The Poison We Pick

The simplified picture is still often the chemical picture, imo, for 2 reasons: 1) the public forgets that the brain is an organ that obeys physical laws, and that behavior and perception depend entirely on the brain. 2) Ok, yes, environment is important, but how is that represented in the brain? It's still physiological, which inevitably includes chemicals.

[1] http://nobaproject.com/modules/conditioning-and-learning

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rat_Park

[1] https://www.npr.org/sections/health-shots/2015/01/05/3718949...

http://slatestarcodex.com/2017/10/25/against-rat-park/

Capitalism has succeeded in its primary goal - amassing resources for capital-intensive projects. We’re done, we have so much capital companies sits on hundreds of billions of dollars. Something new will be needed for the next step.

I worry that the increasing focus on a meritocracy (especially in tech) ignores the fact that it devalues anyone who for whatever reason -- lack of education, lack of natural ability, or just lack of motivation -- doesn't contribute enough to be considered important. It's probably an improvement on the system we had before, where you were valued for being part of the right community or the right family, but I hope this isn't the end goal, and that we can eventually get to a state where we consider everyone inherently valuable.

That is a rather optimistic projection of the rollout of Level 5 autonomy. The total number of heavy trucks sold worldwide was less than 400k in 2014, and no one has full Level 5 yet (if it can even be done large scale at a profit), so I would adjust those expectations. Most 'displaced' truckers should be able to find work unloading automated long-hauls into smaller short-hauls and driving them during a lengthy transition period.

> your only options are to find a system where people have value independent of their productivity, make being valueless palatable, or just go die quietly

Points 1 & 2 are somewhat interconnected. If I add up the retail value of all my non-paid work, it comes to far more than I make at my day job, and I suspect this is true for many others. Much of what our culture calls "valueless" - because no money is involved - does actually have value, and this will become more clear as time continues to reveal how difficult automating everything really is.

We have already seen this, for example, with people posting what used to be called home videos (no revenue) to YouTube and stumbling into large amounts of ad income, and I believe we'll see it in more areas. It may increasingly be a 'gig economy', but it's happening slowly, and some of those gigs are turning out to be pretty good.

The surplus increases every year.

Every year, fewer and fewer people need to work full-time in mind-numbingly boring jobs to produce what the population needs.

So why do we keep up the fiction that everyone needs to waste their lives doing unnecessary work?

It's time to imagine how we could achieve a post-work society where more people could realize their potential, instead of being tied down to meaningless, mindless and unnecessary drudgery.

If you can get a large enough group to say: "Enough, the AI doesn't represent our values, let's change it!", it will already have happened because the same people will have already changed their buying habits.

The second part is the ease of getting pleasure on demand. At any part of the day, most are free to look at the internet of anything ranging from funny pictures to pornographic pictures. They can turn on netflix, play video games, and do just about anything from the convenience of their smart phones. You can see this on just about any subway; a room full of people each engulfed in their own personal world driving their pleasure centers.

When you bring these two together (feelings of inferiority / detachment to those around you AND pleasure on demand), you get a person whose general approach to life is like that of a drug addict. They crave simple pleasures and justify it because they feel like shit. They also feel as if they're alone in this world, and so who cares? Of course this is all subconscious and part of a habitual perspective, but this is the kind of world we're growing up in America. Pharmaceuticals have significant power here and want to convince you they can fix you with a pill. Maybe they can. But what I'm trying to highlight is that we now have a mentality of always looking around for a "fix". I find very few people who can last a whole subway train just looking at the window pondering or who can strike up a conversation with a stranger for the hell of it. We're becoming way too engulfed in a pseudo personal world, and smart-phones are driving it.

No, I'm not trying to start a crusade against smart phones or even taking any stance at all. This is just how I see the problem currently. I want to believe technology can help fight it by bringing more people together for social events, but where's the advertising money in that? And who cares if you're not profiting? This pursuit of profits above all else has created a very shallow society and I would argue the drug epidemic is a reflection of it.

I've been reading "Sapiens" and one of the recurring themes is the idea humanity's success is built on the ability to create useful fictions to bind large groups to a goal or cause. I think we are struggling with that in the first world as we give up religion without a clear replacement fiction that reassures people someone will be there if they get sick and when they die. In addition, we are discovering some groups have (for want of a better term) weaponized fiction to achieve their goals.

I liked it all a lot better when that last sentence lived entirely in the fiction of people like Warren Ellis and not in reality.

EDIT: Sapiens, not Simians.

What if our pandering to rugged individualism has simply lead us to create a society where institutions, instead of providing a level playing field, reward those that have already won and punish those that have not?

