The best thing I can think of is to incentivise him to read Humans Are Not Automatically Strategic (via positive reinforcement). For a 16-year-old, the important thing to emphasize is not that older people tend to make better decisions, because a 16-year-old will immediately suspect anything you say afterwards is pro-old-people propaganda. Rather, the correct thing to do is emphasize how people in general tend to make the wrong decision, and how drugs are an attractor state; due to the biochemistry of the brain, using pleasurable drugs ruin all of the fun that can be experienced from anything that isn’t drugs. The drugs then gradually dominate the mind, the money, and the life of the victim, suckering them out of everything that they are and eventually taking everything.
Optional extra: There are very large numbers of people in the US alone who are less fortunate than us; they had very poorly funded schools growing up and their parents were below the poverty line before they were even born. As a result, drug use spread there like a virus, not because those people had nothing to live for, but because they were abandoned by the rest of civilization and left with no knowledge, no discoverable path to a better life, and like everyone else on earth they were still not automatically strategic.
I sent the post to him, and got an “I knoowwww, I derived all of that ages ago”. He has that characteristic teenager flippant egotism, and believes he has enough self control to not get addicted, and that his drugs of choice are much more likely to have a positive rather than negative effect. Was worth a shot, though.
believes he has enough self control to not get addicted
Oh my...
Is there an easy way to falsify this?
For example, my personal addiction is sugar. (That is even more tolerated socially than alcohol, and yet causes a lot of harm.) It seems like it should be easy to stop eating sweets, at least for a week, but just doing it for 24 hours feels like a big struggle. (To me. For some people it seems much easier.)
So, my mental image of drugs (such as heroin) is by analogy… like discovering a new taste receptor… that can provide 100x more pleasure than sugar for a few seconds or minutes… and results in a 100x stronger craving for more. This seems similar to how other people have described their experience with addiction.
Such thing would enslave me on the first try. Which is why I don’t try it in the first place.
Is there something your son would have a real problem to give up for a week? Tell him to try it (actually try, not just as a thought experiment), and tell him that some drugs create exactly the same kind of craving, only much stronger, that actually never goes away. Some people can stop taking the drugs, but they cannot stop knowing how another dose would make them feel. (Knowing, not in the intellectual sense, but in the “your mouth starts salivating” way.)
I wish I had a magical button what would erase all my memories of the taste of refined sugar, and I would only leave myself a strongly worded warning to never taste that shit again, at any cost. That’s the point: never trying is much easier than trying and then trying to stop. You only find out too late.
He’s experimented with giving up various things (not on any social media besides LW and stackexchange and mostly posts as opposes to scrolls, has gone no-sugar), but I doubt it has been as much of a challenge as quitting drugs would be. You’re right that you only find out when it’s too late.
I think that your son is incorrectly analogizing heroin/other opiate cravings to be similar to “desire for sugar” or “desire to use X social media app” or whatever. These are not comparable. People do not get checked into sugar rehab clinics (which they subsequently break out of); they do not burn down each one of their social connections to get to use an hour of TikTok or whatever; they do not break their own arms in order to get to go to the ER which then pumps them full of Twitter likes. They do routinely do these things, and worse, to delay opiate withdrawal symptoms.
(For reference, my wife is a paramedic and she has seen this last one firsthand. Tell me: have you ever, in your life, had something you wanted so much that you would break one of your own limbs to get it?)
Another way of putting this is that opiate use frequently gives you a new utility function where the overwhelmingly dominant term is “getting to consume opiates.”
believes he has enough self control to not get addicted
So first, as poster above points out, there is not a good way to establish this. You have certainty on this topic well above what the evidence merits.
But leaving that aside. A lot of the core issue here is that the risk/reward profile absolutely sucks for recreational opiates given almost any reasonable set of initial assumptions.
Like, suppose you’re right and you don’t get addicted. I guess you have… discovered a new hobby, I guess? Whereas if you’re wrong then your life is pretty much destroyed, as is the life of everyone who loves you most.
EDIT: Another pretty-routine circumstance my wife runs into at work: Narcan injections are used to bring somebody back if they’ve stopped breathing due to opiate overdose. Patients need to be restrained beforehand since they will frequently attack providers out of anger for ruining their high, even after it is pointed out to them that they weren’t breathing and were approx. 1 minute from death.
I’m really sorry that the advice that I gave was counterproductive. If I had known that it could make a real person more likely to use drugs in the future (instead of just less likely), I would have spent at least 15 minutes double checking and editing in order to get the best possible outcome.
