Comment by culi | Hacker News Reader

Comment by culi | Hacker News Reader

> Now, three completely independent cultures have reported the same specific type of hallucination, and two cases are attributed to the same DNA-verified mushroom species. That indicates that these bizarre psychological effects aren't cultural manifestations or coincidences—they must have a shared underlying chemical and neurological basis.

Rubroboletus sinicus is another species under investigation. Another bolete.

The Chinese Daoist Ge Hong also wrote in Baopuzi around 300 CE about this effect from a mushroom and it seems to be common knowledge in pockets of China. Mushrooms that have this effect are collectively called xiǎo rén rén.

I also found this bit funny from the Wikipedia:

> In 2023, Lanmaoa asiatica received international media attention after U.S. Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen was reported to have eaten a dish that contained it during an official visit to China. Yellen stated that the dish had been thoroughly cooked, and she experienced no ill effects (hallucinations).

> Mushrooms that have this effect are collectively called xiǎo rén rén.

"Little people people" or does the second rén have a different meaning here?

The effect of reduplicating is to make it diminutive. It like adding -ito to the end of a Spanish noun.

Are you sure? I thought that's what "xiǎo" was doing here, with "rén" being repeated meaning "everyone".

I would defer to a native speaker, but Chinese is extremely contextual, and even native speakers often can’t tell you the formal rules of usage for something like this. There’s a lot more listening to register and intuiting intent required than with English. The same phrase used in different way can have a different function. In this usage it does not sound like plural “people” to my ears.

You can say something like 「你看！可愛的狗狗」 and it’s “look! A cute doggy” (reduplicating 狗 gǒu). On the other hand you could say 「人人都知道她是小三！」 and it means “everybody knows that she’s (his) mistress!” (reduplicating 人 rén).

I think this first example is spot on. Though a sibling comment's Wikipedia link doesn't mention it, there is a diminutive or hypocorism use that I feel is best translated into English with the -y or -ie suffix.

狗狗 doggy 猫猫 kitty 鸟鸟 birdie 宝宝 baby

And it kind of works for verbs too: 看看 [take a] looky

Yeah, I'm not sure what's going on with that Wikipedia page.

> Reduplication is sometimes employed in verbs and adjectives to enhance the effect of them.

> 胖胖的 pàng pàng de ('quite fat') from 胖 pàng ('fat')

This is the exact opposite of how I'd understand it. Saying someone is 胖 is just calling them fat (rude), but 胖胖的 is teasing, cute, chubby, etc.

> teasing, cute, chubby, etc.

gordito

The usual Chinese expression to describe the mushroom hallucinations is 见小人 (jiàn xiǎo rén), literally “see tiny people.”

Usually there isn't a second 人 (rén) being reduplicated here.

人人 does mean “everyone,” but that's a different construction, and Chinese noun reduplication isn't generally equivalent to adding Spanish -ito. You may also see 小人儿 (xiǎo rénr), where 儿 is a colloquial/diminutive suffix.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reduplication#Chinese

Maybe they are not just little but socially oriented (i.e., a people person).

I see you got some answers already but I'll tell you plainly it make it cute.

Like 'mei' means girl but "mei mei" means cute/precious little girl. 'Go' means dog, "go go" means a cute little dog. And so on.

It's funny how the Wikipedia article call hallucinations "ill effects". I am yet to hear people call caffeine effects "ill effects". People and their sociocultural biases, uh?

The large majority of people want absolutely nothing to do with hallucinations

The religious will love them if they arrive naturally. There are even a few studies that administered psilocybin to religious professionals. They described it as the most profound experience of their life.

Is this the same majority of people who seem happy for social media companies to shape their realities?

Imagine a person who does not want social media companies to shape their reality, yet does not want their perception of reality to be compromised by hallucinations. Or perhaps you would be fine with being snuck LSD on your way to work, or court, or picking up your kids from kindergarten? Most people do not seek out hallucinations

Seeing things that don't exist is generally detrimental to your short term survival.

Arguably the long term survival and flourishing of the human species is due to humans being able to “see things that don’t exist”.

I couldn't have phrased it better.

What a wild claim. You can't just say it's arguable, you have to actually argue it. Personally I think it's true but only in a metaphorical way that doesn't apply to hallucinogenic drugs; inasmuch as it applies to hallucinogenic drugs, it's false.

I dunno if it's so wild, but maybe I'm zooming out way too much. The example that came to my mind was "mathematics", something that doesn't "exists" but we "see" it everywhere and humanity got massively improved thanks to it. Electricity would be another example :) I guess how wild the claim is depends on how charitable you read it.

