I have no idea what a DMT trip is actually like but I liked the depiction in Enter the Void: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BCIe9gh84NE.
429 karma · joined November 30, 2013
Normally I wouldn't attack something that someone else feels is helping (even placebos can be helpful for some people), but this is the top comment.
It's an instance of a more general intuition that excessive consumption of fiction distorts people's beliefs about the world. For example, at some point I saw a study that showed people who watched more TV tended to overestimate rates of violent crime significantly, but I can't find it now.
Anecdotally many people seem to think that human genetic engineering would create permanent class divisions, and they tend to refer to fiction, eg, Gattaca, when asserting this. But that doesn't really make sense. Any rational nation-state would subsidize it massively for the population once it was cheap enough.
World-building for purposes of entertainment generally has little to do with successful prediction. Hanson has made this point in a few places, eg, http://www.overcomingbias.com/2015/11/science-fiction-is-fan.... I'm not sure if you've read Age of Em but it didn't feel like reading scifi, so much as reading an encyclopedia.
RE: the list of "wild ideas." He estimates that maybe a third of them are true. Quoting a few and acting shocked that that's the case is not a very epistemically hygienic criticism.
BTW if anyone wants to read a summary that carries some of the tone and emphasis of the book itself, https://casparoesterheld.com/2016/08/30/the-age-of-em-summar... is pretty good.
Per wikipedia (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nicotine) the general medical consensus is that nicotine poses few risks on its own for nonpregnant adults, besides vasoconstriction and dependence.
I'm skeptical because people so often attribute many of the negative effects of other chemicals in tobacco to nicotine with no evidence (a point the OP hammers home at https://www.gwern.net/Nicotine). Even the FDA seems comfortable with this conflation, as evidenced by their disposition toward e-cigs.
See, eg, http://www.neweconomics.org/blog/entry/the-truth-about-money....
I kinda doubt that would be profitable relative to just hiring readers, but in general you don't need to replace workers completely to cannibalize some of their wages/jobs.
It looks like y'all are really aiming for Bret Victor-style direct manipulation, which is a bit more ambitious, but Tonic has incorporated some similar ideas, including time-traveling debugging, and it seems like there's a lot of overlap around the more basic features, like the automagical approach to packaging and the data visualization stuff.
http://slatestarcodex.com/2015/07/16/cbt-in-the-water-supply...
http://slatestarcodex.com/2013/09/19/scientific-freud/
http://slatestarcodex.com/2015/07/13/things-that-sometimes-w...
http://slatestarcodex.com/tag/psychiatry/
I only read a couple of these and that was a while ago, but one interesting (and completely unproven) idea was that CBT's effect size could progressively vanish because so many of the useful ideas are being incorporated into folk psychology.
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There's a longer post that I'd like to write about this topic in general (CBT, mindfulness, thoughtful self-help à la the OP) that I'd like to write, but that's going to take more thought. So I'm just going to throw some notes down.
The conclusion I've reached is that you can take that same analytical lens you use to tackle technical topics, turn it inward, and get actual benefit for relatively little time invested.
Recently I read Your Brain at Work. There were some flaws (eg, it really pushed ego depletion, which has failed to replicate), but one idea that stuck with me is that mindfulness isn't just hippie "being present" stuff. The meditative exercises can feel like that, but there's also a very analytical reflective aspect. One benefit of meditation is that it makes you more conscious of your own thought processes, which allows you to notice and stop unwanted mental processes as they arise.
Some other recent essays made the point that the most important benefit of the quantified-self movement is reflection, and you should make your choices about what and how to track based on that.
http://www.ribbonfarm.com/2016/03/24/the-holy-grail-of-self-...
http://www.ribbonfarm.com/2016/04/21/a-framework-of-experime... (the section Concrete Reflexivity is the most relevant)
I've been working on some habits inspired by http://lesswrong.com/lw/fux/my_workflow/. What I found most valuable was incorporating periodic, deliberate reflection into a daily routine with a (digital, searchable, cross-referenceable) paper trail.
I realized that TODO lists weren't just useful for remembering to do things but also useful for clearing out mental static. So instead of just keeping lists for work/school, I also kept a list of more frivolous things (project ideas to flesh out, looking up peoples' opinions on some book, etc.) and would offload any distracting thoughts that came to mind during work hours to it.
I'd heard somewhere that speaking to someone in the morning helps you wake up faster, so I begin practicing Duolingo in bed on important mornings, and kept track of how long it took me to get to work each day (+how much sleep I'd gotten, etc.).
I'd been reading about Jonathan Haidt's theory of moral value and how a lot of human political instincts could be framed as extensions of the basic disgust instinct, so I decided to try deliberately linking distraction with uncleanliness in my mind. I don't think that was particularly helpful or harmful. But in the process I noticed that uncleanliness for me corresponds to a feeling of skin-tingling, like I hadn't showered for a day or two, and I did start having that same feeling when I was getting off-task during the day.
I'm not sure any of this has made me significantly more productive, but the sense of mental control has made me calmer.
Immortality would change that but I expect by the time we figure actual immortality out we'll have either gotten off the planet or figured out brain uploads (this is what I imagine applying the reversal test to). In both those cases overpopulation is not a significant problem.
In the mid-term we're much more likely to see life extension and staving off dementia, and that would be helpful to countries struggling to sustain a workforce.
It's always a good idea to apply https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reversal_test. Given you lived in a world where death was a choice, would you prefer to take that away?