Researchers mined Erowid and fed the entries to an AI
pioneerworks.org
pioneerworks.org
The general idea of training LLMs on forum archives seems promising though!
From the methods section:
> The database of drug narratives from Erowid’s “experience vault” is entirely anonymous. Rigorous quality control is conducted by trained experts with careful consideration given to “quality, credibility, and focus on effects or outcomes” (www.erowid.org). By means of that mechanism, all reports that provided the basis for the present investigation have successfully exceeded a standard quality filter.
IIRC they have moderators vet them and only a relatively small percentage get published. The founders and staff actually take their mission statement seriously.
It all went great, Claude even gave references, until it hallucinated an innocuous but significantly game-breaking rule ("rest lets you heal one health for two stamina").
This just reinforced my lack of trust in LLMs, and I would sure as hell not ask an LLM what drugs were safe or not.
What would be interesting would be training using the data from PsychonautWiki[0] which has all sorts of good data about drug information & safety (and experiences)
I chuckled. Reddit data is THE gold standard for training something such as an RHCF model, properly up voted/downvoted data through an API. FWIW I'm sure a lot of ChatGPT data is trained there.
"tweakers.net" does something very interesting. They allow you to vote 'freely', but if you don't adhere to their voting rules repeatedly, you will have your voting rights locked away.
Their current rules are:
-1 = flamebait, troll, etc.
+0 = irrelevant, inaccurate
+1 = relevant
+2 = informative, helpful
+3 = must read comment
If you constantly give +3's to mediocre comments because they agree with your bias, you will get a warning. Similar with -1 to dissenting opinions. After one warning, your vote rights are locked away and you will have to write a good justification on getting them back.
To give an example on why voting sucks here for example (yes, I know) and it will sound a bit like sour grapes:
I made a comment on how Sonos is great, because their voice assistant processes your voice completely locally. I get berated and told it is not private because you need an account (the EU would fine Sonos severely if they claim local processing but do not do so). I get downvoted to -2 (!), whereas the completely incorrect comment gets sent to +3.
Similarly, another commentor says Sonos has horrible software lifetimes. However, they often update their products for ~10 years, which is a better support timeline than even Apple. I'm sent to 0 twice, incorrect commenter goes to +2.
With the Tweakers system, Dang would swoop in and annihilate the voting rights of anyone who upvoted these people. Alas, HN loves being a bandwagony echo chamber, so the pain continues :)
https://erowid.org/experiences/exp.php?ID=97541
The style of writing and the amount of stereotypes makes me convinced this is a rather hilarious piece of writing, not even false, but likely never happened.
I can assure you that my lengthy description of waves of orgasmic bliss that descended into a hospitalised bad trip† while on 2C-I and cannabis is written as I experienced it, nothing fanciful about that. But I also don't understand how do you claim stories about people literally on drugs to be fanciful. What do you expect people to see and experience if they've taken strong psychedelics? I have no basis to doubt one has really spoken to the Alien God while on salvia.
† thankfully it was only a panic attack, but they're a little bit scarier to have when the walls are melting.
I wish we were studying them with competency, in environments that were fully untethered from absolute profitism, LEO fear, politics and other non-medical agendas. We could use some better tools to address the negative effects of our increasingly complex (and decreasingly prepared) living.
Also, after I got hospitalised, the ER paramedics returned the small bag of white powder to me. I don't know if that's common practice , but I appreciated the gesture.
I still haven't listened to Maggot Brain since that day.
Did something similar on the same data at school many years back, but I used the category labels to try and predict good and bad trips. The model worked abysmally, but the features made for great word clouds.
to an extent, I understand the concept of studying the old plant remedies for what is actually useful from the plant and which remedies really do not harm but do no actual good either. dosing is important and using raw plants makes that really hard. creating clean extracts of known qualities makes a helluva lot of sense. i just think bigPharma took the concept too far.
