Thanks for sharing, although I'm curious what prompted this to be posted in 2025?
I've heard from a few underground psychedelic facilitators that LSD is one of the best 'medicines' for therapy of various kinds, but (a) the duration is often uncomfortably long, (b) the social/political stigma hangover from the 60s adds undesirable connotations which can 'prime' the participant in negative ways, and (c) the variability in street doses makes it unpredictable to work with if you don't have a way of measuring potency yourself (which I would argue disqualifies you from being a facilitator to begin with, but that's a separate topic...)
As for duration, this research indicates that lower doses are metabolized much faster (6.7 hours for 50ug vs 11+ hours for 200ug) which could help although the tradeoff is less 'good effect' even if 'bad effect' is minimized as well.
However, with respect to dose potency, a PSA for anyone new to this area -- go to the /r/LSD subreddit and read the pinned post on street dosages -- in short, street doses are on average ~100ug below what they claim.
So when this study says that 50ug produces such and such effects -- and the typical psychonaut on reddit might roll their eyes at such a 'light dose' -- keep in mind that an accurate "50ug" in a lab likely means "150ug" on the street which is a fairly typical dose sold. Of course the data shows an occasional over-dosed tab vs. the reported value, too.
Which leads to the most important PSA of all: please don't put any psychoactive substance into your body without having a lot of confidence in its actual composition and dose.
You forgot (d) which is that the people involved are often terrible people.
The issue of people on mind-altering substances being involved with "facilitators"/therapists who use that power for their own ends showed up even in the recent MAPS trial with alleged professionals.
LSD and other psychedelics like mushrooms of mescaline are best used with someone who actually cares about you in a setting you control for self-exploration and absolutely devoid of the kind of people who become psychedlic-assisted underground therapists.
I hear you, and it's a good warning, but I think the word "often" in your first sentence requires some qualification or maybe nuance.
It's no different from any other potential for abuse from someone with power - the way to mitigate it isn't merely to try pick good people (of course, start there), it's to wrap the vulnerable elements in protective practices and institutional controls to prevent abuse if an individual actor fails to live up to the standard.
For example, in the biggest abuse scandal of our generation (sexual abuse by Catholic priests), it's not just that the priests did great individual evil but also that the institution itself utterly failed to do anything about it or even abetted it.
However, the illicit nature of psychedelics makes those kinds of controls or institutions impossible or very hard to put in place.
Finally, for the abuse in the MAPS MDMA trial (which was 1 patient out of 200 participants) to be used as evidence that psychedelic therapy is more prone to abuse, you'd have to look at the rate of abuse among therapists and psychologists as a whole to know if it's par for the course or something extraordinary.
Bad actors will try to take advantage of the vulnerable -- and these drugs put you in a more vulnerable position than otherwise -- so your warning still stands. I just don't think these issues are unique to this stuff other than the legal status.
I think you’re basically ignoring the history. I cited the MAPS example specifically because it was a highly observed study where the people involved were incredibly aware of what had gone wrong in the past with psychedelic-assisted therapy and even given that still couldn’t keep it out of a single trial.
The history of psychedelic use in therapy is part of how we got here in the first place. The therapists in the 50s and 60s were engaging in inappropriate behavior with their patients with regularity.
I am very pro psychedelics but the 60s provides an almost endless array of examples of how it can go wrong. Psychedelics basically do not belong in a therapist to patient context because the therapists attracted to that approach have a tendency self-select.
A lot of the modern day gurus and shamen have exactly the same problem.
>with someone who actually cares about you in a setting you control for self-exploration
Yeah I've never tried any psychedelic. I once had a girl offer to 'trip sit' me but honestly, I was too worried about old traumas coming up. I liked her and I did not want her to see that.
I hear you. I didn't try any of them until I was in my late forties. I don't drink and we basically tried pot a few times a year in our thirties. I read about set and setting and we decided to try it.
Taking mushrooms with my wife in our forties was probably one of the top ten most important things I've done in my life.
The traumas absolutely come up. That's kind of the point. They take you where you need to go even if you don't want to go there. I had a lot of rage and anger and deep embarrassments and now it feels like that's been scraped out of me, like a boil that needed to be lanced.
It's not for everyone to enjoy but I think it's for everyone, once or twice.
> if you don't have a way of measuring potency yourself
>Why don't you display actual milligram quantitative amounts? #
> In short, we are not allowed to do so. In the United States, the handling of Schedule I substances (MDMA, LSD, Cannabis, etc) is restricted to those with a valid license. Forensic labs such as DDL and others require and obtain licensure in order to operate. An unpublished administrative rule stipulates that licensed labs are not allowed to provide quantitative data to the public, reportedly for fear of providing 'quality control' to dealers and suppliers of black market products.
