Andrew Huberman's Claims About Cannabis Annoy Drug Experts
rollingstone.com
rollingstone.com
Most weed users will nitpick research that shows weed is safe and good for you while most detractors will find research that says the opposite.
I don't know the science but at least to me it "feels" like the weed benefits have been pushed a bit too much too widely lately (legalization lobby) and we are now seeing a huge backlash. I'm seeing the same trend happening with Mushroom/Psylocibin (about to get legal so a ton of research/articles to make it look perfectly safe).
The few Huberman podcasts I have listened too I find he hasn't really taken a stand on anything and typically reads from a paper that claims things. Just reading the results of a study, or saying something is interesting and should be explored more is now an endorsement by him for some reason.
This is 99% of research in 2024, except the research that was directly sponsored by corporations to get a competitive edge and make more money. Ironic how BigCo is now more trustworthy than navel-gazing academia. Although it's hard to feel sorry for them for this self-inflicted wound.
People just don't understand the concept of cherry picking studies anymore and reasonable in-the-middle discussions have gone extinct.
Totally agree. The entire legalization political momentum started because cannabis has real medical benefits. Early legalization efforts focused on cancer, and AIDS, because the benefits there are very real. Marinol is a synthetic cannabis drug.
Then some how the movement lost the plot and people started purporting benefits for things like ADHD, insomnia, and anxiety. I am confident the large majority of medical professionals would claim there are better drugs for those conditions. Then legalization was sold as a better alternative to alcohol and opiates (which it is). But some how the low addiction rate got sold as no addiction. There are scores of people who are probably making their anxiety worse with daily cannabis use, who are under the impression they are self-medicating their anxiety. When they quit they might go through withdrawals, despite believing it's not addictive. I think the science is fairly clear and maybe not settled in certain places, but I think the pendulum has swung from the misinformation of DARE to the misinformation of the Cannabis lobby.
I generally buy the legal CBD stuff I can get here and mix it with street weed which is generally high on THC and it does wonders to relieve my anxiety and stress. Smoking CBD itself is great but has a much more limited effect, in my experience.
Overall, I take his recommendations for ingestion of any substance with skepticism. He often bundles his health recommendations into “protocols” or combinations of interventions which may have been studied in isolation but likely not in combination. Yet the term “protocol” carries a weight, that suggests that the bundle of interventions is better studied than they are. But maybe that’s just me. And one can make what one will about his financial association with supplement suppliers. Of course, it’s all disclosed; so listeners can decide for themselves whether or to what extent bias may enter the picture.
I suppose you don't need to worry about neurodegeneration if you die from a heart attack or aneurysm before you get that old
Could you source this?
It has been known for a long time that nicotine, as well as caffeine and other stimulants can delay Alzheimer's. I don't think that Andrew's claim is novel or controversial, but he is making an observation not a recommendation.
AFAIK he's just a biology professor convinced that we don't have free will.
One thing that keeps me open-minded about free will is that, yeah my actions may be the result of natural processes, but I also have the ability to reflect upon those actions so that my responses change the next time. But, then again I would probably defend the idea of free will even irrationally. In my opinion even if I don’t have free will I still have to live like I do.
Edit: I just googled Behave citations and one of the first things to pop up was someone claiming he has bad sources. But, I didn’t investigate that person’s claims either. So, be skeptical I guess.
So you can see why I might vehmently disagree with people like Saplosky who attemt to reduce us to mere machines. How depressing, which is ironic, since Saplosky's Stanford lecture on depression really started me on the road out of my depression.
Is addiction a disease or a moral failure? Is depression a chemical imbalance or is it your own fault, maybe just “exercise and smile more”?
Questions of that nature are fair but simply being against a researcher or author because they have a viewpoint different your own is entirely what’s wrong with so much of discourse today.
No, I think Robert Sapolsky's focus is too narrow and materialistic, ignoring almost everything that makes us human. In the story of the seven blind men and the elephant, Robert Sapolsky is the blind scientist that feels the trunk and proclaims the elephant is a snake. Robert Sapolsky's science is flawed. If human behavior can be explained by chemicals then why do we need his colleagues in other departments at Stanford, such as the psychologists?
My point was he was doing what he does to make money Malcolm Gladwell style and I thought there was nothing wrong with that but that was a reason why I didn't take him seriouly.
The idea that consciousness is 5th fundamental force sounds great but doesn’t make any sense.
Everything in universe is interaction of particles in force fields. We have mathematical definitions for them in standard model of physics.
And consciousness is what we experience in our brains as a model of reality. It’s a much more complex emergent concept arising from how neurons are wired together to process input -> output signals. Consciousness boils down to signal processing. Which down the stack of atoms and subatomic particle requires the fundamental forces.
Very different things. Put in a different way, they are fundamental because they explain everything in observable universe.
That being said, I respect your right to believe.
