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Knew that name sounded familiar.. Margaret Mead was one of the 'core group' members of the Macy Conference(s) in Cybernetics [0], whose other members included such people as John von Neumann, Norbert Wiener, Walter Pitts, Warren McCulloch..

[0] https://asc-cybernetics.org/foundations/history/MacyPeople.h...

Also a wonderful anaecdote, WRT LSD and Tech - when Hoffman's 100th birthday happened they had an interview with one of the founders/first employees of Cisco, and he stated they were against drug testing, because they discovered the logic for BGP and RIP routing protocols in epiphanies due to LSD.

Also, there is this letter from Hoffman to Jobs:

https://www.huffpost.com/entry/read-the-never-before-pub_b_2...

That Cisco anecdote is pretty great!

Do you have a source or any additional keywords I might be able to use to search for it?

Our toddler is now asleep so I am also here to do a brief AMA about the book and psychedelic science in the 20th century if anyone has questions. :)
Mushrooms have had a profound positive impact on my life so I'm drawn read anything in the orbit of psychedelics, but I'm even more interested after this interview! I pre-ordered a copy.

It was cool to see your mention of Ginsberg and the Beats, my wife and I just stopped through City Lights and the small, but pretty neat, Beat museum that's nearby.

Anyway, congrats on the book, I look forward to reading it!

UCSC should also have a psychedelics studies program (is there any better place?), particularly on account of their already unique (and wonderful) History of Consciousness program.

I remember an old and dear chemist friend of mine there who made me aware of the Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies (MAPS). I still have his copy of Sweetness and Power: The Place of Sugar in Modern History he lent me after taking a sociology course on drugs in society, if I recall correctly.

When I was younger, I heard lots of stories about how Margaret Mead was the best anthropologist. Then, later I started hearing about how some rivals were digging up how she just made up half of the stories because she wanted to believe something different. I wonder if there's been any more exploration of her research and whether she applied this wishful thinking to LSD too.
Did you ever wonder to validate the things you "started hearing"?
Yes, that's why I'm asking here. Maybe someone else has some insight.
This is Ben's new book! One of Hacker News's resident historians.
Oh, is this a pinned post? First time I think I've ever seen a post with so few votes do this before! :D
Not pinned, but it was a SCP pick (per https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26998308)
There's always this odd religious angle to psychedelics that users and advocates have that I find deeply off putting.
And that angle is also often visible when socializing with researchers in that field, except they try to hide it.
I always find it interesting that whenever an article about psychedelics gets posted, the comments are always “We don’t know yet if this is positive, we need much more evidence and science!”

Yet the standard of rigor for alcohol, weed, SSRIs and tiktok is somehow not as stringent.

>alcohol, weed, SSRIs and tiktok

Only one of these is conventionally understood to confer a net benefit in its most common use cases, and the SSRIs have been subject to extensive testing and approval processes.

I disagree with the sibling commenter that alcohol does not dramatically alter your perception of reality. He simply isn't drinking enough. Likewise it is more than possible to limit the psychedelic dose so that it does not lead to heedlessness; Shulgin noted that many users prefer what he called a "plus-two" instead of the highly disorienting "plus-three".

While the medical application of psychedelics is probably going to be subject to the same rigorous approval process that characterizes the medical application of other things, the primary benefits attributed to conventional psychedelics are not easily reconciled with the usual endpoints of contemporary medicine. People claim to have experienced improvements in moral character, reasoning about certain problems, interpersonal trust, and other behavior changes which are not considered targets of treatment by contemporary medicine. There have been a few limited studies looking at psychedelics for depression and anxiety, but the improvements are just OK, though the prospect of just taking a drug once instead of daily is certainly attractive.

Meanwhile, the non-prescription use of psychedelics has been "experimented" with in a few cases, particularly in the Netherlands, Oregon, and Florida. Unfortunately, while incidents of psychedelic-influenced misbehavior are rare in general, they seem to become more common when the availability of these drugs is decriminalized. My hypothesis is that people are more likely to be reckless when they are not afraid of getting caught. A system of licensure for users would hopefully help prevent this.

> SSRIs have been subject to extensive testing and approval processes.

SSRIs barely beat placebo and have a significant side effect profile

Even more than that, it's always mentioned by the scientists, advocates, and journalists ad-nauseam too.
I don't. None of those things completely mess with your perspective of reality like psychedelics. Idk it's like comparing code correctness for a calculator vs a control module for a spaceship. Totally different ballparks.
Are you saying that people are insufficiently critical of alcohol, SSRIs, and tiktok? That's been far from my experience.

Weed, you might have a point, but it's also fairly evidently far more benign than alcohol and tobacco, and has been pretty clearly unjustly demonized for decades in an attempt to target specific populations, so it's not unreasonable for the pendulum to overcorrect a bit before we find a comfortable equilibrium.

