This is a nitpick that doesn't really affect the overall message of the post (which I upvoted), but:
The Economist's Democracy Index shows a sharp decline over the last decade:
That chart has a cut y-axis; the decline looks much less sharp in a graph that shows the full range:
This box from Wikipedia also suggests that the overall average going from 5.55 to 5.3 isn't that significant, as the whole scale is used and everything between 4 and 6 is considered to be within the same category of regime:
Though note that this assumes that defenders are willing and capable of actually patching their systems. There are lots of people who are running outdated insecure versions of various pieces of software, product vendors with no process for patching their products (especially in the case of software embedded into physical products), etc.
E.g.:
This report analyses 127 current routers for private use developed by seven different large vendors selling their products in Europe. An automated approach was used to check the router’s most recent firmware versions for five security related aspects. [...]
Our results are alarming. There is no router without flaws. 46 routers did not get any security update within the last year. Many routers are affected by hundreds of known vulnerabilities. Even if the routers got recent updates, many of these known vulnerabilities were not fixed. What makes matters even worse is that exploit mitigation techniques are used rarely. Some routers have easy crackable or even well known passwords that cannot be changed by the user. [...]
Our analysis showed that Linux is the most used OS running on more than 90% of the devices. However, many routers are powered by very old versions of Linux. Most devices are still powered with a 2.6 Linux kernel, which is no longer maintained for many years. This leads to a high number of critical and high severity CVEs affecting these devices.
Also specifically on the topic of routers, but also applies to a lot of other hardware with embedded software:
The problem with this process is that no one entity has any incentive, expertise, or even ability to patch the software once it’s shipped. The chip manufacturer is busy shipping the next version of the chip, and the ODM is busy upgrading its product to work with this next chip. Maintaining the older chips and products just isn’t a priority.
And the software is old, even when the device is new. For example, one survey of common home routers found that the software components were four to five years older than the device. The minimum age of the Linux operating system was four years. The minimum age of the Samba file system software: six years. They may have had all the security patches applied, but most likely not. No one has that job. Some of the components are so old that they’re no longer being patched. This patching is especially important because security vulnerabilities are found “more easily” as systems age.
To make matters worse, it’s often impossible to patch the software or upgrade the components to the latest version. Often, the complete source code isn’t available. Yes, they’ll have the source code to Linux and any other open-source components. But many of the device drivers and other components are just ‘binary blobs’—no source code at all. That’s the most pernicious part of the problem: No one can possibly patch code that’s just binary.
Even when a patch is possible, it’s rarely applied. Users usually have to manually download and install relevant patches. But since users never get alerted about security updates, and don’t have the expertise to manually administer these devices, it doesn’t happen. Sometimes the ISPs have the ability to remotely patch routers and modems, but this is also rare.
The result is hundreds of millions of devices that have been sitting on the Internet, unpatched and insecure, for the last five to ten years.
On the software side, there was e.g. this (in 2015, don't know what the current situation is):
A lot has been written about the security vulnerability resulting from outdated and unpatched Android software. The basic problem is that while Google regularly updates the Android software, phone manufacturers don’t regularly push updates out to Android users.
New research tries to quantify the risk:
We are presenting a paper at SPSM next week that shows that, on average over the last four years, 87% of Android devices are vulnerable to attack by malicious apps. This is because manufacturers have not provided regular security updates.
I skimmed this a bit, but found it a little hard to follow along your notes without knowing what those first seven pages of the book were actually saying. I felt that in order to understand your thought process, I would first need to read your notes and reconstruct the argument the book was making from your responses to it, and then read the post a second time once I had some sense of what it was a reaction to. But that seems pretty error-prone; it would help a lot to have a summary of those seven pages before your notes.
I think there's also a third type of curiosity. The two that you mentioned sound goal-driven in a sense; you either want to understand how something works, or to fit it into a particular understanding of the world. And there's a sense in which the curiosity gets "finished" once it achieves that understanding, and then moves on.
That's in contrast to what I'd call "open" curiosity, which has no particular fixed goal or agenda that could be achieved. Instead it's something like, in each passing moment, being open and curious about what will happen next rather than needing things to proceed in any particular way. I associate it with the kind of curiosity that the IFS conception of Self has, and that you might have while Circling; one that involves being aware of your fixed and normal ways of seeing the world but holding them lightly and being receptive to anything that deviates from your normal conceptions.
Unlike the more goal-driven kinds of curiosity, learning more doesn't need to make it more challenging to maintain open curiosity. No matter how much you know and no matter how familiar the situation, you can always remember to provisionally suspend your existing interpretations and see what the situation is actually like.
without any empirical data for or against.
I think there's plenty of empirical data, but there's disagreement over what counts as relevant evidence and how it should be interpreted. (E.g. Hanson and Yudkowsky both cited a number of different empirical observations in support of their respective positions, back during their debate.)
