I calculate a 99.99% chance you have never tried any such substance and therefore know not what you're talking about. The "long term personality changes" are for the vast majority transformational in a positive way, as in doing away with pathological stuff forever.
I encourage you to take a moment to get acquainted with what is being done clinically ( which to be honest is not what I was referring to ) ;
Matthew Johnson: Psychedelics | Lex Fridman Podcast #145
> I calculate a 99.99% chance you have never tried any such substance and therefore know not what you're talking about. The "long term personality changes" are for the vast majority transformational in a positive way, as in doing away with pathological stuff forever.
You've calculated statistics for things you've made up.
Please please don't quote podcasts as research, and giving me 3.5 hours of homework listening to understand your point is poor communication and ensures the maximum amount of resistance to understanding what you're trying to say.
I did put a rough number on it but I must be pretty close. I reckon it might sound a bit rude which It wasn't intended to be.
As for the podcast, I was proposing it as a gateway into this field, not as a source to substantiate my general point although it does. My point is otherwise based on first hand experience and a large body of anecdotal evidence. You summarily dismissed one of the most promising array of treatments for people going through some rough stuff without any evidence or submitting any source yourself.
You're right about the poor communication bit though and thank you. Here's a 3:57 minute cut-off [0] from that same podcast, dealing specifically with psylocibin interventions.
> Please please don't quote podcasts as research
Well, this is a podcast with a cutting edge researcher ... I think it's fair game, and I didn't call it research.
I can assure you the general idea we're discussing is worth some of your attention, especially if you or someone you know is dealing with just about any type of serious personal issue.
“The brain is not a blind, reactive machine, but a complex, sensitive biocomputer that we can program. And if we don't take the responsibility for programming it, then it will be programmed unwittingly by accident or by the social environment.”
> Meditation is the ultimate key though, putting in the hard work and then using shrooms sparingly to cash in on that.
First, that ^ is gold.
Second, I've only had a few experiences with it (MDMA), but as far as I'm concerned, it's a waste doing it with other people versus by yourself. It's cool with people too, but off by an order of magnitude from what you can cash out solo, especially if you're someone who makes that ^ kind of comment. To be clear, I haven't actually done any since I found this document here a few months ago. But I have some shit that needs to be dealt with at the kernel level and I'm going to handle that sooner rather than later.
Speaking to your other comment ^ I think one could also come to meditation from that gate. Someone not into any of this could realize over night that there are all these other layers of reality that are accessible to them and pursue the path inward afterwards. Or realize they are dealing with extra and unnecessary layers of reality, depending on their specific case and how you want to look at it.
"By lending as little as $25 on Kiva, you can be part of the solution and make a real difference in someone’s life.
100% of every dollar you lend on Kiva goes to funding loans."
"Kiva borrowers have a 96% repayment rate historically."
I routinely give on Kiva but I feel bad knowing that the APRs actually offered are like 30%+ to the guys receiving the loans. Can the cost of administration be that severe?
It's some nonsense method of calculating. It's somewhere on the site.
Kiva provides zero-interest loans to µfinance partners, they charge interest to the actual guy who wants to buy a cow, then return the principal to Kiva who gives you back the money. So yeah, Kiva provides zero-interest loans, but the cow guy getting the money is paying like 20%-80% APR.
I think it was their partner Credituyo that was patently ridiculous, like 80% APR loans and shit. But don't quote me on that. Probably have a bunch of other similar partners.
There are two reasons why the loans are 80% APR, either because lots of them fail to repay (which goes against the 96% repayment rate) or because the recipients of the loan generate enough value to justify paying 80% APR. (unlikely because that would have attracted a colossal amount of investors and reduced yields back to the single digits that are available to other markets).
Honestly, looking at it, it would be better if they just obtained the funding themselves by borrowing it at low interest rates and you just pay a subscription fee to cover the interest and administrative costs.
The main reason is that administering small loans is expensive: costs of administering/chasing the debt don't really scale down just because the loan itself is only $50, and most of these entities seek to turn a profit too. Additionally there's a suspicion the middlemen sometimes use other loans' interest payments to cover defaults since nonrepayment makes them look bad to Kiva lenders.
Zidisha (YC14, nonprofit) cut out the middleman to do pure P2P lending in the developing world at much lower rates but at least when I was on the platform had significant issues with defaults even with local volunteers helping with chasing (and some defaults definitely weren't planned).
I have come to see this "fading" as highlighting. Here as well as in the world at large. To be fair, most of the time the downvoted comment here is trash in one way or another, but sometimes it's gold. Often times it's neither and should be left alone.
