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DavidM comments on Meditation, insight, and rationality. (Part 2 of 3) - Less Wrong
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Also, "enlightenment is impossible to communicate [about to unenlightened people]" is not a proposition which must have no evidence for it, any more than "higher mathematics is impossible to communicate about to people without any mathematical training" is.
I think that the latter proposition is true, and I believe with high probability that you do too.
You are incorrect about me. It's true that the shortest complete communication of some part of calculus is often to teach someone calculus, but there are shorter incomplete communications that work in that they communicate the goal without being calculus. "Integration means finding the area under a curve" is a classic example. Or, going higher, "an 'algebra' is the (misleading) name for a bunch of objects like numbers or vectors that can be turned into each other by addition or multiplication."
I do agree that "enlightenment is impossible to communicate" can have evidence for it. I should have said something like "this is an assertion that you have not substantiated in any way other than claiming it." Maybe you could make a list of possible properties of enlightenment and demonstrate that enlightenment had consistent properties by getting enlightened people to check off the same items on the list, even when subtly pressured to check off different items (to try and filter out the obvious cultural correlation).
The point at issue was communicating about higher mathematics with people who have no mathematical training, rather than people who have some mathematical training.
Remember, the original point concerned communicating about enlightenment. "Some mathematical training" may be analogous to "partially but not fully enlightened." "No mathematical training" is analogous to "never effectively practiced meditation."
I still believe with high probability that you think "higher mathematics is impossible to communicate about to people without any mathematical training" is true. A good place to find someone without mathematical training would be a member of a hunter-gatherer tribe.
Aren't numbers a human universal? Sure, it's hard to talk about curves without defining "curve" first, but if I can just draw in the sand and say "that's a curve," we're back to the option of communicating the gist of things without handing the person a textbook. Could I communicate any sort of higher math I know in this way? This is tricky because I can't think of anything, but that's hardly a general proof. Maybe quaternions would be hard to communicate to a hunter-gatherer, but again "hard" is a far cry from impossible.
No. The Pirahã, for example, have no concept of exact numbers, only of smaller and larger amounts.
The last time I looked this up, all results on the Piraha language are due to a single anthropologist, Daniel Everett. There's been some debate in the literature about whether or not he was actually correct about their innumeracy; see the "Further Reading" section on the wikipedia page for some examples.
I see nothing there that contradicts what I said, but it does seem most of the links are dead.
On the object level, your belief-as-stated is not conclusively known. Everett sub 1986 believed that there were words for "one", "two" and "many"; this belief was updated in 2008 when one speaker in an n=4 study used the word for "one" when there were six things presented to them.
On the meta-level, none of Everett's results (as far as I know) have been replicated by an independent anthropologist, which means that your belief-as-stated has one point of failure. Given the surprising nature of his results, we should demand strong evidence that his results are true and not due to, e.g., cultural/linguistic misunderstandings. In fact, the linguistics community has indeed questioned the data closely.
The proposition "higher mathematics is useful" can be communicated to people with negligible mathematical training, along with specifics and supporting evidence. Higher math is required to describe the physics that can figure out from first principles how chemistry should work, and somewhat lower higher math can figure out the area under curves and so forth.
In particular, a person who knows no math can observe that people who know higher math are required in order to do chemistry simulations, for example.
Is there a similar easy way to make a claim that enlightenment is useful that is testable by unenlightened people?
(For the record, I'm inclined to believe you, but it would be comforting to have a concrete argument for it.)
I see at least two basic ways that one could approach the issue.
The first is to treat it like a mindhack, and evaluate it by its apparent results in people who have applied it. Ask them what good it's done them, and observe their lives and behavior to confirm. Perhaps tell them what your idea of "useful" is and ask them to constrain their explanation of what it's done to those things.
The second is to examine whether it leads to testable beliefs that turn out to be accurate (cf. this comment). See if there is a topic which enlightenment is claimed to be relevant to which you consider useful, state some beliefs, see if the enlightened person says otherwise, and go from there. (This requires that the enlightened person also be rational and well-informed. An enlightened person who doesn't know anything about the subject you want to talk about, who is uneducated, mentally ill, brain-damaged, or whatever, is probably not going to state accurate beliefs, for reasons unrelated to enlightenment.)
Just, unfortunately, not how to get access to them.
I had to search around a bit to figure out what he meant, but now I think wedrifid is mocking this sentence from the original post:
I thought he was making a joke about the inadequacy of mathematics as a tool of sexual conquest.
Wow, I sound cryptic and deep. Or would if I wasn't casually low brow. (Gabriel nailed it.)