this btw is why we now see some of the TPOT rationalists microdosing street meth as a substitute. also that they’re idiots, of course.
somehow this man still has a medical license
It is pretty awesome gear though, you gotta give him that.
This is up there with the time that rationalists convinced themselves to get addicted to heroin for productivity or whatever.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34648499
EA appeals to exactly that kind of really-smart-person who is perfectly capable of convincing themselves that they’re always right about everything. And from there, you can justify all kinds of terrible things.
I came to the same conclusion after a group of my friends got involved with the local rationalist and EA community, though for a different reason: Their drug habits.
They believed themselves to have a better grasp on human nature and behavior than the average person, and therefore believed they were better at controlling themselves. They also had a deep contrarian bias, which turned into a belief that drugs weren’t actually as bad as the system wanted us to believe.
Combine these two factors and they convinced themselves that they could harness recreational opioid use to improve their lives, but avoid the negative consequences that “normies” suffered by doing it wrong. I remember being at a party where several of them were explaining that they were on opioids right now and tried to use the fact that nothing terrible was happening as proof that they were performing rational drug use.
Long story short, the realities of recreational opioid use caught up with them and they were blind to the warning signs due to their hubris. I intentionally drifted away from that group around that time, so I don’t know what happened to them.
I will never forget how confident they were that addiction is something that only happens to other people, not rationalists like them.
Also I should point out claims around micro-dosing psychedelics are actually pretty sketch…and some of these people claim daily use of lsd - which is impossible (due to receptors getting flooded).
daily use is definitely possible! you’ll just get absolutely nothing out of it other than extremely minor but cumulative damage to your heart (which notably doesn’t happen when you’re not doing weird shit with your acid and you give it a fucking week or two off)
not really relevant, but: a quote from an interview with hard-living 60s rock band the Pretty Things:
“…microdosing LSD [is] a practice May thinks may have been invented by a keyboard player who performed with the band in the 70s. “He used to have a little lick of acid every morning while standing on his head, doing his yoga exercises.” And did it help him psychologically, as latterday devotees of microdosing claim it can? “Well, no, not really,” sighs May. “He went pretty loony, to be honest.””
Source: this article
In his book on psychedelics, David Nutt suggests that it is likely that the observed benefits of microdosing are just the placebo effect.
