It's not as though this is some thousand-year-old fence; psychadelics were illegalized under Nixon. If there was a reason other than 'they are drugs', it has not been made public, and all research at the time suggested that they should not have been illegalized. I'm open to being told I'm wrong, but 3 pages of google results did not push me in that direction.
These drugs have been illegal for a lifetime. It's hard to get people to accept even overwhelmingly beneficial technology into the main fold of society. I'm not optimistic anything beyond weed is gonna get legalized federally in our lifetime.
As cannabis (and now psilocybin) have demonstrated, we don't really need federal legalization to make significant strides at the state level. If anything, it's a positive pushback against nearly a century of dramatic overreach by a federal government granted far too much power. At some point, the federal government will have to face the awkward situation that 100% of the desirable to live in states are in open contempt to federal law, and they have to play catch-up.
Generically (not always true) red states have that for gun stuff (decriminalized unregistered / federally illegal NFA items) and blue states have that for pot and maybe even something else. It's hard for me to imagine the government will eventually catch up to freedom-leaning on either side, but I agree improvements at the state level is far better than nothing.
As a depression treatment, it far exceeds the state-of-the-art SSRIs, which perform only slightly better than placebo. It's cheaper, more effective, and lasts longer. ~10% of Americans suffer from depression, and more than a third of them don't respond to SSRIs at all. Dramatically reducing the suffering of 3% of the population at net-negative cost is a big deal.
For comparison to topics-de-jour, in the US 0.3% of the population will get an abortion in a given year, 3.5% are gay/bi, 0.3% are trans, <0.03% die from gun violence (and over half are suicides potentially reduced by this treatment) each year, and about 1/40th of them are killed by law enforcement. Improvements in these areas will have a smaller effect size (ie. protecting gay marriage will not improve the lives of gay people as much as curing someone's depression will, gun control will not end all gun violence).
Big caveat here is that this treatment is relatively new, and depression treatments tend to be promising initially with results that fade in the long term. Additionally, the legalization of that treatment does not mean everyone who needs it will get it. On the other hand, depression is only one of the many issues that can be treated with psychadelics. We'll have to wait and see
Fwiw at least in the US it not likely to be cheaper. Until covered by insurance, a professionally administered experience will most likely be
be similar to a guided ketemine session which is currently around $450 a session when it costs penny to make.
I get why some people would want or need a physician, but these drugs should be offered at cost in take home form too. We let people take opioids and amphetamines at home without supervision, and for most people that's fine.
I'm with you in spirit, but practically speaking it's an excellent idea to have a friend with experience to accompany you during your first session.
Even if your friend just sits there for four hours while reading a book, it's comforting to know that someone you trust is there to say "yes" when you start asking "is this really happening?" That can make the difference between a wonderful experience and an alarming one.
Compare that to SSRIs that you have to take for 3 weeks before they either succeed or fail (and have unpleasant side effects). Also suicide while coming down off of SSRIs is unfortunately very common.
Contrast with:
One session of psychedelic assisted therapy has been shown to offer months of relief from depression.
I’m not saying it’s a magic cure, just that we owe it to ourselves to continue to study psychedelic assisted therapy.
Absolutely, I should have brought up risks as well. Triggering early schizophrenia is a big one, personality changes also seem like a significant concern. I'm not aware of any IQ changes- if you have a study, send it my way if you please. If you're just gesturing at the fact that long-term research is lacking, I'm very much in agreement.
Tangential: This argument comes up a lot, and I get that it's a specific example to make a general point, but are we that confident that removing Hitler from the equation means no Holocaust? It can't be denied that he had significant influence, but Nazis existed without him and antisemitism was widespread in Germany at least as far back as its founding. Am I wrong to think Hitler's contribution was not necessary for that outcome?
The novel "Time and Time again" by Ben Elton explores the possibility of averting of the world wars via time travel. I really enjoyed the book and would recommend. Without wanting to spoil anything, I would say it broadly agrees with your thesis.
Afaik, Hitler was instrumental in making Nazi party big and popular. They became big due to his speaking abilities. Antisemitism was widespread all around Europe. Germany was not the most antisemitic one - the Jews were running to Germany from Easter Europe.
The nazi party was not the only competitor for power and among those, it was only genocidal by ideology. Germany could end up as military dictatorship - there would be imperialism but it would not be the same. It could end up as actual democratic country too. But, the party that won were Nazi and there, Hitler was the one who made that party big.
I would think consciousness, rather than intelligence, is the important component that should persist irrespective of humanity. Intelligence, curiousity, and creativity are important too, but on their own they don't hold moral significance. A universe of computers is not superior to a universe of atoms without something experiencing those abstractions and giving them meaning.
What does the risk profile look like for launching nuclear fuel through our atmosphere? It seems intuitively concerning, but I don't know much about nuclear.
It isn't too big of an issue, rockets have to meet certain requirements to fly nuclear material. The flight profile is required to be over water, so intact material just gets diluted or sinks. There are some requirements about how the flight termination system works (eg it shouldn't spread payload debris over a large area) and general reliability considerations identical to those for human spaceflight.
Essentially, flying nuclear material is treated with the same level of basic care as flying humans.
Once the material is in space the regulations aren't as thorough, I imagine the most that NASA considers is for the launch to be into a direct injection orbit or at a sufficiently high parking orbit that there isn't an immediate risk of uncontrolled reentry in case of some failure.
Basically zero. Unused nuclear fuel is not very radioactive. You can hold it in your hand with a glove. Once you split atoms it becomes more hazardous, but space nuclear doesn't start up until after it's been successfully lifted.
While I think this is a solid point in general, if someone has installed weights to trick autopilot into thinking they're awake and holding the wheel, they probably know that they're supposed to be awake and holding the wheel.
This is an extreme exaggeration. If you've used Twitter since the Musk takeover and come away with the impression that you can't criticize him there, you've had a completely alien experience to mine- it seems to be the main use of the site these days.
He has banned parody accounts that don't specify 'parody' in the username, he's threatened to de-amplify negative tweets, and he's banned the ElonJet account. I vehemently disagree with all of those moves, but the idea that the site is now unusable to say anything that he doesn't like is absolutely hyperbole.
In that sense you could argue that all of astrophysics is built off of a biased sample from which we can draw no conclusions. And you may well be right, I'd think, though it is unfalsifiable.
I don’t think it’s necessarily unfalsifiable to some degree. But there’s certainly parts of our astrophysics model that are already unfalsifiable and there’s no way around that. For example, the existence of the unobservable universe by definition is unfalsifiable. We kind of just assume the locality principle and that stars leaving our ability to observe them is expansion and not them hitting the edge of the universe and getting destroyed :).
>Reality shows that countering crazy ideas with rational argument is not working very well.
Have you had a very different experience of reality than me? Apart from some very niche places, the response to crazy ideas has been insult, ignore, and call for censorship. In the rare case that any good faith response is made, it's an appeal to an authority that the crazies don't respect because it repeatedly and unapologetically lied about someone they do.
From my perspective it is abundantly evident that the decades-long push of these people out of the public and into their own spaces is the cause of our current strife. In the aforementioned niche places, election doubts were all but extinct within a month because people actually addressed them at the object level. But I'm not saying you're wrong, I'm genuinely curious about where/when you've seen rational argument fall short.
It's only enforceable if accompanied by speech. If I commit a crime with no evidence, my confession is the only thing that can convict me. I don't think it would be fair to say I'd be forbidden from confessing.
I think there's a stronger case that your purchase choice is covered as free expression or that the government can't compel you to do business with a private entity.
