I learned this meditation technique from my freediving coach. It's a technique we employ during a breath-hold to help us deal with an increasingly strong urge to breath.
Understand that the urge to breath is driven by the body’s desire to rid itself of carbon dioxide (CO2)--not (as some assume) your body's desire to take in oxygen (O2). The urge to breath is a warning, however. It can be safely ignore up to a certain limit. That limit, for our purposes, is the loss of consciousness (cerebral hypoxia); however, the urge to breath becomes quite strong well before your blood oxygen saturation low enough to cause... (read 490 more words →)
Why would the meditator not want to admit that they wasted their time? Often if people feel they wasted their time watching some stupid movie or TV program they have no issue at all complaining about it. Or if they went on a cruise and didn’t have a good time they are often completely open about the reality of the experience. When I read what you wrote I can’t help but think you have some strong bias against statements people make about meditation. If what you say is true, and people feel like they wasted their time meditating, then why would they continue doing it? Your logic just doesn’t add up.
...provides no more benefit than any other religious program would provide
What makes you call meditation a religious program?
Where is the religion in this practice:
Many people are in fact choosing to not have sex with humans, instead simulating interaction with a human while self-stimulating. If your criticism here is based on an assumption that such choice is somehow invalid or worse, it would be great if you could support that.
I thought that was probably not a choice for most people. Perhaps a result of society getting so obese that no one finds each other attractive anymore? For me, it's like the difference between riding (preferably racing) a motorcycle vs playing a motorcycle video game. I can't imagine why anyone who has experienced the former would prefer the latter.
The OP conceded my points were valid btw, but thanks for weighing in with your profound personal insights!
> I believe this is mostly a waste of time.
oh well!
>there are a lot of people on Less Wrong in particular are - for good reason - skeptical about whether or not there is actually anything worthwhile going on in this space.
if the goal is, in part, to get more people to try meditation, you could also 1) cite the scientific literature on the benefits, 2) maybe encourage them to try (if only for 10 minutes a day, but should be for at least 6-8 weeks in my opinion), 3) compile personal testimonials about the benefits (and perhaps your own story).
A lot has been written about the basic idea. I imagine the type of people who are most interested in... (read 362 more words →)
I'm not sure exactly what you disagree about, but thanks for the comparisons.
Here's a nice comparison on Quora from someone "Practicing Yoga & Meditation since 2001"
Zen is a school of "sudden enlightenment". You "just sit" on the cushion for a million years and with shear mind force destroy your ego and then you suddenly "get" it. Or (in the Rinzai school) you are given an absurd puzzle called Koan to solve. It throws your ego from its normal course that you reach Satori. Hence all the strange and crazy stories of Zen masters.
Vipassana is a school of "gradual enlightenment". First you learn how to focus on a single object or awareness... (read more)
The datasets it was trained on include Wikipedia (English), Common Web Crawl (basically a subset of the Internet), Github, among others.
A team of researchers from OpenAI recently published a paper describing GPT-3, a deep-learning model for natural-language with 175 billion parameters, 100x more than the previous version, GPT-2. The model is pre-trained on nearly half a trillion words and achieves state-of-the-art performance on several NLP benchmarks without fine-tuning.
In paper published on arXiv, a team of over 30 co-authors described the model and several experiments. The researchers' goal was to produce an NLP system that performs well on a variety of tasks with little or no fine-tuning, and previous work had indicated that... (read more)
thought of you!
> If you're planning on spending two months improving the revenue created by feature X by 3%, do the napkin math to see if existing revenue coming from X justifies two months salary.
How do you know they didn't? That deck is just a summary of years of work. Perhaps reach out to Dan McKinley for further discussion. I'm afraid we've both just making a lot of speculation at this point. Talk to Dan.
When your revenue is 7-8 digits, 3% can add up! Sometimes it's such a no-brainer that it's not worth opening Excel over. Last week I had my devs spend a few days implementing a way to create DHL labels... (read more)
Thanks! Was there any requirement that it needed to be a physical set? I assumed the AI would probably be interested in a digital environment.
The set could have a bunch of "cards" to start; or maybe the whole thing is open-sourced if you're philosophically opposed to the idea of people making their own decisions about trading money for things they find valuable. But those issues seem rather secondary to the spirit of the challenge here.