I got to thinking about that, and I came up with a theory: Machine translation of course requires a corpus of texts that exist in at least two languages, a Rosetta Stone. The Bible is the most translated book on Earth. For tiny or dying languages, the kind with some thousands of speakers at most, the Bible may be the only written work that's ever been translated into or out of that language. So the Bible is their entire training corpus, and it's not enough.
The most fascinating thing about the place was that later the whole area had been designated a special scientific survey protection region. They protected the environment by scientists bringing money to do research to pay the locals (kind of like eco tourism protection for areas that aren't very safe for tourists). These folks were mostly hardcore evolutionary biologists rather than creationists like the missionaries, so there were older folks living in the village who in their life had gone through the history of western philosophy: they grew up with animast beliefs, converted to christianity as teenagers and now are experts on evolution. Conversations with them about the nature of existence remain some of the most inspiring and interesting in my life, I recorded a bunch and keep meaning to transcribe off cassette tape sometime.
More information for the curious here: https://pngbiodiversity.org/wp-content/uploads/2022/06/Crate...
It is often caused by using LSD for the first time. Drug mixing makes it more likely to happen.
Personally, I'm avoiding psychedelics so that I don't get it. [Edit] The downvoters are shameless and reckless, and potentially responsible for ruining lives. Stop acting like a cult.
Here's my pro-hallucinogen argument: if you have persistent, treatment resistant anxiety, there is nothing even close to a heroic dose of your favorite hallucinogen to kill your ego and let you see through the bullshit in your life. You'll have a pretty bad time during the trip, but the clarity it provides is life changing.
It would nice to get more data about HPPD to understand its prevalence and risk factors.
[edit] I would agree that hallucinogens might be a good mind medicine, but they should be likened to medications or surgeries when it comes to risk.
Or it may traumatize you for life. And that "clarity" may just be an illusion, which doesn't mean it can't have a positive effect, but you can't really count on it.
That's the problem with psychedelics, they are unpredictable. The can definitely do miracles, but they can also do great harm, though usually not by the way of toxicity or addiction.
There is a reason we don't use LSD for psychiatric treatment. This is no conspiracy theory, they tried, and failed. I mean, LSD is a product of big pharma, and as you may have guessed, Sandoz really wanted to make a real treatment out of their patented drug, for money.
Maybe with modern science and better experience with psychedelics, we could success where the others have failed, but we are not there yet. That's why I really don't recommend that type of self-medication.
Now, if you want to enjoy a good trip, go for it, there are some risks, but rather low if you do it properly, and many good things in life carry risks.
But suggesting a heroic dose to someone anxious with the implication that it may lead to a bad trip is going against every advice regarding psychedelics, and essentially replicating the very experiments that failed and caused LSD to end up as a schedule 1 drug rather than a recognized treatment. It may work, but that's a huge gamble.
I think this is most interesting and potentially promising: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6082376/
Disclaimer: While I have big problems with current legal regimes and discourses on 'drugs' (virtually always excluding ethanol and nicotine), I do NOT promote or advocate the use of psychedelics. Most of them (see above) are massively under-researched and many available substances are not at all pure, so there is always a non-trivial danger associated.
This is wrong. There's a lot of misinformation around the history of psychedelics. The early "clinical trials" were extremely bad science. The short version is the scientist leading the team who first synthesized it was also the person who first attempted to popularize its use, and is pretty much a poster-child for "sex- and drug-crazed hippy". The US had already adopted a heavy anti-drug rhetoric and later LSD was rolled into the war on drugs effort. There was bad-faith-actors on both sides of the fence for a long time.
>Or it may traumatize you for life. [...] But suggesting a heroic dose to someone anxious with the implication that it may lead to a bad trip is going against every advice regarding psychedelics
Completely agreed. The potential for long-term trauma cannot be understated. They shouldn't be played with unsupervised, and the supervisor should be well versed in what happens with a good AND a bad reaction. (I don't like the term 'bad trip'.)
You seem to have missed some history.
