I also came to note that the request was for ‘the best arguments against psychedelics, not for counter-arguments to your specific arguments in favour’.
None of these engaged with the pro-psychedelic arguments I made in the main post
The majority of my response explicitly discusses the weakness of the argumentation in the main post for the asserted effect on the long-term future. To highlight a single sentence which seems to make this clear, I say:
I don’t see the information in 3(a) or 3(b) telling me much about how leveraged any particular intervention is.
I also referred to arguments made by Michael Plant, which in my amateur understanding appeared to be stronger than those in the post. To me, it seems good that others engaged primarily with arguments such as Michael’s, because engaging with stronger arguments tends to lead to more learning. When I drafted my submission, I considered whether it was unhealthy to primarily respond to what I saw as weaker arguments from the post itself. Yet, contra the debrief post, I did in fact do so.
Huh. The winning response, one of the six early responses, also engages explicitly with the arguments in the main post in its section 1.2 and section 2. This one discussed things mentioned in the post without explicitly referring to the post. This one summarises the long-term-focused arguments in the post and then argues against them.
I worry I’m missing something here. Dismissing these responses as ‘cached arguments’ seemed stretched already, but the factual claim made to back that decision up, that ‘None of these engaged with the pro-psychedelic arguments I made in the main post’, seems straightforwardly incorrect.
Thanks, I think I overstated this in the OP (added a disclaimer noting this). I still think there’s a thing here but probably not to the degree I was holding.
In particular it felt strange that there wasn’t much engagement with the trauma argument or the moral uncertainty / moral hedging argument (“psychedelics are plausibly promising under both longtermist & short-termist views, so the case for psychedelics is more robust overall.”)
There was also basically no engagement with the studies I pointed to.
All of this felt strange (and still feels strange), though I now think I was too strong in the OP.
I also came to note that the request was for ‘the best arguments against psychedelics, not for counter-arguments to your specific arguments in favour’.
However, I also wrote one of the six responses referred to, and I contest the claim that
The majority of my response explicitly discusses the weakness of the argumentation in the main post for the asserted effect on the long-term future. To highlight a single sentence which seems to make this clear, I say:
I also referred to arguments made by Michael Plant, which in my amateur understanding appeared to be stronger than those in the post. To me, it seems good that others engaged primarily with arguments such as Michael’s, because engaging with stronger arguments tends to lead to more learning. When I drafted my submission, I considered whether it was unhealthy to primarily respond to what I saw as weaker arguments from the post itself. Yet, contra the debrief post, I did in fact do so.
Huh. The winning response, one of the six early responses, also engages explicitly with the arguments in the main post in its section 1.2 and section 2. This one discussed things mentioned in the post without explicitly referring to the post. This one summarises the long-term-focused arguments in the post and then argues against them.
I worry I’m missing something here. Dismissing these responses as ‘cached arguments’ seemed stretched already, but the factual claim made to back that decision up, that ‘None of these engaged with the pro-psychedelic arguments I made in the main post’, seems straightforwardly incorrect.
Thanks, I think I overstated this in the OP (added a disclaimer noting this). I still think there’s a thing here but probably not to the degree I was holding.
In particular it felt strange that there wasn’t much engagement with the trauma argument or the moral uncertainty / moral hedging argument (“psychedelics are plausibly promising under both longtermist & short-termist views, so the case for psychedelics is more robust overall.”)
There was also basically no engagement with the studies I pointed to.
All of this felt strange (and still feels strange), though I now think I was too strong in the OP.