I wonder how the flow-through effects of psychedelics and their normalisation compare to other interventions. My intuition suggests that the flow through effects are large.
Some speculations:
people tend to make big decisions: this leads to larger consequences, especially if those people are influential. I expect psychedelics and other first-world interventions to have larger flow-through effects because more influential people are affected. Compare changing the life of an American politician vs. saving the life of a Ugandan farmer.
people come up with new and creative ideas. In Pollan’s book there’s a reference to the idea that psychedelics increase the rate of mutation of ideas. Yes, a lot of these are bad/useless ideas, but some are good/useful. Which ones spread depends on the selection filter (i.e. the epistemic hygiene of the community). But even useful ideas can be harmful. Do we really want general faster intellectual and technological progress; will the progress be general or will it affect certain domains more than others?
people seem to become more active and ambitious (and thus change more in their environment). I’m not sure how desirable this is. That depends on the difficulty of cooperating and coordinating with them, and also on the danger of a less stable system (I’m assuming more ambition leads to more change and less stability, but even this may be wrong if people act to increase resilience and enforce the current system. The latter seems unlikely in the case of psychedelics however.)
These flow-through effects may be bigger (and I’m already quite uncertain about this) but they are not necessarily positive. They also increase altruism, which is probably good, although ambitious and uninformed altruism is probably worse than doing nothing at all.
Well, there are many more ways for things to get broken than to get improved, unless you think the world is currently particularly broken. Only if actions are sufficiently non-random do I expect the sign to be positive.
A separate-but-related thing is how psychedelics can induce mystical experiences. There appears to be a large amount of commonality in the subjective experience of psychedelic trips, across different people & settings (Griffiths et al. 2019).
Also there’s some weak evidence that psychedelic use reliably increases nature-relatedness & decreases authoritarianism (Lyons & Carhart-Harris 2018), both of which seem positive in expectation.
I wonder how the flow-through effects of psychedelics and their normalisation compare to other interventions. My intuition suggests that the flow through effects are large.
Some speculations:
people tend to make big decisions: this leads to larger consequences, especially if those people are influential. I expect psychedelics and other first-world interventions to have larger flow-through effects because more influential people are affected. Compare changing the life of an American politician vs. saving the life of a Ugandan farmer.
people come up with new and creative ideas. In Pollan’s book there’s a reference to the idea that psychedelics increase the rate of mutation of ideas. Yes, a lot of these are bad/useless ideas, but some are good/useful. Which ones spread depends on the selection filter (i.e. the epistemic hygiene of the community). But even useful ideas can be harmful. Do we really want general faster intellectual and technological progress; will the progress be general or will it affect certain domains more than others?
people seem to become more active and ambitious (and thus change more in their environment). I’m not sure how desirable this is. That depends on the difficulty of cooperating and coordinating with them, and also on the danger of a less stable system (I’m assuming more ambition leads to more change and less stability, but even this may be wrong if people act to increase resilience and enforce the current system. The latter seems unlikely in the case of psychedelics however.)
These flow-through effects may be bigger (and I’m already quite uncertain about this) but they are not necessarily positive. They also increase altruism, which is probably good, although ambitious and uninformed altruism is probably worse than doing nothing at all.
Seems desirable to me on net, though you make a good point about how the sign of this isn’t obvious.
Well, there are many more ways for things to get broken than to get improved, unless you think the world is currently particularly broken. Only if actions are sufficiently non-random do I expect the sign to be positive.
Makes sense. A claim I’d defend here is “properly administered psychedelic use increases the amount of non-random, positive-expectation action.”
One mechanism for this is lessening the impact of internal blockers, e.g. depression & anxiety (Griffiths et al. 2016), e.g. PTSD (Mithoefer et al. 2018).
A separate-but-related thing is how psychedelics can induce mystical experiences. There appears to be a large amount of commonality in the subjective experience of psychedelic trips, across different people & settings (Griffiths et al. 2019).
Also there’s some weak evidence that psychedelic use reliably increases nature-relatedness & decreases authoritarianism (Lyons & Carhart-Harris 2018), both of which seem positive in expectation.