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gwern comments on Mental Rebooting: "Your Brain on Porn"... - Less Wrong
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Eh? In what sense - on a bang for buck/hour basis maybe?
Yes, I think the (physical and mental) health benefits for exercise and meditation are largely overrated, and can be achieved by a very limited practice, and so provide not nearly enough activity to replace a superstimulus. Going beyond that hits diminishing returns very quickly.
Plus it's difficult to do them safely. Lots of exercise has risk of injuries, especially on the level that could compete with a superstimulus.
I also always cringe when people recommend meditation as a healthy alternative, especially because the kind of meditation they end up doing is a mixture of jhana practice and vipassana. Jhana has no plausible benefits besides being a basis for other techniques (and it's fun and addictive, of course), and vipassana is deliberately designed to cause breakdowns, not stabilize people. Mindfulness ends up as vipassana lite, with the hope that the practitioner never gets too deep into it to cause problems.
That's not to say that there aren't suitable forms of meditation for health purposes, but these rarely get used in practice, and so we have the crazy situation of non-ascetics using renunciation and dissociation practices.
But that wouldn't be enough to improve my looks ;-)
Food consumption is healthy to a point and taken beyond that has a point of not merely diminishing returns in terms of health and vitality but actually becomes detrimental.
So long as you have clearly defined goals and you utilize exercise and/or meditation as tools toward those goals, I see them as a vital component of the instrumental rationalist's toolkit. Now, you really won't find those goals as something advocated in pretty much any culture or society dedicated towards those functions. Exercise buffs talk about "getting fit" when this carries all sorts of cognitive baggage conceptually. Try going to a gym and asking for a physical trainer and explaining that you want none of A) getting "ripped", B) "losing weight", C) "building stamina" -- but are simply there for longevity extension purposes through health maintenance. It's a fun exercise. The good ones can handle it. The co-exerciser off-the-street however painfully frequently cannot.
Meditation is even worse. I have found it an invaluable tool as part of an exercise regimen towards the maintenance of a facile metacognitive-state "induction" capacity (that is, switching on the light inside my own head and peaking at what's going on beneath all the cobwebbs, metaphorically/allegorically speaking). It also is useful in terms of maintaining a precise awareness of body signals in order to adjust -- as much as can be done with the conscious invocation of placebo effect anyhow -- certain physiological states such as levels of mental alertness, fatigue, pain, nausea, etc.. When viewed as an implement, I don't believe I'd be anywhere near as successful in my "instrumentality" as I currently feel I am. But the simple truth is that all of this I have basically had to develop on my own; it's practically impossible to avoid woo when delving into meditation.