
State-Space of Drug Effects - gwern
http://qualiacomputing.com/2015/06/09/state-space-of-drug-effects-results/
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Alex3917
The methodology from On Being Stoned is much stronger. The problem is that the
qualitative effects of a drug are determined not just by its molecular
structure, but also by the dose, the route of administration, and the type of
person using the drug.

By not controlling for any of this, you're just seeing the biases of the
status quo being reflected back at you.

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squobias
_you 're just seeing the biases of the status quo being reflected back at you_

I love your phasing. It captures the essence of many "bugs" in stataistical
analyses in a rather poetic and, more importantly, persuasive way.

Is this original or do you happen to have a source for this quote?

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Alex3917
I wasn't quoting anything. I'm not a huge stats person, I have a casual
interest in epistemology but in this case that sentiment just comes from
having a lot of domain-specific knowledge about drugs. If you search my
comment history for drug-related stuff, you'll see similar criticisms of David
Nutt's studies, among other things.

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glup
The best qualitative thing I've seen on the state space of drugs is this
selection of self portraits:
[http://bryanlewissaunders.org/drugs/](http://bryanlewissaunders.org/drugs/).
Special mentions for meth, lithium, and bath salts. Ooh boy I don't want bath
salts.

~~~
GuiA
I guess it's sort of a cool art project? But it doesn't seem that useful as a
data point. Mostly because the artwork is likely affected by the expected
outcome more so than the actual experience, and that experiences can vary
wildly even with the same substance, and varies wildly amongst people.

I.e. from this guy's self portrait with absinth you'd imagine that it makes
you sad, but that's never been my experience with it.

More than anything it's a nice showcase of the artist's stylistic range.

~~~
chestervonwinch
Agreed, and more generally, how do you say attribute different artistic
stylings as due to a drug vs. all other factors (e.g., expectations of the
drug, mood, social setting, etc.). I would imagine this has been studied in
perceptual psychology (or some related field) in a more controlled fashion.

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mirimir
It's odd that the article doesn't even mention Shulgin's PiHKAL and TiHKAL.
There are protocols.

Also, without access to accurate testing, people have no clue what compound(s)
they're actually using. So I suspect that surveys get mostly at expectations.
As Alex3917 notes.

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phenomenaldog
The article itself does not mention it, but the site definitely does, as well
as expanding on the works of Lilly, Carhart-Harris, Pearce and a variety of
other psychedelicists.

The survey also collected information about the number of times that the
substance was used, though apparently it didn't matter. What is remarkable is
how well the differences match to common knowledge, even though each survey
taker only provided a response for a particular substance. Expectations might
have a bigger role if the survey included all drugs at once, and people
thought on their own "I don't know about that one, so I'll just answer with
what I have heard about it." Rather, the survey asked participants to answer
it for a drug that they had substantial experience with. Another thing to note
is that factor analysis itself is likely to reduce a lot of possible biases,
since people don't know in advance how the various items will end up being
bunched together. If there is a popular expectation that ecstasy is "life
changing" that particular item might have a weird pattern of responses for
ecstasy. And yet, its overall loading on the various factors would remain
relatively unaffected, since each item is contributing only a little to the
final factor scores. Thus lexicalized associations (e.g. "the beauty of LSD")
will be washed away by the influence of the remaining 49 items.

But yes, one wishes a lot of improvements. Personally, though, I think that
having random people on the internet applying statistical techniques to new
domains of knowledge in order to bring attention to low hanging fruit is
really good. Of course they will not do it as well as a funded lab would, but
they will help accelerate such research.

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mirimir
Thanks. Perhaps my cynicism about drug authenticity is dated.

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tdaltonc
It seems like a parsimonious state-space for a drug would just be the
agonistic/antagonistic affinity for every neuro-receptor. There would be some
partial coronations (between all of the subtypes of the GABA receptor for
example).

It would be neat to see how the authors psychological state-space and this
neuro state-space map to each other though.

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tachyonbeam
> just be the agonistic/antagonistic affinity for every neuro-receptor

Except that pretty much every receptor subtype, every transporter protein and
many other brain genes exist in multiple variations in the human population,
and those variations do alter the way these proteins act. This is one reason
why different drugs affect different people differently, because at the lowest
level, you don't have the same brain chemistry as other people, there are an
infinite number of possible variants.

