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Comment by throwaway8879 | Hacker News Reader

Strictly anecdotal obviously, but having spent a majority of my 20s in and about the Ayahuasca "peace and love let's dance with flowers in our hair" crowd, I can tell you that a lot of the empathy and mental growth is very superficial. At least seemed that way to me.

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I've been working with ayahuasca for about a decade now, off and on, myself, have done a number of dietas, and been the guy blowing smoke on people who are falling apart in ceremony or helping them to and from the bathroom or whatever. While there is absolutely a lot of what you describe and worse (like blatant predation) in that world, there's also just a lot of superficiality everywhere. Some people just won't see through their own bullshit well enough to offer anything but superficial, and that's probably going to come across particularly sharply once you can see it.

My own experience, since we're swapping anecdotes and beyond confirming that stuff exists, is that the people I've kept in touch with from that world aren't like that, whether they went to Peru once, or a dozen times, or never. They have reliably grown in ways they can't imagine themselves having done, without their work with the medicine. Since you can't A/B test someone's life, you can never say, but having seen however much of these people's lives, they all seem better off, in so many ways.

But selection bias is a thing, obviously. And dueling anecdata is interesting. Just probably not very useful.

EDIT: Phrasing

You sure it's not just being around young people. The prefrontal cortex doesn't mature until late 20s, so people are more impulsive and selfish.

The 30+ crowd in Ayahuasca/Psychedelics have been some of the kindest, most giving people I have ever met in my life.

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