I was misleading and probably caused harm by being polite and indirect instead of saying “this popular thing looks bad to me” explicitly. I regret this and intend to be less polite in future. But the opposite error is also harmful…
Many turn to meditation as a less grueling, less expensive, more popular alternative to psychotherapy or psychedelics. And in small doses it's usually beneficial.
What no one tells you is that the mainstream meditation methods were explicitly designed to turn you into a zombie. That's what their inventors said they wanted. And if you practice them seriously, that's what happens.
If you wander around Berkeley, you can't help occasionally noticing a freshly-severed head in the gutter on a back street.
It's really sad, but people do sometimes cut their heads off. I mean, it's not my problem, right? And it's not a pile of skulls. It's not anyone's problem.
"Well, yes, we do recommend removing your head," Berkeley thought leaders say. "But only for advanced practitioners, and only under medical supervision. We firmly oppose this sort of back-alley decapitation."
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Save this link in case of emergencies (you or someone you know is having trouble with meditation that affects your ability to function normally for more than a little while after stopping meditation): cheetahhouse.org/get-help-intro
Being a sciency kinda guy, I'd like quantitative evidence.
Much of the academic and clinical work on negative effects of meditation has been done by Willoughby Britton and her colleagues. See her site for details! vivo.brown.edu/display/wbritt…
@slatestarcodex .@glenweyl’s “Why I Am Not A Technocrat” is also very good and worth reading if you haven’t already.
I think there is much less disagreement here than it may seem. Both essays are quite complicated, so sorting this out point-by-point would be difficult, but…
@slatestarcodex@glenweyl Both essays take what I would call a meta-systematic, meta-rational position (which is why I admire both of them). They seem to agree on a core understanding (one that is, I think, very important and NOT widely recognized):
The science reform movement ~3 years ago was "it's definitely not about fraud, that hardly ever happens, it's about inadvertent errors, or at worst sloppiness."
Increasingly it's "it's about fraud."
Rubbish science is one manifestation of the pervasive characteristic of current society, bullshit in the sense of Harry Frankfurt: communication whose function is purely social performance, so that no one cares whether it is true or functional.
Everything you learned in school about how to write, and most of what you learned in most jobs, is WORSE THAN WRONG.
Here's why your writing sucks, and how you can fix that:
You learned that the function of language is to state facts. [*Cough* rationalism...] FALSE!
Language is the way we do relationships. Writing puts you in relationship with readers.
Relationships are shared caring. Do you care about your readers? Do they care about your text?
DO I CARE? is what the reader asks when reading your title. When reading your first sentence. When reading your first paragraph. Unless the answer is HELL YES, they'll close the tab.
There's another hundred open. And there's the stuff in Pocket, and a subreddit to check, and
Does “enlightenment” mean a permanent no-self state, someone asked in email? It depends who you ask… also, is that something worth pursuing? vividness.live/2012/09/13/epi…
Here @OortCloudAtlas answers to “what does ‘deconstructing yourself’ mean.”
A more sophisticated story than the Buddhist “no self” theory, which is ultimately about avoiding rebirth by not existing…