Right, and I think any serious civilizational benefit of drugs in the sub-hallucinatory regime is at least unproven, and benefit in the hallucinatory regime doesn't exist. That's sorta what I mean: "where big, false; where true, not big."

> sub-hallucinatory regime is at least unproven, and benefit in the hallucinatory regime doesn't exist

It's a interesting train of thought if nothing else. How would we "prove" a thing like "humanity benefits from being able to create, share and read books?" for example? Or that we can organize in grassroot movements? It's also really hard to qualify directly, as the impact is so indirect.

Same with psychedelics, a lot of scientists, researchers, creatives or even business-people attribute psychedelic usage to some of their success in their fields, but how can we really know if it was because of that or not?

> any serious civilizational benefit of drugs in the sub-hallucinatory regime is at least unproven

If you do want to get into the "where big":

Shamanic/ritual/religious/social practices that wholly involve hallucinatory experiences (both with and without the aid of hallucinogenic substances) are well attested and documented throughout human development.

So the existence is there; if you want to argue that actually it was a Bad Thing for human collectives, from Siberia to the Amazon, from 50k years ago to the present day, to engage in these practices and that they'd have been much better off Not Doing It, I guess the burden of that proof is on you?

I don't think it was a Bad Thing; I'm not at all convinced it was a Good Thing. A Thing not being actively deleterious is enough to reach fixation.

I guess you'd agree with Bertrand Russell that "it's never an advantage to believe something that isn't true".

It is one of my favourite quotes. However, i think it only holds amongst intellects of his calibre.

I've come to the position that false beliefs aren't necessarily harmful, in the context of proles who already believe a lot of wrong things.

I mean, people claim therapeutic benefits to psychedelics, and there is some evidence.

People don't see math or electricity with their eyes and it is simultaneously hard to argue that their physical counterpart doesn't exist. Your examples are things you can't see but exist.

Your analogy is exactly backwards.

> People don't see math or electricity with their eyes and it is simultaneously hard to argue that their physical counterpart doesn't exist. Your examples are things you can't see but exist.

How is that different from psychedelics? We can "see" their physical counterparts (and chemical reactions) in people's head and body as they trip too.

I have a camera. Suppose I rub course-grained sandpaper all over its lens. Now the camera sees scratches, instead of the outside world. But those scratches are real! We can see their physical counterparts if we study the camera. Clearly, the camera has been much improved.

Interesting analogy, but what does it mean? What is your point here?

Mathematics is to hallucinatory mushroom people as the flap of a hummingbird's wings is to the scratches on a lens.

I read it as “we can see with our imagination”. We build, we invent, we follow our “hallucinations” whether they come from drug use or just an active imagination giving revelations.

Steve Jobs seems to have connected having a vision in the metaphorical way you describe with his youthful experimentation with LSD.

Are you talking about caffeine dependence? For many people, caffeine itself feels beneficial.

So does meth.

Meth can be neuroprotective at low doses and is available by prescription for ADHD and obesity. Though, I treat my ADHD with dextroamph and I don't think I need to experience meth (I've heard it is more prone to addiction).

Vast majority of illicit adhd/Adderall on the street is actually just lower dosed meth. You probably would never know the difference, and many people don't.

I get mine from the pharmacy.

A lot of sold-as pure isomers are also simply racemic. People often won't notice that either (due to placebo and other factors), but they won't be getting the full benefit they wanted.

There are outliers like myself of course that cannot have levoamphetamine, it completely disables me. I do not know why and I don't really care to find out. The one and only time I took regular adderall, I had to sleep it off.

So does social media. Keep scrolling man, just one more hit.

Caffeine is beneficial; it's not just a feeling. It has a neuroprotective effect shown in animal model of ALZ and a statistically significant effect in humans that decaffeinated beverages don't provide.

https://www.mdpi.com/1420-3049/27/12/3737

https://www.health.harvard.edu/diet-and-nutrition/harvard-st...

I wasn't meaning to say it's not actually beneficial, I just don't like how often people get dependent on it without realizing. (As in, I wouldn't really mind if people knew they are dependent, but being completely oblivious to it is sort of offputting.)

There's no such thing as a bad food, only a bad diet. Chocolate is also considered neuroprotective. Food is medicine.

> People and their sociocultural biases

No, intent matters. If you drugged someone with caffeine (or someone drank it not knowing what it was) then their symptoms would also be called ill effects.

> I am yet to hear people call caffeine effects "ill effects". People and their sociocultural biases, uh?

