Although psychadelics is plausibly good from a short-termist view, I think the argument from the long-termist view is quite weak. Insofar as I understand it, psychadelics would improve the long term by
1. Making EAs or other well-intentioned people more capable.
2. Making people more well-intentioned. I interpret this as either causing them to join/stay in the EA community, or causing capable people to become altruistically motivated (in a consequentialist fashion) without the EA community.
Regarding (1), I could see a case for privately encouraging well-intentioned people to use psychadelics, if you believe that psychedelics generally make people more capable. However, pushing for new legislation seems like an exceedingly inefficient way to go about this. Rationality interventions are unique in that they are quite targeted—they identify well-intentioned people and give them the techniques that they need. Pushing for new psychadelic legislation, however, could only help by making the entire population more capable, including the much smaller population of well-intentioned people. I don’t know exactly how hard it is to change legislation, but I’d be surprised if it was worth doing solely due to the effect on EAs and other aligned people. New research suffers from a similar problem: good medical research is expensive, so you probably want to have a pretty specific idea about how it benefits EAs before you invest a lot in it.
Regarding (2), I’d be similarly surprised if campaigning for new legislation → more people use psychadelics → more people become altruistically motivated → more people join the EA community was a better way to get people into EA than just directly investing in community building.
For both (1) and (2), these conclusions might change if you cared less about EAs in particular, and thought that the future would be significantly better if the average person was somewhat more altruistic or somewhat more capabable. I could be interested in hearing such a case. This doesn’t seem very robust to cluelessness, though, given the uncertainty of how psychedelics affect people, and the uncertainty about how increasing general capabilities affects the long term.
Although psychadelics is plausibly good from a short-termist view, I think the argument from the long-termist view is quite weak. Insofar as I understand it, psychadelics would improve the long term by
1. Making EAs or other well-intentioned people more capable.
2. Making people more well-intentioned. I interpret this as either causing them to join/stay in the EA community, or causing capable people to become altruistically motivated (in a consequentialist fashion) without the EA community.
Regarding (1), I could see a case for privately encouraging well-intentioned people to use psychadelics, if you believe that psychedelics generally make people more capable. However, pushing for new legislation seems like an exceedingly inefficient way to go about this. Rationality interventions are unique in that they are quite targeted—they identify well-intentioned people and give them the techniques that they need. Pushing for new psychadelic legislation, however, could only help by making the entire population more capable, including the much smaller population of well-intentioned people. I don’t know exactly how hard it is to change legislation, but I’d be surprised if it was worth doing solely due to the effect on EAs and other aligned people. New research suffers from a similar problem: good medical research is expensive, so you probably want to have a pretty specific idea about how it benefits EAs before you invest a lot in it.
Regarding (2), I’d be similarly surprised if
campaigning for new legislation → more people use psychadelics → more people become altruistically motivated → more people join the EA community
was a better way to get people into EA than just directly investing in community building.
For both (1) and (2), these conclusions might change if you cared less about EAs in particular, and thought that the future would be significantly better if the average person was somewhat more altruistic or somewhat more capabable. I could be interested in hearing such a case. This doesn’t seem very robust to cluelessness, though, given the uncertainty of how psychedelics affect people, and the uncertainty about how increasing general capabilities affects the long term.
Kit & I worked through the long-termist argument somewhat in this thread.