electriclizard

Yeah, it's these "different ideas" of contemplative studies that gives it a bad name. There are especially a lot of grifters in the west selling snakeoil "eastern medicine."

Ultimately, you have to try things out and see what affects your subjective experience. You will know by direct experience what is transforming your experience.

If something doesn't work, throw it out.

There are a lot of different ways of meditating, because the brain is complex enough that every person has different predispositions. But ultimately meditation begins by watching your mind so that you can know how it behaves and then testing different things to see how the behavior changes.

But I do like CBT and agree is has the strength you're talking about; it has the rigorousness of scientific research behind it, so its solutions tend to be applicable for larger categories of people.

Science usually throws out anomalies where something only works or doesn't work for a few individuals.

it just sounds like it provides a temporary feel good experience.

I think you're missing the point of optimizing for subjective experience over objective knowledge. The feel good experience is the point. Subjectively, life is like playing a video game; you do what _works_ to have good mental health. Sure it's fun to wonder what the video game's code looks like, but that's not the point of playing the game.

You will never experience the BackEnd of your brain. We can affect it of course, with medication and surgery etc. I take medication for anxiety myself, but I also meditate, and it's the union of FrontEnd behaviors and BackEnd modification that gives you wellbeing.

Also, subjective experience is testable, it's just not testable by anyone but YOU. You try things out and you see how your subjective experience changes.

There are tests we've done (MRIs on meditators) that show the neural correlates of meditation etc, but again that's not the point: You are going to die and all your knowledge will be annihilated, so play the game to have the best life by optimizing your subjective experience of every moment of life.

Yes. All my therapists have referred me to meditation and explained to me that Cognitive Behavioral Therapy takes some influence from it.

There are tons of articles published in journals on it.

As for the quackery, that comes from attempts to discern objective truths. Traditional medicine is terrible for objective truths. But it shines in subjective experience.

The west has shifted into believing subjective experience is useless compared to objective knowledge.

This is like a BackEnd engineer saying that he doesn't believe the FrontEnd exists.

We've been studying the FrontEnd for the majority of human history, and while many things we've found are just plain wrong in an objective sense, they still have subjective value.

Case and point: look at how meditation has been receiving continuous affirmation from the scientific community.

What are the logistics for this? Does ByteDance clone their repo and make America the owner?

Be kind. Be humorous. Be gentle.

“In this world … you must be oh so smart or oh so pleasant. Well, for years I was smart. I recommend pleasant.”

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EzOIhLJ1C-Y

Hey man. Graal was an intimate part of my life growing up. I had thousands of hours logged on Valikorlia and a few hundred on other playerworlds. It was a good idea. It's where I first started programming; graalscript was my first language.

It's sad to see it go. I really wish we could have a game experience that had the community graal did. There's not much with that level of involvement for players anymore; it's all now downstream of ivory towers and extremely restricted.

I played Graal for 10+ years, mostly on Valikorlia, but I tossed around Era and Maloria too; I started some time between 2002 and 2005.

But I didn't realize its main website had been taken down, as I was literally on it a few months ago. Did it die completely? I am no longer able to login with the client.

That's too bad. It really was ahead of its time technologically; it's where my programming life got started and I was intimately familiar with graalscript and GS2.

thinking in words and sentences sounds like thoughts being weighed and slowed down

This has been my experience as I've learned to stop thinking in words. I realized at one point that words are learned; which means that there was a point where you were thinking without them, before you learned language.

I've done a lot of work on myself with therapy and meditation and learned to think without words. And what I've noticed is that when I think with words, they occur AFTER what I'd call sensational thinking; thinking without words is a full-body sensational experience for me and not something that only occurs in a slice of the mind like a vapid calculation.

mind chatter

A few times I've experienced acting without any chatter. A pure quietness. It's wonderful.

I've been working on myself to make this a permanent thing.

I can do both. Getting rid of the inner voice took a lot of therapy and meditation and I still struggle; I had it for most of my life.

The "inner voice" is absolutely a real voice, as real as my own; and it's not necessarily the only voice. The voices are not auditory hallucinations—they are very distinctly discernible from sounds I'd hear with my ears.

