The suggestions this essay gives for strength training -- that you can simply practice the final task of interest, instead of doing targeted training -- is ineffective at best and dangerously wrong at worst. While I'm less familiar with the other topics, I think similar dynamics apply, calling this entire essay into question.
Suppose your only goal in life is to win powerlifting competitions. Following the advice of this essay, you'd think one should just do nothing except practice the competition lifts. And that's very much not what competitive lifters do.
They do assistance exercises: when a muscle is the bottleneck, train that muscle, instead of training a larger movement that also uses that muscle.
Actually, the essay's own examples make the point stronger:
> There's another more interesting advantage though, which is that the feedback loop is tighter. If you're trying to lasso a bull and your grip strength is what's failing, guess which muscles are going to get the impetus to grow? If you're trying to lift a big rock into the back of a truck, not only does each muscle get its own growth signal in proportion to its need, you get practice learning to use them.
No! That is not how it works. While your pull strength might be limited by the grip, your number of reps will be limited by your overall fatigue, which is very much driven by your larger muscles. And thus your grip muscles are actually not getting that much signal to grow.
Actually, did you know that, in many lifts, the limiting factor is not your muscles at all, but rather your central nervous system? (Sometimes "lifting weights for the brain" is literally just lifting weights.)
If someone is doing deadlifts and finding themselves limited by grip strength, then they will start doing assistance exercises for the grip. Or if their actual goal is leg and back strength rather than the raw deadlift number, then they may start using deadlift straps.
This generalizes.
If you're a pianist, and you struggle through a difficult section of a larger piece, then you practice that section or practice drills or other pieces that exercise the technique underlying that section, instead of getting the small amounts of improvement that come from the few seconds of that section while also practicing the rest of the piece and dividing your attention on other things.
A related issue is that oftentimes the real practice has a larger cost, be it time, money, or health. It's well-known in lifting that muscles grow faster than connective tissue, so that someone constantly pushing their maximum is guaranteed an injury, even if they have perfect form. Due to the larger family of phenomena this comes from, Eddie Hall, contender for strongest man in the world, said that he only makes 1-rep max attempts in competition. Quite the opposite of trying to do the "real thing" to improve!
Actually, the arguments of this essay are essentially the same as what I argued against nearly a decade ago in The Practice is not the Performance: Why Project-Based Learning Fails. Project-based learning had a lot of mindshare in the 2010s, boosted by various fads such as programming bootcamps. When I first published it, I got a lot of public attacks, along with a lot of private appreciation from people who went through project-based learning programs and came to realize how ineffective they were compared to traditional education. It wound up on the front page of HN again some years later, and was met with a lot of agreement as more had come to realize the failures of the bootcamp approach.
There is a place for doing real projects and noticing when you're missing the ability to combine individual skills you learned into the whole, and this essay does touch on that. I can most appreciate this essay as a reminder for people who have been too stuck in school of the importance of the 12th virtue of rationality (keeping sight of the end goal). But there's something I can't put my finger on that leads me to imagine it being read by people who ought be doing assistance exercises in the gym and practice drills for their career. Should you reverse any advice you hear?
I think most of this can be summarized in the line "Professional athletes lift weights for good reason", no? There are indeed good reasons to lift weights in judiciously chosen ways. I've done a fair bit of lifting myself, and still do some.
I can most appreciate this essay as a reminder for people who have been too stuck in school of the importance of the 12th virtue of rationality (keeping sight of the end goal).
Right, so are you working your grip strength because the rope got pulled out of your hand, and you realize that your grip needs more specific work until that stops happening? If your meditation practice involves running up against real limits, working the piece that you observed to fail, and testing with short feedback loops against the actual purpose, then you already get it.
Most people I see talk about meditation don't have that. People will do it because "Science says it helps with anxiety", or because "there is no self" sounds profound and fascinating. And then they go focus on their breath for countless hours, hoping that the skills somehow translate while being ironically mindless about the connection. Which is where, I argue, mindfulness counts the most.
