There is a lot of scientific research/results based on actual measurable results and biology which supports the benefits of strength training. Can the same be said about meditation?
So many allusions and claims such as your 'yes' in this thread, and yet, not a single actual link/reference to anything actually scientific/verifiable...
Maybe you should actually share a link if you're so sure, instead of crying about being antagonized?
Many things have been practiced/studied for thousands of years - that alone isn't interesting or valuable imo.
What are the objective benefits of meditation - what is the exact/specific process and what specifically does it accomplish?
I can see how being in a silent reflective state and similar practices could have various effects and benefits (not that I know specifically what those are) - but what separates me zoning out in the shower/on the bus from actual meditation? How is 'guided' meditation when you're actively listening to someone else even the same thing?
Whenever I ask my meditating/'spiritual' friends about these things the response is basically vague undecipherable gibberish and allusions that it is unexplainable to someone like me who is not ready to accept the truths lol.
What does reading a great novel or starting a garden specifically accomplish? People do some things for reasons that aren't easily quantifiable. It seems to me that you are starting from the viewpoint that everything has to prove its worth before you accept it, even if millions of people before you have found it fulfilling and worthwhile, which does not seem productive.
If you had never read a book before, and someone was trying to convince you to try it, what could they point to that would fulfill all your criteria? Would it be enough to say it makes you smarter? That's not very specific. It sharpens your thinking? Makes you more empathetic? That would all seem like 'vague undecipherable gibberish' if you had no experience with it. They might resort to saying that it can connect you with a great dialogue that has been occurring for over two thousand years, but as you say, the fact that people have been doing it for thousands of years doesn't make it interesting or valuable.
Seeing a study that some part of the brain responds more quickly for up to 90 minutes after reading or that people with gardens live 0.28 years longer on average would not make me want to do those things more, because those are NOT the benefits of doing those things. You have to figure out what you're supposed to do with your one human life. Science is one tool, culture is another. Neither of them makes the other superfluous.
> What does reading a great novel or starting a garden specifically accomplish?
It accomplishes many things - specifically granting entertainment, pleasure, etc that practitioners like.
> It seems to me that you are starting from the viewpoint that everything has to prove its worth before you accept it
I'm starting with the viewpoint that there are literally thousands of various different practices out there have have existed for a long time and have been practiced by many people. Many of these are complete bullshit. How do you filter out the good from the bad/useless?
> even if millions of people before you have found it fulfilling and worthwhile
Millions of people have found many many different things fulfilling and worthwhile over the ages, some of these things we've since realized are bullshit/bad. Do you accept every single belief/practice based on how popular it has been?
> If you had never read a book before, and someone was trying to convince you to try it, what could they point to that would fulfill all your criteria?
They could say: it's entertaining/interesting/pleasurable, they could say that knowledge/insights are contained in books, that different/interesting perspectives and other people's thoughts are contained in books (which are objective facts), etc. Saying 'it makes you smarter' is vague and unconvincing.
Unless (and even if) you choose to live your life as a sort of survey of all possible human practices, the things you will never have the chance to try will vastly outnumber the things you try.
Also, many practices confer the best benefits after a significant time commitment, so even if you optimize for number of things, you still won't actually be experiencing them in the same way as their proponents do.
Given the vast amount of experiences, practices, and tools available to us, I think it's pretty reasonable that most people seek out at least some level of external curation.
Sure, but the person I replied to seemed quite adamant and specific in rejecting external curation.
He wants to know for sure, he'll have to see for himself. That's actually one of the very useful generalizable lessons you can learn on this path.
Of course you won't be able to experience everything? That's a feature of the universe. You won't even be able to hear about everything. It's up to the individual to decide their breadth/depth ratio, but at a certain point you need to, pardon my french, "shit or get off the pot".
Very simply, meditation is an attempt at single-pointed concentration. It involves cultivating awareness of the mind's contents and the ability to let thoughts pass without fixation. "Zoning out in the shower" probably means something more like daydreaming, where any and all thoughts are permitted to exist without active control. Focusing intently on a difficult cognitive task ("flow state") is more akin to meditation than zoning out.
