As I say in the post, don’t be a dumbass. Do an expected value calculation. If it doesn’t pan out, don’t do it.
Some drugs are risky and might kill you. Some drugs are safe at even very high doses. Some can have long-term negative side effects. Some don’t.
The point of this post is to point at the ugh field around doing drugs and say “hey, that’s an ugh field, you should look into it, because some people do drugs and think it’s a good idea even after we discount folks who are addicts, and maybe it turns out you were wrong to dismiss certain drugs out of hand because you weren’t bothering to check the math yourself”.
Sounds from your comments like you did the math and in your estimation they still aren’t worth it. Great! But different people value different things and not everyone will get the same result.
1) People systematically underestimate the effect drugs have on them. This is anecdotal evidence, but I guess many people have an experience with a drunk person yelling at them “I am not drunk”, or know a junkie who insists that he has it completely under control, can stop any time he wants, and it has no impact on his life, while his family is like “since he started taking drugs, he abandoned all his former hobbies and friends, dropped out of school, and all he talks about are the drugs”.
You could interpret this as a revealed preference, like maybe from his perspective the life with drugs is indeed better than the life without drugs, his new friends better than his old friends, etc., even if his parents disapprove. But to me this seems like dramatically modifying your utility function from U1 to U2, where according to U2 your new situation is great, but according to U1 it possibly is not. I currently happen to be at U1, so I am judging things from the perspective of U1.
2) There seems to be big variance in reactions to (some) drugs. Like, one person takes 10 doses without developing addiction; another person tries once, gets addicted. Even the same person can have a different reaction to the same dose on a different day. This is further complicated with illegal substances, because of varying purity and additives. The anecdotal evidence about how safe it is to use substances may be the survivor bias, with evidence to contrary dismissed as “those people were at risk” or “they did something wrong” (which seems to imply that you are not at risk, and your probability of doing something wrong—even at the moment you are high—is negligible).
Here we could list people from the rationalist community who experimented with drugs and died. I am not in Bay Area, where the prevalence seems to be greatest, but I could still add a friend of a friend to that list.
3) There is a well-known tendency of people who start experimenting with one illegal substance to also try another. This is probably a side effect of illegality—if you drink alcohol or smoke tobacco, your alcohol or tobacco producer does not have an incentive to convince you to also try something else; your drug dealer however has a strong incentive to convince you to try something with a greater profit margin. If you do not interact with dealers directly, you should still expect peer pressure towards the same. So a full calculation of danger of X should also include a term for people who moved from X to Y. If you tell me that obviously X is totally unlike Y, I don’t disagree; I am just saying that this is what “you that didn’t try X” believes. There is a reason to assume that “you after using X” will believe differently. Similarly, “you after using X” will probably be more comfortable to try higher dosage, and to take the drug more often. A calculation that does not take this into account is unrealistic.
In summary, you say “do the math”, I say that the math is typically done incorrectly, based on filtered data, often based on reports of people who are notorious for being untrustworthy; plus there are a few people who were rationalists, did the math, and died regardless. If you still believe that you can do the math correctly, okay, maybe you are right, or maybe you are just overconfident, I don’t know.
As I say in the post, don’t be a dumbass. Do an expected value calculation. If it doesn’t pan out, don’t do it.
Some drugs are risky and might kill you. Some drugs are safe at even very high doses. Some can have long-term negative side effects. Some don’t.
The point of this post is to point at the ugh field around doing drugs and say “hey, that’s an ugh field, you should look into it, because some people do drugs and think it’s a good idea even after we discount folks who are addicts, and maybe it turns out you were wrong to dismiss certain drugs out of hand because you weren’t bothering to check the math yourself”.
Sounds from your comments like you did the math and in your estimation they still aren’t worth it. Great! But different people value different things and not everyone will get the same result.
Here is a summary of the problems I see:
1) People systematically underestimate the effect drugs have on them. This is anecdotal evidence, but I guess many people have an experience with a drunk person yelling at them “I am not drunk”, or know a junkie who insists that he has it completely under control, can stop any time he wants, and it has no impact on his life, while his family is like “since he started taking drugs, he abandoned all his former hobbies and friends, dropped out of school, and all he talks about are the drugs”.
You could interpret this as a revealed preference, like maybe from his perspective the life with drugs is indeed better than the life without drugs, his new friends better than his old friends, etc., even if his parents disapprove. But to me this seems like dramatically modifying your utility function from U1 to U2, where according to U2 your new situation is great, but according to U1 it possibly is not. I currently happen to be at U1, so I am judging things from the perspective of U1.
2) There seems to be big variance in reactions to (some) drugs. Like, one person takes 10 doses without developing addiction; another person tries once, gets addicted. Even the same person can have a different reaction to the same dose on a different day. This is further complicated with illegal substances, because of varying purity and additives. The anecdotal evidence about how safe it is to use substances may be the survivor bias, with evidence to contrary dismissed as “those people were at risk” or “they did something wrong” (which seems to imply that you are not at risk, and your probability of doing something wrong—even at the moment you are high—is negligible).
Here we could list people from the rationalist community who experimented with drugs and died. I am not in Bay Area, where the prevalence seems to be greatest, but I could still add a friend of a friend to that list.
3) There is a well-known tendency of people who start experimenting with one illegal substance to also try another. This is probably a side effect of illegality—if you drink alcohol or smoke tobacco, your alcohol or tobacco producer does not have an incentive to convince you to also try something else; your drug dealer however has a strong incentive to convince you to try something with a greater profit margin. If you do not interact with dealers directly, you should still expect peer pressure towards the same. So a full calculation of danger of X should also include a term for people who moved from X to Y. If you tell me that obviously X is totally unlike Y, I don’t disagree; I am just saying that this is what “you that didn’t try X” believes. There is a reason to assume that “you after using X” will believe differently. Similarly, “you after using X” will probably be more comfortable to try higher dosage, and to take the drug more often. A calculation that does not take this into account is unrealistic.
In summary, you say “do the math”, I say that the math is typically done incorrectly, based on filtered data, often based on reports of people who are notorious for being untrustworthy; plus there are a few people who were rationalists, did the math, and died regardless. If you still believe that you can do the math correctly, okay, maybe you are right, or maybe you are just overconfident, I don’t know.