Not on LSD, I’ve done some emotional processing with others on MDMA but I don’t know if I’d describe it as “targeted work to change beliefs”, it was more stuff like “talk about my relationship with my family more openly than I’m usually able to.”
I was introduced to belief reporting, but I didn’t do very much of it and wasn’t on drugs at the time.
I’d already been incredibly paranoid about how closely they follow my online activities for years and years. I dunno if that counts as “conspiratorial”, but to the extent it does it definitely made me less conspiratorial.
I think when I was at my most psychotic some completely deranged explanations for the “rationalists tend to be first borns” thing crossed my mind, which I guess maybe counts, but that was quickly rejected.
I have conspiratorial interpretations of things at times, which I sorta attribute to the fact that rationalists talk about conspiracies quite a lot and such?
...did you try to ‘induce psychosis’ in yourself by taking psychedelics? If so I would also ask about how much you took and if you had any severe or long-lasting consequences.
I have had LSD. I’ve taken like, 100μg maybe once, 50-75 a couple times, 25ish once or twice. No lasting consequences that I would personally consider severe, though other people would disagree I think? Like, from my perspective I have a couple weird long-shot hypotheses bouncing around my head that I haven’t firmly disproven but which mostly have no impact on my behavior other than making me act slightly superstitious at times.
I had a serious psychotic episode, like, once, which didn’t involve any actual attempts to induce it but did involve a moment where I was like “okay trying to hold myself fully to normality here isn’t really important, let’s just actually think about the crazy hypotheses.” I think I had 10mg cannabis a few days before that, and it’d been like a month around a week and a half since I’d had any LSD. That was in late August.
Edit: Actually, for the sake of being frank here, I should make it clear that I’m not particularly anti-psychosis in all cases? Like, personally I think I’ve been sorta paranoid for my entire life and like… attempting to actually explicitly model things instead of just having vague uncomfortable feelings might’ve been good, even if they were crazy… I dunno how accurate this is but it’s possible to tell a story where I had some crazy things compartmentalized which I needed to process. How much that generalizes to other people is very much arguable, but I don’t personally feel “stay as far away as you possibly can from any mental states that might be considered sorta psychotic-adjacent” would be universally good advice.
But like, no, I was not at any point trying to induce psychosis, that’s just my perspective on it in retrospect.
...iirc you had LSD like a week or so before you had the cannabis? And you took the cannabis while fairly sleep deprived. And I definitely started getting worried about your mental state after the LSD, so even if you consider the psychotic break as starting a few days after taking cannabis I definitely think the psychedelics were a compounding factor.
Edit: I do think the LSD was a contributing factor, but it’s hard to separate effects of the drug from effects of the LSD making it easier for me to question ontological assumptions.
Thanks for answering; good to hear that you don’t think you’ve had any severe or long-lasting consequences (though it sounds like one time LSD was a contributor to your episode of bad mental health).
I guess here’s other question that seems natural: it’s been said that some people take LSD on either the personal advice of Michael Vassar, or otherwise as a result of reading/discussing his ideas. Are either of those true for you?
The Local Vasserite has directly stated “i purposefully induce mania in people, as taught by Michael Vassar”. Seems like the connection to michael Vassar is not very tenuous. At least that is my judgement. Others can disagree. Vassar does not have to personally administer the method or be currently supportive of his former student.
Nope. I’ve never directly interacted with Vassar at all, and I haven’t made any particular decisions at all due to his ideas. Like, I’ve become more familiar with his work as of the past several months, but it was one thing of many.
I spent a lot of time thinking about ontology and anthropics and religion and stuff… mostly I think the reason weird stuff happened to me at the same time as I learned more about Vassar is just that I started rethinking rather a lot of things at the same time, where “are Vassar’s ideas worth considering?” was just one specific question that came up of many. (Plausibly the expectation that Vassar’s ideas might be dangerous turned slightly into a self-fulfilling prophecy by making it more likely for me to expand on them in weirder directions or something.)
I am currently holding a rough hypothesis of “when someone is interested in exploring psychosis and psychedelics, they become more interested in Michael Vassar’s ideas”, in that the former causes the latter, rather than the other way around.
I can attest to something kind of like this; in mid-late 2020, I
already knew Michael (but had been out of touch with him for a while) and was interested in his ideas (but hadn’t seriously thought about them in a while)
started doing some weird intense introspection (no drugs involved) that led to noticing some deeply surprising things & entering novel sometimes-disruptive mental states
noticed that Michael/Ben/Jessica were talking about some of the same things I was picking up on, and started reading & thinking a lot more about their online writing
(IIRC, this noticing was not entirely conscious — to some extent it was just having a much stronger intuition that what they were saying was interesting)
didn’t directly interact with any of them during this period, except for one early phone conversation with Ben which helped me get out of a very unpleasant state (that I’d gotten into by, more or less, decompartmentalizing some things about myself that I was unprepared to deal with)
From my conversations with Vassar, I think there’s a sense of “There’s a lot that’s possible to do in the world, if you just ignore social conventions” that’s downstream from being accepting what Vassar says. A person who previously didn’t take any psychedelics because of social conventions, might become more open to taking psychedelics and thinking about whether it makes sense to take them.
Ah, again a situation where ethical concerns are an obstacle to science! We obviously need to ban Michael from a randomly selected half of LW meetups, and invite him to the other half.
(I am happy to answer questions I just don’t want to get into an argument.)
Did you do any targeted work to change beliefs while under the influence of drugs?
Especially, processes like belief reporting or internal double cruxt that were facilitated by another person?
