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Comment by benbreen | Hacker News Reader

Submission note: the title is admittedly sort of click bait-y, but the content is not. I've been making my way through the book from which this is excerpted (Michael Pollan's How to Change Your Mind) and have been really enjoying it.

Previous discussion of the book here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17087961

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The recent Joe Rogan interview w Pollan is also quite interesting. https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=tz4CrWE_P0g

Yaeh, it made me subscribe to audible and listen it for free: https://www.audible.com/pd/Bios-Memoirs/How-to-Change-Your-M... I enjoyed the book, but the claim that quantum physics might suggest that matter can have mind (because of wave particle duality) kind of killed it for me. Also, I don't find opinions of proponents of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trepanning very relevant. But it's a nice overview of history of psychedelics and introduced me to some fascinating figures, e.g. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alfred_Matthew_Hubbard

N.b. Pollan presents his subjective experience. If you liked it, you will love reports on https://www.erowid.org/ and there's a lot of information on https://psychonautwiki.org/wiki/Main_Page if you decide for firsthand experience.

Erowid is I think is nearly as old as the internet, it's good to see that it's still around.

We changed the title above to something considerably less baity.

Sorry to bikeshed, but I feel like the new title is much less clear; I don't know how many readers would know what "Psilocybe Azurescens" means. I sure didn't.

If I may, I suggest: "Michael Pollan on Hallucinogenic Mushrooms"

They're more than "hallucinogenic", and the temporary changes to his perception aren't the thrust of the article.

I never really got what is so wrong with an interesting title, if the article itself is interesting.

If an interesting title gets someone to read an interesting article, what's wrong with that?

Conversely, a boring title on an interesting article is likely to make lots of people miss out on something they'd enjoy or learn from, and that is a loss.

It's bad enough that there are so many interesting articles with boring titles out there, why do we have to make even those with interesting titles more boring?

It's just cargo cult knee jerk reactions: "title is click-baity = bad".

Half of great books, movies, articles etc titles pre-internet and pre-clicks would also have been censored under such thinking.

And significantly more opaque. I’d say the title went from a B to a B- due to the moderation action.

Yep. 'Blade Runner' had no blades, and nothing was 'run'. A direct description of the topic is, by definition, not 'baity'.

Unless, of course, you're trying to conceal the real subject to protect the innocent ... or maintain some illusion.

nothing clickbaity about it! The title describes the content well. the main body of the text is indeed what the title suggests (even if the the introduction was a bit long for my taste). I get what you mean though. before reading the content the title sets off some bait-alarms.

Wonderful book. I enjoyed it so much, I used one of my Audible credits to purchase the audiobook version, narrated by Pollan himself. It was a delight to hear his experiences firsthand, retold in his pleasant tone.

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