I'm actually really into meditation, and I teach a little on the side, and I run into these kinds of people aaaaall the time. It's extremely frustrating. They want results (that probably don't line up with what meditation does), they want it fast (regardless of how dangerous it can be to fuck with your mind like that), and if they can't figure it out the first try, it's your fault because they're too perfect and brilliant to ever have any issues.
They're very into trying to optimize the shit out of everything (guess what, it's already pretty optimized, we have thousands of years of records of people meditating in the past, I think they knew what they were doing) and ignoring any sort of advice when they crash headfirst into a wall.
I have a guy I talk to pretty frequently who is pretty convinced he's the second coming of the Buddha although he recognizes he hasn't quite figured it out yet, and thinks he's VERY close. The reality is he hasn't made much progress at all and just beats his head against the wall and parrots vague concepts like it's supposed to mean something.
>and if they can't figure it out the first try, it's your fault because they're too perfect and brilliant to ever have any issues.
Or in other words: There’s no royal road to ~~geometry~~ meditation.
Pardon my ignorance, but I wasn't aware there was a concept of "progressing" in meditation. My only experience with meditation is a couple minutes to clear my mind before martial arts practice, and it felt quite performative because I don't think it takes much effort for me to clear my mind enough for that... I didn't really consider it went further than that.
Yeah, meditation is a pretty big, complicated, nuanced thing with thousands of years of history and many techniques to do and things to achieve, if one is so inclined. Broken up most simply, you have samatha or concentration meditation, which is the act of cultivating concentration to develop various blissful states of consciousness, and vipassana or insight meditation, which is the act of cultivating the clear-seeing mind, allowing you to notice reality how it is which allows for deep insights into the human condition which can be quite transformative.
There are many ways to measure 'progress' in meditation, in samatha there are a various number of jhana or concentration states, most traditions have 8. In vipassana there are a number of things that can happen to baseline mental functioning as a result of practice, those are typically called paths or bhumis depending on tradition. I work mostly in Theravada Buddhism, and that tradition has 8 jhanas and 4 paths. At 1st path you're considered enlightened, but at 4th path the thing is complete and you're considered fully enlightened. It can all get a little silly and complicated, but the practices, done well and in proper doses, can truly change your life for the better.
Yeah, it can be quite hard to figure out for absolutely certain because all mental states are subjective. That being said, with good mentorship, high standards, and the use of the thousands of years worth of texts that all describe these states similarly, in a certain order, over and over again consistently, you can get fairly good approximations of where you're at and what state you're in at a given time.
There is a lot of trouble with people "overcalling," as in, saying they're in a certain state or have a certain path or have had a certain insight when they haven't, and actually that seems to be part of the process. The trick to keep yourself from totally fucking yourself is to keep your mind open, keep an eye out for what is happening here and now, and not get too upset when people call you out on your bullshit (this is where the Rationalist types usually fail).
Honestly that’s just… hopeful? Like, I get it, usually people figure
this out the first month of college, while sober (or at least, sober for
college standards), not on acid. Ok, maybe the Harry Potter reference is
a bit surprising (to each century, its archetypes I guess).
But still, the guy is exposing a difficult path toward awareness. Why
is that sneerworthy? I would congratulate him if I had anny intention to
create a twitter account
I mean, the original thread was just an extremely overwrought attempt to justify him doing what he was already doing. I'm so confused why so many people are buying into his expression of vulnerability as meaningful, when the ultimate conclusion was that I don't need money because I already have a ton, my parents will probably leave me a ton in their will, so I can just keep not having a job and writing. I'm just so flummoxed why this earns the sympathy of anyone here to start with
> But still, the guy is exposing a difficult path toward awareness.
Some forms of awareness are worth more than others. Not always correlated to how difficult they are to reach.
