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PaperclipPerfector  1yr ago (text post)   2034 thread views

Wellness Wednesday for June 14, 2023

The Wednesday Wellness threads are meant to encourage users to ask for and provide advice and motivation to improve their lives. It isn't intended as a 'containment thread' and any content which could go here could instead be posted in its own thread. You could post:

  • Requests for advice and / or encouragement. On basically any topic and for any scale of problem.

  • Updates to let us know how you are doing. This provides valuable feedback on past advice / encouragement and will hopefully make people feel a little more motivated to follow through. If you want to be reminded to post your update, see the post titled 'update reminders', below.

  • Advice. This can be in response to a request for advice or just something that you think could be generally useful for many people here.

  • Encouragement. Probably best directed at specific users, but if you feel like just encouraging people in general I don't think anyone is going to object. I don't think I really need to say this, but just to be clear; encouragement should have a generally positive tone and not shame people (if people feel that shame might be an effective tool for motivating people, please discuss this so we can form a group consensus on how to use it rather than just trying it).

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I've increasingly become convinced that the underlying principles of the motte aren't working, or aren't true.

...From something I wrote several years ago and never got finished enough to post:

Charity is the benefit of the doubt. All charity comes down to some approximation of the following proposition: "I think you might be a bad person, but it's possible that I'm mistaken. I'll hedge my bets, and not treat you like a bad person if there's another option until I'm extremely certain."

Hedging is the technique of sacrificing scarce resources to offset risk, and the sacrifice generally involves a number of irreducible inefficiencies. The greater the risk, whether in probability or severity, the more sense it makes to offset that risk with a hedge. As risk declines in probability and severity, the inefficiencies involved in hedging eventually make it a net loss. With Charity, we're hedging against the risk of embracing conflict when productive cooperation was possible if we just worked at it a bit harder. The more uncertainty we have about whether some act is being taken in bad faith or not, and the lower the apparent severity of being wrong, the easier it is to treat them with charity, to extend them the benefit of the doubt.

All of this is just groundwork to hammer out a simple point: Charity is not free. It costs scarce resources, and its cost fluctuates according to your supply of doubt. The more certain you are, the less benefit of the doubt you can supply, and the more expensive charity grows. The less certain you are of bad intentions and serious consequences, the cheaper charity is.

Uncertainty exists in the absence of information and evidence. As evidence and information accumulate, uncertainty diminishes, and charity grows increasingly expensive. It costs you in terms of stress, attention, time, frustration. And of course at the tails, poorly-chosen charity can cost you your career, your friends, your sanity and if you're extremely unlucky your life.

Back in the early 2000s, when I was all hopped up on Blue Tribe 9/11 conspiracies, there was a idea kicking around my circles called "Peak Oil". The idea was that oil takes millions of years to make via geological processes, our society depended on it to function, we had used up most of it, and the price of oil was only going to rise from here on till it grew too expensive and society ground to a halt.

Of course, that never happened. Some brilliant engineer invented fracking, and political winds shifted, and here we are still driving cars and pumping cheap gas. Still, the logic seems sound, doesn't it?

Charity takes a long time to form, possibly on the order of generations. Our society depends on it to function. We have used up most of it, and there does not appear to be a way to manufacture more on short notice. Further, technology is making this problem a lot worse, not better, and it is difficult to imagine the social equivalent of fracking. Charity is expensive, and when people cannot afford it any more, society will grind to a halt.

Back in 2015, arguing with people who disagreed with you was a wonderful thing. The ideas they were pushing might seem strange, bizarre or maybe even harmful, but they were also very new and their outcomes and consequences were very much in doubt. There were still a great many uncertainties, hypotheticals, open questions about how things would play out. These uncertainties made charity relatively cheap, and discussion flourished.

It isn't 2015 any more. We've had seven years of incidents, arguments, and happenings to test our predictions and models. We've had seven years of data to examine. We've gotten to see long-term outcomes for a variety of issues. As events stack up, conversation becomes less and less useful. There was a point to arguing about whether Eich's firing was a good idea or not, whether it was a trend or not. By Damore, wherever you fell on the issue, you probably weren't going to change your mind. By Jeong, there was little left to discuss, and the positions people take largely serve only to disprove what few charitable models remain, or to run up the confirmations for sport[...]

[...]In this environment, given a reasonably stable userbase, Charity drops asymptotically to zero. It's never gone completely, but there's not enough to do what we need, and there's a little less every day, and what there is is a little more expensive, requires a little more effort, and the next day a little more care, and more, and yet more. People start rationing their charity. They start hoarding. The community stutters, chokes and seizes. No one wants this to happen! They want the conversations to keep going! They get angry at people for not being charitable enough, and demand more effort. They get angry at people for growing more certain, less open. But what else is evidence for, if not to lead to conclusions? What is the point of conversation, if not to move from less knowledge to more knowledge? Why ask questions if you don't want answers?

Still, it isn't as it was when we knew less and laughed more, and we miss what we once had. And so we try to adjust things, we try to put in more effort, we change rules and adapt approaches. And the evidence continues to accumulate, three thousand comments and maybe two or three hundred headlines and articles and studies a week, steadily, monotonously burning the charity away, belching out whatever soot is generated by burning the milk of human kindness. No one wants it to be that way. No one wants the thing we love to be its own annihilation. But it is that way, and it will be no other.

