He also still seems to me to precipitate psychotic episodes in his interlocutors surprisingly often
This is true, but I’m confused about how to relate to it. Part of Michael’s explicit strategy seems to be identifying people stuck in bad equilibria, and destabilizing them out of it. If I were to take an evolutionary-psychology steelman of what a psychotic episode is, a (highly uncertain) interpretation I might make is that a psychotic episode is an adaptation for escaping such equilibria, combined with a negative retrospective judgment of how that went. Alternatively, those people might be using psychedelics (which I believe are in fact effective for breaking people out of equilibria), and getting unlucky with the side effects. This is bad if it’s not paired with good judgment about which equilibria are good vs. bad ones (I don’t have much opinion on how good his judgment in this area is). But this seems like an important function, which not enough people are performing.
This is true, but I’m confused about how to relate to it. Part of Michael’s explicit strategy seems to be identifying people stuck in bad equilibria, and destabilizing them out of it. If I were to take an evolutionary-psychology steelman of what a psychotic episode is, a (highly uncertain) interpretation I might make is that a psychotic episode is an adaptation for escaping such equilibria, combined with a negative retrospective judgment of how that went. Alternatively, those people might be using psychedelics (which I believe are in fact effective for breaking people out of equilibria), and getting unlucky with the side effects. This is bad if it’s not paired with good judgment about which equilibria are good vs. bad ones (I don’t have much opinion on how good his judgment in this area is). But this seems like an important function, which not enough people are performing.