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The truly interesting thing here is that I would agree unequivocally with you if you were talking about any other kind of 'cult of the apocalypse'.
This has Arrested Development energy ^_^ https://pbs.twimg.com/media/FUHfiS7X0AAe-XD.jpg
The personal consequences are there. The're staring you in the face with every job in translation, customer service, design, transportation, logistics, that gets automated in such a way that there is no value you can possibly add to it
...
2-3 Years ago I was on track to becoming a pretty good illustrator, and that would have been a career I would have loved to pursue. When I saw the progress AI was making in that area - and I was honest with myself about this quite a bit earlier than other people, who are still going through the bargaining stages now -, I was disoriented and terrified in a way quite different from the 'game' of worrying about some abstract, far-away threat
This is the thing to worry about. There are real negative consequences to machine learning today, sitting inside the real negative consequences of software's dominance, and we can't stop the flat fact that a life of work is going away for most people. The death cult vibe is the wild leap. It does not follow that AI is going to magically gain the power to gain the power to gain the power to kill humanity faster than we can stop disasters.
A helpful tool on the way to landing and getting sober is exercise. Exercise is essentially a displacement, like any of the other addictions, but it has the unique and useful feature that it processes out your chemicals, leaving you with less stress chemicals in circulation, and a refractory period before your body can make more.
Almost no matter your physical capabilities, there is something you can go do that makes you sweat and tires you out... and breaks the stress-focus-stress-focus cycle.
Edit: btw, this is great stuff, very good for this community to name it and offer a path away.
Related, but addressing a very different side of the AI risk mindset: https://idlewords.com/talks/superintelligence.htm
This is closer to what I expected for myself. Do you feel a similar pressure to move to the next activity when doing other types of meditation?
Edit: my being stuck in a car might have had something to do with it. Not much to move on to :-)
Forgive my asking a somewhat rude question. I wouldn't ask it except in the context of this sort of "how you learn" discussion. Was "The Mind Illuminated" valuable to you because the scientific material helped break down some kind of pre-existing emotional resistance to a subject which seemed hokey? Is it possible that you previously had trouble meditating because the whole thing seemed made up or poorly justified and a piece of you wasn't willing to try until someone attached it to a science?
Also, how long have you been assessing (weeks, years, etc), and during your assessment phase, have you continued the practice you learned in that first week, or did you fully stop to assess?
To your and habryka's comments:
I should probably not steal the pre-existing word "focus". I figured my meaning fell somewhere within the smear of existing meanings, but it sounds like it didn't, and we should use a different word.
The post neither pre-supposes an interest in meditation, nor supplies a convincing argument for its benefits. To me the tone of the piece indicates a sort of subtext: "if you feel like reading or trying, then read or try. If not, then don't." In my mind it's meant to offer the interested but skeptical a method with low activation energy that doesn't fail the outside view (ie look asinine or cultish).
With you, I failed to sell low activation energy, because your walks already have something that's not worth frittering away. So do mine, so it's worth being more explicit here in the comments: I spend maybe 5% of my total walk time meditating. The cost is not nothing, but it's small. The gain is an ability to capitalize on the ideas I have during the other 95%, by more effectively fixing on them during non-walk time.
I don't think I can demonstrate that value, can't provide evidence. What I can offer is another outside view argument: I'm one of the walking tribe (eg, http://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-27186709), I walk for hours every week, I did not choose this lightly, and I still found it to be beneficial.
I had to think about this, so thanks!
I should have specified that deeply miserable was more of a short term judgement, specifically on a people dimension. If your interactions with people are causing you to be deeply miserable, it's probably a good idea to retract.
But, to me, a really high level of short term comfort in people space indicates a position which is short term good and long term very bad. This isn't always the case, but as a first pass, it sets off alarm bells. It's like the social equivalent of too much candy. "This tastes too good. It can't be good for me to ingest this and only this."
I also think this is because the bad behaviors listed only arise out of a smug level of comfort.
But I still have a hard time explaining when and why the candy feeling actually indicates the candy danger. I think it needs further discussion and further thought.
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Missionaries in North Korea, for all their other faults, are spending a lot of social time with people they know to hate them. Relatively speaking, they're spending a lot of time with the differently-minded.