This is serious weak sauce compared to the great trip reports of
history. For
example:
I once inhaled a pretty full dose of ether, with the determination to
put on record, at the earliest moment of regaining consciousness, the
thought I should find uppermost in my mind. The mighty music of the
triumphal march into nothingness reverberated through my brain, and
filled me with a sense of infinite possibilities, which made me an
archangel for the moment. The veil of eternity was lifted. The one great
truth which underlies all human experience, and is the key to all the
mysteries that philosophy has sought in vain to solve, flashed upon me
in a sudden revelation. Henceforth all was clear: a few words had lifted
my intelligence to the level of the knowledge of the cherubim. As my
natural condition returned, I remembered my resolution; and, staggering
to my desk, I wrote, in ill-shaped, straggling characters, the
all-embracing truth still glimmering in my consciousness. The words were
these (children may smile; the wise will ponder): “A strong smell of
turpentine prevails throughout.”
I’ll be honest I don’t really find this sneer worthy but to be fair I
don’t know anything about this guy. To me it’s more just cringe if
anything. At the end of the day I guess I’m just glad he seems to be
moving in the right direction.
I agree that this particular thread isn’t sneer worthy. I love the (not actually the original) quote “Be kind to everyone, for we are all fighting a hard battle.”
Where a sneer starts to come in is based on a certain hypocritical context. I don’t know the author of this thread, but, many typical rationalists hold a certain neo-libertarian attitude that is essentially a “just world” belief. They can acknowledge privilege while at the same time holding the attitude that everyone who doesn’t get $100K from their parents is in that position because they deserve to be so. Their parents wealth is just derived from their high IQ (or other meritorious ability) and thus, as inheritors of their parents genes, they are also deserving of wealth and other good life outcomes.
And then you get into certain aspects of the related EA movement, where animals are far more deserving of the help of rationalists than Americans in poverty. Bed nets are fine, but maybe the more effective thing is to rescue those in Africa from their low IQs. Don’t get me wrong, there is nothing wrong with engaging in altruistic enterprises anywhere, but the specific things the EA movement concentrates are a little too on the nose given the broader movement’s particular hobby horses.
Everyone is entitled to go through their own voyage of self discovery, but one hopes they discover some other things along the way.
How is he moving in the right direction? He's not going to use that money to help anyone else. His parents are literally holding off on retirement to support him, and yet his final realization is that he should just keep writing and not get a job or change anything about his life.
I mean, the entire thread is written like absolute shit, so it's difficult to tell what exactly what the fuck point he's trying to make with half of this, but what has he said that leaves you with the impression he's moving in the right direction?
I mean, is it possible to not write like absolute shit on twitter? Joking aside, I did make a few assumptions from his post (that you might not agree with) that might explain our differences a bit. The first is that he seems pretty young and inexperienced, and his relative lack of awareness about his own privilege is IMO a little more forgivable if that is the case. Like if you really did have well off parents who went out of their way to shelter you from reality, and spared no expense doing so, that would be hard to break out of and it would in all likelihood leave you with a very impoverished worldview when you enter your young adulthood. The second is that his parents are probably not scrounging for scraps if they gifted him 100,000 friggin dollars. Yes he said that his father told him he was holding off on retiring, but it seems more likely to me that that was either an attempt by his father to motivate his child (or some other similar explanation that we don't have enough information on to judge), or that his parents have a very luxurious idea of retirement. But even the latter guess there doesn't really make sense - there's just no scenario there, or in your read of it, that seems realistic to me. Parents have $100,000 in cash to gift to their son but don't have enough money for retirement (He also says they separately paid $175,000 out of pocket so he could attend MIT). It's a bit absurd. So I think another explanation is more likely.
So to answer your question, I'm starting by just trying to be honest about myself that if I grew up in a similar scenario, I would have almost certainly ended up with similar issues to what he describes in his post. I would probably be depressed and anxious about my own perceived lack of dignity, while also terrified at the prospect and difficulty of becoming truly self sufficient and independent. And if that money was an option, it would always be so easy to slip up and end up right back at the start. I'm not saying this means we should totally pity this guy, or that his problems are bigger than others, it's just that I can empathize with it and recognize that that is still a challenging place to be in in its own ways. In terms of what I view as progress, I guess its just his willingness to communicate openly and honestly (Will quote in a sec, but I think it is a good thing if rich people have the self awareness and courage share publicly that they feel miserable and spiritually empty and share the lived experiences around this), and acknowledging his own failures to grow (No job, no gf, no friends, etc). So here is one thing he says:
> i had friends in college who would complain about money problems and i didn't know what they meant and was too embarrassed to ask. when they said they couldn't afford X i didn't know if they meant "that's not in my budget" or "i don't have the dollars in my bank account"
This is obviously easy to dunk on and I can't really fault people who feel compelled to. But to me it does really share something that only a person in his position could share, and most would simply choose not to (Again, I'd be surprised if even he thought this would be a popular take on the internet). And I think this backs up my point above about how I would have similar issues after his upbringing, and clarifies how that leads to even more difficulty in breaking out of it all.
