Gwern Branwen

There's something out there where we're just like going to look back at it and say, wow, like those people were really poisoning themselves just like with leaded gasoline.

If only they had known, you know, X, Y, and Z or whatever.

It's so obvious now.

Yeah, I think a priori, I would expect possibly intelligence to be like the single most fragile thing and most harmed by it.

But when we look at the time series there, intelligence is pretty stable overall.

So I would have to say that whatever the harmful thing is, it's probably not going to be on intelligence.

Whereas obesity is a much better candidate because you do see obesity go crazy over the last 30 years.

Yeah, I think the cleanest way to divide that would just be to point out that the effects of psychedelics can be acute and permanent.

The things I was looking at are much more controlled in the sense that they are relatively manageable in effect.

None of them affect your judgment permanently about whether to take more nootropics.

Whereas I think something like LSD permanently changes how you see things, such as taking LSD, or permanently changes your kind of psychiatric state.

There's a cumulative effect with psychedelics that you don't see much with neurotropics, which makes neurotropics inherently a heck of a lot safer and much more easy to quantify the effects of.

With nootropics, you don't see people kind of like spinning off into the crazy outcomes psychedelics have.

You know, they get crazier and crazier each time they take another dose, which makes them crazy enough to want to take another dose.

Psychedelics have what you might call a kind of self-recommending problem where they always make you want to take more of them.

I think it's kind of similar to meditation.

what is the most visible sign of having done a lot of meditation, right?

It's that you seem compelled to tell people that they ought to meditate.

This kind of spiral leads to bad outcomes for psychedelics that you just don't see with no tropics.

The standard failure case for nootropics is that you spend like a few hundred or thousand dollars and then you got no real benefit out of it.