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Comment by medler | Hacker News Reader

The tail risk is real though. I do hope someday we’ll have accurate estimates of those risks. In the meantime it seems pretty clear to me that the expected value of these drugs is negative. I think it was Charlie Munger who said “in the best case scenario you feel good for a few minutes. In the worst case scenario it ruins your life.”

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This is true for anything though. For example: I dance (professionally), surf and snowboard. All three of them have caused me injuries, though only one of them left me with something permanent (very minor, more of an annoyance thankfully) and people have gotten extremely serious injuries and even death from all of them. Should we stop doing them recreationally because of possible risks?

If the dance involved slamming your head off the pavement repeatedly until you start smelling colour then yes we would stop that form of dancing.

That's why we have things like alcohol and don't have things like heroin. It's all about risk vs reward. Heroin makes you feel much nicer than alcohol but it's almost certain to fuck your life up so we don't do it.

The head slam may be cooler than interpretive dance, but we don't do it because it gives you brain damage.

> The head slam may be cooler than interpretive dance, but we don't do it because it gives you brain damage.

Counterpoint: there's a whole sport based on that and it does cause brain damage: American Football[0].

[0] https://med.nyu.edu/departments-institutes/population-health...

> That's why we have things like alcohol and don't have things like heroin.

No, by your logic, alcohol would have been banned long before any other mind-altering substance. A multitude of longterm studies[1] have borne out the fact that most illegal drugs are safer than alcohol on multiple metrics[2]. Contemporary drug policy is based on culture and superstition, not science and medicine.

[1] https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-11660210 [2] https://doi.org/10.1016/S0140-6736(10)61462-6

No, because they all have significant upsides that far outweigh the tail risks

I mean maybe? Depends on how willing you are to trade small risks for small benefit. But we have no real bounds on upsides or downsides, and no real probability of any of it. I don't know about you, but my prior in situations such as these is that if a strong effect in either direction were likely, we'd have better data.

Munger should be realistic. In the best case scenario, the drugs trigger metabolic changes that let your body deal with incipient cancer or some other significant disease.

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