We have 2 options for dangerous things:
1) Regulate.
2) Criminalize.
If lots of people do it, (1) is better, even though it normalizes the danger, because we get seat belts and pharmaceutical controls and the ability to innovate and discuss changes in public.
If the people involved can be cast as lower moral status / other, then it becomes a problem of "Dealing with THEM", and we get (2). This is correct if the primary activity is a real, moral crime (theft, extortion rackets), which changing consciousness and numbing pain aren't. This is almost NEVER correct in the case of voluntary economic transactions (for which the societal benefits of regulation have proven to be enormous), unless those interactions are inherently theftlike/extortionate/exploitative-involuntary, because it creates a spiral of violence.
So the questions are: Should pain numbing / consciousness altering be the province of organized crime? Should we devote substantial societal resources to a failed project of stopping people from altering consciousness and numbing pain, or change to make that fact less damaging? Should one part of society get to impose the violence-filled option on everyone else?
Isn't the suggestion that if there were not police/criminals as an interface to getting high, there would be
a) the ability to know whether the drug one is purchasing contains a Fentanyl OD (labeled contents from auditable sources)
b) more access to resources for dealing with addiction, less dangerous circumstances, etc
What has drug prohibition done to help the problem of addiction and violence in the United States?
If I were mostly mobile I would buy one of those 2-way screen extenders that attaches to the back of the laptop and gives you 3 monitors, and/or a large vertical touchscreen to use alongside.
I definitely wouldn't recommend those attached screens. They're small, bulky, usually have low quality displays and none of them can be used without a kickstand, at which point you might as well get a portable monitor instead. They come in a variety of sizes, with many different features (OLED, touchscreen, speakers...) and at many different price points.
I used a 17" DIY portable monitor for about two years when I didn't have a permanent workspace and the only complaints I have about using it are solved in most commercial models, I just stubbornly wanted to use my own. Just be careful with the cheap ones as they often have the same problems: poor viewing angles, no backlight adjustment, wobbly kickstand, multiple cables required....
Very disappointed by this. I've got mounted vertical monitors surrounding an extra wide curved monitor on a desk that has 3 distinct surfaces at different heights and a hidden shelf beneath, with a pull-out Kinesis keyboard and both a mouse and a trackball, with a large drafting desk running along one side, with a shelf above it for technical books.
His keyboard was by far the weakest part of this. Click the link at the top of his post ("Update:") to his newer setup, and you'll see that he upgraded the keyboard substantially to something in the ergo tier.
Multiple times I did it with others and profoundly deepened my relationship with those individuals.
Another time I did it by myself and saw the face of evil and I've never been so terrified, but I survived and wouldn't change a thing.
I don't think any of that can be captured by whatever neuro-binding effect is being mimicked by these designed molecules.
I also took antidepressants for awhile once and it was diet and exercise and commitment to changing my life and talking to a therapist that was what helped; but I know others who need to take pills every day or things go bad. I wish there was a short treatment for people who need that.
The effects used to be classified as a "model psychosis" in the 1950's by psychiatrists. That classification was simply dismissed by the government as it implied LSD had useful research properties: allowing individuals to experience the effects of mental illness for 8 hours and then sobering up.
The government was adamant that LSD and psychedelics had to have no legitimate medical or scientific value, and they had to be banned. To be fair they had escaped controlled use and were being used as "party drugs".
But anyway, it sure can be a hella scary and strange experience, and not always pleasant. Handle with care.
> I don't think any of that can be captured by whatever neuro-binding effect is being mimicked by these designed molecules
Agreed, it sound like they do not cause any hallucinations, so you would likely not "see the face of evil".
> it was diet and exercise and commitment to changing my life and talking to a therapist that was what helped;
Speaking from my armchair, from what I understand about clinical depression, these are the things that someone who is not depressed can do because they "crave" them. For people who are depressed, there is a (possibly intermittent) neurological imbalance that is preventing them from craving these things which would otherwise keep them functioning normally. While it may be possible to power through the depression, and do these things until the imbalance is resolved, I would argue that this is only due to a temporary break or recession of their depressive symptoms, something that an effective antidepressant should aim to do.
I'm not claiming my view is true, I'm looking for feedback on how correct/incorrect my view is.
