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Luke_Grecki comments on Vipassana Meditation: Developing Meta-Feeling Skills - Less Wrong
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While this may be true, it's not clear that they are the optimal way towards this end. We may be able to substitute more effective mental forces. See Will_Newsome's comment for an example.
Note that I speak, at Jeniffer's request, only of potential downsides. As great and even life changing as they may be for some, effects like these:
... are not for everyone. This kind of development of awareness can be seen as a rubicon. When you change the way you think you become a different person to that which you were. As the paper I mention describes, the changes are not universally beneficial. That's seldom how the world works, I'm afraid.
You need a knowable direction of improvement, not merely uncertainty about optimality of status quo. We know that status quo is not optimal, for there is no reason to expect otherwise. But it doesn't suggest that any given change is an improvement.
I didn't claim this.
What was the purpose of your argument?
It was just meant to point out the possibility of supplanting useful mental pressures (that could be disturbed my meditation) by more effective mental processes. I didn't mean to make any claim about whether we can reasonably expect to do this; I was just aiming to stimulate thought about the possibility.
(On a side note, this phrase is an anti-epistemic cliché, usually used to make a privileged hypothesis more salient.)
You don't need to "stimulate thought" about this, everyone already agrees. The reason that caused you to use this argument seems to be that meditation is on the side it argues for, but there is no merit to the argument itself, since it states the obvious and doesn't improve meditation's (or anything else's) case. Do you still endorse that argument as worth making?
More charitably, the original confusion probably started from interpreting wedrifid's comment as arguing for status quo, followed by an argument against status quo that would be correct given that assumption.
No. Thanks for being patient and clearing that up for me.
To sum up, it seems that due to (perhaps unconscious) motivated cognition I failed in at least two ways:
FWIW I think that is how I understood wedrifid's comment, though I failed to articulate this when you asked me about my purpose.
Then, it's incorrect that in context your argument was vacuous, since if one says that 2+2=5, it's still worth arguing that 2+2=4, however obvious that is. On the other hand, motivated cognition was still probably the cause of interpreting wedrifid's comment that way.