161–170 of 278 posts
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Who's equating or defending anything? I just think that saying "I've never done drugs" while at the same time admitting drinking alcohol is kinda silly.
It may be silly, but I bet 99% will understand that he meant the illegal stuff.
Thanks to decades of propaganda...
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" The full methodology isn't actually published anywhere. " I believe it is: http://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-67... . Is a panel of experts providing views on an objective criteria the most satisfying solution? No. But they are open about the method, the scoring system, and data used to set assumptions. Plus, it beats "experts" legislating based on subjective, opaque critera. " The rankings a…
> I believe it is So do you feel like, after reading that, that you could replicate the study and get the same results? Because having read that I understand that the scores came from a committee, and are supposedly an an interval scale, but beyond that I have zero clue as to how they came up with the scores that they did. Also, as far as I can tell this is just a new analysis of his old data, and the methodology for…
Not only do I think it is meaningful to compare the harm done by drugs as they are actually used, it is necessary. Nutt's research is from society's perspective - that's why it spends more time on how people actually use drugs than how much harm would be done if they used them appropriately. It is not meant to guide responsible drug use, but instead, inform pragmatic harm-minimising policy. From that perspective, the inclusion of the endogenous prohibition effects on harm is a feature of his methodology, not a drawback.
Saying a study is "invalid" is a harsher critique than saying there are additional factors that need to be taken into account before coming up with policy conclusions. As an analogy, Newtonian gravity is not "invalid" - it is just a cruder model than one including Einsteinian time dilation. Nutt's 2007 paper is crude compared with his later work. Not "fraudulent" nor "invalidated".
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So you can't decide you want to have a go because intellectuals that inspire you had good things to say about it? That's not a valid choice in your opinion?
If one person out of a every thousand who tries it becomes a super-genius and the others end up drooling morons, then it's probably not a good bet. Anecdotes of selected inspirational people shouldn't be a major basis of your decision to tinker with your nogin. It is something in favour of it, I don't think it's productive to pretend otherwise. But good decisions don't result purely from paying attention to what's in…
I also don't think LSD turns anyone into a super genius...
I was just reacting to a now deleted comment that said you should do it because you want to, not because your intellectual heroes thought it was great. Is it wrong to want to because people you respect say nice things about it? (While remembering to evaluate if it's really a good idea for you, of course.)
I recommend David Nutt's Drugs Without the Hot Air [1] on the subject. Nutt, a British psychiatrist and neuropsychopharmacologist, headed up the U.K.'s Advisory Council on the Misuse of Drugs (a British DEA/FDA hybrid). He was canned when he suggested that alcohol may be more damaging than many controlled substances. Amongst the goodies from the book are this chart [2], which plots dependence risk against toxicologis…
> "found a correlation of 0.04 – which means that there was effectively no relationship at all." This is scary: Independence => 0 correlation but ~(0 correlation => independence) Please get your basic statistic straight.
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I think it's simply misleading to quote studies comparing the effects of acute LSD intoxication to the symptoms that can be seen in psychotic people as evidence that LSD in some way causes schizophrenia. Drunken people share symptoms with schizophrenics too, as well as people who have gone without sleep.
This is not just a matter of resembling psychosis. Haloperidol and olanzapine, two common prescriptions for schizophrenia, have been demonstrated to reduce the effects of LSD. There is a connection between the psychoactive properties of LSD and the neurological etiology of schizophrenia, though the connection needs to be studied further. Yes, research should not be taken as gospel, but it is foolish to think that the…
That is such a bullshit statement. A wide array of pharmaceuticals reduce the effects of LSD as well as other drugs for that matter.
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>It poses a real problem to (his) atheism Theism hardly solves the problem of consciousness. It shuffles the question onto a deity without actually answering it.
To a substance, the soul, not a deity. And that, actually, is an answer.
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If one person out of a every thousand who tries it becomes a super-genius and the others end up drooling morons, then it's probably not a good bet. Anecdotes of selected inspirational people shouldn't be a major basis of your decision to tinker with your nogin. It is something in favour of it, I don't think it's productive to pretend otherwise. But good decisions don't result purely from paying attention to what's in…
I'm not saying it shohld be the only factor! You should always know what you're getting into. I also don't think LSD turns anyone into a super genius... I was just reacting to a now deleted comment that said you should do it because you want to, not because your intellectual heroes thought it was great. Is it wrong to want to because people you respect say nice things about it? (While remembering to evaluate if it's…
I don't see anything wrong with wanting to try something because your heroes thought it was great. Though, I can see that just because your heroes thought it was great doesn't necessarily mean that you'll want to. Maybe that was more what Mr Deleted meant? More along the lines of don't just get swept up in the actions of strong personalities.
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>It poses a real problem to (his) atheism Theism hardly solves the problem of consciousness. It shuffles the question onto a deity without actually answering it.
To a substance, the soul, not a deity. And that, actually, is an answer.
It is really annoying that drugs proponents ignore the obvious negative effects of drugs. Pretending that LSD is harmless is utter utter bulshit. There are so many cases of serious mental problems including permanent insanity caused by psychadelics. And of course there are also the thousands of people that are not exactly insane but have their brains pretty much fried and are just not very good for anything useful an…
> "And of course there are also the thousands of people that are not exactly insane but have their brains pretty much fried and are just not very good for anything useful anymore."
> "To mention one of the more recent fruits of psychedelics -- the guy that shot that US congresswoman in the head fried his brain on mushrooms."
Don't make outlandish claims if you're not going to bother to cite your sources. Also, even if what your claiming regarding the Arizona shooter is true, I have a mustache, does that mean I'm going to commit genocide?
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> I believe it is So do you feel like, after reading that, that you could replicate the study and get the same results? Because having read that I understand that the scores came from a committee, and are supposedly an an interval scale, but beyond that I have zero clue as to how they came up with the scores that they did. Also, as far as I can tell this is just a new analysis of his old data, and the methodology for…
The methodology effectively reflected the divide between experts' and policy makers' views on the relative harms of various substances. Given the nuances involved and our limited understanding I agree with the decision to use a committee of experts versus a more precise mathematical specification. Not only do I think it is meaningful to compare the harm done by drugs as they are actually used, it is necessary. Nutt's…
The problem is that how drugs are used is almost entirely dependent on the public policy surrounding them. E.g. when coffee was an illegal drug, you had many people abusing it similar to what we think of as a stereotypical heroin addict today. So how can you set future public policy based on the societal harms of a drug without taking into account current public policy, when those harms are mostly determined by current public policy? Especially since the study (and his marketing of it) portrays these rankings as being objective and scientific.
And even if you were to think of it as a measure of societal harm caused by individual drugs, it doesn't even make any sense for that. E.g. there are no objective measures of the number of users, the amount of harm caused per user, the amount of harm each user causes to society, etc. It's only the opinions of a bunch of random people about these things. How is this supposed to be more accurate than getting actual data?