Some meditators do pull it off -- Dr.K can sure put his "holding thoughts as object" skills to impressive real world use. But you also get people with decades of meditation experience, who make meditation part of their identity, who nonetheless fuse with their thoughts in a stiff breeze. Without noticing.
And if we generalize beyond meditation to rationality, how many people can give a tightly coupled account of exactly how their engagement with LW connects to their broader goals? How many have even noticed that this post contains zero advice?
Deliberate Practice was basically the realization that this isn't true when talking about rapid skill acquisition. It can be totally fine for normal optimization of life supportive practice.
An interesting idea, but I notice that:
These conventional, supplementary strategies push capabilities beyond those required at the time of performance, ensuring that the performer has spare capacity, not operating at their limits when it counts. Also, many exercises have a complementary nature, such as athletes strengthening muscles that balance their physique and prevent injuries.
Overall, by observing the time-tested training methods of high-functioning professionals from in fiercely competitive fields, I think the advice in this post is mostly incorrect :)
High-functioning professionals don't learn to restrain bulls by actually trying to restrain a bull on day one, that's how you get gored. You look at the task, decompose it into subskills, drill the subskills until you can do them better than you will need to in the real task, then practice stringing them together, and then you go restrain bulls and catch lobsters.
"It is said that meditation is strength training for the mind."
Calling meditation "strength training for the mind" seems inaccurate to me.
There are some aspects of some styles of meditation that could be interpreted in this way, though mostly I think "skill/technique training for the mind" would be more accurate as a generalization.
Less 'gaining more mental strength' and more 'making more effective use of the mental strength that you already have'.
If we are talking about 'mental strength' then the closest applicable concepts in meditation (that I'm aware of) would be 'mindfulness' (sati / 'An optimal interaction between attention and peripheral awareness')
and 'stable attention' (samādhi / 'The ability to intentionally direct and sustain the focus of attention, and to control the scope of attention')
These terms and accompanying definitions come out of the book "The Mind Illuminated", a science-informed meditation guide based on the Samatha-vipassanā style, which has a very helpful glossary at the end.
"Why are we training our minds for strength mindfulness and stable attention again?"
The same as with any 'why' question, this ultimately comes down to what you believe is important in life.
If you can work directly on the things that give life meaning for you, that's going to be what you want to do. Unfortunately it's not always so clear what we want and how we can work towards that.
I would argue that mindfulness and stable attention are particularly compelling in terms of instrumental value, because they directly affect our ability to understand, observe, and intentionally manipulate the continuously unfolding stream of conscious experience that is our life.
From this perspective, meditation seems to me to be a low-cost action that will build skills that are always going to be somewhat relevant to your ultimate goal. Not necessarily the optimal action in every situation, but always offering a way to make small step in the right direction if you're otherwise at a loss for how to make progress.
"Try to do the thing you actually care about."
How can you deliberately try? How do you know, and constantly keep in mind, what you actually care about? How can you ensure that you will do this consistently?
If the answers to these questions are clear for you, then your course is set.
If you're less sure, meditation might be of some use to you in finding answers.
There are other reasons for meditation as well, but I won't go into them here since they are less relevant to the points made in the OP.
See also Kaj_Sotala's A mechanistic model of meditation for a more detailed exploration of the potential benefits of meditation.
Calling meditation "strength training for the mind" seems inaccurate to me.
There are some aspects of some styles of meditation that could be interpreted in this way, though mostly I think "skill/technique training for the mind" would be more accurate as a generalization.
It depends if we're talking "meditation done right" or "meditation as practiced". I agree that skill training is a more useful framing. I see a lot of people operating from a "strength training" framing, with predictable results.
How can you deliberately try? How do you know, and constantly keep in mind, what you actually care about? How can you ensure that you will do this consistently?
If the answers to these questions are clear for you, then your course is set.
If you're less sure, meditation might be of some use to you in finding answers.
These are great questions. How does one deliberately try? How do you know what you care about? How can you make sure you keep your priorities in line?
These are exactly the kinds of question that call for mindfulness and stable attention, because they produce extremely valuable insights once answered. Knowing how to try? Knowing what you actually care about and how to act on that? Doesn't get much more instrumentally useful than that.