LSD was first synthesized in 1938 by Albert Hoffman and first accidentally ingested in 1943 by the same. He was not a 'sex- and drug-crazed hippy'. You are certainly thinking of Timothy Leary, a clinical psychologist, had a mushroom experience in 1960 and spun that into a bunch of research into uses of psychedelics in psychology. He was eventually fired by Harvard in 1963. He then kinda goes off the rails, eventually he went to and escaped from prison along with many other exploits.
* Admittedly, the people there have it the worst.
He was in and out of mental asylums for about 10 years, and recently has just went missing.
I still take drugs when I want to, and don't advocate against them.
My rough advice is to just wait until you are at least 25, follow the safe, sound, setting tips, and always premeditate on what you about to do before you do it.
At Burning Man, there is a place called Sanctuary, which operates essentially a psychedelic ER for people on bad trips. It is run by MAPS, in conjunction with the Rangers, and is located next to Rampart/traditional medical services. The problem with it is that a) it's not well known, and b) if you're having a bad trip, and can't get there/their help, they can't help. So my fantasy solution is that to have trip sitters assigned to people/groups going on an LSD trip to more fully mitigate the problem. Both on and off playa. I do realize this is infeasible since there is no such pool of experienced trip sitters to pull from, plus LSD is still a controlled substance, unfortunately.
well, kinda /s.
These are drugs we're talking about. The use of drugs comes with risk. Being able to assess risk versus reward is apart of being an adult and making adult decisions, but I'm glad you've included more information (HPPD) for perusal. I've done my share of psychs but didn't know about this. Fascinating!
I'd suggest shrooms, which are totally different.
- It completely destroyed my night vision to the point that I couldn't see at all in low light. No eyes would never 'adapt' because the amount of visual snow (like a TV set to an untuned channel) would overwhelm what I could see
- Massive halos around lights. Night time became dreamy.
- After-image impressions of reading text. So it became a little harder to read.
- It's very easy for me now to experience closed eyed visuals when I'm completely sober. It usually happens when I'm tired.
These effects can happen with all hallucinogens and weed is psychoactive, too. People don't mention these nuances that visual changes may linger after the trip. You can imagine that some people might feel like they've just screwed themselves up forever. I felt that way for about a month before I got used to it. The effects above have mostly gone away now though.
I really do think that these kind of drugs permanently change how you visually perceive the world. So I think your concerns are completely valid. I have heard stories about this exact topic online from people freaking out.
> After-image impressions of reading text. So it became a little harder to read.
Anyone who has benefited from Erowid's psychoactive drug info should consider donating!
If i recall correctly, something like 70% of people fall asleep in the MRI so theres no baseline brain state to compare.
Nah, I'm kidding, there's no way I can sleep inside a MRI machine. I just think of dancing electrons going through my body. I also think it is an extreme version of dubstep.
Oh I see! THAT'S what they are REALLY doing. One more reason to sanitize the web of old posts. Doesn't even matter if those stories the LLM is being trained on are actually useful and valid, if they are just enough to persuade some board member to grant a patent on a molecule that others have discovered long before the patent troll.
"I dig the cocaine and it was awwwwwesome!"
tl;dr - I seriously doubt any of the users wants to be identified, much less compensated for providing "data".
On point though, many of the chemicals in question aren't legal so not sure how much users would want to be identified..
I'm a very experienced psychonaut and even I won't dare touch that stuff. One of my friends did and just watching him on it made me never, EVER want to do it.
e: From the original paper:
> Rigorous quality control is conducted by trained experts with careful consideration given to “quality, credibility, and focus on effects or outcomes” (www.erowid.org). By means of that mechanism, all reports that provided the basis for the present investigation have successfully exceeded a standard quality filter.
Totally.
maybe the AI researchers are from the same school of thought. having bad/unvetted medical data/advice on psychedelics would be better than no data at all, right? /s
The point of the website is to collect information about drugs for education and research purposes. It's a 501c3 nonprofit, which operates explicitly for public education. It's funded by donors, not by consumers of the info collected.