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41380-022-01661-0 this paper was published recently, shows there's actually a lot less evidence for the "depression is caused by a neurotransmitter imbalance" hypothesis than people tend to believe.
There's a wide range of symptom-clusters called "depression" and other mental health issues that pair nicely with feeling terrible.
If it's not that bad, and/or if you have sufficient willpower or support you can change your life. But I wouldn't describe it as powering through. More like finding the capacity to grow and change; depression is neither monolith nor destiny.
Other people NEED modern pharmaceuticals to live full, functional lives.
**
Interesting that people seem to focus on the hallucination claim, not the deepening of interpersonal relationships claim, which is the much more important result, from my perspective, and the part really not replicable with a pill, because it requires an intense shared experience.
Frege is all over analaytic philosophy, as I experienced it as an undergraduate in a top department. Many of the most important papers and books (Dummett, Kripke, Evans, etc) in philosophy of language, logic, mathematics take various of his positions as starting points.
I would describe Frege as the philosopher I had never heard of before showing up at a philosophy department whom I then heard the most about.
His insights were "forgotten" for a time, but have been central to discussions for several decades.
That he took a walk everyday is somewhat informative, given how much of his philosophy is centered on normativity, but I prefer the anecdote about how he was a billiards hustler as a student, because even more pointedly, Kant's philosophy is about making space for human freedom in a world of Newtonian mechanical determination.
Great love for Wittgenstein, Russell, Frege, the Vienna Circle—their philosophical and logical writings—and I do feel alienated when I encounter their popular treatments, because it makes my ego feel special having read their most important works, but I bet the Wittgenstein-Russell fame was good for lots of people getting exposed to the path: I heard about them in a Time Magazine special edition retrospective on artists and thinkers of the 20th Century 22 years ago.
When I study something, I go for awhile, but eventually it becomes difficult, confusing, hard to see the forest for the trees. Particularly with technical information and skills like programming (or natural) languages.
When I come back a little bit later, I find that I only remember the things that made sense; my confusions are forgotten, and there is fresh mental space and energy to master a bit more of the terrain before I need another break.
I'm still staggered how potent a post effort pause can get. I can spend hours and days trying to improve something and not being able to see the easiest spots. I come back 4 days later and everything just jumps out as obvious as day. No confusion, no fatigue, lots of ideas, enthusiasm, creativity..
Our subconcious mind often works on our problems while we aren't thinking about them, i that's more what's going on here than forgetting. your brain figured it out for you while you were doing something else
That's sometimes true but I think my point still stands.
When I'm studying a foreign language, I learn some words and they stick, but I'm exposed to a bunch more that I don't remember next time. I forget those meanings, but the ones that stuck are now vivid and with me, brighter.
When I'm studying Kubernetes, I end up reading a ton of information that's irrelevant to the task at hand, and lots of it doesn't make that much sense because I'm new to it. The next day, when I come back, the things that I actually understood remain, ready to be the foundation for new learning, which they couldn't have been when they were mere data points in an overwhelmed brain. I don't remember the parts I was confused about yesterday, just this stuff that now makes sense.
To unite our points, I might be thinking of something like: the immensity of sensory and cognitive data that pass through (sub)consciousness during the learning task are sifted and sorted in the unconscious while not learning; one might call the sifting "forgetting" and the sorting "figuring out".
If lots of people do it, (1) is better, even though it normalizes the danger, because we get seat belts and pharmaceutical controls and the ability to innovate and discuss changes in public.
If the people involved can be cast as lower moral status / other, then it becomes a problem of "Dealing with THEM", and we get (2). This is correct if the primary activity is a real, moral crime (theft, extortion rackets), which changing consciousness and numbing pain aren't. This is almost NEVER correct in the case of voluntary economic transactions (for which the societal benefits of regulation have proven to be enormous), unless those interactions are inherently theftlike/extortionate/exploitative-involuntary, because it creates a spiral of violence.
So the questions are: Should pain numbing / consciousness altering be the province of organized crime? Should we devote substantial societal resources to a failed project of stopping people from altering consciousness and numbing pain, or change to make that fact less damaging? Should one part of society get to impose the violence-filled option on everyone else?