In Europe, one can send samples to drug checking services and get information about potency, but here the US Government is basically admitting that it's artificially inflating the risk of overdose by denying consumers information they need to stay safe. They can point to these inflated harms as justification for continued persecution of individuals who use drugs.
Yes, you can't use official labs (which of course would be the gold standard) but you can order and use kits from places like Meraculix (who have a US distribution point, so the tests travel via domestic mail within the US). Not risk-free since ordering a test kit for a scheduled substance at least implicitly implies you have a scheduled substance in your possession (or access to one). Sorry about your drug laws.
IMO it's a mistake to get too caught up in the (admittedly self-described) goal of modelling AI's economic impacts.
Instead, this is a super rare and valuable look into who/what/how folks are doing with Claude across millions of conversations, nicely categorized by function and task.
The economic impact data (i.e. wages) that they might overlay onto that usage data is a separate thing that -- of course -- is more subjective and likely to be part of some PR machinery about the public value of AI etc.
But as to sharing the raw usage data itself - we should applaud it! What a useful window into how this stuff is being used in the real-world.
Will OpenAI release similar data? Why or why not? I hope they will. It elevates the discussion for everyone, and frankly would be 'good business' if it gets people thinking about who/how AI could be used at their organization with more granularity.
I believe this is a well-understood feature of the dopamine system? The sensitivity of the receptors is like a balance scale, and will correct to one side if the other is flooded.
Give yourself big dopamine rushes and the scale balances by reducing your sensitivity to dopamine and (crudely put) causes feelings of discontentment, and you’ll need more dopamine released to feel like normal. Alternatively, push down on the pain side of the scale by doing some controlled suffering — fasting, cold plunge, intense exercise — and the receptors become more sensitive, and you feel better.
I’m sure this is too simplistic of a model but it makes sense to me in terms of lived experience.
Creating music that you yourself love -- even music no one else will ever hear -- is a peak human experience that I wish everyone got to experience.
The joy of creation is truly wonderful for its own sake.
Can AI help that creation, just like other "synthetic" techniques for making music (not least - the synthesizer)? Definitely.
But for me at least, the less of me (i.e. other people's samples, stock sound effects, DAW gimmicks) that's in my music, the less rush and joy I get from it. The less it feels "mine". But that's all very subjective.
Which takes me back to why this is such a dismal take. Why wouldn't this dude point to how making music is a creative joy, and AI can help bring that joy to more people by lowering the barrier to entry?
Love your point here - the non verbal-ness of it feels like an increasingly rare thing in our lives (especially in tech).
Music and I suppose other traditional 'fine arts' (painting, drawing, sculpture, etc) are these windows into creation that's not as mediated by language, which is arguably the defining feature of humans.
I suppose dance / ballet / etc would be another similar space too, a kind of physical creation not mediated by language.
Towering above all other art forms, though, remains music - with such an immediacy to it (both in terms of how it hits your senses and how easily it seems to convey emotionality). It's no wonder that it looks like it's the top form of 'art' made and enjoyed by humans these days.
I can't be the only one that sees "wokeness" and general political radicalization (on either side) as being explainable by the collapse of religion and nationality as the key sources of identity and group-inclusion.
Political identities are modern-day religions, basically.
I'm not saying it's better to be actually religious - this isn't some sob-story about how the decline of religiosity is some great evil. I'm just pointing out the parallel: that something that's consumed A LOT of human energy and attention has disappeared in 1 generation leaving a huge vacuum of meaning for most people, and people are filling that vacuum with political identities.
Doesn't this list work for both political movements and religions: shared moral frameworks, common enemies, a metaphysical value system, sense of belonging, set of virtues and sins, rigid orthodoxy, regular rituals (protests, boycotts, etc), transcendent societal goals, conflict-as-sacred-struggle, etc.
Overly simplistic, maybe; but I think I'm not too far off.
I mean, an LLMs ability to solve a logic puzzle seems like a weird way to gauge how it could be USEFUL to you (even if it otherwise would be a good test of how 'intelligent' the LLM is).
Do you search Google or Reddit and wish you could just 'get the answer' instead of wading into pages/posts?
Do you compare two long documents together and not want to invest a few hours into a close reading of them?
Do you write code that consists of trivial functions or trivial text manipulation?
