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naraburns  nihil supernum  2yr ago (text post)   Edited 2yr ago   34788 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of November 14, 2022

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Using things like this when you don't actually have anything wrong with you, when you just wish your mind worked differently viscerally disgusts me. I'm not exactly a Mormon over here - I start the day with coffee and often finish it with whiskey. I don't care if people smoke weed or even have the occasional bump of cocaine.

I'm largely in the same boat as you, philosophically -- I go cold turkey on caffeine regularly to make sure I can, don't and can't take more than a single serving of alcohols at a time, have a bit of internal resistance to even prescribed non-psychoactive drugs, and think people are too quick to dismiss the psychoactive risks of 'soft' drugs -- but I'm gonna push back a little bit, here.

I don't like the existing drugs, but I also don't think there's some particularly holy nature of the unaltered biochemistry. The snarky side is that we're already doing a lot of alterations to it, for better or worse: people worried about fluoride in water stealing their essence are probably a little nuts but it also probably does have some minor neurological impact, removing lead from everything is probably overstated but also not trivial, the amount of taurine you get in your diet probably effects memory even if you can separately synthesize it internally.

But the deeper part is that I'm extremely skeptical that even if the modern natural brain biochemistry was once well-optimized for the ancestral environment, that it currently is for our current one. Depression and obesity are popping up at ranges that are simply nonsensical from an evolutionary perspective. A significant portion of the male population can't successfully initiate sex to completion with any partner, nevermind one they can reproduce with. Modifications should be met with extreme skepticism because they're so hard to evaluate from the inside, and shouldn't be exploited for stupid or valueless reasons, and if there are available non-pharmaceutical interventions that work even moderately well I'd favor them.

But shit's broke already.

But the deeper part is that I'm extremely skeptical that even if the modern natural brain biochemistry was once well-optimized for the ancestral environment, that it currently is for our current one

Agree strongly here. For all the benefits of modernity it is clearly driving us 'crazy' in large numbers.

I don't like the existing drugs, but I also don't think there's some particularly holy nature of the unaltered biochemistry

There clearly isn't in a broad sense - genetic differences between humans that lead to great differences in intelligence or some other traits are themselves biochemical. But the particular mechanisms of psychoactive drugs are strong enough that they aren't doing the kind of thing that, like, a gradient descent of fine modifications would, but more just 'making you focus really hard on some specific thing' (stimulants, bad because - naturally - you'd be considering if you should do that thing and how you should do it in relation to larger-scale structures), or 'kinda feeling good or having crazy insights while actually just being dumb' (alcohol, weed, psychoactives). In the particular case of stimulants for 'not being able to focus', I really do think it's just a 'natural' lack of desire to engage in various aspects of school, work, modern life that is in great part justified, but poorly developed, rationalized, and then treated with the drug

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