Buy a million dollar house? Write off the cost of financing it. Get injured and not be able to work for a year? Huh, not sure someone with that kind of resume gap is the kind of person that we want to hire.

Then we wring our hands about why a frustrating, alienating society frustrates and alienates people.

I find Pitirim Sorokin's classification of societies as either ideational (spiritual) or sensate (materialistic) helpful in understanding where we are. I strongly believe the evidence points to our modern civilization being in the late stages of sensate decline. Science and technology has brought enormous benefits to the world but has utterly devastated the individual dignity of man, leaving only meaningless pleasures to provide any motivation for living. I think we will soon (100 years?) see a cultural shift back towards immaterial values and purposes higher than the satisfaction of our sensory desires. The question in my mind is whether that shift happens before or after our current civilization destroys itself.

Morality isn't about what is right or wrong. You need to get past that. There are plenty of situations where there is no right answer and an individual is forced to choose between two wrongs.

Morality is what an individual ascribes to be proper or improper and it is very fluid. An individual's morality is influenced by everything from the situation to the people around them. They may inherit their sense of morality of another person or group but morality is still a personal choice.

We tend to think that everyone shares the same morality and so it becomes confusing when we encounter situations where our moral beliefs are at odds with others and we're in the minority. It doesn't help that the moral code ascribed to by a community might be completely different from the one the next town over.

What has been lost is widespread confidence and faith in those institutions that previously served as the pillars of society -- the church, the king and the nobility. Now people are completely on their own for their worldview. What's become abundantly clear is that people are very, very bad at constructing useful or reliable models of the world. Left to their own devices the people will readily embrace all sorts of nonsense, the more extreme the better. Some will turn to drugs and some will turn to ranting about crisis actors and some will turn to video games.

None of this is a cause for concern. These people's lives are still orders of magnitude better than those enjoyed by people just a century ago. A life wasted playing video games for 12 hours a day still beats one wasted slaving away for 12 hours a day on the farm.

What is disconcerting is that the "poison" is seeping into the vital and core institutions and systems that contribute to our extraordinary quality of life. The author is concerned about the suicide rate (which impressively continues to break new records every year) but what should really be frightening is the extraordinary poor governance that Americans have enjoyed for the past 20 years. (Seriously, trillions of dollars flushed down the drain on completely pointless wars.) When the real engine of American prosperity sputters out we will have much more significant and difficult problems than a bunch of dumb, bored kids getting high on dope.

I think what you regard as "people engaged rabidly in the consumption of fiction" he might interpret as people living passively, bored and confused, abdicating a sense of responsibility for their own lives. I think he is a precursor to the Neil Postman line of cultural criticism, if anyone's looking for more books.

Man's Search for Meaning is a short and compelling book, he describes a way forward that doesn't involve resurgent nationalism or religious fundamentalism, and I've gotten a lot out of it personally.

1. Even if you start from a position of complete nihilism, you can recognize that pain (both physical and psychological) is real and that you don't like it.

2. You can observe that people who perceive their life as meaningful are more likely to be capable of persevering in the face of extreme pain and suffering. So in a sense meaning is "more real" (stronger) than pain. (I don't get much out of the "more real" aspect, but I think it's part of Peterson's attempt to find harmony between rationality and religion.)

3. Even if/though meaning is completely subjective, you can derive meaning from taking steps toward a goal, specifically a positive vision for your own life that you've imagined in great detail (and ideally written down), including how you want to affect the people around you and the wider community. Having a vision of the life you want to avoid (Hell) is good, too.

4. Your goal (life vision) will change as you move toward it, but that's a good thing because it means you're learning and expanding your horizon.

Peterson and some colleagues created a kind of self-help course based on this sort of thing called Self Authoring and he often cites the positive outcomes it had when they researched it using college students (higher grades and lower dropout rates).

I think he would say that the societal malaise you're talking about is essentially Nietzsche's death of God and that you can draw a line from that loss of a foundation to the horrors of the 20th century (Peterson would probably just say "the gulags"; he sees more of a danger from "radical leftism" in contemporary society than fascism). The above could perhaps be described as his alternative to attempting to address the lack of a social firmament through some totalistic ideology, which has in the past led to pathological totalitarian states like Hitler's Germany and Stalin's USSR.

Can it be? Maybe the universe is so information-rich that it yields a vast and ever multiplying array of fundamentally undecidable questions. Everyone knows the big ones: god/gods, life after death, ultimate origin of the universe and consciousness, etc., but there's quite a few more.

If there are lots of undecidable things then how do we ever agree on objective meaning without some totalitarian or tribal pressure just dictating one to us?