Having myself spent a period of my life thinking that all the world's problems would vanish if only we all took more LSD, MDMA and DMT... and since realizing that there really is no substitute for honesty, self-sacrifice and hard work... I'm reminded of Hunter S Thompson in Fear and Loathing:

... a generation of permanent cripples, failed seekers, who never understood the essential mystic fallacy of the Acid Culture: the desperate assumption that somebody - or at least some force - is tending the light at the end of the tunnel.

I had a similar phase myself. Though I still genuinely believe that every person should have a psychedelic experience at least once in their lifetime, as well as a talk-session with close friends while on MDMA.

These two things radically shifted my life perspective and resolved a lot of inner issues, both after just a single time.

Particularly the psychedelic experience is great for sparking realizations that things like hate, xenophobia, racism, etc. are all so absurd and non-productive.

YMMV. I took LSD. It didn't do a whole lot other than make me think I could play the piano when I definitely can't. The only life changing thing was I was down some cash which I could have spent on something else. A friend at the time took it and killed themselves a month later.

Point is there are no absolutes and a lot of romanticism and anecdotes around it when we need science. But it's difficult to be anything but subjective about it if you have experienced it. I suspect any critical thinking becomes biased and that relationship requires some analysis as well.

Boring take I know but to pose a question: at the level of society if it is normalised, does taking psychedelics have a general positive or a general negative outcome?

MDMA in particular has such obvious usefulness for relationship/marriage counseling therapy.

After many years of experimenting with pretty much every conventional and 'research' drug, MDMA is the only one that stands out to me personally as having a lasting impact on how I view the world.

I had the same experience, minus MDMA (never had the chance) and the racism stuff. Completely changed my mental shape at age 47 when I tried mushrooms for the first time (also my first psychedelic). Not a do-frequently thing but genuinely mind opening.

The people using microdosing to be more effective at work, well... good grief.

"We should continue to keep our borders unchecked. Source? It was revealed to me in a psychedelic dream."

You should run for office with that platform and see how far it carries you.

Were you racist, xenophobic, and hateful before? If not, your realizations about their productivity aren’t particularly relevant.
I don't think psychedelics are a panacea but they'll likely help the world move in a positive direction: https://jakeseliger.com/2023/09/25/strange-trip-psychedelics....

MDMA may also be the only, or among the few, things that really work in and for couples therapy (it's also not a panacea). Banning it is a travesty.

There's an interesting alternative world chronicled in part by Michael Pollan in How to Change Your Mind, and by others, in which psychedelics are integrated into therapy, psychiatry, and other forms of medicine and improvement.

Unlike LSD or psilocybin, MDMA causes addiction, so there is some ground for a ban.
Most people who try these things briefly entertain these ideas. They are really interesting and have the potential to trigger positive breakthroughs in a person’s thinking. They also have high potential in therapy for things like PTSD and depression.

But all you have to do is spend a little time around drug users or pay attention to the discourse in psychedelic friendly circles (Joe Rogan and Russell Brand anyone?) to see that drugs are not some kind of magic enlightenment in a pill. If they were there’d be more enlightened drug users.

There is also the example of the Canadian psychologist, Elliot Barker, who tried to treat criminal psychopaths with LSD, only for researchers to later learn that it made them more psychopathic and re-offend at higher rates.
Maybe, it's like with programming.

You can code a game, a database, an OS, a framework, a LLM etc. with one tool.

Set and setting are critical factors in the outcome of any use of psychedelics, particularly for naive users unfamiliar with the effects. Practically speaking, this means LSD could plausibly be used in both cult brainwashing and cult deprogramming activities. That's why the CIA thought it could be used as a mind control / interrogation tool in the early 1950s (e.g. MKULTRA), while others adopted it as a liberating creative tool for artists (indeed, I once met a classically trained flutist who reported that they found it impossible to improvise over a jazz chord progression until they tried LSD).

Personally I think a great many of the problem outcomes with psychedelics is related to consumerism and the desire for quick fixes. A society blanketed with pharmaceutical advertising and indoctrinated with the notion that pills fix health problems will tend to generate individuals who think taking some drug will 'fix' them. A typical outcome for such people is that they try some psychedelic, have a great time, and then run back to the well for another taste, and then have a horrible grim experience, reliving some past personal trauma or consumed with morbid thoughts of death and darkness, etc. - the so-called 'bad trip'. Let alone people who take so much they completely dissociate with sensory reality, a very dangerous situation as they may fall off cliffs, walk into traffic, etc.

More often than not, people indoctrinated into consumerist drug use will instead turn to alcohol, opiates, cocaine, amphetamines, benzos, etc. - all drugs with fairly predictable feel-good effects, a variety of negative health effects, and high addiction potential - but not much risk of a 'bad trip'. In contrast, psychedelics have potential for combatting addiction to such drugs because they lead to introspection, self-reflection, and the realization that the short-term feel-good effects of addictive drugs are not worth the long-term consequences - the degradation of ones' mental and physical capabilities, degraded social relationships, loss of emotional control and so on.

