This + Sasha's review have been very helpful for understanding Mark's protocol (partly for validating my sense that it *is* very confusing to interpret), so thank you taking the time to write this.
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I think my biggest remaining question/confusion/skepticism/disagreement is why the Manual says so little about the concrete conclusions reached by those who follow the protocol.
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(The shitposts section of the Manual does have some concrete conclusions, but it's explicitly marked as a shitpost and there's no line of reasoning/feelings/experiences leading up to those conclusions.)
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I find it hard to believe that each person has to spend 10,000 hours thinking about how to keep doing good, how to stop doing bad, etc., and that there is almost nothing concrete one can say about which things are good or bad. This is certainly not how it works in other fields.
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It might take the very first person hundreds or thousands of hours of work to prove some theorem in math, say, but those who come later can learn the proof very quickly just by reading.
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(Or to turn this around: imagine a real analysis textbook whose main instruction was to "think really good about math" and to "stop trying to think bad about math", etc., instead of just actually giving concrete theorems.)
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There must be "trails" of thoughts or feelings or experiences or *something* that would transmit a specific insight more quickly or at least make it comprehensible, without conducting the search process from scratch oneself, or at least some way to guide the search process
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(compress the exploration *tree* down to a single *path* down to leaf node).
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Sasha's review mentions how "everyone’s path eventually goes to a similar place, although the trips are different", but even supposing the paths people take are different for everyone, surely there are patterns.
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Why does there seem to be no interest (or even active refusal) to trying to make the process shorter by explaining the specific conclusions so people can reach them faster? Why does the Manual seem to say nothing about the empirics around what people actually end up doing?
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good Q's. There is a bunch of discussion of conclusions~
for example,
* meditationbook.page/#touchstones-s
* meditationbook.page/#on-groundless
These are in the "far reaches" section.
There are some sketches of "stage mappings":
* meditationbook.page/#crappy-timeli
* meditationbook.page/#vague-sketch-
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In some ways, the entire document is intermediate conclusions, things to keep an eye out for along the way. At least originally, this was especially intended to be true in the "lists and more" section, though that section has metastasized.
meditationbook.page/#lists-and-more
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ok this could be clearer and better organized but~
> I find it hard to believe that each person has to spend 10,000 hours thinking about how to keep doing good, how to stop doing bad, etc.
Let's see.
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