A lot of beginners are so bad at this that some amount of guiding back to the goal is helpful. Many can only go a few seconds without getting fixated on passing thoughts.
Practicing one's ability to focus on a single thing and reducing mind-wandering will improve one's capability for concentration.
You're talking about Samatha-vipassanā which is the cultivation of stable attention and mindfulness as two skills. Your skill can be measured by the nine stages of tranquility:
"immersion" as a better translation than "concentration", suggested by Sujato
(can't remember their exact chat about that EBT translation compared to Bodhi or Brahm in whichever of the miriad of Buddhist Society of Western Australia talk/retreat videos I heard it discussed)
mindfulness of body sensation, feeling, thought and principle bringing enough equanimity to start ignoring it all really easy, though the moral aspect can't be separated because doing not wholesome actions will leave you thinking about them
> What are the objective benefits of meditation - what is the exact/specific process and what specifically does it accomplish?
There is no one form of meditation, and each practice has different results, but the majority of them share proven reductions in anxiety, stress, depression, and improvements in all sorts of gauges of mental well being.
One of the fundamental teachings of Buddhism is the interdependence of all phenomena [1], and when you begin your practice you'll start seeing that when you sit, you might notice less daily anxiety, which might translate into better physical health. Or you might notice that being slightly less depressed makes you engage in your relationships with friends and family better. You might notice that your hips open up, which might mean less lower back pain.
The point being there are tons of positive benefits from a meditation practice that don't include some metaphysical nonsense that might be hard to take at face value. As my meditation teacher often emphasizes, if the practice doesn't deal with your day to day, quotidian problems of being alive, then it's just nice philosophy and nothing else. The Buddha taught that we should put first things first, and that's dealing with the suffering and stress of our lives. [2]
Also, "zoning out" is pretty much the opposite of meditation. Meditation is to be fully without distraction, whereas "zoning out" is giving in completely to the distraction.
> How is 'guided' meditation when you're actively listening to someone else even the same thing?
Generally speaking, meditation shouldn't be interrupted by too many instructions. Most common is no instructions during meditation, or instructions only when a shift in practice is being done. Otherwise, most of the instructions are before starting meditation.
It’s very subtle and to be honest if you need to be sold on it it’s probably not going to help you much. It can be as simple as having half an hour where you can put everything (including yourself) down and stop poking at it, compounded over time there are some benefits, but yeah i don’t think it’s something that needs to be sold or gamified etc.
> if you need to be sold on it it’s probably not going to help you much
This seems like a red flag because it can be used to justify anything, even being in a cult. I think there probably are benefits to some of these things, but we shouldn't shut down when someone asks what the mechanism is. Perhaps they want to get some of those benefits, but want to go about it a different way, and therefore want to know how they might go about doing that.
Telling them that someone who wants to be "sold" on it isn't going to benefit just makes the whole thing seem less legit, IMO.
Well, disclaimer — I am a practicing zen buddhist, but it’s something I came to myself, we aren’t recruiting like religions, and there is no dogma or origin myth to believe in.
You’re unlikely to see a buddhist missionary asking if you’ve heard to truth about emptiness on a street corner ;)
My point was simply that, at least in my personal experience, if i had found zen as a tool to achieve something, e.g it was sold to me as having some effect other, it would not have worked.
> You’re unlikely to see a buddhist missionary asking if you’ve heard to truth about emptiness on a street corner ;)
That made me lol, because yes I've never experienced that. But then I remembered that SGI had a lot of controversy due to their aggressive proselytizing in Japan in the 20th century. [1]
Also, we do have to bear witness to Theravadin monks in Myanmar advocating for (and participating in) genocide against the Rohingya due to their religious beliefs. Similarly in Sri Lanka against Tamils and Muslim populations there.
I think the problem is that when you look at a brain from the inside, a lot of it looks irrational. Someone explaining a feeling or a mechanism based on thoughts to someone looking at that brain from the outside will have to bridge billions of neurons standing in between them. Nobody, not even a neuroscientist can do that, with any scientific rigor.