Not on LSD, I’ve done some emotional processing with others on MDMA but I don’t know if I’d describe it as “targeted work to change beliefs”, it was more stuff like “talk about my relationship with my family more openly than I’m usually able to.”
I was introduced to belief reporting, but I didn’t do very much of it and wasn’t on drugs at the time.
Did you come to “conspiratorial interpretations” of the behavior of your family in that process?
I’d already been incredibly paranoid about how closely they follow my online activities for years and years. I dunno if that counts as “conspiratorial”, but to the extent it does it definitely made me less conspiratorial.
I think when I was at my most psychotic some completely deranged explanations for the “rationalists tend to be first borns” thing crossed my mind, which I guess maybe counts, but that was quickly rejected.
I have conspiratorial interpretations of things at times, which I sorta attribute to the fact that rationalists talk about conspiracies quite a lot and such?
...did you try to ‘induce psychosis’ in yourself by taking psychedelics? If so I would also ask about how much you took and if you had any severe or long-lasting consequences.
No, I did not.
I have had LSD. I’ve taken like, 100μg maybe once, 50-75 a couple times, 25ish once or twice. No lasting consequences that I would personally consider severe, though other people would disagree I think? Like, from my perspective I have a couple weird long-shot hypotheses bouncing around my head that I haven’t firmly disproven but which mostly have no impact on my behavior other than making me act slightly superstitious at times.
I had a serious psychotic episode, like, once, which didn’t involve any actual attempts to induce it but did involve a moment where I was like “okay trying to hold myself fully to normality here isn’t really important, let’s just actually think about the crazy hypotheses.” I think I had 10mg cannabis a few days before that, and it’d been
like a montharound a week and a half since I’d had any LSD. That was in late August.Edit: Actually, for the sake of being frank here, I should make it clear that I’m not particularly anti-psychosis in all cases? Like, personally I think I’ve been sorta paranoid for my entire life and like… attempting to actually explicitly model things instead of just having vague uncomfortable feelings might’ve been good, even if they were crazy… I dunno how accurate this is but it’s possible to tell a story where I had some crazy things compartmentalized which I needed to process. How much that generalizes to other people is very much arguable, but I don’t personally feel “stay as far away as you possibly can from any mental states that might be considered sorta psychotic-adjacent” would be universally good advice.
But like, no, I was not at any point trying to induce psychosis, that’s just my perspective on it in retrospect.
...iirc you had LSD like a week or so before you had the cannabis? And you took the cannabis while fairly sleep deprived. And I definitely started getting worried about your mental state after the LSD, so even if you consider the psychotic break as starting a few days after taking cannabis I definitely think the psychedelics were a compounding factor.
That’s plausible. It was like a week and a half.
Edit: I do think the LSD was a contributing factor, but it’s hard to separate effects of the drug from effects of the LSD making it easier for me to question ontological assumptions.
Thanks for answering; good to hear that you don’t think you’ve had any severe or long-lasting consequences (though it sounds like one time LSD was a contributor to your episode of bad mental health).
I guess here’s other question that seems natural: it’s been said that some people take LSD on either the personal advice of Michael Vassar, or otherwise as a result of reading/discussing his ideas. Are either of those true for you?
The Local Vasserite has directly stated “i purposefully induce mania in people, as taught by Michael Vassar”. Seems like the connection to michael Vassar is not very tenuous. At least that is my judgement. Others can disagree. Vassar does not have to personally administer the method or be currently supportive of his former student.
Nope. I’ve never directly interacted with Vassar at all, and I haven’t made any particular decisions at all due to his ideas. Like, I’ve become more familiar with his work as of the past several months, but it was one thing of many.
I spent a lot of time thinking about ontology and anthropics and religion and stuff… mostly I think the reason weird stuff happened to me at the same time as I learned more about Vassar is just that I started rethinking rather a lot of things at the same time, where “are Vassar’s ideas worth considering?” was just one specific question that came up of many. (Plausibly the expectation that Vassar’s ideas might be dangerous turned slightly into a self-fulfilling prophecy by making it more likely for me to expand on them in weirder directions or something.)
Thanks again.
I am currently holding a rough hypothesis of “when someone is interested in exploring psychosis and psychedelics, they become more interested in Michael Vassar’s ideas”, in that the former causes the latter, rather than the other way around.
I can attest to something kind of like this; in mid-late 2020, I
already knew Michael (but had been out of touch with him for a while) and was interested in his ideas (but hadn’t seriously thought about them in a while)
started doing some weird intense introspection (no drugs involved) that led to noticing some deeply surprising things & entering novel sometimes-disruptive mental states
noticed that Michael/Ben/Jessica were talking about some of the same things I was picking up on, and started reading & thinking a lot more about their online writing
(IIRC, this noticing was not entirely conscious — to some extent it was just having a much stronger intuition that what they were saying was interesting)
didn’t directly interact with any of them during this period, except for one early phone conversation with Ben which helped me get out of a very unpleasant state (that I’d gotten into by, more or less, decompartmentalizing some things about myself that I was unprepared to deal with)
From my conversations with Vassar, I think there’s a sense of “There’s a lot that’s possible to do in the world, if you just ignore social conventions” that’s downstream from being accepting what Vassar says. A person who previously didn’t take any psychedelics because of social conventions, might become more open to taking psychedelics and thinking about whether it makes sense to take them.
Ah, again a situation where ethical concerns are an obstacle to science! We obviously need to ban Michael from a randomly selected half of LW meetups, and invite him to the other half.