Another thing informing my view here is something I already expanded on in another comment (I won't type as much on that here because this is already long, it's in the other comment if you're interested), but that is the context collapse that happens on platforms like Twitter. I don't think most people reacting viscerally to this post would do the same if someone shared this with them in person. That's how I try to look at it, and I think if some rich person I knew shared all of this with me, I would probably be pretty proud of them for trying to confront it at all rather than take the easy route of living off his parent's money. I see that as progress. The other part here is that as far as I can tell this is just Some Internet Guy (He says he had 8k followers before this post), which is important to the way I try to approach internet discourse. I think the type of mockery and shaming that this subreddit takes part in is only constructive and just when directed towards individuals/organizations with outsized influence/power and who are pursuing ideologically driven projects. But I guess that could just be me, there aren't hard rules here. I'm still unclear on how this person even relates to the rationalist community, but maybe I would be less forgiving if he were actively engaged in and arguing for an ideology of economic oppression. What I see is a guy who was born into wealth telling us "hey everyone I'm pretty miserable". His own understanding of the problem, his views of the world and his place in it, and his conception of the possible resolutions, to the extent that he shares them, are certainly under developed. And some of the stuff he says is concerning, like the metaphor about having been born into a guild. But it's all just that, under developed, and it's just a person who is trying to make sense of his life and publicly sharing the ways in which the privileged spot he got in life is insufficient in its own ways and maybe he would prefer something different. I guess my view is that we'd be better off if more wealthy people were this self aware (Which isn't to say he is extremely self aware) and transparent, and I also think that when someone tells you they're miserable and that they want to be better, it's more constructive to engage with compassion and respectful criticism than immediately dunk on him for being an asshole. Now that this has gone viral I have absolutely zero doubt that he will get raked through the coals anyways, this is red meat for Twitter.
>I mean, is it possible to not write like absolute shit on twitter?
Twitter at least avoids the wall of text thing reddit enables.
Anyway, banned for (1) being too sympathetic to a shitty selfish person and (2) typing all that out.
I know him through the math community, he's incredibly good at math. Like one of those people you're just like "Fuck, I wish I had 1/10000th of what he has". It's often a bit of a rocky landing for those of us who try to branch out and get involved in normal life.
I mean... it's at least completely tone deaf to complain about getting 100k from your parents as a birthday gift. Also, is acid just a substitute for therapy nowadays? Am I out of touch or is it the children who are wrong?
I agree with all of that personally, but I just consider it to be more of an issue with Twitter as a platform than anything else. This guy is being vulnerable and vulnerable in a specific way that even he probably knows isn't going to be looked at generously by most of the internet. But that's your option if you're gonna post, send it to the whole world or don't send it at all. And we are all in that position to some extent, because we generally want to talk about things on the internet that we haven't fully fleshed out yet, that is just the best of our understanding, that we don't have PHDs in, or that our older selves will probably look back at and be completely embarrassed by. I think the context collapse going on here is a bigger issue than the content of his tweets. If I had a random rich friend and he came to me and said all of that stuff in a private conversation, I would probably be pretty proud of him even though he still has a ways to go.
