Skepticism vs. Meditation (& Unnatural Vegan)
12 November 2017 [link youtube]
The "softball" article quoted in the video is from Scientific American magazine, and can be found (in full), here: "Where's the Proof That Mindfulness Meditation Works?"
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/wheres-the-proof-that-mindfulness-meditation-works1/
People: "no evidence" means "no evidence".
Youtube Automatic Transcription
the difference between science and
pseudoscience it matters to some of us more than others this video is going to talk about that general question it's going to talk about the specific example of meditation scientism pseudoscience in justifying and glorifying Buddhist meditation and it's going to talk about the conflict to myself and one other vegan on YouTube who identifies herself as a skeptic look I have actually read the philosophy of sex this empiric us I'm someone whose life has been profoundly influenced by reading various ancient Greek and ancient Roman philosophers sex this empirica is one of them I care about skepticism a lot and my experience in the Internet has been so unbelievably negative that I've stopped using the word skeptic and skepticism because I've seen how that word has been dragged through the mud and lost all its meaning on the Internet today and it's a goddamn shame skepticism is an important concept sir science is an important concept it's important that we really understand what science is what it isn't and why we distinguish these things and understand the difference between science and pseudoscience matters and it matters to me personally and as it happens I have a background in Buddhist philosophy Buddhist history Buddhist languages studying the pali canon etc as it happens I'm in a position to come on the internet and really warn people that the excuses being made for Buddhist meditation the claims that has some medical benefits they are every bit as pseudo scientific as parallel claims that might be offered by Christians Catholics Protestants etc claiming that prayer has the same benefits right now I had the experience of saying this in forums on the Internet in forums that are out have the word skeptic in the title skeptic discussion forum and then all these people who identify themselves as skeptics who identify themselves as atheist pile on to tell me what a piece of [ __ ] I am for daring to say that Buddhist meditation is not vindicated by the highest and finest court of scientific opinion okay and it's not let's throw up some screenshots really quick from a scientific American article I can give you a link to this article it's a it's to the point however it is a softball article I'm gonna point out why it really doesn't come down hard enough on pseudoscience under the heading of Buddhist meditation a new paper cites a 2015 review published an American psychologist magazine reporting that only around 9% of research into mindfulness based meditations pardon me mindfulness based interventions or meditation has been tested in clinical trials that included a control group the authors also point to multiple large placebo controlled meta-analysis concluding that mindfulness practices have often produced unimpressive results yes um a little bit of an understatement here I believe I have read that meta review but you have to keep in mind what the goal posts are here if you claim that prayer Christian prayer calms people down you can prove that scientifically but nobody's impressed the question of unimpressive results matters and it matters more profoundly than this mere turn of phrase would indicate if you take people who are culturally Christian or forever reason respect prayer as an action and you use prayer as a method to calm them down and you then use scientific or pseudo scientific measurements to show that they're all ten percent calm or after prayer does that prove that prayer is any more efficacious than taking the to the gym to work out taking them swimming or is that it has more of a positive impact on their lives than just sitting in silence now prayer may I've seen studies that looked at elderly people and you take these elderly people and take them out to sing and a choir or do other Christian activities and has all kinds of positive effects on their health and well-being and their level of engagement their level of cognitive function two elderly people for whom the social elements of religion chit-chatting with other people at the church singing at the church or indeed praying at the church can have scientifically measurable effects nevertheless attributing health benefits to prayer is pseudoscience the fact that you can measure something and the fact that something exists the fact that there's a Cyrille effect does not automatically put something in the category of science rather than pseudoscience so this question of unimpressive results matters 2014 review of 47 meditation trials collectively including over 3,500 participants found essentially no evidence for benefits relating to enhancing attention curtailing subs abuse aiding sleep or controlling weight okay the whole article at Scientific American is is soft balling it's too easy on this the the title and the thesis should have been there is no evidence for these benefits this is pseudoscience this is a huge industry including an industry of peer-reviewed magazines by the way there are specialized peer-reviewed publications where everybody doing the peer review is deeply IDIA logically committed to the idea that Transcendental Meditation has positive benefits or that Buddhists pseudo Buddhist mindfulness meditation has positive benefits peer review means nothing when the people sitting around the table doing the peer review are all religious maniacs and yes I've been a scholar of Buddhism I've been through the peer review processes in Buddhism it ain't science it's a goddamn joke anyway there is no evidence that was the second study here of 2014 the first one mention in 2015 is not that there's no evidence it's that the science is junk science maybe 9% of the scientific studies are not complete [ __ ] and of those 9% even then we've got problems and they're finding very unimpressive results where we have to ask ourselves is mindfulness based intervention my invitation is it actually more