It has a very Monroe Institute / Esalen at the peak of its history when Terrence McKenna and Timothy Leary were around vibe. Think of it as smart people with wide interests and often heterodox views shooting the shit but with some funding and a quasi-academic structure.
I don’t know a ton about it but I’ve followed it for a while and that’s what it looks like to me.
We should have more of this. Much of what this kind of place generates is kooky or art rather than science, but it’s also the kind of mountain stream that feeds into things like the 1990s Santa Fe Institute that in turn helps give us modern agent based simulation — to pick one random example.
I also don’t get the sense this place has been turned into a vehicle to inject race science or other “heterodox” “just asking questions” fashy on-ramp stuff into the discourse like some other forums for free thinking.
I think your first paragraph nails it. I find the "Satori to Silicon Valley" concept plausible in the sense that when experts (who study their subject for years without psychedelics) use psychedelics it could accelerate lateral/outside-the-box thinking. The rub is that I've seen a lot of people talk a lot but achieve nothing while doing much larger amounts of psychedelics over much longer periods of time. To me this clearly shows that psychedelics are at best a minor tool (and only to those that dedicate themselves to a specific endeavor). I agree there's a place for it, but the annoying thing about funding it as research is that laymen will run with it as if psychedelics by themselves simply improves life. I don't think this is true.
Yeah it seems pretty harmless. I like the comparison to the Santa Fe precursors, and I definitely agree that a certain degree of more or less sanctioned weirdness is good for the environment. I think what I was trying to convey (a bit harshly) was just a sense of like “what is this??” that I got from looking through their sites.
I don’t know a ton about it but I’ve followed it for a while and that’s what it looks like to me.
We should have more of this. Much of what this kind of place generates is kooky or art rather than science, but it’s also the kind of mountain stream that feeds into things like the 1990s Santa Fe Institute that in turn helps give us modern agent based simulation — to pick one random example.
I also don’t get the sense this place has been turned into a vehicle to inject race science or other “heterodox” “just asking questions” fashy on-ramp stuff into the discourse like some other forums for free thinking.