Coffee has well known ill-effects, I think every coffee drinker at one point have drank too much and felt them themselves. Apparently such a big topic that it isn't just a section of the Caffeine page, it has it's very own Wikipedia page! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Caffeine_toxicity

Unknowingly taking psychedelic substances is nothing positive, however positive outlook you may have on them.

There are a lot of people with a cultural bias toward hallucinations, who want really hard to get high off anything that could allegedly make them high.

But despite that, this mushroom is not a popular recreational drug. Much like amanita muscaria, which certain people insist must be great if used right, is common as dirt, and yet is so unpopular as a drug that it isn't even restricted.

By these same accounts, you'll get sick. It's unpleasant. Not even the most enthusiastic "psychonauts" seem to manage to take joy in this thing, little people or not.

That does not seem to stop people from taking Ayahuasca, which seems to very commonly make people sick.

It stops the uncountably large majority of people from doing it. Like more then 99.9% of people.

> It stops the uncountably large majority of people from doing it. Like more then 99.9% of people.

Most people don't even know about it or have the means to access it as its either not available or not legal in their jurisdiction so not accurate. About 45% of the adults drink. How much lower would that percentage be if alcohol was little known and subjected to the same regulations psychedelics are under?

That it's not legal in their jurisdiction doesn't stop other drugs. Hallucinogenic drugs just don't catch on. They have periodic fads, but even then they're a fringe phenomenon compared to other illegal drugs.

It's the best argument to legalize them if you ask me. It's clearly a self-limiting problem - I think it's simply because of unpleasant experiences, but I suppose it's also possible that the life-changing experiences make them not need the drugs anymore.

> Much like amanita muscaria, which certain people insist must be great if used right, is common as dirt, and yet is so unpopular as a drug that it isn't even restricted.

Psilocybe, the genus containing the most commonly cultivated magic mushroom, is also quite common. It is globally distributed with native species on every continent (less antarctica ofc). It didn't become illegal because it was common in the "wild", but because of the cultivation of one particular species at home and in closets.

A. muscaria on the other hand has never been successfully cultivated as far as we know. You would be surprised how many powerful psychoactive "drugs" can be found in ecosystems around the world

Granted, amanita mushrooms are mycorrhizal, so it wouldn't be worth it to farm them. But they are also extremely common, so why would cultivation make a difference? There are plenty of wild foods which are also not cultivated (cloudberries, lingonberries, chanterelles) yet you can find in supermarkets. They can also be dried, and according to conventional psychonaut wisdom (such as it is - ibotenic acid bad, muscimol good) that makes them better.

I didn't say it was legal because it's common - as you say, psilocybe mushrooms are also common - but because it's so unpleasant it has low abuse potential.

The presence of bioflavinoids, polyphenols, and other things that signal the endocrine and nervous systems in adaptogenic ways is wildly under discussed, and underrated.

Plants/fungus can help convince your systems that things are okay, that it’s okay to be closer to resting state / content - not just “provide nutrients and fiber” as believed - though those things are super important, too!

Not sure if it's the same here, but I've been told your usual 'trip' off psilocybin bearing mushrooms is really just a form of food-poisoning

You should read a little about it and I think you would change your mind.

The adverse effects of psilocybin are well known and documented and we know for sure that it’s not physically dangerous.

For the trip part we mostly know how it work and how interact and it can be healing (or bad trip depending on the context).

Still you may have have digestive adverse effects, not because of poisoning but because the human gut cannot digest crude mushrooms.

But you will not be physically sick per se like you would be with a bacteria or a toxin, your immune system will not fight anything.

Oh, I've done more than my fair share of substances across the hallucinogen class, with a preference for Shrooms or LSD

I just was under the impression that from a 'medical(?)' point of view, the trip is nothing more than food poisoning

That's probably based on some specific definition of food poisoning where you get effects from the food. It's semantics rather than saying anything useful about what's going on.

What's funny about that? If people started hallucinating from coffee that would be considered an ill effect.

If you're basing your perception of sociocultural biases on what you (1 person) have seen or not seen, you may be speaking to your own biases, rather than others'

To wit: multiple people here have definitely heard the thing you have yet to hear.

Some ADHD stimulant medications quite literally boost your mood. A literal anti-depression pill.

This function is listed as a side effect of being on these meds. Which is true, it's not being used to treat depression, though is often being used to treat people with depression and treat the root cause of that depression. It just also happens to "perk" you up.

Not all hallucinations are pleasant. Magic mushrooms are known to be pleasurable for many people, but I've heard these mushrooms are not very fun and can last days. Given these effects have been known for a long time there could be a good reason it never caught on

Reply on news.ycombinator.com