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GabrielDuquette comments on No, Seriously. Just Try It. - Less Wrong
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Comments (41)
Lately, I've been wondering about meditation as a potential hack for social anxiety. If non-proliferation of unwanted thought patterns is desirable, that is.
I also wonder how much serenity is too much when interacting socially. Confidence and a degree of unflappability are useful, but a zombie trance is unnerving and putoffish.
In my admittedly limited experience, people who start off relatively normal are unlikely to get to the point where being too mellow would be a problem by way of meditating. Without a concerted effort to make it do so, meditation doesn't seem inclined to change peoples' default mental states; most likely you'll wind up with the meditation-related states as voluntarily-achievable extras, if anything. (Some people don't even manage that.)
If you do tend to naturally find yourself in the kinds of states that most people try to achieve by meditating, or you tend to have particularly volatile default states, it might be worth worrying about, but in at least the first of those cases you're probably not going to get too much from meditating in the first place.
I would very much like to read a post on lesswrong about meditation and its benefits to rationality. Since it is used for achieving happiness it might be something for lukeprog.
There have been several.
One.
Two.
Three.
Four.
I agree, and I can't do it. I'm in the 'naturally find yourself in the kinds of states that most people try to achieve by meditating' camp, which makes comparing and contrasting really, really hard.
Cool study about meditation here.
http://www.frontiersin.org/decision_neuroscience/10.3389/fnins.2011.00049/abstract
There's a wide range of serenity that would merely be considered "laid-back", which is generally considered a positive characteristic.
nervous-smiling < zombie < confident-smiling (as if you feel you have and can afford to give something they would greatly value)