The self-reported nature of surveys like this make them… well, “almost entirely useless” might perhaps be a slight overstatement, but not much of one. (Commentary.)
What I should like to see is evaluation, by others (family, close friends, etc.), of the effects of psychedelics on their users. We know that the gulf between self-perception and third-party evaluation of the effects of meditation, “enlightenment”, etc., can be vast. That this should also be true for psychedelics, seems to me to be quite likely. So I take self-reports—and conclusions drawn from surveys such as this one—with a grain of salt, to say the least…
Hm, I disagree! I think I share some of your skepticism, in that the fact that a very large fraction of survey users with long-term personality changes report that those changes were positive doesn’t cause me to be confident that I’d believe they were positive, or that a smarter, wiser version of me and others would believe that they’re positive, or that the average member of society would believe they’re positive, etc.
However, “almost useless” seems too strong to me; for me at least, it was still a meaningful update to know that people believed there were long-term changes and that they said those changes were positive and not negative. I’d have been much more concerned if people said the changes were negative (I think false positives of good changes are ore common than false negatives on bad changes) and psychedelics would have seemed lower stakes if there’d been fewer reports of long-term changes.
Also I think a bunch of the other questions have fewer issues related to self-evaluation, since a bunch of the questions are either more objective (“how many times did you trip?”) or explicitly subjective (“did you experience the trip as a positive one?”).
But yeah, I agree that evaluation by others would be really valuable.
The self-reported nature of surveys like this make them… well, “almost entirely useless” might perhaps be a slight overstatement, but not much of one. (Commentary.)
What I should like to see is evaluation, by others (family, close friends, etc.), of the effects of psychedelics on their users. We know that the gulf between self-perception and third-party evaluation of the effects of meditation, “enlightenment”, etc., can be vast. That this should also be true for psychedelics, seems to me to be quite likely. So I take self-reports—and conclusions drawn from surveys such as this one—with a grain of salt, to say the least…
Hm, I disagree! I think I share some of your skepticism, in that the fact that a very large fraction of survey users with long-term personality changes report that those changes were positive doesn’t cause me to be confident that I’d believe they were positive, or that a smarter, wiser version of me and others would believe that they’re positive, or that the average member of society would believe they’re positive, etc.
However, “almost useless” seems too strong to me; for me at least, it was still a meaningful update to know that people believed there were long-term changes and that they said those changes were positive and not negative. I’d have been much more concerned if people said the changes were negative (I think false positives of good changes are ore common than false negatives on bad changes) and psychedelics would have seemed lower stakes if there’d been fewer reports of long-term changes.
Also I think a bunch of the other questions have fewer issues related to self-evaluation, since a bunch of the questions are either more objective (“how many times did you trip?”) or explicitly subjective (“did you experience the trip as a positive one?”).
But yeah, I agree that evaluation by others would be really valuable.