> As anticipated, this comment is unpopular. However, no one has yet attempted to articulate a criticism
You aren't owed a fruitful discussion, and it's clear you're not looking for one. That's criticism enough, but I'll continue.
> spits in the face of process that has produced every genuine, valuable human insight in history
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Psychedelics_in_problem-solvin... and other anecdotal experiments and experiences seem to indicate otherwise.
> I haven't encountered a single LSD advocate that wasn't conspicuously unstable and self-hating
I'm sorry that this has been your experience. That hasn't been my experience. There are a lot of quiet users of LSD, so given your aggressive stance against it, you're most likely to only encounter the most outspoken/optimistic ones. How about someone like James Fadiman? How is he conspicuously unstable and self-hating?
> we don't say a word when they encourage others to risk everything
Many recognize that not every psychological experience is harmless or positive. I see a lot of people warning of the risk of correlation with schizophrenia, and others warning that a negative experience can do a number on your psyche. It's not for everyone, and not for anyone all the time, and many make the point to responsibly disclose that.
There are many things that fit this description: being a parent, puberty, your first kiss, falling in love, a death in the family. Would you cling to a definition of yourself that has no room for major, perspective-changing, life-altering insights? You can try, but life has a way of changing constantly whether you want it to or not.
Recreational drugs serve no "purpose", as you say (objectively useless). But what purpose is there in being born, eating, making love, making friends, and eventually dying? Purpose is what you decide it is. If some people want to explore their brains using chemicals then what the problem with that? Yes, everything has risks, but so does getting up in the morning.
Live and let live. You may not like the fact that drugs can change personalities in a way that makes you uncomfortable, but this is a big world: I'm sure you will be able to find like minded company. Maybe even here on HN? Who knows.
I didn't have a choice to go through puberty. That was programmed through millions of years of adaptive evolution. It's the last thing from senseless.
I kissed my first woman because millions of years of adaptive evolution have tempered me to benefit from intimacy, bonding, and community.
If could do anything to help it, my family would never die. This is a terrible thing I never chose, and wouldn't wish on anybody if it were a choice.
All of these things that change us are nothing like a strange chemical we've stumbled upon and found to scramble our brains. Next.
All you do is make grand, unsourced claims such as calling LSD "an objectively useless and destructive drug" followed by preemptive insults on anybody who'd dare to respond. You should work less on trying to sound clever and more on actually saying clever things. "the delicate and exhaustingly intentional intellectual and emotional process that has produced every genuine, valuable human insight in history", seriously?
Did you miss all the other comments celebrating LSD, and Nick Sand for providing it to the masses? This is absolutely right place to say it. You just don't like it, for completely different reason.
> You should work less on trying to sound clever and more on actually saying clever things. [my wonderful prose], seriously?
I was sloppily recording my honest thoughts at two in the morning, and I did a pretty good job.
Let's contrast with some words quoted in this thread, probably more carefully spoken at the time:
What I found to be the genius of LSD is that it really gets you high, higher than the programs, higher than the walls that mask and blind one to the energy destroying presence of many contradictory but hidden programs.
What do you think is more clever? What is being celebrated in the highest rated post of this thread, and what is being mocked near the bottom? That doesn't seem strange to you?
It doesn't kill you, nor does it irreparably alter your personality in a completely senseless way. There are studies that suggest people who has tried LSD has their personality altered in a positive way, in that they're more open to new ideas afterwards. It is true though, that some people get very enthusiastic when they first try LSD, some overly so.
I know a lot of people who do LSD now and then and the vast majority of them are successful upper middle class people who's had no ill effects and lots of positive ones.
There are also many people who's successfully used LSD as a problem solving aid http://archive.wired.com/science/discoveries/news/2006/01/70...
That's not to say people don't have negative experiences though and I don't think LSD is for everyone. Some people freak out completely by even small changes in their perceptual experience for example, though usually not if they know the basic of how LSD works and how the mind works. A very useful thing to know is that what we experience as reality is basically just one view of the underlying data from a set of sensors (our senses), there's a neural net with multiple layers that starts with simple things like edge detection or whatever and builds up the 3D model we consciously experience from a mix of the external data, but also internal data, etc., there's no right or wrong view of this data, we could have evolved to experience it completely different and we can make computer program to visualize data in numerous different ways and on psychedelics you can experience things a bit differently from what you're used to. The reason it's useful to know some of this is because if you experience something strange when doing psychedelics, you'll know you're not being kidnapped by aliens, going insane, talking to god or whatever weird thing that some people sometimes seem to think.
