Comment by amohr | Hacker News Reader

Comment by amohr | Hacker News Reader

Anecdotally, I was surprised, above all, by how natural it feels to start meditating. There's thousands of years of practices and traditions meant to improve/structure the act, but I never really thought of those as being aimed at someone like myself. As a result, most of my exposure, up until a few months ago, was either through articles like this one or occasionally at the end of martial arts workouts.

But I spent a part of this summer working on a farm in rural Wisconsin and I ended up with a period of downtime in the early evening - after the day's work and catching up with emails and whatnot. As it turns out, I was also struggling with a particular quandary (specifically, I was trying to define 'value') and one day, I just sat down cross-legged on the porch with my eyes closed, facing the setting sun.

What I did from there is hardly what any sort of zen master would consider 'meditation,' but I was amazed at what a difference it made to simply make a conscious decision to sit and think only of one topic. Consequently, I was reminded of a zen koan that I had encountered earlier in my investigation of the meaning of value, which was edifying enough for me to feel okay with calling what I had started doing 'meditation.'

I guess the bottom line is not to put too much stake in what everyone else says meditation is or isn't and focus on the practice of just taking time to be alone with your thoughts long enough to organize them in such a way that makes sense for you. Again, this is strictly anecdotal, but I think that's where you'll really see many of the benefits associated with meditation coming from. As someone who was diagnosed ADHD in college and has always had a problem with focus, I can say that having a disorganized mind can really be toxic to your life and work.

I guess the bottom line is not to put too much stake in what everyone else says meditation is or isn't and focus on the practice of just taking time to be alone with your thoughts long enough to organize them in such a way that makes sense for you.

This brings up the interesting and valuable question of what meditation is and isn't. Buddhist meditation is a skill that concerns itself with two activities. I've provided a link at the end of this reply that you can use to learn Mindfulness (as taught by a monk who is also a Stanford Ph.D in Buddhist Studies).

So what are the activities that comprise meditation?

The first activity is to willfully concentrate the mind in an effort to calm it. This is done by focusing strictly on the sensation of the breath in order to restrict the mind from wandering off. The name of this activity in Pali is called "samatha", which means "calm" or "tranquility".

The second activity is to see the processes by which the mind runs off into orthogonal thought and unhelpful states of mind. Once you see these processes happening, you intervene in them to stop them from happening in order to bring your mind into a strong state of calm awareness. This activity is called "vipassana" in Pali. It means "insight" in English.

Samatha and vipassana are two sides of the same coin. They are a process broken into two supporting functions to achieve the goal. When people are introduced to meditation, they are being introduced to the encompassing practice of samatha-vipassana, otherwise referred to as Mindfulness Meditation.

One of the most thorough and accessible sources of instruction on Mindfulness is Gil Fronsdal. You can find an entire course, along with everything else on this site, for free here:

http://www.audiodharma.org/series/1/talk/1762/

I was also struggling with a particular quandary (specifically, I was trying to define 'value')

Is that you, Mr. Pirsig?

Serious question, though... have you read Zen and The Art of Motorcycle Maintenance?

I have and loved it - it is responsible for my regular use of the word 'gumption.' But, now that you mention it, I should go back and read it again. When I first read it, I was much more technically oriented and have since shifted towards a focus on writing. This is largely what caused said quandary.

When you're working on technical problems, the question of value is relatively straight-forward: you are attempting to solve a problem by creating tools or applying existing ones. As a writer, it's a bit more nuanced. Moreover there's not a quick or easy way to measure that value.

If I hack up a script to grep a dataset, when it's done, I can toss the code and nobody has to know how ugly it is - the task is done. I cut an hour of work down to 30 seconds using 15 minutes of coding: saved time = obvious value.

If I rewrite the copy on my landing page, I may see an increase in conversions, but there's a strong chance that I timed that rewrite to coincide with a marketing push. Did my new landing page with a stronger call to action and a more approachable voice convince people to sign up? Did my popular friend give me some twitter love? Or did I change the copy to fit a new, more attractive design?

Basically, 'value' is an extremely elusive concept. I've asked a lot of people about it and the resulting conversation is pretty formulaic: it starts with a simple, poorly veiled abstraction of what the respondent does and, as I challenge it, it morphs into this maddeningly abstract compromise.

This response was inappropriately long, I realize, but it's obviously a topic that's been tugging on my brainstrings.

Speaking of long responses, feel free to ignore this, I just wanted to explore your idea a bit.

If I am understanding you correctly, it sounds like in your example of re-writing your landing page the question you're facing is "Can we measure the value that re-writing the landing page generated" (or even "Can we measure value"). It sounds like the elusive nature of the answer to this question is coming from a couple of sources:

1) Incompleteness of information - you can't possibly know who's sharing links to your site or what exactly caused every new visitor to decide to visit (was it just x,y, or z? simple correlation?). 2) Complexity of information - even with perfect information of the environment your site operates in - the number of variables affecting it is so large that it would be near impossible for you to comprehend how they all interconnect and determine the root cause of the up-tick. 3) Inherent subjective nature of value - The new trend could be fleeting, or even worse -- you might have changed something that increases short term performance but may be detrimental in the long term (Reddit gold?). This makes it hard to categorize this as good/bad/neutral.

I think the root cause of all of these issues in relation to your conundrum is the basic desire or need to categorize information we receive about the world. In this example, you would be attempting to categorize the rewrite as an action that was either positively, negatively, or neutrally valuable, and at least the above 3 limiting aspects of this information are preventing you from easily doing so.

The two extremes of the options you'd have, given this, would be on one end to try and minimize the limiting aspects of the information (maybe going so far as to invent some type of analytics tool with AI that can tell you with X probability that the action will be worth it), with the other extreme being to throw your hands up and ignore any information related to it. I think the question obviously isn't "which option do you choose" but rather where do you draw the line -- where do you stop and decide that whatever else lies beyond your current state of understanding can remain unknown?

I think in the literal sense, this is relatively easy, as we have to make choices based on limited information every day. The real trick is in the follow-through: refraining from judging our decision to limit ourselves (or not) as either good or bad.

Sources: just my own thoughts and opinions...

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