Is there research which supports these claims?

Here's some that I know of, from my bookmarks. I imagine a Google search would find you plenty more:

• http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2007/05/070507202029.htm
• http://psyphz.psych.wisc.edu/web/News/Meditation_Alters_Brain_WSJ_11-04.htm
• http://www.livescience.com/health/070629_naming_emotions.html

they cannot impart any novel knowledge apart from themselves

It's not knowledge, it's skill at self-control and self-awareness. And like most other skills (riding a bicycle, driving a car, etc.) you can't acquire them by reading about them or simply thinking that you already know how to do them.

One of the most pernicious biases of the human brain -- pernicious because it interferes with self-improvement -- is that your brain believes it can always intuitively predict its own responses to mental and physical actions that it has never actually taken.

This means that, even when a self-improvement book includes a technique that produces some useful, novel result, most people will never actually try it, versus just reading about it and imagining that they know what it would have been like if they'd tried it... and concluding that it wouldn't do anything!

And meditation is absolutely in this category. There's a world of difference between intellectually "knowing" how much dreck your brain is putting out, and the practical experience of sitting there and listening to it, day after day, and realizing just how utterly stupid you are... it's also an active discouragement from listening to your own crap the rest of the day, too.

We could also get into health benefits, improved concentration, and all that sort of thing. From personal experience back when I was regularly attending the Dallas Zen center, it also makes you calmer, friendlier, and more confident, although alas those effects are not permanent if you stop. It's sort of more like exercise that way, I think.

Anyway, enlightenment is hardly a requirement for doing meditation, and Zen masters routinely discourage students from paying attention to any exotic or "spiritual" experiences they may have, precisely because the practice is an exercise, not merely a way of getting to some particular destination.

But... why?

Suppose there is such a thing as spiritual enlightenment that is not captured by conventional religion, suppose neither Eliezer nor Adam get it. Further, suppose you attain it. Sure, it's a novel experience, but so are drugs for many folks. What do you expect to get out of it?

"No free lunch" is a basic tenet in knowledge acquisition. Want to know how life emerged? I'm sure we can all suggest books, university courses, museums, documentaries... but meditation? Mysticism? Yogis? They all may be a wonderful experience, with a feel of enlightenment to them, but they cannot impart any novel knowledge apart from themselves.

Another commenter suspects that mystical experience is underestimated by rationalists. Well, what is their true value? What knowledge do they carry?

I only skimmed the article, but through the glasses of evolutionary biology, the idea that most kids (and adults) aren't interested in being educated is almost trivial. Steven Weinberg once remarked that people are more interesting than electrons, and I think that this is the essence of the relative failure of the education system. It's a wonder anybody at all finds special interest in stuff like ocean currents, fossils and fractals. It's ridiculous to expect most or even a sizable fraction to consciously want to invest in such things when they could be hanging out with their friends or engaging in other socially productive activities.

I understand that there are many philosophies in education, and I wonder if they're just like different schools of psychotherapy. Can anyone point to any relative studies (preferably with large sample-sizes over long periods of time)?

Cryonics... and whether to spend your money at the margins on healthcare... and...

Perhaps I am prejudiced by poker (and games in general), but I see life as a constant series of decisions. The quality of those decisions, combined with luck, gives an outcome. Life is a game of chance and skill, in other words.

MAS rationality makes for better quality decisions, and thus makes for better outcomes. When there are institutional substitutes, I agree they can also make for better outcomes, but there are no institutional substitutes for the vast majority of the constant stream of decisions we encounter in life. I predict if you went through your day, noticed every decision you make (hundreds?), and scored them based on whether it is plausible that the decision could entirely be made via an institutional substitute, removing your own need to be rational completely, you would find almost none qualify. Those that do would be among the most important (medical decisions, how to invest your money), but some important decisions would remain (acting in an emergency situation).

Consider that in the West, life expectancy is very high, and people are very wealthy in historical perspective. This is the default position - to end up prematurely dead or poor (in an absolute, not relative, sense) you need to either take a lot of risk or be otherwise very unlucky. Sure, life could be better. But most (Western) folks have it OK as it is - yet they're not rational by OB standards.

