algekalipso

• algekalipso 10 Jul 2019 7:07 UTC

  14 points

  in reply to: Tetraspace Grouping's comment on: Get-Out-Of-Hell-Free Necklace

  Ag­ma­tine is an aminoacid you can buy over the counter at sup­ple­ment stores and on­line. It is used as a work­out sup­ple­ment, to make weed feel stronger, and as a hang­over pre­ven­tion rem­edy. Ag­ma­tine has a high af­finity for a num­ber of re­cep­tors sites, and it is cur­rently be­ing de­bated whether it satis­fies the crite­ria for be­ing called a neu­ro­trans­mit­ter.

  Of par­tic­u­lar note is ag­ma­tine’s high af­finity to the imi­da­zoline re­cep­tor, which ac­cord­ing to Thomas Ray- who an­a­lyzed the re­cep­tor af­finity of 30+ psychedelics- might be one of the keys to the “magic of MDMA”. On 2o to 80mg doses on an empty stom­ach, ag­ma­tine does have a nice and very mild pos­i­tive effect on valence. Mild re­lax­ation, akin to chamomile tea, and mild feel­ing of so­cial close­ness, akin to a glass of wine or a bit of Indica. Ac­cord­ing to some anec­do­tal data, and in line with Thomas Ray’s pre­dic­tions, tak­ing ag­ma­tine in con­junc­tion with 5HT2A ag­o­nists gives rise to a sub­tle em­pathogenic effect.

  Now, all of that is for back­ground. If you buy a tube of ag­ma­tine you will see that the recom­mended dose is be­tween 500 mil­li­grams and up to en­tire grams. After all, it is in food and it has an ex­tremely high safety pro­file. Some­how the gen­eral pub­lic has missed that on much lower doses it has a nice mild eu­phoric qual­ity. Any­how, at the doses typ­i­cally con­sumed, ag­ma­tine has a dis­tinct blunt­ing effect. As de­scribed by peo­ple who have both taken SSRIs and ag­ma­tine, the effects of high-dose ag­ma­tine on plea­surable and nox­ious stim­uli are of the gen­eral type of “blunted qual­ity”. Emo­tions feel more fuzzy, mu­sic sounds more flat, thoughts seem less deep, philos­o­phy is more bor­ing, and or­gasm is less in­tense. This type of effect (both cut­ting the top and bot­tom ends of valence) is what we ex­pect to hap­pen if you add *neu­ral noise* into your ner­vous sys­tem. Like listen­ing to white noise—it is good if the sound it masks is dis­so­nant and un­pleas­ant, but bad if you are try­ing to listen to a sym­phony, or to the voice of your loved ones.

  It is the blunt­ing effect of ag­ma­tine at 0.5 grams+ doses that makes it a great can­di­date to re­duce the im­pact of brain­wash­ing. Like an SSRI, but much faster and re­versibly, ag­ma­tine will make what­ever mul­ti­level mar­ket­ing pyra­mid scheme feel­ings of guilt and greed you were sub­jected to kind of melt away and feel more dreamy and less “real”. This psy­cholog­i­cal effect seems to last af­ter the ag­ma­tine has been me­tab­o­lized.

• algekalipso 10 Jul 2019 0:01 UTC

  17 points

  in reply to: aarongertler's comment on: Get-Out-Of-Hell-Free Necklace

  Thank you.

  Two things:

  (1) We are try­ing to ar­rive at a met­ric like you de­scribe at QRI. See: Quan­tify­ing bliss and a fu­ture for neu­ro­science for the big-pic­ture idea. I think the suffer­ing you de­scribe is very rele­vant for in­stru­men­tal rea­sons, but per­haps not very large in terms of ab­solute val­ues (still sucks, ob­vi­ously!).

