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Morality is orthogonal to what Vinay is talking about. “Everybody meditate and all problems will vanish” is not a moral project. Moral effects are part of the wishful magical thinking about the expected impacts. Spiritual striving doesn’t necessarily induce any useful morality.
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Replying to and
It can spontaneously pop out of “amoral” practice, like it happy-path “should,” but it takes thousands of hours of individual effort, with a lot of failure modes and no guarantee of success. (So not a pop. level sol’n.) I mean something vaguely like this (but w more nuance etc.):
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Strive to be truly good all the way down for selfish reasons. It’s the optimal solution to many self-interested life problems.
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Color me highly skeptical. I can’t think of a single historical example where this has unambiguously happened. Pockets of spiritual practice have at best played a minor supporting role. Kinda like how having a couple of tall guys around helps while say remodeling a house.
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It’s the inner work version of the efficient markets argument at best, with indirect benefits being similar to “trickledown” and “there are positive externalities, and negative externalities will eventually be priced in” type wishful thinking, and far less compelling.
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Replying to and
Right but while *markets* have externalities, *everything* doesn’t have externalities. So it comes down to are individual people long-run effectively 50.000001% neutral/powerless, bad, or good, contingently-in-interaction with other people and everything else.
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Individual impact is a function of what individuals try to do. Sounds tautological, but average smart people end up doing some modest version of whatever concrete thing they set out to do upto first order. Beyond that yeah, it’s basically ~50%.
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If you try to write, you might write at a few mediocre essays. If you try to solve climate you might have a mediocre impact on a project. If you try to meditate, you might enjoy a few episodes of illumination. Beyond that first order, it’s a slightly evil crapshoot.
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Replying to and
Some people will recursively account for nth-order effects and contingencies in their plans and goals (meta-strategy), cf. consequentialism. (And this becomes less and less costly with more meditation, yadda yadda.) And so… what if being slightly “evil” is “good”?
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My point is only that being slightly evil is at least demonstrably helpful to the individual with high likelihood. Beyond that is a self-serving leap of faith of one sort or another. Other strategies can’t claim *even* the individual benefits so they only have leaps of faith.