It takes me back to one of my favorite quotes ever:

“The most merciful thing in the world, I think, is the inability of the human mind to correlate all its contents... some day the piecing together of dissociated knowledge will open up such terrifying vistas of reality, and of our frightful position therein, that we shall either go mad from the revelation or flee from the light into the peace and safety of a new Dark Age.” ― H.P. Lovecraft

I would look in ways american society puts more pressure on individuals, than, say , scandinavian societies do.

I would look to economic and not existential issues.

I think the article nailed it when it pointed out america has no experience of pre-industrial culture at large.

One thing to remember though about the war on drugs and especially the opiate crisis is that it was also largely a creation of the CIA who learned it from the Brits who had been doing it as far back as the opium wars. Black markets provide black money budgets not overseen by Congress, and the CIA really hates oversight (they prefer overlook committees). The main opiate crisis in particular stems from Vietnam, where generals would play along for a cut while the CIA had drug operations all over including Laos, etc. They'd then ship it back and sell it specifically in the inner (mostly black and other minority) city.

The same thing is true of this opiate crisis. The war in Afghanistan has massively increased poppy production (which the taliban had outlawed) while US forces would eradicate weed crops they allowed poppy fields, and low and behold, the vast majority of the heroin, etc now in America can be traced (Chem analysis) right back to Afghanistan. I promise you it's Vietnam on repeat, and the CIA has their hands all over it.

Of course south America is the same. Behind every top cartel member is a CIA man pulling their strings, and look at the destruction they are wreaking on the border towns. The death toll of civilians is higher than allied casualties in OIF!

It's just like Iran contra. Since lots of the time they don't want to pay full price, the Intel agencies will ship arms to them as well.

It's high time for a new church committee!

The problem is the surveillance engine is so pervasive, which enables the blackmail and extortion system, just about every senator or congressman who pushed back would be quickly compromised.

This is the real deep state, in the Peter Dale Scott sense of the term, and it must be addressed if we are going to strike at the root of many of our problems, instead of hacking at the branches.

Children are forced to conform to the state's schooling program from a very early age, and those who fail to do so are labeled as such with bad grades and trips to the school office. They are humiliated in front of their peers and feel powerless and dehumanized. This record follows them through their entire schooling career. The religious and cultural traditions of their parents are ridiculed by the authority figures at school. School zones keep poor children out of good schools.

Wealth inequality will naturally arise in any system, but when gains go to the politically-connected or well-lobbied, then the state is artificially enriching those at the expense of others. This is not the functioning of capitalism but rather of cronyism and corruption.

Student loans are out of control precisely because the government got in the business. Higher education costs are out of control because of the excess money from the student loans.

The job prospects suck because of excess regulation in the economy. Entrepreneurs are not able to innovate as well due to so much red tape. Occupational licensing sets up barriers at all levels of the workforce, enriching the incumbents and limiting competition. Healthcare is so overrun with regulation it's laughable to mention the word "market" in the same sentence. Those are barriers put in place of market forces by the state.

The drug epidemic is merely the result of all these forces put together.

I would put one caveat on this: it's due to wealth inequality that doesn't come from having created more wealth. All of the examples are of people not creating wealth, but accumulating it by transferring it from other people to themselves. That kind of wealth inequality is bad not because wealth inequality is bad in itself, but because our society as a whole needs people to be creating wealth in order to continue to exist; so if all of the smart, talented people find they can get more wealth by transferring it from others instead of creating it, our society will eventually collapse.

I think Pg had an essay about this a while back.

Is there an actual example of this? I can't think of a single one.

it must be taken as a given that change (i.e., progress) will happen. you can thank the 2nd law of thermodynamics for that. so then the perspective must shift from “can we keep the world the same as we imagine it to have been in the past (while ignoring all the bad parts and negative consequences)?” to “how do we deal with a changing world, adapt to it, and focus our efforts toward positive change?” we just don’t get to sit still. life only happens in the gap between order and chaos.

the quote i prefer is

“The oxytocin we experience from love or friendship or orgasm is chemically replicated by the molecules derived from the poppy plant. It’s a shortcut — and an instant intensification — of the happiness we might ordinarily experience in a good and fruitful communal life. It ends not just physical pain but psychological, emotional, even existential pain.”

this articulates a mechanism by which opioid addiction lodges itself in the failed corners of society. so how do we fix that? it’s not by considering addicts criminals. the “war on drugs” experiment has proven that doesn’t work. instead, we need to accept the social responsibility of creating “losers” in the first place. we need to progress to the next level of societal structure that redirects folks back into meaningful and purposeful lives.

i think the stage might be set to move to a kind of globally-aware localism. that is, having people focus on their microcommunities (the 5-10 block radius around where we live in cities, a bit bigger in less dense areas). how do we organize homes, schools, businesses, offices, services, etc. in ways that reinforce our ties to each other rather than two-dimensional celebrities and fantasies of far-off wealth and fame that make you feel like you’re losing? but also use technology to learn from those far-flung places to improve your own lives locally. you only need a few people around you appreciating your efforts to get plenty of oxytocin to forget about the hard opioids.