I have learned how to think without this voice and I prefer doing so immensely, as the voice is akin to vapid calculation, while thinking without it is a sensational experience with feelings and is a much more enjoyable experience, extending beyond the location of where I hear the inner voice and goes as far experiencing sensation throughout my entire body; this sensation can be as vivid as physical touch.

In fact the voice is slower than sensational thinking. It occurs after the sensational thinking and the sensational thinking rarely can occur at the same time as the voice; they very easily become mutually exclusive and the inner voice tends to be the one that dominates.

I hope to reverse this relationship with continued work. Thinking without an inner voice is a much more enjoyable life for me.

Would a machine solving the trolly problem on whether to hit the wall vs some cyclists ever choose to hit the wall in a way that damages the driver, bounces into the people and damages some of the people, but kills no one?

I have seen accidents where a truck driver drives partially off the road to slow down his truck and minimize damage, but does not go entirely off it because that would kill him.

I've no interest in controlling the people around me. I'm interested in controlling myself, which I'm not allowed to do at work due to the need to survive. Your choices are determined by your options; you do not pick your options at work, your employer does.

Those who it's fake for are not allowed to throw it off. I get my socialization in groups I choose to be a part of where I don't have to curtail my every thought to avoid political retaliation that affects my livelihood.

And get a PhD before you start throwing around words like "mental issues" for things you disagree with.

It's too true and so depressing. People can't stand up to the immense volumes of resources and hundreds (thousands?) of years of research these organizations are founded on. All my education has lead me to not participating being the best solution.

Despair is a good word. I couldn't think of a better one to describe the dropping of emotion that I feel when I hear people repeat verbatim.

Wish there were something we could do.

When you know, you know. I'm sorry you've been through the hell. I hope you're doing better.

I'm working on convincing myself that not all persuasive communication is bad!

By a series of unfortunate events I've been victim to gaslighting from a lot of people in my personal and work lives, so I struggle with this too.

one reason I enjoy limiting how much television I watch

Absolutely. I've no delusion that I can combat the manipulation. The best defense is to not absorb the data to begin with.

I sincerely hope we soon enter a future where everyone has options that best suit them.

I'd like that too.

I am curious, why do you like going into the office? Does it give you something that you need, or does being remote too long make you uncomfortable because of something your mind is doing to you, which you have to escape?

It's been a bit like having access to my computer's terminal for me. I didn't expect the power. I did way more than just turn off the distractions. I fucked some shit up and had to spend some time in the shop. But I also learned how to fix the stuff that was broken and then stay the hell away from the terminal the rest of the time.

My issue was mainly that I couldn't turn the UI back on. But also I fucked up all the links and the whole system was out of order.

Now I still use it when necessary because I still have bugs, which is really easy because just thinking about it will pop it open. But I mostly use it to signal to me when the UI is starting to fade away; not something I was good at before.

Complete manipulative nonsense if they ever use "top of the band" as reason to change their relationship with you imo. A Ferrari doesn't stop being Ferrari just because it's parked amongst Priuses. If you're worth paying $x for $y, you're worth paying $x for $y minus the reduction in taxes they'll pay; your moving to an area with less taxes is them getting you on sale.

It is a bit ridiculous to base these things off location when the location would reduce the taxes the company pays for you.

I'd like to understand how these market values are calculated. It can't be supply and demand, because if you move to a place with 0 supply you do not maximize your value.

I should be able to say to them "hey, I create $x for you now and I cost $y, but if I move I will make the same $x for you for $(y-z), and it will make no impact on means or ends since I'm entirely remote."

It leads to me wanting to kill myself more often and needing to invest more time in therapy, commutes, and recovery. And over half the engineers I've spoken with, who drop their facade, feel the same.

Being stuck in a chair all day with people watching you is not a good life. Being forced to adhere to arbitrary social convention instead of speaking sincerely and expressing yourself is not a good life.

Choosing to lay in bed, work in the sun, recline on the couch, say hi to your cat, be your most authentic self, is a better life. Personally not dealing with the anxiety and body pain makes me more productive. But maybe everyone is right and we can get more productivity out of people by gutting their personalities and self-appreciation; but if that's the cost, I sincerely do not care. I'd rather everyone enjoy their short lives than spend them colorlessly and regret their choices on their deathbeds.

Survival is enough. I think living is more important than working. Working exists so that you don't die. We should do the work necessary that everyone thrives, otherwise our choices should maximize living.