Psychocybernetics is one of the most interesting self-help books I've ever read. Thread of interesting bits: The book is structured pedagogically rather than anecdotally. There are sections to write notes and quizzes to remember things. In the postwar period a bunch of researchers started doing big experiments and learning about how humans really learn and to date no one really uses the research for much, certainly not for curriculum design.

If someone tells you that thinking is the problem, that's wrong. Thinking isn't a problem with no clinging. If someone tells you desires, goals, and actions in the world are the problem, that's wrong. Desires, goals, and actions aren't a problem with no clinging. If someone tells you that selfing is the problem, that's wrong. Selfing isn't a problem with no clinging. If someone tells you that clinging is the problem, that's half right. But clinging isn't nearly as much a problem with no clinging to not-clinging. If someone tells you that not doing their special kind of practice is the problem, that's wrong. Various practices can help to experience clinging directly, but there's no special kind that exclusively works. Practicing less clinging is often more like practicing folding origami than it is an imagined special spiritual journey. There's nothing to forgive (though it sometimes helps, to model the forgiveness that was wanted but not felt) your childish parts for clinging. Clinging to parents is how a child survives. Some practices work by temporarily suppressing the correlates of clinging, to make it more likely that you'll notice something interesting. It is common to mistakenly turn a formal practice instruction into a suggestion for how to live life.

Another feature of low trust societies is a breakdown in the ability to spend more money to get better outcomes. You can spend more money, but the quality of the outcome is fairly random. You've likely observed with with brands over the last ten years. Instead, better outcomes become more a function of knowing the right people, who have domain expertise. Or doing exhaustive research yourself, which pulls everyone away from spending their time on their comparative advantage.

'Low trust society' can be a bit abstract. Concretely, it means that you expect the people around you to lie on a regular basis and face no repercussion for doing so. More broadly, you get so used to this that you don't notice that it is draining. Draining to know that if you call out such behavior you will face hostility and get no backup from others who have little enough slack that they don't want to risk social discord.

I posit there is a latent genre I will refer to as Epistemic Horror, in which characters and/or the audience struggle to separate delusions from reality. That this genre has many works that don't fit well into their more usual genre listings, and that this genre is important.🧵 Part of the problem with the genre is that for some works, their inclusion in the genre can slightly spoil the effect. I think this tradeoff is worth it, but just to warn those who disagree, the next post is a list of such works

A few years ago Ken McLeod made a great post on Facebook about how to approach meditation questions. I lost track of my link to it for a long time and am happy I found it again! 🧵 As noted in An Arrow to the Heart, the word sutra has the same root as the word suture, to join or to meet. In the Buddhist tradition, a sutra refers to the meeting of the teacher’s mind and the student’s mind, one of the reasons that most of the sutras are set up as Q&A sessions

'Craving' is not desire but specifically desire born of ignorance as to how things really are. Where the desire comes from, what it is really made of, and what its true consequences are. How does one tell the difference? Trace a desire to its root and you'll find one of two things, your actual values or a snarly loop with no ground. How does one trace a desire to its root? Training in Core Transformation causes the mind to habitually trace such patterns.

There are three relatively simple (ie mechanistic) skills I know of that seem to make big qualitative shifts in people's output. They can be divided into input, processing, and output. They are info triage, note taking, and touch typing. Each of them can improve substantially with only limited practice time but often get brushed off bc they seem like minor efficiency improvements rather than qualitative ones, but what we know from creativity research is that quantity past a certain threshold turns into quality.

Acceptance in Buddhist parlance plays a similar role to forgiveness in Christianity. Accepting the world is closer to forgiving the world for being so messed up, rather than any sort of connotation that we won't do anything about it. Consider the metaphor of a family member having a substance abuse problem. Acceptance of the situation as it really is is a prerequisite for skillful action, not a decision to do nothing for them.

Meditation is physically uncomfortable. This is a feature as well as a bug for [spoilers] reasons, but we shouldn't make it unnecessarily hard on ourselves. Here's what I still use after years of trying all sorts of different sitting set ups. This hexagonal sitting pad is the most comfortable I've tried. Can be used on its own or on top of a meditation cushion. Doubles as a good head pad for lying in savasana.
amazon.com/Cushion-Breath…

One way to prioritize is to ask yourself which activities compound dramatically. Here are some roughly in order of how much they have impacted me:
Regularly socializing with growth minded people, this is what encourages you to do everything else. Ben Franklin had a junto.
1/ Learning to learn (deliberate practice, understanding pedagogy, reading efficiently, improving search)

When learning a skill, figuring out what skills are upstream/contribute to other things and spending extra effort on those while learning the base skill
2/

"How does merely observing an emotion fix anything?"

An extended example. When another person asserts something you think of as not just wrong, but threatening, you experience fear as tension in your body. This is unpleasant. Anger then arises as energy to try to destroy the source of suffering.

Lord help me I'm going to try to answer the questions I've been getting about karma. 🧵 I'm going to try to describe something I'll call 'karmic strings' to emphasize that I don't think this is a complete take on the Buddhist reaction to the more ancient Hindu karma concept. That topic fills books. This is about one important pattern that is relevant to everyone.

Addiction isn't simple. If it were a simple problem you probably already would have dealt with it. Complex problems are always at least two sided and the sides push against each other to keep you in the equilibrium you're in.
1/ When you temporarily ramp up the force of one side the other side also ramps up to match it, because you're a homeostatic being. The simplest two sides are your attraction and aversion circuity, so deep it pre-dates being a mammal.
2/

Here are some questions I've found valuable in investigating goals. Feel free to suggest more. What do I want and how did I come to want it?

Been talking over the-trauma-cluster-formerly-known-as-adhd with a Buddhist friend the last week and we have a new (to us, haven't gone digging too deep for prior art yet) testable hypothesis about how it works:
1/ When you're a kid, you get some low level parameters set that define your basic relationships to different types of things (see: object relations therapy), one of which is your attitude to ambiguity. What happens if too large a fraction of ambiguous situations resolve badly?
2/

Why is contemplative practice so confusing? Why do many people seem to be on wild goose chases for decades? At least ten types of confusions:
Confusion about formal practice instr.
about the goals of practice
about life philosophies
normative claims about the world or psychology metaphysical claims about reality
measuring progress
interpretations of physical experiences
language problems
millennia long arguments between major schools
conflation of time windows, experiences at the sub second, multi second, minute, day, month, and lifetime