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GabrielDuquette comments on No, Seriously. Just Try It. - Less Wrong
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Comments (41)
It occurs to me that when I'm reluctant to chat up a stranger, it's not "actual" external consequences that I fear, so much as my own feelings of embarrassment, shame, etc (note: I've no idea if this is true for others). Feeling embarrassed is a (not insignificant) negative in my utility function. And it happens to be a fact about me that if the conversation goes badly, I will feel embarrassed!
Now, this is just a chimp-brain reflex. I'd willingly take a pill that made me less unhappy about failed social interactions, and it's on my to-hack list. But I wanted to let you know that, in some cases at least, saying "hey, there's no actual danger here," doesn't address the actual issue, because the anxiety isn't based on that particular concern.
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)