this btw is why we now see some of the TPOT rationalists microdosing street meth as a substitute. also that they’re idiots, of course.
somehow this man still has a medical license
This is up there with the time that rationalists convinced themselves to get addicted to heroin for productivity or whatever.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34648499
EA appeals to exactly that kind of really-smart-person who is perfectly capable of convincing themselves that they’re always right about everything. And from there, you can justify all kinds of terrible things.
I came to the same conclusion after a group of my friends got involved with the local rationalist and EA community, though for a different reason: Their drug habits.
They believed themselves to have a better grasp on human nature and behavior than the average person, and therefore believed they were better at controlling themselves. They also had a deep contrarian bias, which turned into a belief that drugs weren’t actually as bad as the system wanted us to believe.
Combine these two factors and they convinced themselves that they could harness recreational opioid use to improve their lives, but avoid the negative consequences that “normies” suffered by doing it wrong. I remember being at a party where several of them were explaining that they were on opioids right now and tried to use the fact that nothing terrible was happening as proof that they were performing rational drug use.
Long story short, the realities of recreational opioid use caught up with them and they were blind to the warning signs due to their hubris. I intentionally drifted away from that group around that time, so I don’t know what happened to them.
I will never forget how confident they were that addiction is something that only happens to other people, not rationalists like them.
That thread is gold. Specially love this one where heroin is dismissed because it’s not utilitarian enough
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but it’s a bad trip, man
@gerikson Sure, but it is free.
If you want to prematurely end your stimulant rush, booze, GHB, or ketamine will do that.
Ketamine and booze will absolutely not do that, and for the love of God do not take GHB to cool off a rush, what in God’s name are you thinking, you ludicrous phoney
Are these guys lying about drug use to look cool???
“incredibly dangerous drug advice that doesn’t get called out” is practically an orange site specialty at this point. it’s weird that their world-class mods don’t even catch the obvious cases
EA appeals to exactly that kind of really-smart-person who is perfectly capable of convincing themselves that they’re always right about everything. And from there, you can justify all kinds of terrible things.
i’d normally disregard that outright as adderal talking
It is pretty awesome gear though, you gotta give him that.
This was definitely written on an adderall bender.
Messing about with meds for yourself is the sort of thing that gets medical doctors struck off, even if the paperwork is in order, so I would not actually assume that at all. I do think he’s dancing on a fine line with essays like this.
It reads like adderall bravado to me. From the beginning where he’s confident that his patient’s colleagues are already on it.
Also I should point out claims around micro-dosing psychedelics are actually pretty sketch…and some of these people claim daily use of lsd - which is impossible (due to receptors getting flooded).
daily use is definitely possible! you’ll just get absolutely nothing out of it other than extremely minor but cumulative damage to your heart (which notably doesn’t happen when you’re not doing weird shit with your acid and you give it a fucking week or two off)
not really relevant, but: a quote from an interview with hard-living 60s rock band the Pretty Things:
“…microdosing LSD [is] a practice May thinks may have been invented by a keyboard player who performed with the band in the 70s. “He used to have a little lick of acid every morning while standing on his head, doing his yoga exercises.” And did it help him psychologically, as latterday devotees of microdosing claim it can? “Well, no, not really,” sighs May. “He went pretty loony, to be honest.””
Source: this article
In his book on psychedelics, David Nutt suggests that it is likely that the observed benefits of microdosing are just the placebo effect.
What about addiction risk?
The data on this are really poor because it’s hard to define addiction. If a prescription stimulant user uses their stimulants every day, and feels really good on them, and feels really upset if they can’t get them…well, that’s basically the expected outcome.
did I just watch Scott try to reply guy addiction out of existence?
also, all the paragraphs Scott uses to call his patients liars and insinuate that other psychiatrists have guilty consciences are really uncomfy? cause it really feels like a normal response to the situations he’s describing is “boy I’m getting a lot of folks with ADHD and neurodivergent traits and all they seem to want is one treatment for it, maybe I should examine that more closely” and not “look at all these normal-brained fucks with intense problems focusing coming to me for drugs, which I’m certain the other pill-pushers in my industry will give them without question. welp time to not even attempt to establish a therapeutic dosage or even guidelines around how much to take since this is a fun safe party drug”
An ounce of NSFW might help here. There’s a very reasonable definition of addiction using ΔFosB modulation. Scott probably doesn’t like this because it implies that the concept of addiction is hopelessly overlapping with desires for food, shelter, exercise, social belonging, etc. and totally avoids the difficult subjective task of determining whether a person’s addiction is interfering with their daily life; Scott gets paid good money to be judgmental about his patients’ lives!
Ok. But this part is pretty reasonable:
Think about how wasteful all of this is. We throw people in jail for using Adderall without a prescription. We expel them from colleges. We fight an expensive and bloody War on Drugs to prevent non-prescription-holders from getting Adderall. We create a system in which poor people need to stretch their limited resources to make it to a psychiatrist so they can be prescribed Adderall, in which people without health insurance can never get it at all, in which DEA agents occasionally bust down the doors of medical practices giving out Adderall illegally.
It’s absolute bullshit that I can’t buy amphetamine at my corner store if I want to. Yes, it’s probably bad in the long-run. But I fucking want it.
Edit to add more substance: I also believe without evidence that “ADHD” is a lingering result of the transition of humanity to a sedentary lifestyle, but some are better equipped to deal with it than others. The whole binary of “You have ADHD” and “You don’t” is utter nonsense made up by the prohibition state to justify medicating people with amphetamine.
as a long-term supporter of the idea that folk should be able to just get high if they want to, it’s incredibly hard to square my beliefs with the existence of a person like Scott, especially having directly dealt with the outcomes of Scott’s advice amongst folks I have worked with
in general, the capitalist idea that even getting high needs to have utility has led to the normalization of some of the worst drug culture I’ve ever seen, from the can of worms that is lifestyle microdosing to some much worse shit than that