While I'm not the biggest fan of companies trying to land grab the psychedelic craze, there are things that would be nice to have, like psychedelics that don't activate 5-HT2B (associated strongly with aortic hypertrophy, i.e., your heart valves grow too big) over time. Sure, we haven't necessarily seen a ton of direct linkage to IRL use, yet, AFAIPK, but still it's something that's been strongly shown, and most 5-HT2A psychedelics also activate 5-HT2B.

Curious about selectivity against 5-HT3 as well as the nausea can be a problem.

Some people wish for non hallucinogenic 5-HT2A activation and that seems like a bizzarely detached from reality pipe dream. Like, sure, maybe it's technically possible, but are you going to find a compound that selective (likely not) and is it actually going to remove all psychomometic effects (lol no, how do you think these things work)?

There's always tradeoffs, it's like the weirdly detached desire to "reduce hallucinations" in language models but keep the same level of performance. Like, how do you think it's going to learn? You can't just magically make an unbiased perfect estimator with no variance for some limited capacity and data, your variance must live somewhere and in language models it tends to (generally) live in the higher level correlations between concepts.

A good dose of basic mathematics and information theory really could set these fields straight.

In any case, some of the future here looks exciting.

> psychedelics that don't activate 5-HT2B (associated strongly with aortic hypertrophy, i.e., your heart valves grow too big)

Do you have a source for that? I'm a cardiac sonographer and I've never heard of aortic hypertrophy.

I hadn’t heard of it either but it does seem like there are some studies. https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007/978-3-030-55920-5_... Cardiac valvulopathy is likely not an adverse effect to consider when psychedelics are used occasionally but this may be different for “microdosing” which involves low doses of psychedelics taken daily or multiple times per week.

  > Some people wish for non hallucinogenic 5-HT2A activation and that seems like a bizzarely detached from reality pipe dream.
This is actually an area of active research with promising developments, FWIW:

https://psychedelichealth.co.uk/2023/06/13/non-hallucinogeni...

Please read in context with the rest of the post! The idea is that it's very hard to raise the entropy of the brain without psychomometic effects as best as I understand, due to some fundamental informational qualities of those processes.

It's like looking for a flu medicine and judging it by if makes a fever go down because a fever is an arbitrary human-measurable metric. Has some quality of life impacts but is second player to the actual health impacts of conditions including fever (especially ones with long term impacts) and is extremely superficial.

I think that's the idea, maybe you can avoid visual cortex stuff but you can't magically get no psychomometic effects unless somehow the medication is perfectly shooting some kind of entropic gap.

I'm sure it's possible but I feel like it's much better as an accidentally discovered thing or a second or third generation medication thing, not a first priority, if that makes sense.

It's hard for me to understand what is meant by "similar characteristics to psilocybin" without hallucinogenic effects. Is the idea that the hyperreality of the subconscious / inner life would dominate conscious perception, but without the confusing or distressing associated overload of the physical senses, e.g. seeing or hearing things that aren't there?

It's almost impossible to imagine the one aspect of the dreamlike state dominating the mind without the disruption of the other, but even if the senses are perfectly unperturbed I would think the unconstrained and disordered psyche alone could be very upsetting or confusing.

> Curious about selectivity against 5-HT3 as well as the nausea can be a problem.

That would be a nice feature aiui; some people I know got into the habit of always taking psychedelics with ondansetron to try to avoid the nausea.

I could be just in a bitter mood, but somehow all of these articles decrying what a terrible job we did by shutting down psychedelic research in favor of a war on drugs... Don't make me feel optimistic that we've moved on or improved as a species.

Like, this attitude of "oh NOW we see, we were just dumb 40 years ago! Everything will be better because NOW we get it" strikes me as exactly the same attitude that caused this problem in the first place.

The regulators etc thought they knew better and "fixed" the errors of the past by starting the war on drugs.

I guess to me, like, just focus on science and principles like free speech and the funding of interesting hypotheses. I feel like we're just demonizing a new group here and not learning the lesson of: "stop demonizing."

Sure, it can feel that way if you believe that the war on drugs was started to keep people safe. However, if it was started as a means to persecute "undesireables" or political opponents the current trend seems less questionable.
I think we actually did learn things that we didn't know the first time around. We know that it's dangerous when influential researchers go around promoting psychedelics as a panacea like Timothy Leary did. The current wave of researchers seem to be much more responsible in emphasizing an evidence-based approach, the importance of screening for risk factors, and limiting the use of psychedelics to a controlled therapeutic setting.
I mean this sincerely: I think you’re right about this coming from your mood. You haven’t engaged with the actual argument much. It’s pretty reasonable to say things people did in the past were wrong. You can do things from first principles, but that also gets real abstract. Eventually, people need to be for or against specific policies.