All of Hijol's Comments + Replies

Answer by Hijol40

If the person cannot bring an argument for the unability of measurment then i guess it could fall under the arument of ignorance "I, and maybe we, don't know if, then either it's impossible or everything is possible". In this case "I don't know how to put a value in human life then it's impossible". This my best shot so far but it has some limits i guess, usually the argumebt of ignorance is used in a debate where facts have a important place as "Do Alien already came to earth" or "Do vaccines work ?". In this case the argument can take the following forms

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Thank you kind sir for answering and sharing your experience.

I'm only vaguely familiar with satanism and all the form it can take, I assumed it was about bringing the human back at the center of the Universe "as a God" at the center of its own experience, dismiss him from its function and raise the human to a realistic and powerful place : We're not Gods but we're not a nothing, and we have strengh. I did not know that my claims about a "rational symbolic magic" could find followers here, i'll take a look !

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Yes of course a year is a priori enough to see changes.

Yup, this was the conclusion of my first answer ! It would be wonderful, but I truly believe that a two weeks study won't show any valid result in terms of personnality. But yes i agree, what are they waiting to for to conduct a large scale study ?! :)

1romeostevensit
Oh, right I was not paying much attention to the two week thing. I got a large effect with a retest one year later with daily practice and multiple retreats.

Yes, attention can be indeed mediated through general tiredness and general motivation but also a large number of other factors like cognition need. The idea is that all of these factors can be well modified by other things than your meditation routine (for example tiredness can be modified just by what you did the very same you make the test), making the measurement difficult implement, can be done but with a hell ton of stats...

No i don't know any, with a quick research i found this article in the NYT that maybe can give some hints

https://well.blogs... (read more)

But you're not supposed to see large changes in a personality test, Big 5's dimensions are theorically stable over time. Very large changes can be attributed inter alia to a Pygmalion effect due to self-evaluation (It can also be founded in hetero-evaluation). In these conditions it's common to see very large changes in Big 5, i'm agreed that it is a language abuse to qualify this as measurement errors but the result is the same, it do not measure real changes. Correct me if i'm wrong but this is why it is very common to confirm the fidelity of a big five with a test-retest process, because Big five is supposed to have a strong over time consistency.

2romeostevensit
I agree there should be skepticism when people report significant changes on psychometrics that are in general testing populations stable. The same thing arises in small studies sowing meditation boosting IQ. But the hypothesis that meditation can change things that other interventions can't should be chased down since if true it's very important.

Big 5 is a personality test. Personality is not supposed to change over a short period of time. All results should be measurement errors and random fluctuations from testing conditions. It would be interesting to see personality changes over a long period of time though.

1romeostevensit
Very large changes that are concordant with others' reported changes in your behavior are likely not measurement error.

It's seems difficult in a first place to measure... But why not. Validity and sensitivity won't be that big of a problem if you decide to use standardized tests. I'm more concern about fidelity.

It will most likely contain some error. Your test can give you some result that you might interpret when in reality it can only show random fluctuation. Understand here : There are standardized tests, so they won't show you random fluctuations but they're designed to measure a criteria IN GENERAL and not the part of this measure which is du... (read more)

1justinpombrio
I'm interested in the causal effect that meditation has on my attention, etc. If that effect is mediated through, e.g., reducing fatigue, all the better! Do you know of any? Right now I plan to use tagtime to do free-form experience sampling, plus the meditation games on Quantified Mind once a week or so. (Thanks all for these suggestions!)

I'm from an occidental culture... It's difficult to understand and to adopt a spirituality from the opposite side of the world, codes and symbols are upside down (or downside up ! ) and it's easy to get "cultural interference" that mislead you in your path. When i think about it i thought about cultural appropriation before it was a cool hipster thing... Now i tend to feed on everything I found and make my own occidental mess of a spirituality. I guess everyone who's a minimum curious tends to mix up different ideas he can rely on.

Thank you very much it was a really good talk !

PS : again sorry for misspost my pc is a mad beast... sorry mods

Exactly, I think words are conforting, they give us something to rely on. As they are barely the only thing we can rely on, more than useful they're a essential. But I think it's indispensable not because the balance between word and wordless is the thing that makes us progress but because the word keeps us bounded to our condition. As we can't let us drown into the speechless and the silence we need some sort of rope to ride up the cliff afterward (or get down the moutain depending on your personnal and cultural orientation and symbolic). ... (read more)

3Elo
Agreed. The unfortunate thing about wordless experience for me is that I can't record and therefore can't repeat it very well. I've woken up from a dream feeling like just when it got less describey I had a realisation and feel better. I don't know what happened or why or how. And I'd like to be able to repeat that while awake. There are no words for that. I like the phrase "I make my own soup". Me too. I wonder if everyone does a bit. (obviously to certain degrees, talking here about a larger degree for myself). My phrase is "I am my own guide"

This is a very interesting post, thank you for bringing this up. This a going to be a very personal thought i'd like to share.

I think that, as you well sayed, your enlightenment needs to follow both paths; "emotionnal" and "rationnal" to simplify. The difference imo lays in the distance you can travel on these paths. I actually think this distance is finite and actually pretty limited. Every questioning whether it is about the nature of reality, consciousness, or the inner meaning of our joys or fears ends in a space where words ... (read more)

3Elo
Yes. A certain amount of seeking is required to make progress on the path, at a different point on the path, all seeking must be abandoned. And all not-seeking must also be abandoned and all abandon must also be abandoned. Yes there is also a balance between the words and the wordless (3 things, "words", "wordless" and "balance") Just wordless is not the solution, just words is not the solution and just balance is really not anything at all without both sides to balance.