Putting the onus on the government to solve this problem goes against the very essence of this piece. If social fragmentation is truly the cause of the opioid crisis, then government intervention will by like putting a mud wall in front of a raging river.

The distribution effect is often ignored by non-US reporting about various "social maladies" (stupid term, but gets the idea across) in the country: the US is surprisingly internally divided not just in politics, but in empathy. There's often a nation-tribalist effect of "people are dying not in my (city|town|state|area|demographic|politcal party); I consider those deaths sad, but no sadder than someone dying in another country", which I think is important and often overlooked.

Humans are terrible at estimating risk. We seem to do it by attributing it to the ease which we can recall an incidence of something similar happening. This may have worked well when we were part of small tribes, but it's terribly adapted to a world where every unusual, capricious event is is broadcast nationally and the mundane, common dangers receive very little media attention.

You can see this with the current debate over guns. Now I favor the liberal position of drastically increasing gun control, but only around 11,000 people are murdered with guns each year and another 22,000 or so kill themselves. That's around a 1/30,000 chance of being the victim of gun violence. Those deaths may be largely unnecessary, but we should still have the perspective to realize that they're not a significant threat to our health.

No, I'm serious.

If you don't want the tweets, just filter links out of tweets. But the part where writers promote themselves on Twitter is true enough.

I hope that people don't look to this article as a serious review of history.

It’s about the breakdown of the social glue in the face of relentless market pressure and individualism, and the diminish end of trust and solidarity, along with institutions like organized religion, unions,families, or even sports clubs.

- The last 2 major drug-use epidemics in the US erupted in communities afflicted by major financial hardship and growing socioeconomic disparities. Both were victims of the poppy. I hesitate to discard the correlation.

-I have taken hydrocodone. Personally, I hate it. I can’t think or function, but yeah other than that nothing seems like it matters. For me, it feels deadening, like suicide, the other epidemic that happens to be afflicting the same communities as the opioid epidemic. There is no recorded rise in suicide availability. I hesitate to discard the correlation.

-Although much of the world has been outlawing opioid availability, opioids are available and prescribed throughout. We do not/cannot know how many people would be using opioids if they lacked availability to them but this drug has a nature worth considering, which I think the article gets at very well.

-Let’s say the pharmaceutical cowboys’ are privy to ‘supply and demand’. No we aren’t talking about a fluid market but let’s also say, hypothetically, that not every society in the world is feening to collapse itself for opioid highs. And let’s assume US pharmaceutical suppliers have ways of identifying and responding to demands with supply despite being a regulated industry. I personally find none of these to be even a stretch, and to conclude, I have no problem imagining how it would play out exactly like we have observed.

Why all of the moralizing about the "evils" of opiate addiction? Addiction is complicated, and while substance abuse can be harmful to the user, widespread social intolerance and the subsequent prohibitions on addictive substances only serve to amplify that harm.

The opioid deaths we see are a direct result of the prohibition of opioids. Shipping into different jurisdictions carries the largest risk in the black economy. Thus, the transition from opium to morphine to heroin to the various fentanyls. There can be no quality control or FDA-enforced purity standards, hence the overdoses.

If you want to reduce deaths, opioids need to become more available, not less.

If you want to talk about morality, my question for you is: why do you want to restrict access to the chemicals that make these poor souls feel normal, pushing them into the black market?

The education and healthcare is problematic and class-based, and many policies are near-sighted. There is an unhealthy obsession with shallow entertainment. Public opinion matters more than truth. There's no justice if you're not a ultra-rich, companies will just go to court until you're broke.

There are only two important political parties - both seem to have some moral issues. In general, Americans don't live very sustainable (gasoline, cars, and tech is really cheap, so why bother?). There is also a weird obsession with race - it's for some reason very common to divide people in races (apparently, you're either black, white, hispanic, or asian and there is nothing in between).

While most of the Americans I met work extremely hard and are a joy to be around, I also found them to be quite nationalistic and oblivious to criticism on the USA. Of course, this whole rant is a huge generalization :)

Based on what I've seen this is certainly not true baring a few exceptions.

"The drug was ubiquitous among both the British and American forces in the War of Independence as an indispensable medicine for the pain of battlefield injuries."

What is your point exactly?