Curated. I really liked this very clear discussion of bids and the development of trust. I also thought it had subtle but important points that aren't always mentioned, such as the way that trust built up via fulfilling all bids is fragile.
That's a fair question, I would guess that most of the people responding to those studies would still be in the habit of meditation.
On the other hand, I think that once people start hitting that intermediate range, they get to the point where meditative practices become automatic enough to happen in the middle of daily life. I myself only do a pretty limited amount of formally sitting down for a dedicated meditation session - my meditation app reports an average of 15 minutes per day over the last year - but I do feel like I do quite a bit of it at the same time as doing other things like walking or cooking, and that helps maintain some of the benefits as well (even if not as effectively as a more dedicated formal practice might). A lot of the time it's also so automatic as to be effortless.
So eventually it becomes possible to maintain more of it with less of an explicit time investment, IME.
And in my experience, insight into Emptiness, No-Self, etc., is transitory and not helpful anymore once you’ve stopped meditating huge amounts for a while.
Counterpoint: the research reviewed in Altered Traits suggested increasing permanent effects from meditation the longer you practice, with time spent on retreats being one significant factor.
... at the start of contemplative practice, little or nothing seems to change in us. After continued practice, we notice some changes in our way of being, but they come and go. Finally, as practice stabilizes, the changes are constant and enduring, with no fluctuation. They are altered traits.
Taken as a whole, the data on meditation track a rough vector of progressive transformations, from beginners through the long-term meditators and on to the yogis. This arc of improvement seems to reflect both lifetime hours of practice as well as time on retreat with expert guidance.
The studies of beginners typically look at the impacts from under 100 total hours of practice—and as few as 7. The long-term group, mainly vipassana meditators, had a mean of 9,000 lifetime hours (the range ran from 1,000 to 10,000 hours and more).
And the yogis studied in Richie’s lab, had all done at least one Tibetan-style three-year retreat, with lifetime hours up to Mingyur’s 62,000. Yogis, on average had three times more lifetime hours than did long-term meditators—9,000 hours versus 27,000.
A few long-term vipassana meditators had accumulated more than 20,000 lifetime hours and one or two up to 30,000, though none had done a three-year retreat, which became a de facto distinguishing feature of the yogi group. Despite the rare overlaps in lifetime hours, the vast majority of the three groups fall into these rough categories.
There are no hard-and-fast lifetime hour cutoffs for the three levels, but research on them has clustered in particular ranges. We’ve organized meditation’s benefits into three dose-response levels, roughly mapping on the novice to amateur to professional rankings found in expertise of all kinds, from ballerinas to chess champions. [...]
Sticking with meditation over the years offers more benefits as meditators reach the long-term range of lifetime hours, around 1,000 to 10,000 hours. This might mean a daily meditation session, and perhaps annual retreats with further instruction lasting a week or so—all sustained over many years. The earlier effects deepen, while others emerge.
For example, in this range we see the emergence of neural and hormonal indicators of lessened stress reactivity. In addition, functional connectivity in the brain in a circuit important for emotion regulation is strengthened, and cortisol, a key hormone secreted by the adrenal gland in response to stress, lessens.
Loving-kindness and compassion practice over the long term enhance neural resonance with another person’s suffering, along with concern and a greater likelihood of actually helping. Attention, too, strengthens in many aspects with long-term practice: selective attention sharpens, the attentional blink diminishes, sustained attention becomes easier, and an alert readiness to respond increases. And long-term practitioners show enhanced ability to down-regulate the mind-wandering and self-obsessed thoughts of the default mode, as well as weakening connectivity within those circuits—signifying less self-preoccupation. These improvements often show up during meditative states, and generally tend to become traits.
Shifts in very basic biological processes, such as a slower breath rate, occur only after several thousand hours of practice. Some of these impacts seem more strongly enhanced by intensive practice on retreat than by daily practice.
While evidence remains inconclusive, neuroplasticity from long-term practice seems to create both structural and functional brain changes, such as greater working connection between the amygdala and the regulatory circuits in the prefrontal areas. And the neural circuits of the nucleus accumbens associated with “wanting” or attachment appear to shrink in size with longer-term practice.
While in general we see a gradient of shifts with more lifetime meditation hours, we suspect there are different rates of change in disparate neural systems. For instance, the benefits of compassion come sooner than does stress mastery. We expect studies in the future will fill in the details of a dose-response dynamic for various brain circuits. Intriguing signs suggest that long-term meditators to some degree undergo state-by-trait effects that enhance the potency of their practice. Some elements of the meditative state, like gamma waves, may continue during sleep.
I haven't tried doing an emotional work retreat as described here, but I endorse the general idea that most people will get more of the thing they want out of a combination of meditation + emotional work practices rather than meditation alone. Or if they had to choose just one, they'd probably be better off with the emotional practices rather than meditation.
I meant in the sense that there were quite a few different pieces of evidence presented in the post (e.g. this was one index out of three mentioned), so just pointing out that one of them is weaker than implied doesn't affect the overall conclusion much.