It doesn't really surprise me that's possible. I've landed by accident in a very recognizably DMT state when the stars aligned. It can happen, I just don't generally buy claims of "naturally". It's a preexisting state, but getting into it requires such a shock (such as flooding the brain with exogenous DMT) to enter.
That's not the same as the Bufo state which I can't really imagine entering naturally, is it actually like that or just in the ballpark?
Would love to hear about your experiences. Get in touch!
In the ballpark (very much my own opinion, I don't know what the heck is actually happening and of course it's 100% subjective). There's the shock part for sure, and it's definitely much more gradual than the rocketship that is bufo, but the way things are released, and the struggle/tragedy of trying to hold on to those things in that state, and the blissful relief when you actually manage to let go is all spot on. Bufo/5 goes a bit further (and maybe that's only because that come-up is SO fast) and forces you to let go of life itself (pending the dose is right) and throws you into a near-death experience type of place (full on nondual territory). Coming back from it leaves you feeling squeaky clean, light and reborn. But that might just be me...I like to go hard and I know a lot of people really struggle with stuff (it takes some practice to be able to let go).
As someone who has gotten a lot out of psychedelics therapeutically, you are correct. Psychedelics do not in of themselves grant any insight or wisdom beyond perhaps raw experiential evidence that our senses are fallible and our perception of the world is an artifact of cognition.
Past that, psychedelics are (kaleidoscopic, funhouse) mirrors. In the hands of a curious and humble person they can (in addition to being a lot of fun shared with like-minded others) be valuable therapeutic tools for approaching firmly rooted hangups, attitudes, etc. In the hands of someone like your friend, you get what you observed.
Both are commonly occurring patterns, and if you know a person's character even a little well you can usually predict how they'll engage with and come out of the experience.
To quote Shulgin,
> The most compelling insight of that day was that this awesome recall had been brought about by a fraction of a gram of a white solid, but that in no way whatsoever could it be argued that these memories had been contained within the white solid. Everything I had recognized came from the depths of my memory and my psyche.
> Even in extremis: A fist-fight is a sequence of biomechanical optimization problems, and there's always a "perfect move" at any given moment in time.
No, it is not. And no, there isn't.
This is exactly the sort of reductive mode of thought the article is calling out.
No, it is not. First of all the territory isn't fixed. Second of all the existence of a fitness landscape (let alone ocean) doesn't guarantee the existence of unique optima, nor that the ones you identify aren't in a second or less your loss because your opponent read you. The other person's behavior is unpredictable but can be guided, and likewise. Feints are a huge part of fighting.
To think you can identify a model in this situation is pure hubris. Absolutely no one who fights thinks this way. Fighting is NOT LIKE CHESS.
This fundamental faith in modeling is dangerous. It overestimates its own applicability, and ignores its predisposition to only focus on the most available data (under the incorrect assumption that if you collect more and more it will eventually "average out").
It’s not even a well-defined question to ask "what is the best action".
To ask that in the context of a fight (not a bounded game like chess) is already to assume the existence of a complete utility function on which to measure it. That’s:
1. Philosophically, putting the cart before the horse.
2. Computationally, asking for the function that is the entire universe. Any utility function you define, an adversary (say, God) can find edge cases it doesn’t account for, endlessly. Chess has a finite state space; a fight doesn’t. Formalizing this hits the usual incompleteness and undecidability limits.
You’re claiming a perfect map exists (Platonist position); I’m saying that if such a thing exists, it’s just the territory itself, which isn’t a map (Nominalist position).
I'm not saying you can get a perfect map, I'm saying the territory exists.
I don't think we really disagree.
Other than that if you compare 2 possible future timelines, you can either pick a favourite in which case that one has more utility, or you can't in which case they have equal utility.
Sure, there's a predictive aspect to it. What if your opponent zigs instead of zags, etc. But this is basically a matter of forecastable probabilities and can be added to your model. The optimal move still exists, no question about it.
Any problem of bodily motion through space has an optimal solution. In athletic situations, humans often can't think fast enough to find/utilize it, or aren't coordinated enough to move in the optimal way. And a biomechanically-perfect savant may still lose to an opponent vastly physically superior.
I'd bet you $20 that none of the people who have ever won a fistfight have done so by modelling it as a biomechanical optimisation problem, at least on the fly while it was happening.
The comparison is unintentionally funny because it's the exact same "I can ignore the experience of the people who my work impacts because my models are perfect" mentality that produces unlivable apartments in dead lifeless streets.
This is the truth! Added to the purely mechanical process, is an enormous psychological aspect. But... we can do even better! The above _assumes_ that fist fighting is indeed what we want to do, but perhaps the best (TM) solution is to avoid the fist fight alltogether?
Since ultimately, living, and living well, is about values, how do I choose to live, according to which values, science will never be able to capture that dimension.
I feel that scientists and technologists, and designers for that matter, should study more philosophy. It will open up their eyes to the fact that not every question is solvable by science.
Technologists in particular, taken as a group, have a very specific philosophical outlook that they don't tend to interrogate in themselves because it's so pervasive and intrinsic to what they work on and how they do so. Fish unaware of water, so to speak. It's a set of assumptions that make sense when you're programming software, but break down when applied to other things in the real world.
The tend to assume the universe is deterministic.