I don't think people are going to discover a way to frack charity. On the other hand, maybe it helps some to realize that the problem isn't just other people being awful, that the problem really is, lord help me, systemic, an emergent property of the world we're stuck living in rather than a choice people are making.

Sadly, the above is probably just more of the sort of depressive worldview that you're objecting to. Faith was the only exit from this dead-end that I could find; so long as the Rationalist tendency to empirical calculation is followed, fatalism seems inevitable. To escape the trap, it is necessary to defy the odds, to embrace axioms rather than evidence.

I don't think people are going to discover a way to frack charity

One thing that gives me hope for the future is promising results from clinical trials of MDMA and psychedelics. I think eventually this could eventually lead to legalization outside of clinical settings. That could lead to something like the hippie movement of the 1960s. This time the movement would have much better odds at succeeding because:

  • The government would have a much harder time shutting it down

  • The public image around these drugs has shifted favorably

  • The movement could attract wealthy supporters

  • Lessons have been learned from the failures of the earlier movement

At the very least I think drug law changes would lead to the creation of new spiritual communities that could fill a void for people who are not currently religious.

My problem with that is, setting aside the whole question of legalisation, this is the same brightly optimistic view of "it will change and elevate human consciousness, as a species we will evolve past war and hatred!" that the proponents of LSD and the hippies had first time round.

How did that work out?

Legalise psychedelics, and it'll be like legal weed: people breeding newer strains to be even more powerful, because what users in general want is not to expand their consciousness, they want to get high. They want to feel good. They want more bang for their buck and they don't care about becoming an evolved future human.

Read subreddits where the druggies hang out, and it's often "so I took six different and contradictory drugs at once, my heart feels like it's going to explode, do you think taking 'shrooms would help?"

Legal E will be like all the other drugs we've legally consumed over the generations. Has alcohol make society better regarding spiritual communities, even though it was associated with Dionysius and sacred? We'll take your sacrament and turn it into a consumer experience, packaged for maximum effect and leaving you okay to go back to work on Monday as a productive economic cog.

How did that work out?

I’m much more realistic about the expectations of how this will work out. Both LSD and MDMA were used very successfully as therapeutic tools when used in a session with medical professionals. The drugs ‘escaped the lab’ because they were so effective and beneficial at what they do. In trials today people have said that sessions with these substances were one of the most meaningful experiences of their life, that the psychoactive session was more beneficial than years of traditional therapy.

Of course people will misuse drugs and use them for escapism but that doesn’t reduce the benefit for the people that use them responsibly. You can find people that misuse/abuse anything (e.g. cars, prescription drugs) but that isn’t a good argument that nobody should have access to those things.

There are an incredible number of psychedelics and entactogens that have been discovered (see PiHKAL and TiHKAL by Alexander Schulgan). Much of this had to with finding ways around the drug laws to make legal substances. Some are more powerful, some are weaker, some are less visual, duration of effects varies, etc. I think new drugs being discovered is a good thing because each drug may be useful in specialized situations.

Has alcohol make society better...

Alcohol is not a fair comparison; the mechanism of action is different and it is not being used as a medical treatment.

"Escaping the lab" is the trouble, though. "they work if used responsibly" works for all the pain-killers that are being widely misused. Let's face it: most people won't want access to psychedelics to help with their personal therapeutic journey, they will want to get high and have fun. Just like everyone who uses/abuses drugs recreationally. And so we have the problem: how do we control access to these drugs?

Let anyone who wants them get them? Then what about the irresponsible users who will jump out windows thinking they can fly? We can be hard-headed and go "if you kill yourself or someone else because you are such a fuck-up you don't know how to get high responsibly, that's your problem" but I don't think society as a whole will be happy with that. Certainly not the families of those harmed by the druggies. 'Make it all legal' may be a good plan or not, but the after-effects have to be considered as well.

"If you fuck yourself up we will spend countless sums on helping you fuck yourself up, but heaven forfend we make rehab or counselling mandatory"? We're not seeing much benefit there.

"Everyone gets arrested" - I'm sort of on this side, and no I don't believe "poor Jamal had his life ruined because the cops caught him with a small amount of weed for his own use". But yeah, I'm willing to agree that this can be bad for small users and doesn't shift the large dealers or criminal gangs.

The problem with "make it all legal" is that we can't put the genie back in the bottle, and we can't undo harm that occurs when people do fuck around and find out.

I'd prefer to live in a society where people had the legal option to choose psychedelics over alcohol as their recreational drug of choice.

Psychedelics are far more physically safer: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Drug_danger_and_dependence-small.png

Users are far less likely to harm themselves or others when under the influence as compared to alcohol: https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-11660210

Psychedelics can cause you to quit more harmful drugs such as alcohol: https://www.nature.com/articles/nature.2012.10200

Additionally, psychedelics can inspire users to invent things, become more connected with the world, or feel a greater sense of purpose. Many psychedelics are non-addictive and can cause people to realize that they no longer need any drugs in their life.

If people switch from alcohol/pain-killers/benzos to psychedelics as their recreational drug of choice I think the net result would be less crime due to the drug effects being so different.

If people commit crimes (other than use/possession/distribution) then they should be held accountable in the same way as someone who committed the same crime sober.

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