Do you want a 3-hour podcast summarized into a few bullet points for a particular audience?
Do you want to send a saucy limerick to your friend on their birthday?
Do you want to compare Kant's view on <topic> with <new_metaphysical_school_of_thought>?
Do you want to analyze 250k rows in an Excel file of user support tickets and summarize the top issues?
etc etc etc.
Totally fine if you don't do any of these things, but these are the things most people are using LLMs for.
Whatever other zaniness is going on with Musk/Sam/etc, I can't escape the feeling that if I had donated a lot of money to a non-profit, and then a few years later that non-profit said "SURPRISE, WE'RE NOW FOR PROFIT AND MAKING INVESTORS RICH but you're not an investor, you're a donor, so thank-you-and-goodbye"... ya, I'd feel miffed too.
If we're a for-profit company with investors and returns etc... then those initial donations seem far closer to seed capital than a not-for-profit gift. Of course hindsight is 20/20, and I can believe that this wasn't always some devious plan but rather the natural evolution of the company... but still seems inequitable.
As much as Elon's various antics might deserve criticism (especially post-election) he seems to be in the right here? Or am I missing something?
I believe they offered Elon shares in return for the initial donation, and he turned them down because he didn't want a few billion worth of OpenAI, he wanted total executive control.
But we're all kind of arguing over which demon is poking the other the hardest with their pitchfork, here.
A few months ago I learned to solve the classic 3x3x3 using the beginner's method [0]. Basically, you memorize a set of algorithms based on the current state of the cube and what overall stage of solving you're at (you first solve the white layer, then the middle layer, then the final layer).
What's funny is that I feel no compulsion to learn other methods, no compulsion to get faster at it, no compulsion to move up to larger cubes like 4x4x4 etc.
I just find it soothing and meditative. In fact, doing a few cubes has replaced some amount of doom-scrolling for me. Hard to describe exactly. Scratches some hand-eye / brain-motor itch.
Yes, i understand perfectly this is exactly what i do with my cube, it is sitting in my desk and i give it a few solves daily, it really helps to keep my mental in a good state.
I will probably buy another this time stickerless to not worry about them deteriorating over time
I think that's 2/3rds of it, but I think you'd need to add the final 1/3rd which is a shared metaphysical set of values. In other words, the tribe needs to be about more than just kinship and belonging - there needs to be a higher purpose or esoteric dimension to the group that comes from beyond the group.
I was writing a similar comment when I read this one. Hard agree.
The collapse of religion and its close-knit communities has created a vacuum that gets filled with (checks notes) -- vapid corporate culture BS, identity politics (actually, politics of all kinds), consumerism, and much more.
You don't have to believe that religion is good or right (how can they all be right?) to believe that humanity in the West is in the throes of a profound crisis of meaning despite significantly better quality of life than ever before.
I can't help but picture our grandparent's generation. Imagine your grandad -- a WW2 vet, provider for his family, guy who tried his best to build his community -- coming home in the 50's from his job at the factory fawning over some pseudo-inspirational new take on management that the plant manager is promoting.
One gets the sense that we're unmoored as a people, and will cling to almost anything that provides a meta-narrative and set of values... because we no longer get one from a close-knit community of people joined together with a set of values.
I've heard from a few underground psychedelic facilitators that LSD is one of the best 'medicines' for therapy of various kinds, but (a) the duration is often uncomfortably long, (b) the social/political stigma hangover from the 60s adds undesirable connotations which can 'prime' the participant in negative ways, and (c) the variability in street doses makes it unpredictable to work with if you don't have a way of measuring potency yourself (which I would argue disqualifies you from being a facilitator to begin with, but that's a separate topic...)
As for duration, this research indicates that lower doses are metabolized much faster (6.7 hours for 50ug vs 11+ hours for 200ug) which could help although the tradeoff is less 'good effect' even if 'bad effect' is minimized as well.
However, with respect to dose potency, a PSA for anyone new to this area -- go to the /r/LSD subreddit and read the pinned post on street dosages -- in short, street doses are on average ~100ug below what they claim.
So when this study says that 50ug produces such and such effects -- and the typical psychonaut on reddit might roll their eyes at such a 'light dose' -- keep in mind that an accurate "50ug" in a lab likely means "150ug" on the street which is a fairly typical dose sold. Of course the data shows an occasional over-dosed tab vs. the reported value, too.
Which leads to the most important PSA of all: please don't put any psychoactive substance into your body without having a lot of confidence in its actual composition and dose.
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