The best thing I can think of is to incentivise him to read Humans Are Not Automatically Strategic (via positive reinforcement). For a 16-year-old, the important thing to emphasize is not that older people tend to make better decisions, because a 16-year-old will immediately suspect anything you say afterwards is pro-old-people propaganda. Rather, the correct thing to do is emphasize how people in general tend to make the wrong decision, and how drugs are an attractor state; due to the biochemistry of the brain, using pleasurable drugs ruin all of the fun that can be experienced from anything that isn’t drugs. The drugs then gradually dominate the mind, the money, and the life of the victim, suckering them out of everything that they are and eventually taking everything.
Optional extra: There are very large numbers of people in the US alone who are less fortunate than us; they had very poorly funded schools growing up and their parents were below the poverty line before they were even born. As a result, drug use spread there like a virus, not because those people had nothing to live for, but because they were abandoned by the rest of civilization and left with no knowledge, no discoverable path to a better life, and like everyone else on earth they were still not automatically strategic.
I sent the post to him, and got an “I knoowwww, I derived all of that ages ago”. He has that characteristic teenager flippant egotism, and believes he has enough self control to not get addicted, and that his drugs of choice are much more likely to have a positive rather than negative effect. Was worth a shot, though.
Oh my...
Is there an easy way to falsify this?
For example, my personal addiction is sugar. (That is even more tolerated socially than alcohol, and yet causes a lot of harm.) It seems like it should be easy to stop eating sweets, at least for a week, but just doing it for 24 hours feels like a big struggle. (To me. For some people it seems much easier.)
So, my mental image of drugs (such as heroin) is by analogy… like discovering a new taste receptor… that can provide 100x more pleasure than sugar for a few seconds or minutes… and results in a 100x stronger craving for more. This seems similar to how other people have described their experience with addiction.
Such thing would enslave me on the first try. Which is why I don’t try it in the first place.
Is there something your son would have a real problem to give up for a week? Tell him to try it (actually try, not just as a thought experiment), and tell him that some drugs create exactly the same kind of craving, only much stronger, that actually never goes away. Some people can stop taking the drugs, but they cannot stop knowing how another dose would make them feel. (Knowing, not in the intellectual sense, but in the “your mouth starts salivating” way.)
I wish I had a magical button what would erase all my memories of the taste of refined sugar, and I would only leave myself a strongly worded warning to never taste that shit again, at any cost. That’s the point: never trying is much easier than trying and then trying to stop. You only find out too late.
He’s experimented with giving up various things (not on any social media besides LW and stackexchange and mostly posts as opposes to scrolls, has gone no-sugar), but I doubt it has been as much of a challenge as quitting drugs would be. You’re right that you only find out when it’s too late.
I think that your son is incorrectly analogizing heroin/other opiate cravings to be similar to “desire for sugar” or “desire to use X social media app” or whatever. These are not comparable. People do not get checked into sugar rehab clinics (which they subsequently break out of); they do not burn down each one of their social connections to get to use an hour of TikTok or whatever; they do not break their own arms in order to get to go to the ER which then pumps them full of Twitter likes. They do routinely do these things, and worse, to delay opiate withdrawal symptoms.
(For reference, my wife is a paramedic and she has seen this last one firsthand. Tell me: have you ever, in your life, had something you wanted so much that you would break one of your own limbs to get it?)
Another way of putting this is that opiate use frequently gives you a new utility function where the overwhelmingly dominant term is “getting to consume opiates.”
For reference, I’m not automatically suspicious of drugs—I wrote https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/NDmbnaniJ2xJnBASx/perhaps-vastly-more-people-should-be-on-fda-approved-weight .
So first, as poster above points out, there is not a good way to establish this. You have certainty on this topic well above what the evidence merits.
But leaving that aside. A lot of the core issue here is that the risk/reward profile absolutely sucks for recreational opiates given almost any reasonable set of initial assumptions.
Like, suppose you’re right and you don’t get addicted. I guess you have… discovered a new hobby, I guess? Whereas if you’re wrong then your life is pretty much destroyed, as is the life of everyone who loves you most.
EDIT: Another pretty-routine circumstance my wife runs into at work: Narcan injections are used to bring somebody back if they’ve stopped breathing due to opiate overdose. Patients need to be restrained beforehand since they will frequently attack providers out of anger for ruining their high, even after it is pointed out to them that they weren’t breathing and were approx. 1 minute from death.
I’m really sorry that the advice that I gave was counterproductive. If I had known that it could make a real person more likely to use drugs in the future (instead of just less likely), I would have spent at least 15 minutes double checking and editing in order to get the best possible outcome.