Responses to your comment are contrary, but my anecdata: Just after I moved away from a particular social scene, a bunch of close friends in it got very into psychedelics. Weekly usage or more frequent, all different kinds of che,ical (‘pure’ lsd, street acid, shrooms, DMT, RCs, etc.)
Many of them did adopt some real wacky beliefs that they have held onto many years past their use. ‘Radicality’ of belief seemed proportional to volume of use. I’m talking Q-anon levels of delusion and beyond. They all felt they were in touch with greater truths and pitied me and my judgement; my self-restriction of perception. They have a lot of flowery language about how I can’t know what I can’t see that you have to be some sort of logician to parse.
In one case, I have watched this ‘enlightenment’ morph over the years from communicationg with beings from beyond the veil to potentially violent political extremism. The guy has been sober for years but low-key views all of his actions and work through a lens of ‘ultimate battle of cosmic good and evil’. Naturally ‘good’ cosmically aligns with whatever his interests at that time are.
If you’re a young person reading this: taking psychedelics a couple times is an interesting experience, perhaps worthwhile. But I’m real damn certain that the ‘enlightenment’ is basically being high. Drunk on a false sense of peace with the universe which exists only as a malfunction in your brain’s wiring. Beware people who tout those effects. They are out of touch with reality.
*I have read there is clinical potential to help PTSD sufferers. I’m not denying this. But 99% of usage is not happening is carefully, scientifically studied and controlled situations. Keeping a trip journal is not scientific, even if you have a chem phd.
Saying anything that isn't 100% positive about psychedelics on the internet tends to bring out a lot of psychedelic fans who vehemently disagree. Any time I comment about psychedelics online without a unilaterally glowing endorsement, my comments' score bounces up and down as much as any other controversial topic.
It's fascinating to see even the counter arguments here tap into exactly the sort of mystical beliefs I was talking about: Questioning reality, suggesting that maybe psychedelic induced experiences are revealing an alternate reality and so on. A common theme is a belief that psychedelic users are seeing the real reality through their drug use, which is supposedly unavailable to those of us who aren't inducing these artificial altered states with drugs.
> But I’m real damn certain that the ‘enlightenment’ is basically being high. Drunk on a false sense of peace with the universe which exists only as a malfunction in your brain’s wiring. Beware people who tout those effects. They are out of touch with reality.
Well said. I haven't known anyone to go as deep as your friends, but I have known a few people who started to believe that their drug-induced states were something more than just a drug-induced feeling. It's scary to watch someone lose grip with the difference.
It's also scary to read all of the deadly serious comments here on HN suggesting such clearly false beliefs might be true.
> I have read there is clinical potential to help PTSD sufferers. I’m not denying this. But 99% of usage is not happening is carefully, scientifically studied and controlled situations. Keeping a trip journal is not scientific, even if you have a chem phd.
I've read just about every study on psychedelics and therapy recently. In every* single trial, the psychedelics are part of an extended therapy program involving as many as 20 therapy sessions for every 1 psychedelic session. Anyone taking psychedelics ad-hoc at home and expecting to replicate the study results is not coming close at all.
> They all felt they were in touch with greater truths and pitied me and my judgement; my self-restriction of perception. They have a lot of flowery language about how I can’t know what I can’t see that you have to be some sort of logician to parse.
This concept has been promoted by philosophers and mystics for centuries and is completely consistent with mainstream neuroscience and psychology. I'm not saying that your friends genuinely transcended this barrier, but that they didn't and thought they did is not a proof that such a realm does not exist.
> They are out of touch with reality.
Surely. But, do you believe that you are accurately in touch with reality?
I live near Detroit and have seen before/after photos. Good on you for speculating the role of survivorship bias, but evidence that you are just plain wrong exists. One example off the top of my head:
https://www.birminghammichiganbank.com/birmingham-national-b...
I’m not in architecture, but I am a painter and I took university courses on it (my degree is in advertising, but I was good enough at drawing that the art profs let me run with the seniors in a couple upper level classes).
They are not teaching aesthetics any more. They threw away the casts and teach ‘concept’. Students aren’t taught how to approach Michelangelo’s David, they’re taught how to approach Duchamp’s fountain. I heard a professor espouse that Twombly was some enormous departure from Pollock, an artistic revolution as great a distance as Picasso from Velasquez.
So the theory is that the entire profession of architects is against constructing buildings people actually want? Or that times have changed and we lack the environment and infrastructure to achieve what we once could do.
I kind of always wanted to be an architect, and my skillset largely seems inclined toward it; so much so that growing up, my dad was sure it was what I’d do. But EVERY exposure I had to young people in the industry, and even education to an extent (Saw a passionate friend quit the UMich program) belied the sentiment we’re bemoaning here. I wound up consigning my impulses to representational painting.
Out of curiosity, before modernism, what would an architecture curriculum have looked like? Are there any foundational texts?
*I don’t hate modernism, lots of it is pretty cool. However, I hate what it did to the pedagogy of painting. It set me back ten years because it was so hard to find anyone who knew what they were talking about. Western art departments figuratively and literally destroyed the basis for teaching representational aesthetics, which had been developed for thousands of years, and then celebrated themselves for doing so. Now, relatively, no one knows how to draw.
I suspect something similar happened in architecture, and in light of that, I don’t know who to trust or approach on how to start self-learning. I’ll never build cool buildings, but I can design them and use architecture to inform my painting.
Is 30 too late to become an architect? I have background in arts/3d modeling, etc. But I only seem to hear discouraging things from young people in the industry.
Perhaps not. Maxerickson pointed out production could be shifted away from meat to legumes in the event of serious shortages. Seems right in line with climate goals.
Good luck growing legumes on the acreage currently used for beef production… you can hardly walk much less tractor incredible expanses of this land. Beef cattle very efficiently convert the grasses on these lands into healthy, nutritious food for humans.
It’s terrifying to realize how many of the people trying to influence food production have little if any practical knowledge of how farming actually works. People are going to starve to death en mass if your ilk have your way.
That is, admittedly, a lot higher than I was expecting! But 70% is still a sizeable majority. Moving the entire industry to grassland feeding would likely result in a fundamental upwards shift in how beef is priced, one that I suspect the GP would be unwilling to accept.
Many of them did adopt some real wacky beliefs that they have held onto many years past their use. ‘Radicality’ of belief seemed proportional to volume of use. I’m talking Q-anon levels of delusion and beyond. They all felt they were in touch with greater truths and pitied me and my judgement; my self-restriction of perception. They have a lot of flowery language about how I can’t know what I can’t see that you have to be some sort of logician to parse.
In one case, I have watched this ‘enlightenment’ morph over the years from communicationg with beings from beyond the veil to potentially violent political extremism. The guy has been sober for years but low-key views all of his actions and work through a lens of ‘ultimate battle of cosmic good and evil’. Naturally ‘good’ cosmically aligns with whatever his interests at that time are.
If you’re a young person reading this: taking psychedelics a couple times is an interesting experience, perhaps worthwhile. But I’m real damn certain that the ‘enlightenment’ is basically being high. Drunk on a false sense of peace with the universe which exists only as a malfunction in your brain’s wiring. Beware people who tout those effects. They are out of touch with reality.
*I have read there is clinical potential to help PTSD sufferers. I’m not denying this. But 99% of usage is not happening is carefully, scientifically studied and controlled situations. Keeping a trip journal is not scientific, even if you have a chem phd.