ask a friend for advice and take it. I would be free of the nonsense of rejecting advice to meet subconscious emotional needs. How is this working out? I had a handful of successes; it is not a complete failure. Also it fits with having a sense that more is possible and striving for it.
The article mentions opportunity cost, but punts the issue into the long grass
I agree that this mode of thinking gets little explicit use, but I don’t think that people can do well in real life without it, so I think that we all tend to bodge up substitutes.
The mode that comes naturally is to undertake courses of action that we anticipate having positive outcomes and to reject courses of action that we anticipate having negative outcomes. We compare against zero.
Sometimes we have a choice of two good options and the uncomfortable realisation that we ought not to divide our efforts between them. Perhaps we recognise a convex situation in which half of each achieves less than all of the lessor. Perhaps it is simply that it is clear than one option is better than the other. If we are comfortable with letting opportunity costs guide our actions we probably get on with the preferred action without commenting on the alternative.
What though if we are uncomfortable with opportunity costs? We feel bad about neglecting to do something positive, and we can assuage this guilt by criticising the second best option by denigrating its merits below zero. This permits us to reject the second best option using our ordinary, lame, comparison against zero.
One cause of the negativity that stops our kind cooperating is that many of us have other things to do and are not comfortable with opportunity costs. Consequently, we cannot just get on with our preferred plan of action but must run down the alternative. We can cure this by becoming more comfortable with opportunity costs.
That doesn’t explain people hanging back from collective action on altruistic causes that have come top of their preference list, so it cannot be the sole answer, but I still wonder if it is the largest part of the answer.