https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
You can argue that psychedelics are unsafe without resorting to bringing up ideological COVID culture war stuff.
Maybe it's a better cultural value for our truth seeking groups to avoid psychedelics and other hallucinogens.
Lots of people claim to have solved a problem they have, and some of these solutions end up being forgotten, bad, or authentically and positively life-changing.
Hard to draw conclusions from this landscape (which is why scientists should be experimenting with them).
With some technical problems I have certainly felt that I have solved them and come out with nothing but undecipherable scribble at the end. Once or twice something useful in the afterglow, but much of it is lost (or was never real to begin with)
Did you actually feel that you had solved all major conflicts, or are you 1) parodying your own ambition of insight or 2) making the separate claim that “if the primary agents in the conflict could have the experience that I’m having, they maybe would not be so conflicted?”
(2) for example is a much, much more believable claim than “I solved all the problems” despite their superficial similarity.
I’m not really interested in what you believe, it’s clear you haven’t had psychedelic experiences, which is fine, but it’s a bit rich for you to be claiming what I could have experienced if you’ve never had your wetwear run that particular program. Psychedelic experiences are unbelievable by their very nature. At their worst (as was repeated elsewhere in the thread, and actually in the article as well) you are literally entering the state of a schizophrenic. It isn’t very nice.
And at its best you can think that you have deep insight into major world problems, the cause of conflicts and how to solve them.
In a more personal middle ground it can also be a highly fertile environment for self reflection and introspection with lasting benefits
I haven't met anyone who's seriously felt they'd "discovered" or solved anything serious while tripping. I know people who've left relationships or changed career paths, so as with nearly anything psychoactive, YMMV.
I'm only aware of it happening a NOx trip in the 1800's
> Maybe it's a better cultural value for our truth seeking groups to avoid psychedelics and other hallucinogens
So. You're afraid of them then. Otherwise you'd post some actual evidence.
Has worked every time for me.
Still, I really enjoy that feeling, along with the visual and auditory effects of LSD and enjoy taking it a couple times a year.
Perhaps the experiences that others have had spark true insight, but not in my experience.
Sometimes you had separate yourself pretty far from something to be able absorb and understand an issue, and LSD can cause that space.
I see the space, the separating, as the benefit. Gave new prospective.
Are you sure you're not confusing LSD with THC? What you're describing is well known as "stoner epiphanies"...
However, imho. altering the thought process through drugs and really introspecting on what changes and how that relates to the sober state can yield a LOT of valuable learnings.
I feel like I learned a lot about myself just by introspecting on the effects alcohol, THC, etc. had on me. Really gave me some insights on how associations are formed, what euphoria does to decision making and so on.
I use it once every month or so, and while I’m on it I did the following:
Built a triangular arbitrage DeFi trading system that made me 200k
Sped up a face recognition system to from 16,000faces a second to 1.2M faces a second
Created the first version of my nudged elastic band simulator for finding transition state energy
Learnt GPU shader coding and made my first real-time atomic force simulator
All of this while high on LSD, not having the idea and implementing later, but having the idea and then implementing while high,
I do a lot of coding while normal too, but LSD seems to remove all self doubt and makes me come up with creative solutions much much much faster, it’s not a simulation, I am objectively better while using it.
It has downsides too though, usually the day after I am more tired than usual and need a day to just rest, and it doesn't always work, sometimes while on it I just feel like chilling and reading, it's not something that can be forced
I would bet that people who are predisposed to e.g. schizophrenia are, for the most part, going to experience some insult that makes it come on at some point before 30 years old. It's just a question of when, where, what, but it'll happen.
I bet the group of people who could develop schizophrenia were they to experience the right insult, but don't, is very small.
Except that these numbers do exist and it's a well documented phenomenon.
If you're around people you trust, in a controlled environment, you're not likely to develop schizophrenia.
If you just decide randomly to trip in an unknown environment with people you're not comfortable around, yeah, it's going to be a wild ride and you might not ever truly get off it even after the stuff wears off completely.
Things can go bad in any experience.
You can go zip lining and things can go bad. You can go through any experience and can be left with various degrees of physical and mental damage.
Does that mean we shouldn’t do anything?
I'm not saying you shouldn't do drugs. I'm saying that many of them require way more respect than most people realize they need to give them, and trying to downplay that is not good. I can tell you from personal experience that it's easy to get yourself and people you care about in dangerous places.
Certainly safer than your average road car in most circumstances.
Yeah...I'm going to need to see some numbers to believe that.
Sorry but this is the biggest load of garbage. You can do everything right, and still come away with trauma and psych issues. It's like writing randomly to memory from ring 0 and hoping you don't irreversibly wreck your install.
Yes, but the question is: how likely are "trauma & psych issues"? How dangerous is the drug in comparison to going out and having six drinks over the course of the night, or (if you do LSD say once a year) a year's worth of drinking? Or, how about in comparison to living somewhere that means you need to drive to work every weekday?
-- My friend took drug X and he had an accident!
-- Set & setting?
In other words, we don't care about your friend and his accident, we're just trying to counter any suggestions that he had an accident because of drug X. It was his fault for choosing the wrong set & setting.
Which should tell you all you need to know about the "communities" that form around those substances. People ready to blame each other for whatever happens to them just in case their favourite drug gets a bad name. What a community.
LSD and other similar substances can offer an incredible insight to people who are equipped to handle it. Such substances create new pathways in your brain and increase neuroplasticity.
It's not the one-stop solution to everyone's problems and should NOT be treated as such (far from it!), but it does offer tremendous perspective and insight to those who know what they're getting into.