They tend to assume (incorrectly) that because it's deterministic a good enough model will be able to predict or explain.
They tend to ignore or not even be aware of the inherent bias towards available and measurable data, or that what we can measure must capture the essential dimensions of it.
The most naive tend to assume that given enough data, a model will get better, that the noise will "average out" (it doesn't).
I don't have a good name for this, but it has all the trappings of a good -ism otherwise.
Beyond philosophy, they should study art, music, literature, and whatever else interests. They should spend time with others who do and not only with people who work in technology. Unfortunately, increasingly college CS programs have cut out general education requirements in favor of questionably useful skills training, leaving graduates in a state where this seems daunting.
Computer scientists are building the world we all have to live in. Is it so much to ask that they be educated in the humanities before they're turned loose to do so?
I mean, I think that the universe is close enough to deterministic at a macro scale, but even in a deterministic world you can still get smashed in the head by a falling brick with zero warning. Whether the the sequence of events that led to the brick falling down is deterministic or random is irrelevant to your ability to predict its descent. You only have a feeble human brain, a soft pink organ that's incapable of fitting more than 5 to 7 items in its working memory even before the collision.
This is the sort of statement that is both true and also completely useless in a fist-fight. A fist fight is both biomechanical movement and also a mind-game comprising physical, mental, and emotional stamina.
At this point, people are even modeling figures on Ancient Greek pottery to determine the biomechanical merit of their fighting stances: https://www.mdpi.com/2075-4663/12/12/317
The same or similar techniques, of course, can apply to any combination of fighters (or dancers, or swimmers, etc.) at any particular moment. At the highest levels of sport, biomechanics analysts are employed, e.g.: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/34402417/
In any case, I don't think that I made any extraordinary claims. There are a lot of unknowns, though, as the most valuable analyses tend to be extremely computationally demanding.
It can assuredly be done in practice, with currently available technology. It would, however, be very expensive and time-consuming.
I'm thinking of putting together a set of general biomechanical models for foil or kendo fencing. Both forms feature a highly constrained ruleset, which simplifies things. Hobby project, though, so maybe one of these days...
They can call themselves empiricists all they like, it only takes a few exposures to their number to come away with a firm conviction (or, let's say, updated prior?) that they are not.
First-principles reasoning and the selection of convenient priors are consistently preferenced over the slow, grinding work of iterative empiricism and the humility to commit to observation before making overly broad theoretical claims.
The former let you seem right about something right now. The latter more often than not lead you to discover you are wrong (in interesting ways) much later on.
Who are all the rationalists you guys are reading?
I read the NYT and rat blogs all the time. And the NYT is not the one that's far more likely to deeply engage with the research and studies on the topic.
Yes, specifically when it comes to open-ended research or development, collocation is non-negotiable. There are greater than linear benefits in creativity of approach, agility in adapting to new intermediate discoveries, etc that you get by putting a number of talented people who get along in the same space who form a community of practice.
Remote work and flattening communication down to what digital media (Slack, Zoom, etc) afford strangle the beneficial network effects.
I think they were talking about total time spent working rather than remote vs. in-person. I've seen more than a few studies over the years showing that going from 40 to 35 or 30 hours/wk has minimal or positive impacts on productivity. Idk if that would apply to all work environments though, and I don't recall any of the studies being about research productivity specifically.
You’re being downvoted but you’re right. The number of people who act like a web cam reproduces the in person experience perfectly, for good and bad, is hilarious to me.
A lot of overwrought digital solutions here and not the obvious one:
Stop selling online.
Sell the tickets at a small number of locations near and including the venue, with cashiers empowered to deny suspicious transactions.
Could someone put together a small army of smurfs to buy up all the tickets in major cities? Sure. Could someone have someone on the inside sell them a block of tickets against policy? Sure. We can handle these cases on a locale by locale basis with a convenience trade off that seems appropriate to the place.
Don't let perfect be the enemy of the good, and even worse, don't let overwrought privacy-invading and non-accessible digital solutions (that create a playing field tilted towards bad actors equipped with AI tools) be the enemy of a dead simple analog real-world one that leverages our best reputation management system: ourselves.
> Sell the tickets at a small number of locations near and including the venue
People frequently travel to major cities for concerts, do you expect them to travel twice to purchase the tickets? Either you join a much wider network of sellers than that, or this would only satisfy people already living not too far from the venue.
In practice it does not. If you have had something with FindMy tracking stolen you may know what apartment block it's in, but not what unit.
Police won't or can't do anything if it could be in multiple units or would require any kind of warrant for the building as well as the specific unit you think it's in.
If you're "lucky" some might chaperone you knocking yourself, which itself is not something most want to entertain.
On account of police policy, AirTags are effectively useless for actually getting anything stolen back. You'll get more use out of them in filing your insurance claim if the theft of the item is covered under for example your homeowner's insurance policy.
That's only a problem if the stolen property is in an apartment and not a house or driveway. And even in the apartment case it could probably be used in combination with other evidence (if available) to obtain a warrant, though you're correct that in practice police don't often have the bandwidth to investigate property crimes to that degree.
That's not the same as the Bufo state which I can't really imagine entering naturally, is it actually like that or just in the ballpark?
Would love to hear about your experiences. Get in touch!