LW readers seek a great deal of rationality, which is above and beyond what is required for an OK life in a human society. But remember that LW's prophets have extraordinary goals (Eliezer put a temporary moratorium on the discussion of his, but Robin has futarchy, as far as I understand). If your goal is simply to live well, you can allow yourself to be average. If your goal is to live better than average, you need some thinking tricks, but not much. If you want to tackle an Adult Problem (TM), then you have to start the journey. (Also if you're curious or want to be strong for strength's sake. But your life definitely will not depend on it!)

Cryonics seems to be an exception, but in most cases we'll do best by listening to the collective advice of domain experts. And we shouldn't believe that we can magically do better.

It is not economically feasible to outsmart or even match everyone. And even in an Adult Problem (TM), you can't hope to do it all by yourself. The lone hero who single-handedly defeats the monster, saves the world and gets the girl is a myth of movies and video games. In reality, he needs allies, supplies, transportation, weapon know-how, etc.

If you want to contribute, your best bet is to focus on a specific field. And you'll be much more productive if your background (which includes a lot of institutions) provides better support, evidence- and theory-wise. If we strive to improve institutions in general, that's a net gain for all of us, no matter what field we pursue. That's Robin's point, as I understand it.

(Ideas below are still works in progress, listed in descending order of potential disagreement:)

Bearing children is immoral. Eliezer has stated that he is not adult enough to have children, but I wonder if we will ever be adult enough, including in a post-singularity environment.

The second idea probably isn't as controversial: early suicide (outside of any moral dilemma, battlefield, euthanasia situation, etc.) is in some cases rational and moral. Combined with cryonics, it is the only sensible option for, e.g., senile dementia patients. But this group can be expanded, even without cryonics.

Some have mentioned modern school systems to be broken, but I'll go even further and say that mandatory education is a huge waste of time and money, for all involved. Many, perhaps most, need to know only basic literacy and arithmetic. The rest should be taught on a want-to-know basis or similar. As a corollary, I don't think many or even most people can be brought into the fold of science or rationality.

(Curiously, the original poster wondered if our crazy beliefs might be true, but many responses, including my own, are value, not fact, judgments.)

I think the "random words and phrases" I keep seeing in these comments is a bit of an exaggeration. Reading the (completely undocumented) wikipedia article I get the understanding that they crafted these poems using their own previous work, original ideas as well as phrases clipped wholesale from a book of quotations and deliberately convoluted rhymes from a rhyming dictionary etc. Nonetheless they strung them together with some sense of purpose - the selection was not technically random.

If you read an example from that article you will see that it has some continuity - its not the gibberish you would get from having a computer program randomly selecting phrases. So rather what you have is poetry written by poets using an unconventional method for an unconventional purpose. Its not surprising there are those who found this interesting - but I know absolutely nothing of poetry.

If you're reading this, Kurige, you should very quickly say the above out loud, so you can notice that it seems at least slightly harder to swallow - notice the subjective difference - before you go to the trouble of rerationalizing.

There seems to be some confusion here concerning authority. I have the authority to say "I like the color green." It would not make sense for me to say "I believe I like the color green" because I have first-hand knowledge concerning my own likes and dislikes and I'm sufficiently confident in my own mental capacities to determine whether or not I'm deceiving myself concerning so simple a matter as my favorite color.

I do not have the authority to say, "Jane likes the color green." I may know Jane quite well, and the probability of my statement being accurate may be quite high, but my saying it is so does not make it so.

I chose to believe in the existance of God - deliberately and conciously. This decision, however, has absolutely zero effect on the actual existance of God.

Critical realism shows us that the world and our perception of the world are two different things. Ideally any rational thinker should have a close correlation between their perception of the world and reality, but outside of first-hand knowledge they are never equivalent.

You are correct - it is harder for me to say "God exists" than it is for me to say "I believe God exists" for the same reason it is harder for a scientist to say "the higgs-boson exists" than it is to say "according to our model, the higgs-boson should exist."

The scientist has evidence that such a particle exists, and may strongly believe in it's existence, but he does not have the authority to say definitively that it exists. It may exists, or not exist, independent of any such belief.