effective than just sitting alone in a room going to the gym going to going to church singing in the choir prayer etc we're getting down to measuring very very small positive results these people lead author of the report Nicholas Van Damme a clinical psychologist and research fellow in psychological sciences the University of Melbourne contends potential benefits of mindfulness are being overshadowed by hyperbole and oversold for financial gain gia think mindfulness meditation training is now a 1.1 billion dollar industry in the United States alone guys let me spell this out for you one of the most powerful ways to make money out of this kind of therapy is through the court system as soon as you can get the prison system in the court system to believe that mindfulness meditation will help people be aggressive less likely to reoffending similar into society then you can start getting money out of the government things are compelling people to pay you can you then you're really onto a kind of gravy train so getting this pseudoscience made into a kind of surrogate psychotherapy that the taxpayers will back and the court system aback is very important you can pause and read all the text if you want to click on the link below this video actually read the whole article it's pretty short but as I say it is a softball article next quotation two trials published earlier this month in science advances magazine also support mindfulness practices the first found mindfulness like attention training reduces self perceived stress but not levels of the hormone cortisol a commonly used biological gauge of stress levels the other trial links mindfulness like attention training blah blah blah look um guys self perceived stress this is also referred to as a subjectively perceived stress there are some other differences the term here how can you possibly claim that it is any more of a science to claim that meditation improves so self receipt stress as opposed to prayer exactly the same claim could be made for Christian prayer and it would be equally as true people who believe in prayer can calm themselves down and in their subjective perception they can feel less stressed out because they've prayed people who believed in singing in the choir or other religious rituals this is a religious ritual why do people do religious rituals they do have some subjective effects on self perceived stress but interestingly they do not actually in this case have an impact on your cortisol levels which may indicate that this is only the perception of how stressed out you are and not how stressed out you already are guys we've been through this in terms of science versus pseudoscience it's much more difficult to pin down with something like massage massage makes people think they feel better but it doesn't actually make them feel better it doesn't actually cure their medical conditions and as we would say to here most of the research I saw indicated that doesn't actually even solve problems like stress but it makes people think they're less stressed out it makes them happier so some medical doctors will recommend massage massage therapy even though massage therapy is not scientifically vindicated we're in a much more ideologically loaded confusing a difficult situation with Buddhist meditation worming its way into the scientific and medical establishment then everyone in the so-called skeptic community bending over backwards tried to make excuses for this stuff and embrace it as science when it should be reviled as pseudoscience I had a conflict with another youtuber here that originated in this mess I still to this day and hated and reviled by unnatural vegan a so-called skeptic because she saw me making catty remarks in a Facebook group of other so-called skeptics so everybody in this group it says skeptic at the top of the group everyone in the group supposedly a skeptic everyone in the group identifies as an atheist but when I post my point of view as someone with more than 10 years experience in the field someone who actually learned to read Palli studied the Pali Canon someone who knows Buddhist dogma as well as Buddhist history but as philosophy someone who really has a very robust proven background and a couple of peer-reviewed articles I have every reason to have a you know deep-seated strongly held view on Buddhist meditation and all these people are jumping out of the corners of this Facebook group for skeptics to make excuses for Transcendental Meditation for mindfulness based meditation therapy for these these different gray area treatments and unnatural vegan a self-professed soclety of what does she do she's on their side she's on the side of the hippie flower children which is who she really is what she really is what she really believes the reality is unnatural vegan calls herself a skeptic but she's someone who after completing her university degree in philosophy believed in insane hippie pseudoscience joined an all raw vegan diet and decided to refuse to use toothpaste because toothpaste was unnatural and she basically lost all of her teeth she got fillings in a whole bunch of her teeth she destroyed her dental health because she believed in ludicrous pseudo scientific opinion and she is another example of a person which these Facebook groups are full of and these reddit groups are full of seen on reddit like reddit slash our skepticism or whatever these people who call themselves skeptic but he will stand up and defend to the death this notion that the ritual the religious ritual of Buddhist meditation is scientifically valid as a treatment for conditions that in Buddhist doctrine we do not even claim it cures the actual function of these Buddhist meditative meditative practices includes hallucination includes talking to the gods does that sound similar to prayer that remind you of Christian prayer that you see the gods that you hear the gods that you interact with the gods that you literally go up to the heavens and can talk to Indra okay it also includes a number of other very specific experiences referred to as the jhanas the jhana of the formless feit sphere the jhana of infinite form there are a bunch of hard to translate altered states of mind you can get at through Buddhist meditation Buddhist meditation has absolutely nothing to