Elon Musk Associates Say His Strange Behavior May Be Related to Ketamine Habit | Hacker News Reader

Elon Musk Associates Say His Strange Behavior May Be Related to Ketamine Habit

futurism.com

10 pointslaurex13 comments

I've never tried ketamine, but from what I understand it has dissociative effects similar to dextromethorphan and PCP. That's one reason why it's starting to gain acceptance as part of a depression/trauma treatment plan, because at low doses it can help "add space" between how someone feels and how their body is reacting to a trigger.

Recreationally I've seen people describe it as "falling into the K hole" which sounds pretty dissociative. How much ketamine dissociation can people experience before their view of reality is warped in some way? Especially if continued recreational use can cause brain lesions.

Isn't it a bit, well just small-hearted, to be gossiping about somebody else's personal medical choices? And isn't it just a bit too convenient to be able to dismiss him by waving it off as due to drugs?

Elon Musk's behavior is erratic in the same way that the output of a simple 3-line pseudo-random number generator is erratic: you have a hard time predicting what it will do next only because you don't know the reasoning behind it.

Your behavior seems erratic to somebody who is way dumber than you or way less informed than you--because they just don't have what it takes to understand why you came to the conclusions you did and therefore why you are doing what you do. Now, just apply some recursive-self reflexion on this for a minute...

I can't believe I'm here defending Elon Musk of all people; I certainly think he's made some questionable moves lately. But can we move beyond the personal stuff? Wouldn't it be a better public discussion if we kept it to the level of what are the consequences of these decisions?

Musk has a lot of control over the consequences of those decisions. Planning for the future necessarily means trying to understand his reasoning.

He does have access to more information about his decisions than we do, but his choices are so erratic that it's hard to believe he has that much more information. It's so prominent that it was parodied in a film last year: "It's so dumb, it's brilliant!" "No, it's just dumb!"

So maybe he's playing the fabled "four dimensional chess", in which all his choices make sense from some perspective which is hidden from us. But those choices are important enough that we also have to take seriously the notion that they're being made irrationally, and we can expect future choices to also be made badly.

That doesn't justify the invasion of privacy his associates seem to be making here. His private medical choices are his business. But the unjustified release of that information is still information -- albeit qualified by the fact that it's unreliable.

Let's not turn HN into another rumors farm gossiping about celebrities.

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