Thanks, I hadn't seen that. Interesting (and scary).

On super-plagues, I've understood the consensus position to be that even though you could create one that had really big death tolls, actual human extinction would be very unlikely. E.g.

Asked by Representative Christopher Shays (R-Conn.) whether a pathogen could be engineered that would be virulent enough to “wipe out all of humanity,” Fauci and other top officials at the hearing said such an agent was technically feasible but in practice unlikely.

Centers for Disease Control and Prevention Director Julie Gerberding said a deadly agent could be engineered with relative ease that could spread throughout the world if left unchecked, but that the outbreak would be unlikely to defeat countries’ detection and response systems.

“The technical obstacles are really trivial,” Gerberding said. “What’s difficult is the distribution of agents in ways that would bypass our capacity to recognize and intervene effectively.”

Fauci said creating an agent whose transmissibility could be sustained on such a scale, even as authorities worked to counter it, would be a daunting task.

“Would you end up with a microbe that functionally will … essentially wipe out everyone from the face of the Earth? … It would be very, very difficult to do that,” he said.

Asteroid strikes do sound more plausible, though there too I would expect a lot of people to be aware of the possibility and thus devote considerable measures to ensuring the safety of any space operations capable of actually diverting asteroids.

There are stages in meditation when painful thoughts and memories might come bubbling up. If you're just sitting still with your mind and have nothing to distract you, you may occasionally end up facing some past trauma, especially if you've previously avoided dealing with it and have e.g. tried to just distract yourself from it whenever it came up.

(This is not necessarily a negative anything in the long run, since facing those negative thoughts can help in getting over them.)

largely because people identify as "someone who does things," or at least as "someone who ought to do things,"

(either that, or people identify as "someone who doesn't do things", and find that to be a concept with negative value)

I'm skeptical of whether this is a particularly common outcome in practice. I suspect that if you're not an expert Buddhist meditator and basically living in a monastery, you'll just fail at this, and you'd have a much easier time achieving happiness by actually having a strong identity.

Based on my reading of the book, I guess the main suggestions that I'd make to anyone interested in playing around with creating new self-concepts would be:

• Use lots of diverse examples. E.g. if you're creating a self-concept of kindness, look for memories of both large and small acts of kindness. The memories contained within your self-concept serve as kind of templates to match various experiences against; the more diverse the database of templates, the more likely it is that different actions will be correctly identified. (Machine learning folks might say that this avoids overfitting.)
• • You can try to explicitly include memories from different years of life, as well as covering both short and long time periods (e.g. if you hold the door open to someone, that's an act of kindness lasting for a few seconds; if you have a friend who you've been helping with their troubles for the last several years, that can be thought of either as a big set of short acts or a single long-lasting act).
• See if you can include counterexamples as well, maybe doing a negative-positive reframe to turn them into examples, or including qualifiers with them. Again the template matching thing: if your self-concept for a quality contains instances of occasions when you failed to act according to the quality, then that allows you to recognize future occasions when you're not acting in accordance to the quality. This helps avoid unrealistic overconfidence in the quality.

(And for anyone interested in doing this seriously, I much recommend the book for lots and lots of practical examples and tips.)