Why the hell is LSD criminalized everywhere? There are NO negative side effects
On priors, excitotoxicity should be a major concern. He should check his likelihood ratios: if there were brain damage caused by LSD, how likely would that show up in a study? What do the studies actually measure, and what might be happening that they don’t measure? How would you know if people who take a lot of amphetamines / psychedelics were constantly degrading some their cognitive abilities?
“What’s the difference between you drinking alcohol or coffee and me taking amphetamines and doing LSD? Drugs. are. drugs.”
This one seems pretty legit.
Psychedelics and amphetamines are classes of drugs I plan to do, I’ve done extensive (3 hr—sigh) research on their side effects and chemical compositions and all seems fine!
“Look, here’s this site where someone (a ‘gwern’ if I recall correctly) did this scientifically! They’re fine, I want to do that too!”
If he wants to be an edgelord, tell him to read Nietzsche or Nick Land or something. And make schizo blog posts under a pseudonym. Less long term harmful, maybe.
“Why not try heroin if the purpose of life is to optimize happiness assuming heroin provides proportionally more even if for a shorter amount of time?” (!)
That’s not the purpose of life.
But he is apparently “a rational being who can make his own decisions”.
He deserves respect and your attitude is probably subtly or non-subtly dismissive of his agency, and you shouldn’t do that if you want to be trustworthy; otherwise he’ll rightly suspect you’re just lying to him, even if you’re trying to un-epistemically make him reach true conclusions.
downvote for the edgelord sarcasm being insufficiently marked. if nothing else I would want to add a recommendation for Benjamin Hoffman’s blog Compass Rose, to counterbalance somewhat. there are probably others I could suggest as well.
Likelyhood ratios is an interesting point I hadn’t considered. I brought it up to him, and he believes if the change is big enough to impact his life, he’d notice (compared it to sleep deprivation), and if it’s smaller, then it doesn’t matter. Cumulative small changes over time was countered because he’s apparently been benchmarking various aspects of “intelligence” for the past year and would detect a change to baseline.
When he finds this post, he’ll find the Nietsche part amusing (he’s been reading classical philosophy recently), thanks for adding it!
if the change is big enough to impact his life, he’d notice
Well, it depends what he cares about. For example, if he mainly wants to be happy and live a life that feels good / satisfying, which is a reasonable goal, then he may be largely right. On the other hand, a lot of worthwhile goals that he might care about would demand creative intelligence to achieve. A significant drop in creative intelligence—a decrease in someone’s peak ability to create new things, new ideas—is not something that would be picked up in normal studies, is not something that someone would necessarily introspectively notice, and is not something that would necessarily be picked up in benchmarks like dual n-back. Further, creative intelligence is something that would plausibly, on priors, depend on subtle / delicate learning processes that could be disrupted by some psychoactive interventions. E.g. you try a difficult meaningful deep task, and then let your brain mull on that for a week or month, and come up with a novel solution, as is often done in e.g. higher mathematics. But if you’re taking amphetamines, you blitzkrieg some narrow task all day, disrupting the mulling process and overwriting the subtle internal search and training processes your brain had set up while you were engaging in the difficult meaningful deep task.
Edit: and maybe more to the point, development is definitely going to be affected by psychoactive things. I’d bet there have been experiments demonstrating very different neural development given psilocybin vs. not psilocybin. A priori, without good reason to think otherwise, messing with development is bad; we’re mostly well-tuned. This sort of thing could be falsified at least somewhat by looking at infant mice exposed to psilocybin or whatever substance.
On priors, excitotoxicity should be a major concern. He should check his likelihood ratios: if there were brain damage caused by LSD, how likely would that show up in a study? What do the studies actually measure, and what might be happening that they don’t measure? How would you know if people who take a lot of amphetamines / psychedelics were constantly degrading some their cognitive abilities?
This one seems pretty legit.
Now do another 3 hours, but this time with the opposite Bottom Line. https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/34XxbRFe54FycoCDw/the-bottom-line
If he wants to be an edgelord, tell him to read Nietzsche or Nick Land or something. And make schizo blog posts under a pseudonym. Less long term harmful, maybe.
That’s not the purpose of life.
He deserves respect and your attitude is probably subtly or non-subtly dismissive of his agency, and you shouldn’t do that if you want to be trustworthy; otherwise he’ll rightly suspect you’re just lying to him, even if you’re trying to un-epistemically make him reach true conclusions.
downvote for the edgelord sarcasm being insufficiently marked. if nothing else I would want to add a recommendation for Benjamin Hoffman’s blog Compass Rose, to counterbalance somewhat. there are probably others I could suggest as well.
I liked everything else you said.
Yeah… I think the whole thing was written with me in a weird mood, retracted. Ruby’s comment is much saner anyway.
Well, really I was trying to write in a sort of jokey but also no-nonsense way directly to the son in order to not be boring or something. IDK
Likelyhood ratios is an interesting point I hadn’t considered. I brought it up to him, and he believes if the change is big enough to impact his life, he’d notice (compared it to sleep deprivation), and if it’s smaller, then it doesn’t matter. Cumulative small changes over time was countered because he’s apparently been benchmarking various aspects of “intelligence” for the past year and would detect a change to baseline.
When he finds this post, he’ll find the Nietsche part amusing (he’s been reading classical philosophy recently), thanks for adding it!
Sure.
Well, it depends what he cares about. For example, if he mainly wants to be happy and live a life that feels good / satisfying, which is a reasonable goal, then he may be largely right. On the other hand, a lot of worthwhile goals that he might care about would demand creative intelligence to achieve. A significant drop in creative intelligence—a decrease in someone’s peak ability to create new things, new ideas—is not something that would be picked up in normal studies, is not something that someone would necessarily introspectively notice, and is not something that would necessarily be picked up in benchmarks like dual n-back. Further, creative intelligence is something that would plausibly, on priors, depend on subtle / delicate learning processes that could be disrupted by some psychoactive interventions. E.g. you try a difficult meaningful deep task, and then let your brain mull on that for a week or month, and come up with a novel solution, as is often done in e.g. higher mathematics. But if you’re taking amphetamines, you blitzkrieg some narrow task all day, disrupting the mulling process and overwriting the subtle internal search and training processes your brain had set up while you were engaging in the difficult meaningful deep task.
Edit: and maybe more to the point, development is definitely going to be affected by psychoactive things. I’d bet there have been experiments demonstrating very different neural development given psilocybin vs. not psilocybin. A priori, without good reason to think otherwise, messing with development is bad; we’re mostly well-tuned. This sort of thing could be falsified at least somewhat by looking at infant mice exposed to psilocybin or whatever substance.
That is a good point. He concedes it. He tried for “microdosing LSD promotes creative intelligence” but couldn’t back it up sufficiently.
It may be interesting to raise that the evidence for LSD microdosing having the claimed effects is looking less promising these days. https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-022-02876-5 provides a good discussion and https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC9731343/ is the key placebo controlled LSD micro dosing trial result which came out in 2022.