And because meditation is best thought of as a skill, the interactions with the target of focus matter in ways that the "brute strength" framing obscures. If you want to come off as "strong" at jiu jitsu, gym-buildable muscles can help, but not as much as knowing what it feels like to apply your weight properly -- and you can't find that in the gym because there's no "Shoulder on face" machine. The exact ways in which your attention gets destabilized from these important questions, and the moves that hold attention on the instrumentally useful targets, aren't there to be found in the breath.
If the answers to these questions are clear to you, then you don't need "meditation". Your course is already set.
If you're less sure, there is value to be found in practicing holding stable attention on these questions.
For example: how does "just do the thing" help me get better sleep?
What does your mind feel like, when you are trying to go to sleep? Is that state compatible with mental rest and relaxation? If not, what mental move could you use to go towards relaxation? What are your dreams like? Are there any persistent themes of anxiety or fear in your dreams, that might arouse your brain enough to interrupt a sleep cycle, or even wake you up? How might you cope better with those feelings, so they don't interrupt?
You could also try setting different intentions before going to bed, like 'tonight I will conjure boring fantasies to calm my my mind' or 'I will focus on my breath to calm my mind' and then see how those influence your sleep.
Very good answer.
Adding onto this, I spent a couple weeks playing with polyphasic sleeping, with explicit intent to "learn how to fall asleep" as the main driving factor. When you're doing 20 minute naps every few hours, that's a lot like "practice falling asleep". Fall asleep, wake up, do it again.
It was definitely helpful in teaching me what to sleep, and a large part of that is giving me an answer to "What does it feel like to succeed in falling asleep". It blew my mind to realize that I could go days on what I had thought was "no sleep" because I had continuous experience. The answer is basically "Your mind slows down to a stop", and you can experience that without loss of consciousness though your ability to tell time goes away because there are no events to count and use to estimate time.
Interestingly, I met an experienced meditator at an early LW meetup before this who said he had experience maintaining awareness throughout a full night's sleep. It seemed crazy to me at the time and I couldn't mentally represent what that'd be like, but hammering on "try to sleep" got me that experience in nap form.
It is said that meditation is strength training for the mind. Why are we strength training our minds again? What is it that this strength is for, and are we keeping this in mind when we choose what and how we lift?
I think many people are doing meditation in order to reflect on what really matters to them. But let's focus on the case where meditation is only strength training for a particular goal, for the sake of argument.
I think there are a lot of structural differences between physical strength training and meditative training. In fact, I think meditation is more "resting" than "training" in some ways.
- Figuring out what you really need (why you're anxious, why you can't speak in public, why you can't create long-lasting relationships...) is really hard, and noticeably harder than just doing the meditation.
- Meditation really is that good. We don't have to guess about whether meditation alone is useful in different domains; it's a well-studied phenomenon now. It helps regulate your emotions, helps you sleep, can help with obesity and just with general mood. Nobody does meditation to get better at writing emails, but it certainly does help me stay motivated while I write them.
- You can make meditation your fallback state; you can't make physical training your fallback state. When you're exhausted and you don't know what to do next, meditating really helps clean up your thoughts. And once you make it a habit, it does not require any motivation or planning: you just do it.
- I heard the testimony of one guy who said that he developed persistent awareness (a strong meditative state after the end of his meditation) after doing, well, only meditation. If being more aware while you're working is your goal, then doing just meditation may be enough.
If you want to become physically strong, the default solution to this problem is to go lift weights. The idea is that you can challenge your muscles in the gym, build capacity to develop force, and then next time you need to use strength for real, it'll be easier. And this works, obviously. Professional athletes lift weights for good reason, and it pays off when they have more strength with which to push back the opposing lineman or whatever.
However, this isn't the only way to build strength, and done poorly it can have serious downsides.
The alternative is to just go do things that are hard. Not because they're hard, but because they're worth doing even though they're hard. A farmer doesn't need to lift iron so that lifting bales of hay is easier, he can just lift the hay -- and if it's hard, that will build the strength that makes it easier. If nothing else, this saves him a gym membership and time by doing his strength training on the job.