do with these pseudo scientific claims that have been attached to it if if there were scientific value of this kind in Buddhist meditation it would it if so facto not be British meditation but these are people who call themselves X and nevertheless completely dogmatically and completely anti skeptically want to stand up for and defend the modern myth that Buddhist meditation is a white Western secular medical practice just as valid as or even more valid that as than anything done by psychotherapists anything come up with by Sigmund Freud whether or not Sigmund Freud has any scientific validity is a topic for another video but in my conflict with this other youtuber or natural vegan it's interesting because the the the source of the conflict was that she saw me getting pissed off in a skeptic discussion forum where I posted something that's kept discussion forum saying hey you know what and again I have more than 10 years of research in this field I know a lot about Buddhism I know a lot about Buddhist meditation history ancient texts philosophy etc etc I really do have a base say this saying you know what Buddhist meditation is a sham if you're looking at it in terms of these these scientific claims about Buddhist meditation being some kind of meta having some value in medical science it is every bit as laughable as when Catholics claim that about prayer all right on a deep level we have to recognize what is meditation meditation is it really a religious ritual but it's hilarious to me that I had a rift with a natural vegan and still to this day because she and her little hippie heart couldn't stand to see me so cynically and so confidently standing up to hypocrite skeptics phony ass hypocrite skeptics making an excuse for an Asian religion that they would never make for a European religion making an excuse for an Asian religion they would never make for Catholicism or Protestantism just because it's a little bit exotic it's a little bit more distant they feel like this can be defended as science and it ain't okay respecting a foreign religious tradition foreign literary tradition for and philosophical tradition means that you hold it to the same standards you'd hold your own tradition - okay the same way I'm willing to interrogate the value of the works of Aristotle or the value of the works of Plato with both words of Shakespeare I bring that same level of rigor to Buddhist philosophy and in in doing so if I did any less do you think I'd be doing them a favor do you think I'd say oh you people in ancient India I can't hold you to the same level of rigor I hold ancient Greek that's basically a racist attitude that's basically a condescending attitude doesn't help anybody doesn't have the progress of the field right but it is just as crazy and just as ludicrous to claim that you have discovered a cure for depression that can be medically valid in the pages of Aristotle as it is to claim that you found a modern medical cure in the pages of the Pali Canon the most ancient Buddhist scriptures especially when you have divorced those meditative practices from their actual dogmatic doctrinal and philosophical function when you vasive created a modern myth out of ancient oriental bits and pieces and then tried so hard to slap the name of science on top of it to cash in because as that article says this is a 1.1 billion dollar industry ibonus yen
pseudoscience it matters to some of us more than others this video is going to talk about that general question it's going to talk about the specific example of meditation scientism pseudoscience in justifying and glorifying Buddhist meditation and it's going to talk about the conflict to myself and one other vegan on YouTube who identifies herself as a skeptic look I have actually read the philosophy of sex this empiric us I'm someone whose life has been profoundly influenced by reading various ancient Greek and ancient Roman philosophers sex this empirica is one of them I care about skepticism a lot and my experience in the Internet has been so unbelievably negative that I've stopped using the word skeptic and skepticism because I've seen how that word has been dragged through the mud and lost all its meaning on the Internet today and it's a goddamn shame skepticism is an important concept sir science is an important concept it's important that we really understand what science is what it isn't and why we distinguish these things and understand the difference between science and pseudoscience matters and it matters to me personally and as it happens I have a background in Buddhist philosophy Buddhist history Buddhist languages studying the pali canon etc as it happens I'm in a position to come on the internet and really warn people that the excuses being made for Buddhist meditation the claims that has some medical benefits they are every bit as pseudo scientific as parallel claims that might be offered by Christians Catholics Protestants etc claiming that prayer has the same benefits right now I had the experience of saying this in forums on the Internet in forums that are out have the word skeptic in the title skeptic discussion forum and then all these people who identify themselves as skeptics who identify themselves as atheist pile on to tell me what a piece of [ __ ] I am for daring to say that Buddhist meditation is not vindicated by the highest and finest court of scientific opinion okay and it's not let's throw up some screenshots really quick from a scientific American article I can give you a link to this article it's a it's to the point however it is a softball article I'm gonna point out why it really doesn't come down hard enough on pseudoscience under the heading of Buddhist meditation a new paper cites a 2015 review published an American psychologist magazine reporting that only around 9% of research into mindfulness based meditations pardon me mindfulness based interventions or meditation has been tested in clinical trials that included a control group the authors also point to multiple large placebo controlled meta-analysis concluding that mindfulness practices have often produced unimpressive results yes um a little bit of an understatement here I believe I have read that meta review but you have to keep in mind what the goal posts are here if you claim that