Meaningness Podcast

We both aim to transmit ways of being. That demands a different mode than conventional teaching, which explains facts, concepts, theories, and procedures.David attempts to transmit meta-rationality—not a theory or method, but a way of being, namely “actually caring for the concrete situation, including all its context, complexity, and nebulosity, with its purposes, participants, and paraphernalia.”We both attempt to transmit Vajrayana Buddhism. That is a way of being: it includes elaborate doctrines

Content note: Traditional religious artworks featuring nudity, death imagery, and body horror. Possibly not safe for work, or life.The video includes those as illustrations. Without them, listening to the audio alone may be difficult to understand. Watch full-screen for maximum impact.Context, explanations, and transcript at: https://meaningness.substack.com/p/wearing-human-bone-ornaments Get full access to Meaningness at meaningness.substack.com/subscribe

I discuss the intellectual history of interactions between Buddhism and cognitive science, prompted by a blog discussion of doubts about modern meditation systems.There’s not many intellectually interesting people in the world, and they all talk to each other. They’re in very different fields, working out the same set of ideas in different contexts. But any intellectual era has a fairly limited number of major, significant new ideas that everybody’s working on.If you’re going to be part of the

Max and I discussed the nature of lineages, and why they are so important for learning through apprenticeship.I went into detail about my participation in multiple lineages of artificial intelligence research (0:33), developmental psychology (5:41), Vajrayana Buddhism (9:18), meta-rationality in experimental science (17:38), teaching and learning tacit knowledge (21:22), the misuse of statistical methods and meta-rational remedies (24:45), the perversion of science for institutional legibility

This is about my self.It's about how I relate to it—to my self. I've gotten somewhat better at that, over many years. You may have a self too, in which case my experience may be interesting.This is an unusually personal, and unusually concrete, piece.That is motivated by reader feedback. I did a post about Ultraspeaking recently, which some people said they liked because it was more personal than usual. That was partly because I originally intended it to be an audio piece, like this one. I failed in

Welcome to the first episode of the Meaningness podcast!It is about how to learn to be kind.I want to be kinder than I am. Maybe you do too. Good intentions are not enough, I think. My spouse Charlie Awbery offers suggestions.Charlie will teach some methods relevant to this podcast in a workshop in New York City, April 22nd–25th; you can read more and reserve a place here.The making ofThis is the first serious joint recording by Charlie and me. For years, we had repeatedly agreed to podcast, and