So now that you’ve realized this, do you think you’ll be able to use meditation to overcome akrasia?
wunan
Karma: 387
I’ve noticed that your writing tends to be very abstract and gestures towards ideas with a lot of potential impact on instrumental rationality, but often doesn’t spell things out in a concrete way. Do you think you could add examples and, in general, try to say things explicitly instead of hinting at them?
Do we have any data on how well other people who had similar levels of interest in tech did?
I don’t think this guide goes into enough detail. I had read instructions many times that were essentially the same as this and attempted them consistently every day for weeks or months and made very little progress in terms of improving my attention. There was very little difference from if I had been following the instructions “just sit and relax for 15 minutes.”
In my experience, the problem isn’t that meditation is often treated as something that’s too complex when actually it’s very simple, it’s that it’s treated as something very simple when actually it’s pretty complex.
What did help was reading “The Mind Illuminated,” which breaks things down into much more detail. Attempting meditation with the instructions in that book was a very different experience from my earlier attempts. There was a very noticeable improvement in my ability to intentionally maintain my attention within the first few sessions. In fact I made such rapid progress that I stopped after a week because I wanted to take some time to reassess whether this was really a path I wanted to go down (the book provides instructions all the way to “awakening” or “enlightenment”). I’m currently still assessing.
No problem, I don’t think the question is rude. No, I didn’t view it as hokey. I was actually very enthusiastic about it right from the start, but never made any progress. TMI was valuable to me because it provided much more granular instructions.
I stopped to reassess about 2 months ago and have not been meditating in that time.
What were you doing wrong?
It’s analogous to a music teacher instructing you to just sit down and play some notes, any notes, for twenty minutes. It would be amazing if you made progress that way.
This is exactly how it felt for me—I even remember thinking this exact same metaphor after practicing TMI and reflecting on the difference between it and my previous attempts.
Also generally a warning that you might not like enlightenment if you find it.
I’m don’t necessarily disagree (I’m still looking into this topic), but what are you basing this on?
It sounds to me like most of the negative experiences you described were a result of the pills and are not associated with enlightenment:
I go off citrulline malate for 48 hours. And it hits me. Lethargy gone. Cloudy headed thinking gone. Ability to be productive returns. I spend 10 hours at my desk in a row. I write several thousand words. I send off 10 emails and clear my inbox. I power through my to-do list. I stick to my diet for the first time in months. I send emails, I round up outstanding notes, reorganise myself. Reset my GTD system and power through for a day.
I’ve never heard of lethargy, cloudy headed thinking, and an inability to be productive as side effects of enlightenment.
The other symptoms you described later in the post, like calmness even in the face of stressors, don’t seem negative to me as long as you don’t abuse this ability in order to ignore problems. Also, I think the calmness associated with enlightenment might feel significantly different than what you experienced. A lot of people talk about the importance of “responding skillfully” to different situations, meaning feeling anger when you should feel anger, sadness when you should feel sadness, etc, and then being able to let go of those states once they’re no longer helpful. This seems different than the vasodilator-induced state of calm you described.
Book recommendation: Waking Up: A Guide to Spirituality Without Religion by Sam Harris. Discusses enlightenment, meditation, and psychedelics.
Recursive Self-Improvement
You might like the content on 80000 hours, which is pretty popular around here.
Related: Nick Bostrom’s Letter from Utopia
I want to attempt with all my strength, to do the specific things that I see to be done.
And this is why the illness of bodily defeat is so bitter;
one’s struggle, conducted alone, but in the hope of one day dragging treasures into daylight,
is felled by the weakness of one’s own physical vehicle.
I also suffer from a chronic illness that keeps me from pursuing my goals (which I think are the same as your goals) at anything close to the speed at which I feel I should be able to. I don’t know if my condition is better or worse than yours, but one thing that helps me is to think about how there are others out there who are a lot like me, but without these limits, and they seem to be doing what I wish I could do. Maybe they’ll succeed even if I’m not able to help. And if they succeed, then so do I.
You’re not as alone as you think.
In my case, I think illness is very much just a symptom of the struggle to get on with things in an interfering environment.
Do you mean you think you have something like Mindbody syndrome/TMS? I thought I had it for a while, but now suspect the root causes are actually physiological, not psychological, for me.
Just to clarify, am I interpreting your post correctly in reading it as you saying that the reason you’re not operating at your full potential is because of a chronic illness which causes migraines and other symptoms? If so, this may be something that you’ve already thought of, but it’s worth putting a lot of effort into tracking down the root cause of of the illness and fixing it (assuming you don’t already know the root cause and that there is a potential fix) even if it means temporarily working more slowly on the AI alignment problem. That’s what I’m doing, at least.
Have you heard about the EA Hotel? Or considered moving to a country with a very low cost of living?
The podcast Rationally Speaking recently had an episode on the Mohists, a “strikingly modern group of Chinese philosophers active in 479–221 BCE.” They discuss what caused the movement to die out and draw comparisons between it and the Effective Altruism movement.
I remember reading SquirrelInHell’s posts earlier and I’m really sorry to hear that. Is there any more public information regarding the circumstances of the suicide? Couldn’t find anything with google.
It might help if you try to think less in terms of making rationality and EA part of your identity and instead just look at them as some things you’re interested in. You could pursue the things you’re interested in and become a more capable person even if you never read anything else from the rationality community again. Maybe reading stuff from people who have achieved great things and had great ideas and who have not been influenced by the rationality community (which, by the way, describes most people who have achieved great things and had great ideas) would help? E.g. Paul Graham’s essays are good (he’s kind of LW-adjacent, but was writing essays long before the rationality community was a thing): http://paulgraham.com/articles.html
I think the rationality community is great, it has hugely influenced me, and I’m glad I found it, but I’m pretty sure I’d be doing great stuff even if I never found it.
It sounds like you’re describing akrasia. Do you think your meditation-based methods are insufficient to overcome akrasia, or you just haven’t applied them to this end yet?