Stupulous

Absolutely, I should have brought up risks as well. Triggering early schizophrenia is a big one, personality changes also seem like a significant concern. I'm not aware of any IQ changes- if you have a study, send it my way if you please. If you're just gesturing at the fact that long-term research is lacking, I'm very much in agreement.

It's not as though this is some thousand-year-old fence; psychadelics were illegalized under Nixon. If there was a reason other than 'they are drugs', it has not been made public, and all research at the time suggested that they should not have been illegalized. I'm open to being told I'm wrong, but 3 pages of google results did not push me in that direction.

As a depression treatment, it far exceeds the state-of-the-art SSRIs, which perform only slightly better than placebo. It's cheaper, more effective, and lasts longer. ~10% of Americans suffer from depression, and more than a third of them don't respond to SSRIs at all. Dramatically reducing the suffering of 3% of the population at net-negative cost is a big deal.

For comparison to topics-de-jour, in the US 0.3% of the population will get an abortion in a given year, 3.5% are gay/bi, 0.3% are trans, <0.03% die from gun violence (and over half are suicides potentially reduced by this treatment) each year, and about 1/40th of them are killed by law enforcement. Improvements in these areas will have a smaller effect size (ie. protecting gay marriage will not improve the lives of gay people as much as curing someone's depression will, gun control will not end all gun violence).

Big caveat here is that this treatment is relatively new, and depression treatments tend to be promising initially with results that fade in the long term. Additionally, the legalization of that treatment does not mean everyone who needs it will get it. On the other hand, depression is only one of the many issues that can be treated with psychadelics. We'll have to wait and see

Tangential: This argument comes up a lot, and I get that it's a specific example to make a general point, but are we that confident that removing Hitler from the equation means no Holocaust? It can't be denied that he had significant influence, but Nazis existed without him and antisemitism was widespread in Germany at least as far back as its founding. Am I wrong to think Hitler's contribution was not necessary for that outcome?

I would think consciousness, rather than intelligence, is the important component that should persist irrespective of humanity. Intelligence, curiousity, and creativity are important too, but on their own they don't hold moral significance. A universe of computers is not superior to a universe of atoms without something experiencing those abstractions and giving them meaning.

What does the risk profile look like for launching nuclear fuel through our atmosphere? It seems intuitively concerning, but I don't know much about nuclear.

While I think this is a solid point in general, if someone has installed weights to trick autopilot into thinking they're awake and holding the wheel, they probably know that they're supposed to be awake and holding the wheel.

This is an extreme exaggeration. If you've used Twitter since the Musk takeover and come away with the impression that you can't criticize him there, you've had a completely alien experience to mine- it seems to be the main use of the site these days.

He has banned parody accounts that don't specify 'parody' in the username, he's threatened to de-amplify negative tweets, and he's banned the ElonJet account. I vehemently disagree with all of those moves, but the idea that the site is now unusable to say anything that he doesn't like is absolutely hyperbole.

In that sense you could argue that all of astrophysics is built off of a biased sample from which we can draw no conclusions. And you may well be right, I'd think, though it is unfalsifiable.

>Reality shows that countering crazy ideas with rational argument is not working very well.

Have you had a very different experience of reality than me? Apart from some very niche places, the response to crazy ideas has been insult, ignore, and call for censorship. In the rare case that any good faith response is made, it's an appeal to an authority that the crazies don't respect because it repeatedly and unapologetically lied about someone they do.

From my perspective it is abundantly evident that the decades-long push of these people out of the public and into their own spaces is the cause of our current strife. In the aforementioned niche places, election doubts were all but extinct within a month because people actually addressed them at the object level. But I'm not saying you're wrong, I'm genuinely curious about where/when you've seen rational argument fall short.

It's only enforceable if accompanied by speech. If I commit a crime with no evidence, my confession is the only thing that can convict me. I don't think it would be fair to say I'd be forbidden from confessing.

I think there's a stronger case that your purchase choice is covered as free expression or that the government can't compel you to do business with a private entity.

The critical question is whether they'll have to leap forward or fall backward. We simply cannot abide stealing an hour of sleep from our cyborg/transhuman descendants. We'd never live it down.

The Julian Calendar was good enough for centuries after the empire that invented it had fallen, which I think counts as good enough in general. That said, I'd love to read a story about tracking down some time bug a million layers of abstraction down from the state of tech in 9000AD.

Why not ask the people who were there?

What about a 'twitch plays stable diffusion' kind of thing where each visitor can enter a prompt for the next iteration?