Be advised: this thread is not for serious in-depth discussion of weighty topics (we have a link for that), this thread is not for anything Culture War related. This thread is for Fun. You got jokes? Share 'em. You got silly questions? Ask 'em.
- 59
- 1
PaperclipPerfector
1d ago
(text post)
758 thread views
Be advised: this thread is not for serious in-depth discussion of weighty topics (we have a link for that), this thread is not for anything Culture War related. This thread is for Fun. You got jokes? Share 'em. You got silly questions? Ask 'em.
Jump in the discussion.
No email address required.
Notes -
One of my earliest podcast memories from high school is of Sam Harris discussing the paradoxical path towards becoming a successful meditator. For those of you haven’t tried Vipassana, or mindfulness meditation, the end goal is basically to quiet the mind: to be present in the purest sense of being present without latching onto thoughts or judgements. However, I usually find it is quite difficult to actually do this: even when I do manage to successfully clear the mind of thoughts about dinner or my crush in dance class, there’s still a part of me that’s judging how empty my mind is, preventing me from actually being fully in the present. In order to actually successfully meditate you have to cease being this reflective self. That self, as Sam Harris puts it, can’t get there from here.
While I still don’t fully understand how this works in terms of meditation, I think this serves as a pretty apt metaphor for many other areas of life. We simply don’t understand how development, whether as an athlete, artist, or businessman is going to change our relationship to that craft, and who we are in that domain of life in general. In all these fields, the novice can never obtain mastery because it doing so he becomes a master and no longer thinks or behaves like a novice. He couldn’t get there from here.
There are three areas in my life, probably quite familiar to readers of this blog, where I very clearly see this process at work: running/triathlon, language learning, and science. I don’t pretend to be a master at any of these categories, but I do claim to have experienced a profound transformation in how I relate to my own process of improvement in each of them. There is no path from 12-year-old swimmer who pushed as hard as he could every practice, the grammar-drilling high-school student, and the flailing first-year graduate student to who I am today, but rather and abrupt disconnect– which paradoxically cannot be placed at a single point in time. I’ll unpack what I mean more for each specific example below.
Endurance Sports
I started competitive swimming when I was in 4th grade around 9-10 years old. Before that, my parents had made me try a variety of different ball sports (soccer, basketball, baseball, tennis), as well as fencing. I was not particularly good at any of these: I was supremely uncoordinated (still am), not very fit, and because of the first two not very interested in improvement. Swimming changed all that: I quickly became more coordinated, more fit, and much more interested in improvement, and I couldn’t tell you exactly why. Perhaps this first season of swim club represents the first “you can’t get there from here” moment: before I had no interest in sport despite parental pressure, and afterwards it became one of the pillars of my life. The Joshua that deliberately ran away from the ball in soccer games, couldn’t hit a single baseball, and walked during the elementary school run-a-thon would never have been able to understand the person I became within a few months.
The next phase of my endurance sports career was characterized by what I like to call a try-hard, or a no-pain-no gain attitude. I thought that if I just worked harder I would improve. I would constantly sprint the warm-up, race during dry-land circuits, and, once I switched my primary focus to running, treat every easy day as a tempo or light threshold. The model of how I saw myself improving was the ability to continually handle more and more pain and more and more work until I was some kind of athletic übermensch.
This phase lasted from when I was about 10 to my senior year cross country season when I was 18. Ending it required another shift in perspective. I wasn’t going to keep improving, and in fact, I was getting worse by continuing to bash my head into a wall of always high-intensity all the time. In my junior year, along with my friend Zack, I began to become interested in how to actually train and improve based on the science. It wasn’t so much a question of grit and mental toughness and grinding really hard every day, but of intelligently putting together a mix of training that would support the physical and psychological adaptions necessary for improvements. The try-hard, whose favorite poem was Invictus5, and prided himself on how tired he was after practice, never could have gotten here from there.
I have changed my attitude towards training and endurance sports quite a bit since I was 18, but I don’t think I’ve had another discrete transformation. My realizations that lifestyle can have a larger impact than the training itself, the importance of adapting training to my individual genetics and physiology, and the importance of truly easy days all fit within this framework of training as recipe rather than a wall to be knocked down with a sledgehammer. I could get here from there.
Language Learning
One of the big problems with most language learning instruction in schools and on apps like Duolingo, is the disconnect between how the language is taught and what kinds of activities you want to actually use the language to do. In my other blog posts I like to break up the later into four different domains: reading, writing, listening, and speaking. Traditional classroom instruction, as well as the apps, heavily favor the output domains, probably due to the need to evaluate a student’s progress, which is much more difficult to do from the standpoint of pure input. This approach also heavily relies on translation from one’s native language. It’s a little absurd to expect that constant grammar drills, and speaking exercises that involve heavy amounts of translation from one’s native language to lead to fluency, which involves seamless and intuitive understanding of written and spoken language. You simply can’t get there from here.
I tried really hard to get there from here using traditional methods in various languages. 10 years of Spanish in elementary→ high school. Not fluent. 3 years of an hour of Duolingo a day in Dutch. Not fluent. I made similar attempts, although with much less effort for Japanese, Hebrew, and French.
It was only with the discovery of Stephen Krashen’s input hypothesis, and a fundamental change in my approach to language learning away from book learning and towards acquisition that I was able to make real progress. Sixth grade Josh who thought drilling his conjugations harder would lead to fluency never would have made it here from there.
Science
In the career of every single scientist there is almost guaranteed to be a sharp “you can’t get there from here” moment. For me this happened during the second year of my PhD, where classes and controlled experiments gave way to the vast wilderness of the unknown that I would have to hack and slash through to arrive at my thesis. The skills that served me so well in class, memorization and logic, could only take me so far in this brave new world. The intimate details of your specific experiments and systems, how complex pathways interact with each other, and if your hypothesis is total bullshit or not are not facts that you can derive with a pencil and paper sitting with your advisor in July of 2021, but can only be won through the cauldron of trying things out and seeing what shit sticks. You can’t get there from here.
I’ve tried Vipassana before and know a good amount about meditative practices in the conventional religious context it fell out of (1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6). I can’t say I ever became a serious practitioner in any way but one theme that repeats from it over and over is to reduce the attempts to over-intellectualize meditation, because it’s one of the surest ways to lose yourself in the cognitive phenomenology and experience it’s meant to bring you toward.
One of the most popular forms of psychotherapy here in the west is a regimen that bears a close resemblance to common forms of meditation, that was developed by Albert Ellis; called Rational Emotive Behavior Therapy and its offshoot Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (CBT) (1, 2). I’ve found that tends to be more accessible to a lay western audience and has an easier grasp to understand.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link