Tag: sam harris

Meditation: How to tell if you’re beginner, intermediate, or advanced

Ok, forgive me for the clickbait-y title. But that was my reaction as I read the below passage:

The eighth-century Buddhist adept Vimalamitra described three stages of mastery in meditation and how thinking appears in each. The first is like meeting a person you already know; you simply recognize each thought as it arises in consciousness, without confusion. The second is like a snake tied in a knot; each thought, whatever its content, simply unravels on its own. In the third, thoughts become like thieves entering an empty house; even the possibility of being distracted has disappeared. – Sam Harris, Waking Up

I appreciate reading such clarity in a practice (meditation) within a tradition (Buddhism) where there often isn’t much. I think about the passage often. Like thieves entering an empty house…

Notes from Sam Harris’s interview of Will MacAskill

Here’s the episode, it’s fantastic and dense and requires a more attentive listen than your average podcast:

I wanted to share a few particularly powerful comments:

  • Obligation versus Opportunity paradox: an obligation is when you have the moral imperative to help a person or cause because your life is better, which doesn’t seem to convince either Sam or Will. An opportunity is when you help because you’ll feel better and improve your reputation as a result, and this is more convincing to both. Will’s Effective Altruism movement is based on this
  • 90/10 problem: 90% of r&d funds are spent on 10% of humanity’s problems. For example, Will mentions male pattern baldness as an example of a problem that attracts a lot of research dollars but it mostly affects a small, well-off minority, while new antiobiotics aren’t being invented because the profit motive isn’t there
  • Will describes patents as “two wrongs trying to make a right”. Very interesting. The first wrong is that companies can’t capture the full market value of their r&d, and the second wrong is to grant a legitimate monopoly in the form of patents and hope the two failures cancel each other out