But all of that is why I don't go on twitter. I was actually more caught up by his follow up tweet:
> and yeah, once again, it is extremely fucked up that there are people for whom even $1k or $10k of this money would be completely life-changing. there are way more than $100k worth of these people and i don't know how to pick between them and this is the situation we're in it sucks. it just sucks. i don't have anything remotely useful to say about how much it sucks
I'm not sneering at this either but it is pretty shocking how narrow his understanding of what he can do to help people and improve the world given his economic position. I guess I'd just rather find a way to engage with him constructively than dunk on him til he gets cynical and stops caring at all. But that's just my own view of course.
And yeah it is really weird how going and doing acid on your own is like seen as some sort of replacement for having another human being, preferably a trained one, help you. There's definitely a neoliberalism riff there lol.
Yes. And I commented saying I don't personally find it particularly sneer worthy, and your quote of me was part of the explanation of why I don't. I don't see a contradiction.
Edit: Is this someone I should know of? Maybe that is part of my confusion.
This person is being aggressively vulnerable on the internet. It’s
not my cup of tea but that’s ok. I think it is good for trust fund kids
to reckon with their position in life, and this one is starting to do
that. He doesn’t know much (e.g. can’t view camming as work) and I don’t
think insights without action are worth much praise. But not
sneer-worthy IMO.
As far as I know this is kind of the acid deal. Learn something about
yourself, but although it seems important it might be a small part of
your emotional core that doesn’t translate into real-life changes once
you come down.
it is kinda cringe to acid blog on Slack though. screens bad
He's part of the postrationalist/Eigenrobot part of Twitter, which tends to be smug, full of cutesy in-jokes, and drenched in the most obnoxious sort of online irony (along with right-libertarian and HBD apologetics).
Among other things, this is what happens when you get vulnerable in front of a lot of people who've quietly hated you for a while.
I don’t find this one all that interesting personally, but it leads
me to ask a question I’ve had for a long time: why, when I click a
sneerclub link, then go back to reddit, does the thread disappear? I
have to manually navigate to sneerclub in order to comment. I don’t feel
like this happens with other subs, but I always notice it with SC. And
I’m asking the question in this thread because I honestly don’t really
have anything to say.
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Honestly that’s just… hopeful? Like, I get it, usually people figure this out the first month of college, while sober (or at least, sober for college standards), not on acid. Ok, maybe the Harry Potter reference is a bit surprising (to each century, its archetypes I guess).
But still, the guy is exposing a difficult path toward awareness. Why is that sneerworthy? I would congratulate him if I had anny intention to create a twitter account
Edit: No, actually you know what? Fuck him. He thougth a bit more about that and decided that America hates the rich, and this his the cause of his struggle. Also, you are racist because yes.
This is serious weak sauce compared to the great trip reports of history. For example:
I’ll be honest I don’t really find this sneer worthy but to be fair I don’t know anything about this guy. To me it’s more just cringe if anything. At the end of the day I guess I’m just glad he seems to be moving in the right direction.
some twitter people really need to consider keeping a diary instead of posting
Username checks out
(one of them, anyway – high on the list of reasons I avoid Twitter is that the “every user has two kinds of names” UI drives me bonkers)
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This person is being aggressively vulnerable on the internet. It’s not my cup of tea but that’s ok. I think it is good for trust fund kids to reckon with their position in life, and this one is starting to do that. He doesn’t know much (e.g. can’t view camming as work) and I don’t think insights without action are worth much praise. But not sneer-worthy IMO.
As far as I know this is kind of the acid deal. Learn something about yourself, but although it seems important it might be a small part of your emotional core that doesn’t translate into real-life changes once you come down.
it is kinda cringe to acid blog on Slack though. screens bad
give me 100000 dollars whiny baby bitch
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Why are they all so whiny, long winded and crushingly banal? I’m three tweets in and already bored.
Who reads this shit? This is abuse of Twitter as a medium.
Archive
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you know what, this is incredibly funny from an outside perspective
but also, good on this guy for figuring out his personal problems I guess?
I don’t find this one all that interesting personally, but it leads me to ask a question I’ve had for a long time: why, when I click a sneerclub link, then go back to reddit, does the thread disappear? I have to manually navigate to sneerclub in order to comment. I don’t feel like this happens with other subs, but I always notice it with SC. And I’m asking the question in this thread because I honestly don’t really have anything to say.