Honest question ; why ? Can you develop ? I would see this as one of the most urgently needed initiative I could think of, with rampant censorship, PC and cancel culture ...
> Welcome to the website of the Journal of Controversial Ideas, the first open access, peer-reviewed, interdisciplinary journal specifically created to promote free inquiry on controversial topics.
Basically liberating science.
Edit : I see why you would say that with /s but if you tacitly support the cocktail submission, that's what I would like you to expand on ...
In the medicinal literature there is a lot of controversy over whether the first line of treatment for high blood pressure should be a ACE/ARB or a Calcium Channel Blocker.
In the astronomy literature years ago people couldn't agree if the Hubble constant was 40 or 80 the longest time. Nobody knows what that missing mass is, or if maybe you solve the equations of general relativity correctly stars just move that way.
Controversy for the sake of controversy is... CNN. On slow news days reporters wind up "becoming the news" such as
CNN is very smart in pushing fights to the point where they rarely have to fire anybody -- developing notoriety around a personality is an investment as long as you don't cross the line.
As for cancel culture, I'll say this.
People who write for the NYT editorial column don't like it because they get paid $10k to give a talk here or there so it is money out of their pocket.
Parent-of-college-student liberals seemed to like Milo Yiannopoulos at first because they liked "free speech" as a concept. Except in this case Milo feels like it is a failure to give a talk at some school and have nothing happene: really there has to be a riot and he has to get the next one "canceled" because that adds to his fame.
He burned that bridge and conservatives think he is fresh because "the enemy of my enemy is my friend", he gets invited to CPAC... Then the CPAC people see one of his videos on Youtube and they use the name of the Lord in vain and hit the cancel button on Mr Y.
How about that football player Colin Kaepernick who got canceled because he took a stand?
Names have power, and a name like that is a curse that will bring trouble of some kind.
I think I get what your saying, but my understanding ( based on what I read on the website ) is that this is a genuine attempt at letting any coherent idea one can articulate and defend, be presented and discussed for its merits or lack thereof.
Not some sort of controversy hotpot like cable news or what have you. Controversy being merely a (probable) secondary effect of the legitimate endeavor.
When discussing ideas in search of the truth is controversial, you need something like that. The name of the project is merely a signal they are about what they say they are. When operating in that kind of climate, one shouldn't shy away from calling a cat a cat. I don't think this is controversy for the sake of it, just an invitation to any intellectuals that are being called controversial ( or just names ) when they shouldn't be.
Not sure, as for example here on HN, if I viewed a link from one container, and come back to the main page within another ( new and otherwise unrelated ) container, new tab and all + logged out, the link I viewed will still show in grey. Can someone explain how that works by the way ?
the color of the link depends on what is in your history, i don't know if hat is a property that can be queried with javascript. i believe it is only local to the browser. iaw: the browser uses the color for visited links defined in css or elsewhere, but you can't check any property if a link is visited or not. that would be a privacy violation even without containers, as i could just create a webpage with many links that i am interested in, and when you go to my page i'd be able to tell what is in your history.
Where Dr. Lustig posits that sugar [over-consumption] is actually a public health issue.
"Robert H. Lustig is an American pediatric endocrinologist. He is Professor emeritus of Pediatrics in the Division of Endocrinology at the University of California, San Francisco (UCSF), where he specialized in neuroendocrinology and childhood obesity. He is also director of UCSF's WATCH program (Weight Assessment for Teen and Child Health), and president and co-founder of the non-profit Institute for Responsible Nutrition."
Reminded me of the Kathryn Spirit ; "After years of immobility, the federal government awarded an $11-million contract last year to a conglomeration of businesses to dismantle the ship. Ironically, one of the companies picked was the same one that abandoned the wreck in 2011."
Where: "years"=8
"Built in 1967, the Kathryn Spirit has not had an owner since 2015, at which point the federal government took control. The ship, which had been used as a cargo ship in the past, had been towed to Beauharnois in 2011 by the Groupe St-Pierre, which wanted to dismantle it in the St. Lawrence River to then sell the scrap metal."
I encourage you to take a moment to get acquainted with what is being done clinically ( which to be honest is not what I was referring to ) ;
Matthew Johnson: Psychedelics | Lex Fridman Podcast #145
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ICj8p5jPd3Y
Matthew W. Johnson is a professor and psychedelics researcher at Johns Hopkins.
I could accept your statement with "afraid" switched for "prudent" but even then, it turns out Psilocybin is your friend.