banads

High doses of psychedelics literally induces schizophrenia in its users, albeit for a brief amount of time, so it makes sense why that could be dangerous for people already living in such a state

What do you think about the research in question as it relates to social media?

Cool story, its completely irrelevant to what happened last week in the US

Yes, anyone trying to push these drugs on literally everyone is a fool. The reason people with pre-existing psychosis like schizophrenia are being ruled out of such studies is because the risk is plainly obvious.

That's why doctors often prescribe medicine with the caveat "do not take drug A if you have conditions XYZ"

>They try to explain the experience and are fully convinced they learned some fundamental truth but can't explain it in any way that makes sense.

Imagine trying to describe the color blue to a blind person, or the sound of music to a deaf person.

Some things cannot be described or understood without direct experience.

We shouldn't make literally everyone take it, that's silly. The John's Hopkins studies do show sustained long term (6-12 months) clinical improvements for about 80% of test subjects -- from a single dose. No other psychopharmaceutical drug comes close to such success, much less with a single dose.

>I think that's a metaphor

Maybe we could consider it purely metaphorical, if there hadn't been a rash of arsons across the US in recent weeks.

>To be perfectly upfront with my own beliefs, I believe economic disparities is the mother of all other disparities and that many of these statistics that show disparities in outcomes for whites vs blacks are just echos of that economic disparity.

I agree my friend, thank you for the measured response.

>given that biology does have a significant role in some disparities in outcomes for men & women (for example life expectancy)

How do we know biology is the most significant factor that causes women to live longer than men?

How do we know biology is not a significant factor that causes white people to live longer than black people? It's a biological fact that black people in the US suffer greatly from vitamin D deficiency[1]

[1]https://www.cooperinstitute.org/2019/09/24/african-americans...

Indeed, white people in the US on average live 3.5 years longer than black people in the US.[1]

Did you know that an even greater health/life expectancy disparity exists between men and women?

One gender on average lives 5.1 years longer than the other.[2]

>decreased access to medical care and healthy food, unsafe working conditions, mass incarceration, exposure to pollution and noise, and the toxic effects of stress.

Likewise all of these issues affect men disproportionately compared to women.

Why is it so popular to talk about these same issues as systemic oppression against group X (relative to group Y), while ignoring or the fact that those same issues affect group XY, often to an even greater degree (relative to group XX)?

[1]https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Race_and_health_in_the_Unite...

[2]https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_life_ex...

>Nobody on the far-left is advocating for the extreme violence

I have seen many people talking about "burning the system to the ground".

You're right, I think I misread their meaning. Even though still now that I understand it, tribes still exist across the world living in extremely inhospitable environments with very scarce resources, and they still manage to have much stronger community ties than many civilized socieities.

It can of course be superficial, but perhaps "the best minds" as it applies in this context could be measured by salary, education level/cost of education (i.e. how many Ivy Leaguers work at said companies)

Civilized societies are definitely able to produce more food, and shelter at scale using industrial techniques.

Hatred is a perfectly natural human emotion. If we forcibly prevent people from expressing their emotions with words and abdicate our responsibility to defuse hatred with dialogue, it will eventually boil over and be expressed with violence.

It's ironic, because mass censorship proponents claim censoring hate prevents violence, when perhaps it actually makes it worse in the long run.

"Like a boil that can never be cured so long as it is covered up but must be opened with all its ugliness to the natural medicines of air and light, injustice must be exposed, with all the tension its exposure creates, to the light of human conscience and the air of national opinion before it can be cured."

-MLK

>Instead of “western” medicine, I prefer to call it “evidence based, tested with randomized controlled experiments, mechanism of action deduced” medicine

If that's the definition, then there are zero psychiatric drugs that can be classified as western "medicine", as we have yet to understand how drugs like anti-depressants intercourse with the mind ("the mechanism of action deduced").

"psychiatric diagnosis still relies exclusively on fallible subjective judgments rather than objective biological tests" -Allen Frances

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Allen_Frances

>Antidepressants are supposed to work by fixing a chemical imbalance, specifically, a lack of serotonin in the brain. Indeed, their supposed effectiveness is the primary evidence for the chemical imbalance theory. But analyses of the published data and the unpublished data that were hidden by drug companies reveals that most (if not all) of the benefits are due to the placebo effect. Some antidepressants increase serotonin levels, some decrease it, and some have no effect at all on serotonin. Nevertheless, they all show the same therapeutic benefit. Even the small statistical difference between antidepressants and placebos may be an enhanced placebo effect, due to the fact that most patients and doctors in clinical trials successfully break blind. The serotonin theory is as close as any theory in the history of science to having been proved wrong. Instead of curing depression, popular antidepressants may induce a biological vulnerability making people more likely to become depressed in the future.

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4172306/

>Having an abundance of natural resources that are easily accessible at a low tech level seems like it's a very large precondition to making this work

Disagree, "civilized" societies have vast surpluses of the resources needed for survival (Level 1 and 2 of Maslows Hierarchy) compared to tribal societies, although those resources may not be distributed properly -- which is indicative of that which we truly lack: community belongingness and love (Level 3 of Maslows Hierarchy).

Heart disease kills ~650,000 people per year in the US, and is largely preventable with proper diet and exercise.

Indeed, "I believe in Science" is an all to common phrase these days

^This response is so blandly generic.

>You can't decide Facebook is subject to a different set of laws or has fewer rights

Oh but we can, that's what democracy and law makers are for, and if you've been keeping up with the news at all for the past few years, you'll know that's where we are increasingly likely to be heading.

Thanks for the clarification. You're right, access to the internet at large is more or less egalitarian; having your voice heard (and not hidden), is not though, and therein lies the problem.

If a tree falls on the forest, and no one is there to hear it, did it even make a noise?

Also relevant is this very interesting research experiment conducted ~5 years ago on social media manipulation, in which they dubbed the term "Censorship 2.0"

https://www.reddit.com/r/netsec/comments/38wl43/we_used_sock...

I agree with you. In my opinion, it seemed he was extremely likely to win reelection, before covid19 struck. Now, I think those odds have been diminished; the degree to which, though, I am not sure.

Okay, but companies like Google, FB, and Twitter are already putting great efforts towards implementing that type of thing in production.

Whats so difficult about letting a user toggle those existing filters on and off? Or allowing users more control over their news feed, such as allowing it to be chronological? Or hiding items based on keywords?

Its our job as technologists to not only tell people if/when their request is technologically impractical/impossible, but more importantly, to make informed recommendations of what is technically feasible and most closely matches their intended goals (which they might not yet even fully understand themselves).

by putting "parking lots" in quotations, I was meaning to ask for the alternative digital equivalent to major platforms like FB and Twitter.

>You don't need to take a "shot" at a politician when that politician himself has done everything he can to create a public health catastrophe

Are you sure about that? I was sure about that ("there's no way Trump can win") last election, and I was utterly wrong.

Are there any other non-corporate "parking lots" with anywhere close to the same network effects?

We don't need the metrics ourselves to have common sense:

1. Facebook's job as a corporation is to make money

2. Making money for FB is largely based on MAU

3. Playing politics and censoring the chosen world leaders of large portions of their user base is a probable way to lose those users, and thus, money

Our neighborhoods (especially poor/black neighborhoods) are war zones, ever since Nixon declared them so in 1971. The war on drugs is the primary cause of police militarization and mass incarceration. It's like that Orwell quote "We've always been at war with Eastasia"; it's gone on for so long, we've forgotten its actually happening.

FB has the metrics. The precedent is Cambridge Analytica.