prayer Christian prayer calms people down you can prove that scientifically but nobody's impressed the question of unimpressive results matters and it matters more profoundly than this mere turn of phrase would indicate if you take people who are culturally Christian or forever reason respect prayer as an action and you use prayer as a method to calm them down and you then use scientific or pseudo scientific measurements to show that they're all ten percent calm or after prayer does that prove that prayer is any more efficacious than taking the to the gym to work out taking them swimming or is that it has more of a positive impact on their lives than just sitting in silence now prayer may I've seen studies that looked at elderly people and you take these elderly people and take them out to sing and a choir or do other Christian activities and has all kinds of positive effects on their health and well-being and their level of engagement their level of cognitive function two elderly people for whom the social elements of religion chit-chatting with other people at the church singing at the church or indeed praying at the church can have scientifically measurable effects nevertheless attributing health benefits to prayer is pseudoscience the fact that you can measure something and the fact that something exists the fact that there's a Cyrille effect does not automatically put something in the category of science rather than pseudoscience so this question of unimpressive results matters 2014 review of 47 meditation trials collectively including over 3,500 participants found essentially no evidence for benefits relating to enhancing attention curtailing subs abuse aiding sleep or controlling weight okay the whole article at Scientific American is is soft balling it's too easy on this the the title and the thesis should have been there is no evidence for these benefits this is pseudoscience this is a huge industry including an industry of peer-reviewed magazines by the way there are specialized peer-reviewed publications where everybody doing the peer review is deeply IDIA logically committed to the idea that Transcendental Meditation has positive benefits or that Buddhists pseudo Buddhist mindfulness meditation has positive benefits peer review means nothing when the people sitting around the table doing the peer review are all religious maniacs and yes I've been a scholar of Buddhism I've been through the peer review processes in Buddhism it ain't science it's a goddamn joke anyway there is no evidence that was the second study here of 2014 the first one mention in 2015 is not that there's no evidence it's that the science is junk science maybe 9% of the scientific studies are not complete [ __ ] and of those 9% even then we've got problems and they're finding very unimpressive results where we have to ask ourselves is mindfulness based intervention my invitation is it actually more effective than just sitting alone in a room going to the gym going to going to church singing in the choir prayer etc we're getting down to measuring very very small positive results these people lead author of the report Nicholas Van Damme a clinical psychologist and research fellow in psychological sciences the University of Melbourne contends potential benefits of mindfulness are being overshadowed by hyperbole and oversold for financial gain gia think mindfulness meditation training is now a 1.1 billion dollar industry in the United States alone guys let me spell this out for you one of the most powerful ways to make money out of this kind of therapy is through the court system as soon as you can get the prison system in the court system to believe that mindfulness meditation will help people be aggressive less likely to reoffending similar into society then you can start getting money out of the government things are compelling people to pay you can you then you're really onto a kind of gravy train so getting this pseudoscience made into a kind of surrogate psychotherapy that the taxpayers will back and the court system aback is very important you can pause and read all the text if you want to click on the link below this video actually read the whole article it's pretty short but as I say it is a softball article next quotation two trials published earlier this month in science advances magazine also support mindfulness practices the first found mindfulness like attention training reduces self perceived stress but not levels of the hormone cortisol a commonly used biological gauge of stress levels the other trial links mindfulness like attention training blah blah blah look um guys self perceived stress this is also referred to as a subjectively perceived stress there are some other differences the term here how can you possibly claim that it is any more of a science to claim that meditation improves so self receipt stress as opposed to prayer exactly the same claim could be made for Christian prayer and it would be equally as true people who believe in prayer can calm themselves down and in their subjective perception they can feel less stressed out because they've prayed people who believed in singing in the choir or other religious rituals this is a religious ritual why do people do religious rituals they do have some subjective effects on self perceived stress but interestingly they do not actually in this case have an impact on your cortisol levels which may indicate that this is only the perception of how stressed out you are and not how stressed out you already are guys we've been through this in terms of science versus pseudoscience it's much more difficult to pin down with something like massage massage makes people think they feel better but it doesn't actually make them feel better it doesn't actually cure their medical conditions and as we would say to here most of the research I saw indicated that doesn't actually even solve problems like stress but it makes people think they're less stressed out it makes them happier so some medical doctors will recommend massage massage therapy even though massage therapy is not scientifically vindicated we're in a much more ideologically loaded confusing a difficult situation with Buddhist meditation worming its way into the scientific and medical establishment then everyone in the