  (2) I think that an­other im­por­tant up­date that peo­ple should make in EA is that hell-sec­onds are not only much, much, much worse than gar­den-va­ri­ety pain and suffer­ing. But also that they are *far more preva­lent* than we re­al­ize. About 20% of peo­ple in the US live with chronic pain, of which 8% is “high-im­pact” (i.e. se­vere enough to in­terfere with life on many fronts). Kid­ney stones hap­pen to 10% of peo­ple, mi­graines are equally as com­mon, and about 2-3% of peo­ple who get frac­tures de­velop com­plex re­gional pain syn­drome, which tops the scale (and worse of all, it is chronic and per­sis­tent pain rather than epi­sodic like cluster headaches).

  I sus­pect most peo­ple will be hor­rified when we get an ac­cu­rate es­ti­mate of a coun­try’s Hell-In­dex. Per­haps you don’t dip your toes into those realms of­ten, but chances are that your neigh­bor or two houses down the line some­one very close to you does.

• algekalipso 9 Jul 2019 21:46 UTC

  21 points

  on: Get-Out-Of-Hell-Free Necklace

  For con­text, this post is mo­ti­vated by the re­al­iza­tion that pain-scales are log­a­r­ith­mic com­pres­sions of what is prob­a­bly an ex­po­nen­tially-in­creas­ing ca­pac­ity for pain and suffer­ing in sen­tient be­ings. Here is a sim­ple ex­am­ple, as told by the guy who stung him­self with 80+ in­sects to put the pain on a scale:

  4:28 - The har­vester ants is what got the sting pain scale go­ing in the first place. I had been stung by honey bees, old jack­ers, pa­per wasps, etc. the gar­den va­ri­ety stuff, that you get bit­ten by var­i­ous bee­tles and things. I went down to Ge­or­gia, which has the Eastern-most ex­ten­sion of the har­vester. I got stung and I said “Wooooow! This is DIFFERENT!” You know? I thought I knew ev­ery­thing there was about sting in­sects, I was just this dumb lit­tle kid. And re­al­ized “Wait a minute! There is some­thing differ­ent go­ing on here”, and that’s what got me to do the com­par­a­tive anal­y­sis. Is this unique to har­vester ants? Or are there oth­ers that are like that. It turns out while the an­swer is now we know what’s later—it’s unique! [unique type of pain].

  7:09 - I didn’t re­ally wanted to go out and get stung for fun. I was this des­per­ate grad­u­ate stu­dent try­ing to get a the­sis, so I could get out and get a real job, and stop be­ing a stu­dent even­tu­ally. And I re­al­ized that, oh, we can mea­sure tox­i­c­ity, you know, the kil­ling power of some­thing, but we can’t mea­sure pain… ouch, that one hurst, and that one hurts, and ouch that one over there also hurts… but I can’t put that on a com­puter pro­gram and math­e­mat­i­cally an­a­lyze what it means for the pain of the in­sect. So I said, aha! We need a pains scale. A com­puter can an­a­lyze one, two, three, and four, but it can’t an­a­lyze “ouch!”. So I de­cided that I had to make a pain scale, with the har­vester ant (cut­ting to the chase) was a 3. Honey bees was a 2. And I kind of tell peo­ple that each num­ber is like 10 equiv­a­lent of the num­ber be­fore. So 10 honey bee stings are equal to 1 har­vester ant sting, and 10 har­vester ant stings would equal one bul­let ant sting.

  Some EAs have already pointed this out, but I sus­pect that this has yet to make it into “EA Canon” and it thus hasn’t re­ally given rise to novel in­ter­ven­tions. Brian To­masik, Jonathan Leighton, Manu Her­ran, David Pearce, and other “suffer­ing fo­cused ethics” peo­ple have been say­ing this for a while. Read more here.

  I re­al­ize that it is always kind of de­press­ing to look into how bad suffer­ing gets, but it does seem im­por­tant to know if one is in­deed try­ing to re­duce suffer­ing as much as pos­si­ble.

Get-Out-Of-Hell-Free Necklace