That was my thought too, though that also runs into the author's argument that psychedelic research is heavily biased by people who have tried it. On the other hand, I think people who have not tried psychedelics have never experienced how much of what they think of as objective, rational mind is actually fairly fluid, and how much the referential frame of experience informs and influences what we'd consider objectivity.

Physics research is heavily biased by people who live in reality.

Oncology research is heavily biased by having study participants who have cancer.

Am I missing something?

I don’t know if someone who has never taken psychedelics can adequately understand what it is like, unless they have experienced something similar without taking psychedelic substances. (That is, spontaneous, visionary experiences). There’s an intellectualization of what the person thinks this experience is about, as a substitute for direct experience.

A physicist might study physical phenomena, but what they work with are models about those physical phenomena, and then call that “reality”. That isn’t reality. Those are models of physical phenomena with high degree of predictive ability.

Rather, if you want to use an example of someone who attempt to directly experience reality, we’re talking about Zen practitioners or one of those non-dual teachers. If you hear them talk, they spend a lot of time saying very plainly, you don’t really experience reality directly. But people hearing it pretty much nod their head and think that they do.

As far as oncology research goes, you are right. It is biased towards study participants with cancer. Not only do the _researchers_ themselves are not experiencing cancer themselves (unless they got cancer), but what is _not_ being studied is what health and wholeness looks like and contextualizing cancer that way. Instead, we’re getting to know a lot about the mechanisms of cancer, and the various causal chains of cancer, and this limits our view to that of the body as a machine. That by somehow understanding all the fiddly bits, we would understand the whole, and we won’t.

What if this were applied to everything? "95% of participants preferred the meal of pizza to the one that was hard tack and water. However, participants might have just had pre-existing bias that pizza was tasty, and they were able to identify whether they were eating pizza. No conclusions can be drawn whether pizza is actually tasty or this is simply a placebo effect caused by the participants' expectations."

Out of curiosity, is there anything specific about them that you think make them weaker critiques?

> either way they are doing another phase 3 trial so we will know.

As long as (potential?) weaknesses are not repeated; for example, if loss of blinding is indeed a significant issue and the second trial also suffers from the same flaw, then I think it's not unreasonable to call into question the utility of that second trial.