Meditation can be a very subjective experience and the benefits are often not immediate clear to the person practising. Hence it is hard to articulate. Best thing one can do is to just give it a try. It is not for everyone though.
The more explicit/detailed your plan, the more context it uses up, the less accurate and generally functional it is. Don't get me wrong, it's amazing, but on a complex problem with large enough context it will consistently shit the bed.
The human still has to manage complexity. A properly modularized and maintainable code base is much easier for the LLM to operate on — but the LLM has difficulty keeping the code base in that state without strong guidance.
Putting “Make minimal changes” in my standard prompt helped a lot with the tendency of basically all agents to make too many changes at once. With that addition it became possible to direct the LLM to make something similar to the logical progression of commits I would have made anyway, but now don’t have to work as hard at crafting.
Most of the hype merchants avoid the topic of maintainability because they’re playing to non-technical management skeptical of the importance of engineering fundamentals. But everything I’ve experienced so far working with LLMs screams that the fundamentals are more important than ever.
It usually works well for me. With very big tasks I break the plan into multiple MD files with the relevant context included and work through in individual sessions, updating remaining plans appropriately at the end of each one (usually there will be decision changes or additions during iteration).
It takes a lot of plan to use up the context and most of the time the agent doesn't need the whole plan, they just need what's relevant to the current task.
It's ability to test/iterate and debug issues is pretty impressive.
Though it seems to work best when context is minimized. Once the code passes a certain complexity/size it starts making very silly errors quite often - the same exact code it wrote in a smaller context will come out with random obvious typos like missing spaces between tokens. At one point it started writing the code backwards (first line at the bottom of the file, last line at the top) :O.
I've generally had better luck when using it on new projects/repos. When working on a large existing repo it's very important to give it good context/links/pointers to how things currently work/how they should work in that repo.
Also - claude (~the best coding agent currently imo) will make mistakes, sometimes many of them - tell it to test the code it writes and make sure it's working - I've generally found its pretty good at debugging/testing and fixing it's own mistakes.
Gemini weirdly messes things up, even though it seems to have the right information - something I started noticing more often recently. I'd ask it to generate a curl command to call some API, and it would describe (correctly) how to do it, and then generate the code/command, but the command would have obvious things missing like the 'https://' prefix in some case, sometimes the API path, sometimes the auth header/token - even though it mentioned all of those things correctly in the text summary it gave above the code.
I feel like this problem was far less prevalent a few months/weeks ago (before gemini-3?).
Using it for research/learning purposes has been pretty amazing though, while claude code is still best for coding based on my experience.
Also, if the current level of AI investment and valuations aren't justified by market demand (I believe so), many of these people/companies are getting more money than they would without the unreasonable hype.
Communication is not hard, it's very easy, but there are actors who's goal is to obfuscate communication and prevent others from participating.
At the end of the day it comes down to who the decision makers are and how they are incentivized to act. As a simple example - company X has product C, and they set a goal of increasing usage of feature F (of product C). Currently this feature F completely sucks and users don't want to use it - so the idea is to improve it and thus increase usage.
There are 2 ways of increasing usage:
1) Make the feature F more useful/better.
2) Force/push your users to use feature F, by aggressively marketing it, and pushing it within the product surfaces, making it non-optional, etc. and other dark patterns.
Option (1) is hard to do - it requires deep understanding of the product, user needs, the related tech, etc. It requires close tactical collaboration between product and engineering.
Option (2) is easy to do - it requires ~zero innovative thinking, very surface-level understanding of the problem, and relies purely on dark patterns and sketchy marketing tricks. You can almost completely ignore your engineers and any technical debt when following this approach.
If your decision makers are imposter PMs and marketing/sales people - they will almost always choose option 2. They will increase the 'apparent usage' of this feature in the short term, while reducing overall customer satisfaction increasing annoyance, and reducing the company's overall reputation. This is exactly how many 'growth' teams operate. Short term benefit/gaming of metrics for long term loss/reputational damage. Their success metrics are always short-term and linked directly to bonuses - long term effects of these kinds of strategies are ~always completely ignored.