There's another more interesting advantage though, which is that the feedback loop is tighter. If you're trying to lasso a bull and your grip strength is what's failing, guess which muscles are going to get the impetus to grow? If you're trying to lift a big rock into the back of a truck, not only does each muscle get its own growth signal in proportion to its need, you get practice learning to use them. There is skill in coordinating muscle contractions into the right postures to use muscles to do real things. There's skill in knowing when to not use muscles. While I'm sure NFL coaches do a pretty good job of matching training to the field use, it's easy to overemphasize bicep curls because biceps are what you notice on people that "look strong", and now you've invoked Goodhart's law. I've had a woman I know tell me about guys at Jiu Jitsu who at first intimidated her with all their muscles, only for her to realize after rolling with them "Lol, those are gym muscles" — because these guys lacked the body awareness needed to actually use them effectively.
Figuring out what we're lifting for matters, because it determines what we lift and how we lift it. Even if we're just trying to impress people, it's hard to be more unimpressive than spending all our time building muscles that don't actually work when we need them.
It is said that meditation is strength training for the mind. Why are we strength training our minds again? What is it that this strength is for, and are we keeping this in mind when we choose what and how we lift?
Meditation has all the same considerations and more, because staying connected to what you actually need meditation for is itself a meditation skill. Arguably the most important.
Anxiety? Why not do CBT or something. Tackle that directly, with whichever skills prove appropriate, and concrete feedback about whether it's working. How anxious are you, and is it more or less than one perceptual timestep ago? What is correlating with these fluctuations, and what does this imply about how to solve the problem?
Or better yet, why do you care about anxiety in the first place? What are you anxious about anyway?
Oh, public speaking? You're worried that you're gonna do a bad job, and this is pulling your attention away from where it needs to be in order to do a good job? Why not tackle that directly, with whichever skills prove appropriate? Skills like holding attention on the topic of your speech. Like awareness of when your attention is drifting towards unhelpful things, and of why your attention keeps getting dragged where it does. And whether there might be a reason that has elided your awareness.
Whatever the goal, there's always the option of intentionally practicing mindfulness towards the specific things needed to succeed at your goal. Instead of getting your koans from meditation teachers, you can notice the koans that nature puts between us and our goals. If you're diving for lobsters you might think the limiting skill is grabbing them before they get away, but the limit might actually be in your perceptual ontology. Which one of these pieces of kelp — which is definitely kelp — is about to transform into a lobster?
To the extent that becomes limiting, lobster diving becomes a great way to build the skill of noticing the difference between our low level conclusions and the reality beneath. Would you notice if you were up against this limit? There's something to meditate on. Something that will keep your practice grounded in what you care about.
Without that, and without a skilled coach who can keep your efforts grounded for you, there's the risk of developing the meditation equivalent of "gym muscles". Of becoming someone who is breath aware, and who can let thoughts arise and pass "as thoughts" from a full lotus on the meditation cushion, but reverts to conflating their thoughts with reality under the pressure of thoughts that matter, and might even be right. Without any hard earned skills of coordinating thoughts in ways that stand up to pressure and serve to shape reality.
When the thought that arises is "Shit, I left the front door open. I don't know where my kid is", do you have to leave the meditative practice in order to act? Are you building skills for dealing with thoughts of the sort "We're on track to unacceptable outcomes" that don't require either giving up on meditation or giving up on reality?
This alternative is much harder. Try to do the thing you actually care about. Hone the skills of noticing exactly where you're going wrong. Develop awareness of where your perceptual ontology is failing you. And of where your awareness is failing you. Puzzles will multiply faster than the answers.
And as a result, things will stay interesting. It can be hard to stay motivated lifting weights up when they just end up back down in the same spot anyway. Or to focus on your breath when your breath isn't doing anything interesting, and you have to practice not-noticing the lack of a compelling answer to "Why am I doing this anyway? This is stupid".
It's a lot easier to exert yourself to maximum capacity when the connection is solid, and you know what you're fighting for. When there's a bull to restrain, or lobsters to catch. Or unacceptable outcomes on the horizon, and no clear way off the track.