LSD is nothing more than a serotonin receptor agonist (although LSD has a bit more dopaminergic response than other serotonergic psychedelics). It produces certain effects in the body. That's it.
The evidence of long-term harm for careful use seems low to me. (There may be a potential risk of schizophrenia / paranoia disorders and similar, though from what I can Google there is nothing conclusive yet. So if anything, that's what you monitor for. Even in the worst case, I would doubt that a single use would trigger this.)
That certain kinds of psychedelics (serotongerics in particular, but also NMDA receptor agonists, such as the naturally occurring ibogaine... and maybe a few others) seem really prone to produce this sort of almost spiritual response actually fascinates me, for exactly that reason alone. I wouldn't call this "spiritual nonsense" "fake" per se. Maybe these molecules in reality are clues to the actual mechanism behind the emotion, right?
To give another example, ketamine's another recreational hallucinogen; if it also was thought of as akin to a "bullet in the brain" and nothing more, scientists might not have recognized the potential anti-depressive nature of glutamatergic chemicals (as has happened in the last decade or so).
What do you mean "a soul only looking for a saviour"?
Is calling people "basket cases" a reasonable form of argument?
I honestly don't know what question you are asking at the start of your post.
Or Doug Engelbart, or Steve Jobs, or any number of the other pioneers of personal computing who cited their psychedelic use as formative or informative.
I also just want to note that there are at least three earnest, substantial responses to your vitriol (I do not count this among them), and no attempts yet from you to respond to any of them. Perhaps you are just in a different time zone and will get to them later.
Steve Jobs was an idiot. That other guy is nothing special. Show me research mathematicians, hedgefund managers, landlords, or doctors.
From my perspective, to put my anecdotal experience beside yours, I know many very stable, very loving, very intelligent people who use LSD occasionally. These people generally don't talk about it, or haphazardly recommend it to others. But they do enjoy the experience of altered consciousness, and the experience of experimenting with new thoughts and perspective.
If it is a damaging drug, as you claim, then these people emerge from their trips strengthened from the harm. If it has irrevocably altered their personalities, then it has done so to their benefit.
LSD, like other drugs, is a way to play. There are those who take it too seriously - this crowd are as ridiculous to outsiders as the whisky, coffee, or marijuana enthusiast. But for most, it is simply a safe and reasonable way to spend a day in leisure.
Anyway, I simply asserted that the claim to know an experience, before having that experience, is absurd. I'm pointing to the distinction between knowing something, subjectively, as opposed to knowing about it, objectively. That's just a fact.
Consider a less contentious example. Let's say that you've never eaten dry-aged beef. Would you claim to know the taste? Sure, you could understand the chemistry of the curing process. You could have loads of GC/MS data. People could tell you about it. You could have all sorts of brain scan data. You could have formulated all manner of suppositions. But even with all that, until you took a bite, you wouldn't know the taste.
In case this is a new concept for you:
> There are, however, other uses of the terminology related to objectivity. Many philosophers use the term “subjective knowledge” to refer only to knowledge of one’s own subjective states. Such knowledge is distinguished from one’s knowledge of another individual’s subjective states and from knowledge of objective reality, which would both be objective knowledge under the present definitions. Your knowledge of another person’s subjective states can be called objective knowledge since it is presumably part of the world that is “object” for you, just as you and your subjective states are part of the world that is “object” for the other person.
> This is a prominent distinction in epistemology (the philosophical study of knowledge) because many philosophers have maintained that subjective knowledge in this sense has a special status. They assert, roughly, that knowledge of one’s own subjective states is direct, or immediate, in a way that knowledge of anything else is not. It is convenient to refer to knowledge of one’s own subjective states simply as subjective knowledge. Following this definition, objective knowledge would be knowledge of anything other than one’s own subjective states.
I'll preempt the obvious response. Yeah, it doesn't kill you, but it irreparably alters your personality in a completely senseless way, turns you into Tim Leary, or someotherway spits in the face of the delicate and exhaustingly intentional intellectual and emotional process that has produced every genuine, valuable human insight in history. I haven't encountered a single LSD advocate that wasn't conspicuously unstable and self-hating, and we don't say a word when they encourage others to risk everything that matters to a functional person in exchange for fake spiritual nonsense.
Now they'll suggest I take some to free myself from the confines of the emotional equipment that grounds any reasonable value system. As an exercise, read the responses carefully. For nothing, they've bargained away their ability to argue this point with me, and they want me to join the club.
edit: As anticipated, this comment is unpopular. However, no one has yet attempted to articulate a criticism. I welcome any effort, and will try to respond with care.