so-called skeptic community bending over backwards tried to make excuses for this stuff and embrace it as science when it should be reviled as pseudoscience I had a conflict with another youtuber here that originated in this mess I still to this day and hated and reviled by unnatural vegan a so-called skeptic because she saw me making catty remarks in a Facebook group of other so-called skeptics so everybody in this group it says skeptic at the top of the group everyone in the group supposedly a skeptic everyone in the group identifies as an atheist but when I post my point of view as someone with more than 10 years experience in the field someone who actually learned to read Palli studied the Pali Canon someone who knows Buddhist dogma as well as Buddhist history but as philosophy someone who really has a very robust proven background and a couple of peer-reviewed articles I have every reason to have a you know deep-seated strongly held view on Buddhist meditation and all these people are jumping out of the corners of this Facebook group for skeptics to make excuses for Transcendental Meditation for mindfulness based meditation therapy for these these different gray area treatments and unnatural vegan a self-professed soclety of what does she do she's on their side she's on the side of the hippie flower children which is who she really is what she really is what she really believes the reality is unnatural vegan calls herself a skeptic but she's someone who after completing her university degree in philosophy believed in insane hippie pseudoscience joined an all raw vegan diet and decided to refuse to use toothpaste because toothpaste was unnatural and she basically lost all of her teeth she got fillings in a whole bunch of her teeth she destroyed her dental health because she believed in ludicrous pseudo scientific opinion and she is another example of a person which these Facebook groups are full of and these reddit groups are full of seen on reddit like reddit slash our skepticism or whatever these people who call themselves skeptic but he will stand up and defend to the death this notion that the ritual the religious ritual of Buddhist meditation is scientifically valid as a treatment for conditions that in Buddhist doctrine we do not even claim it cures the actual function of these Buddhist meditative meditative practices includes hallucination includes talking to the gods does that sound similar to prayer that remind you of Christian prayer that you see the gods that you hear the gods that you interact with the gods that you literally go up to the heavens and can talk to Indra okay it also includes a number of other very specific experiences referred to as the jhanas the jhana of the formless feit sphere the jhana of infinite form there are a bunch of hard to translate altered states of mind you can get at through Buddhist meditation Buddhist meditation has absolutely nothing to do with these pseudo scientific claims that have been attached to it if if there were scientific value of this kind in Buddhist meditation it would it if so facto not be British meditation but these are people who call themselves X and nevertheless completely dogmatically and completely anti skeptically want to stand up for and defend the modern myth that Buddhist meditation is a white Western secular medical practice just as valid as or even more valid that as than anything done by psychotherapists anything come up with by Sigmund Freud whether or not Sigmund Freud has any scientific validity is a topic for another video but in my conflict with this other youtuber or natural vegan it's interesting because the the the source of the conflict was that she saw me getting pissed off in a skeptic discussion forum where I posted something that's kept discussion forum saying hey you know what and again I have more than 10 years of research in this field I know a lot about Buddhism I know a lot about Buddhist meditation history ancient texts philosophy etc etc I really do have a base say this saying you know what Buddhist meditation is a sham if you're looking at it in terms of these these scientific claims about Buddhist meditation being some kind of meta having some value in medical science it is every bit as laughable as when Catholics claim that about prayer all right on a deep level we have to recognize what is meditation meditation is it really a religious ritual but it's hilarious to me that I had a rift with a natural vegan and still to this day because she and her little hippie heart couldn't stand to see me so cynically and so confidently standing up to hypocrite skeptics phony ass hypocrite skeptics making an excuse for an Asian religion that they would never make for a European religion making an excuse for an Asian religion they would never make for Catholicism or Protestantism just because it's a little bit exotic it's a little bit more distant they feel like this can be defended as science and it ain't okay respecting a foreign religious tradition foreign literary tradition for and philosophical tradition means that you hold it to the same standards you'd hold your own tradition - okay the same way I'm willing to interrogate the value of the works of Aristotle or the value of the works of Plato with both words of Shakespeare I bring that same level of rigor to Buddhist philosophy and in in doing so if I did any less do you think I'd be doing them a favor do you think I'd say oh you people in ancient India I can't hold you to the same level of rigor I hold ancient Greek that's basically a racist attitude that's basically a condescending attitude doesn't help anybody doesn't have the progress of the field right but it is just as crazy and just as ludicrous to claim that you have discovered a cure for depression that can be medically valid in the pages of Aristotle as it is to claim that you found a modern medical cure in the pages of the Pali Canon the most ancient Buddhist scriptures especially when you have divorced those meditative practices from their actual dogmatic doctrinal and philosophical function when you vasive created a modern myth out of ancient oriental bits and pieces and then tried so hard to slap the name of science on top of it to cash in because as that article says this is a 1.1 billion dollar industry ibonus yen