Comment by qrendel | Hacker News Reader

Comment by qrendel | Hacker News Reader

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True, but spending time meditating would inevitably be reducing something else - even if it's just an equivalent of goofing off on HN.

If you enjoy meditating, or think there's a sufficiently high chance of benefits from it, you won't mind. But if you remain sufficiently unconvinced, why spend time on it when you could enjoy more free time instead, just because someone else is convinced there is value in it? To me it seems less an interesting thing I'm eager to try, and more a new chore or exercise I'd have to take up, so the time spent wouldn't be taken straight out of the activities with the least utility - more likely out of "daily/weekly maintenance habits" time. So it would really need to be more effective than whatever I usually would have done instead. If I'm going to spend an extra 10 minutes/day on a new habit, is meditation going to be the most effective one?

It's a similar argument to why I wouldn't spend an hour a week going to church, just because someone else thought it would benefit me with little downside risk. Sure, it might, but I'd need more convincing before I decided to put the time in.

The tricky thing is that it's such a personal, subjective, experiential activity that it seems likely that any amount of scientific PDFs would remain unconvincing.

"I keep hearing people talk about how lime is so tasty, but why should I spend my hard-earned money on a citrus fruit until I've seen convincing evidence that it's actually tasty?"

I'm interested in how people make decisions about what to do. Especially considering how the frontiers of science are so difficult to keep track of. Like, if you were to base your diet on recent nutrition research, you'd have to spend hours every day just reviewing the literature, and you'd probably have to change your diet every week to accomodate for new findings, contradictions, etc.

To me it seems like people are most likely to just go by their own intuitive desires and preferences, using science at most to validate and confirm what they already wanted based on other factors. So, bluntly speaking, someone who is really fascinated by "spiritual" stuff will google for "meditation benefits pdf" and someone who wants to do other things with their time will look out for criticisms and "FUD."

Mostly I'd just make the point that if you try and sit quietly for ten minutes on three consecutive days, that's a negliglible time spent to try for yourself something that a lot of people say is significantly nice in some way—and that's probably a more efficient use of time than to try and look through the available scientific evidence.

Lime is a source of C, which you need if you want to stay alive.

Sure, but aren't there more effective ways of getting vitamin C? A lime is like half a dollar. I don't want to spend my life eating a suboptimal vitamin C source!

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