That’s not unreasonable, but I think that a lot of the problems people have come from not even really trying to be careful.
I think selection effects explain almost all of this phenomenon. My nerdy friends don’t really have trouble holding to their pre-commitments. The reckless 20 year olds I meet in bars don’t even really understand the idea of pre-commitments, and the whole thing is just sort of...uncool, to them.
People don’t regularly pre-commit to how much TV they’ll watch, how much internet they’ll surf, or how much chocolate they’ll eat—and when they do, I expect they fail often. When it comes to alcohol, two drinks becoming many is a total cliche.
When considering the risks of “recreational” chemicals, it helps if we distinguish between moreish and addictive. By moreish I mean the tendency to lead to compulsive redosing, and of course when I say addictive I mean in the medium to long term. These can be surprisingly independent. In the case of MDMA, the consensus among drug users, in my experience, is that it’s medium high on the moreishness scale but very low on the long term addictiveness scale. In my opinion there is pretty much 0 danger of addiction for the vast majority of less wrongers.
However, from personal experience it can be a very dangerous social lubricant, it lead to multiple social interactions that I later regretted strongly, and this seems to be pretty common.
Given that people often fail at precommiting, I’m reading this post and the grandparent as “stay far away from this stuff; it’s dangerous.”
That’s not unreasonable, but I think that a lot of the problems people have come from not even really trying to be careful.
I think selection effects explain almost all of this phenomenon. My nerdy friends don’t really have trouble holding to their pre-commitments. The reckless 20 year olds I meet in bars don’t even really understand the idea of pre-commitments, and the whole thing is just sort of...uncool, to them.
People don’t regularly pre-commit to how much TV they’ll watch, how much internet they’ll surf, or how much chocolate they’ll eat—and when they do, I expect they fail often. When it comes to alcohol, two drinks becoming many is a total cliche.
When considering the risks of “recreational” chemicals, it helps if we distinguish between moreish and addictive. By moreish I mean the tendency to lead to compulsive redosing, and of course when I say addictive I mean in the medium to long term. These can be surprisingly independent. In the case of MDMA, the consensus among drug users, in my experience, is that it’s medium high on the moreishness scale but very low on the long term addictiveness scale. In my opinion there is pretty much 0 danger of addiction for the vast majority of less wrongers.
However, from personal experience it can be a very dangerous social lubricant, it lead to multiple social interactions that I later regretted strongly, and this seems to be pretty common.