Introduction

The LW/CFAR community has a fair amount of interest in meditation. This isn't surprising; many of the people who practiced and wrote about meditation in the past were trying to train a skill similar to rationality. Schools of meditation seem to be the closest already-existing thing to rationality dojos–this doesn't mean that they're very similar, only that I can't think of anything else that's more similar.

People are Doing Science on meditation; there are studies on the effects of meditation on attention, depression, anxiety, stress and pain reduction. [Insert usual disclaimer that many of these studies either won't be replicated or aren't measuring what they think they're measuring]. Meditation is apparently considered a form of alternative medicine; this is quite annoying, actually, since it's a thing that might help a lot of people being lumped in with other things that almost certainly don't work. 

[There's the spiritual enlightenment element of meditation, too. I won't touch on that, since my own experience isn't related to that aspect.]

Brienne Strohl has posted about meditation and metacognition; DavidM has posted on meditation and insight. Valentine, of CFAR, talked about mindfulness meditation helping to dispel the illusion of being hurried and never having enough time. 

In short, lots of hype–enough that I found it worthwhile to give it a try myself. The main benefit I hoped to attain from practicing meditation was better control of attention–to be able to aim my attention more reliably at a particular target, and notice more quickly when it drifted. The secondary benefit would be better understanding and control of emotions, which I had already tried to accomplish through techniques other than meditation. However, I’d had the experience for several years of thinking that meditation was a valuable thing to try, and not trying it–evidence that I needed more than good intentions. 

The experiment

Sometime in early September, I saw a poster on the wall at the hospital where I work, advertising a study on mindfulness meditation for people with social anxiety. I called the number on the poster and got myself enrolled because it was a good pre-commitment strategy. The benefits were deadlines, social pressure, and structure, with a steady supply of exercises, audio recordings, and readings. This came at the cost of two hours a week for twelve weeks, not all of which was spent on the specific skills that I wanted to learn. Another possible cost could be thinking of myself more as someone who has social anxiety, which might become a self-fulfilling prophecy, but I don’t think this actually happened. If anything, sitting down in a group once a week with people whose anxiety significantly affected their functioning had the effect of making my own anxiety seem pretty insignificant. (I was able to convincingly make the case that I suffer from social anxiety during my interview; I've cried in front of my teachers a lot, including during my last year of nursing school, which caused some adults to think that I wasn't cut out for nursing). 

This is a response to Eliezer Yudkowsky's The Logical Fallacy of Generalization from Fictional Evidence and Alex Flint's When does an insight count as evidence? as well as komponisto's recent request for science fiction recommendations.

My thesis is that insight forms a category that is distinct from evidence, and that fiction can provide insight, even if it can't provide much evidence. To give some idea of what I mean, I'll list the insights I gained from one particular piece of fiction (published in 1992), which have influenced my life to a large degree:

1. Intelligence may be the ultimate power in this universe.
2. A technological Singularity is possible.
3. A bad Singularity is possible.
4. It may be possible to nudge the future, in particular to make a good Singularity more likely, and a bad one less likely.
5. Improving network security may be one possible way to nudge the future in a good direction. (Side note: here are my current thoughts on this.)
6. An online reputation for intelligence, rationality, insight, and/or clarity can be a source of power, because it may provide a chance to change the beliefs of a few people who will make a crucial difference.

So what is insight, as opposed to evidence? First of all, notice that logically omniscient Bayesians have no use for insight. They would have known all of the above without having observed anything (assuming they had a reasonable prior). So insight must be related to logical uncertainty, and a feature only of minds that are computationally constrained. I suspect that we won't fully understand the nature of insight until the problem of logical uncertainty is solved, but here are some of my thoughts about it in the mean time:

• A main form of insight is a hypothesis that one hadn't previously entertained, but should be assigned a non-negligible prior probability.
• An insight is kind of like a mathematical proof: in theory you could have thought of it yourself, but reading it saves you a bunch of computation.
• Recognizing an insight seems easier than coming up with it, but still of nontrivial difficulty.

So a challenge for us is to distinguish true insights from unhelpful distractions in fiction. Eliezer mentioned people who let the Matrix and Terminator dominate their thoughts about the future, and I agree that we have to be careful not to let our minds consider fiction as evidence. But is there also some skill that can be learned, to pick out the insights, and not just to ignore the distractions?

P.S., what insights have you gained from fiction?

P.P.S., I guess I should mention the name of the book for the search engines: A Fire Upon the Deep by Vernor Vinge.