- Max Planck
That's a magical concept as well. A theory like mine. Time will tell. I only wish I was around when they figure it out.
Most don’t even believe any other animals other than humans can be conscious. Or that computers can be conscious.
My personal take on this is that the question itself is meaningless because we cannot define "free will" in any coherent way that is actually testable. It all boils down to defining what "conscious" and "self" mean, which are themselves very fuzzy concepts that elude clear definitions. My solution to all this is to just stop wasting time on it, since I don't think there are any practical implications to it (and if there's no free will - whatever that means in practice - then my opinion is itself predetermined in any case).
In a perfect simulation, there is absolutely no way to escape it. A simulation is essentially like a virtual machine running some opcodes. There is absolutely no way to escape it unless the programmer is shit at implementing the opcodes with buffer overflows.
If we cannot computationally reduce, we have no option than to let the simulation play out. So far our universe is not computationally reducible. I.e we cannot compute where subatomic particles will be faster than letting them actually play out.
Whether we have free will or not doesn’t matter. If we cannot computationally reduce, person B cannot compute ahead what person A will do with absolute certainty.
To compute the future, we need to simulate every subatomic particle in universe faster than the the natural speed of universe with fewer particles. That itself is impossible.
We can approximate, yes! But not absolute certainty.
So we have no free will because universe is deterministic. But we also have free will because we need a universe sized computer to know what will happen and the only way to do that is to let the universe play it out. We cannot do that faster than the universe if we are inside the universe.
We are in a simulation. But it does not matter because it makes no difference if we are in a simulation or not.
God exists, but God also doesn’t exist. If God is non-interfering then it absolutely doesn’t matter.
a) extremely passionate about the idea that we have no free will
b) loves the paychecks that arrive after appearing on podcasts and selling books
c) is compelled to do all these things because he has no free will
edit: formating, code blocks don't work anymore?
Sound depressing, but that gives us incredible freedom to investigate causes of human misery and correct them.
I read one of his books when I was a teenager and it’s probably why I chose to do physics.
However, I follow a very outspoken and accomplished IBM quantum information leader on LinkedIn and she has had harsh words on his recent comments on QIP and just his later career in general.
Not sure if many contemporary practitioners take him seriously anymore.
I, for one, even when I disagree with an article, cannot make myself scare quote experts and whine about journalists.
It tortures me that, at the end of the day, I'm either:
A) I'm just making excuses for disagreeing by pretending groups of people are monolith and there's no such thing as subject matter expertise
or
B) I'm just generally upset and going on an off-topic rant.
I wish for a 3rd and better option, lashing out has a nice opiate effect, but I really can't stand looking mendacious.
Why say this? Because I’ve learned that the mendacity of paid experts and journalists goes unchecked when ordinary people say nothing, and quite often the crowd opinion of people with nothing to gain is more trustworthy.
I don't think it's respectful to you to pretend there's no content in the article.
I don't think you're foolish, and simultaneously believe A) nothing was said B) nothing disagreeable was said C) they were paid to say lies.
That'd be an incoherent rant, and you're perfectly legible.
I try to think of it like if there was a programming content creator saying Elxir is powerful and ready enough to use everywhere. Though it is true enough that it can be used anywhere, but anyone here could probably point out a bunch of situations you really should never ever use something like it. But imagine someone without that experience not knowing and taking their word for it and put it into prod blindly, it be a huge waste of time and money. Time and money is one thing but in health, knowing media and reading literacy is dropping, its just something if I where in his position I would see it as irresponsible to even mention some of the stuff he does.
Then that information is structured for a layman, like imagine brand-new devs walking into a bootcamp thinking Elixir is safe main language to learn based on YC hype. As good as it is, it doesn't have a big job market, has specialized use cases, and has the same dev environment/knowledge base of node/js in the late 2000's early 2010's.
I mean, these are generally true so kind of good they are part of hive mind.
We can do it in computer science, I'm sure it can be done in other fields of research also.
I don't know whether he is right or wrong in this specific instance, but he deserves some amount of credit and this Rolling Stone article (and this thread) are mostly full of dismissive invective.
Just terrible advice.
Be less cynical.
Trying to conceive is heavily reliant on timing the cycles so I doubt this something Huberman was unaware of. 6 cycles sounds about right as well. People shouldn't wait around when they're running out of time to have kids.
It blows my mind that a Professor at Stanford could have such a terrible understanding of statistics.
Something I've noticed going through a cannabis legalization. What we were told in the 1990s about cannabis was completely wrong. In their defense, because of it's classification it wasn't possible to do any studies. Only now can researchers actually research with it and we're overthrowing a great deal of ancient science from the past. But also paving way for future understandings.
Looking at the allegation, his main assertion is 'there is literally no research that has ever been done"
Sure because it was illegal. Now the studies are coming in and perhaps the best argument is that it's not settled science? Or perhaps that Andrew overstated positions?