Murtaza Amin

4-AcO-DMT and most other psychedelics also last on the order of 8 hours (or more), while inhaled / injected DMT lasts ~20 minutes.

Normally, ingested DMT has no pharmacological activity because monoamine oxidase (MAO) in the body will break it down before it has any effect. The likely reason is that DMT is endogenous.

Ayahuasca is an ingested DMT extract that also contains a natural MAO-inhibitor. ("Pharmahuasca" is an analogue of it that uses ingestion of purified DMT plus an MAO-inhibitor in pill form).

A sub-impairment dose of DMT sounds like the least invasive treatment for this in particular.

I completely agree that everyone has a right to normalcy.

However, "The Sentinelese" and "Sentinelese Culture" are not moral patients, in my opinion. The individuals are. Each person has the right to choose for themselves how they would live, given adequate information.

I believe that holds true under current capabilities also, but there's no way to give each Sentinelese person a choice like that without immediate disruption that is likely to make their lives worse.

If future technological capabilities allow wider society to give each Sentinelese person an informed choice of how they should live without likely bad effects, that is what I consider the best path.

I've heard enlightenment described as separating oneself from a mindset you are fused with.

An analogy I've seen is when you're so immersed in a video game or story that you're invested and emotionally involved as if it were real. But then you take a step back, realize that it's not your entire existence, and its salience / importance goes back to a reasonable baseline for fiction. The deep emotional investment is gone though you may still appreciate the story.

Is that analogy accurate in your opinion? Am I mischaracterizing it?

I agree that modern AIs would pass the Eliza test as you define it, particularly if given the right prompt. What is the value of the test though? It seems like it would be saturated as a benchmark, and also take a long time to administer.

I don't necessarily know the answer, but I don't find any of the explanations compelling. In my experience as a manager of ~10 employees, some of whom are young knowledge workers:

1. The knowledge workers reporting to me and also on my broader team are putting in long hours, doing grunt work in the lab, developing scientific processes, and writing them up. This is in R&D, where the value comes from expected value of future products.
2. Some people are less than fully utilized, but between 25% and 75% utilization at worst, and varying from week to week. Having

Thanks for writing this! It was a good read, and it helped me see some concepts more clearly, particularly anxiety.

That said, I have a couple of notes:

• The definitions of jealousy and envy you use are different from the ones I've encountered in most places.
  • Envy: You want what someone else has. If you can't have, it you resent them. Most often applies to material things or status.
  • Jealousy: You're worried someone will take something that you have or think you deserve. You take actions to guard that thing (often applies to relationships).
• I think the concept of

Haplodiploidy in hymenopterans (ants and wasps) has a huge impact on eusociality: All daughters of the queen get half their genes from their father's entire genome (the father's sperm are all identical), which means they share 75% of their genes with their sisters rather than the 50% in others like termites. For this reason, Eusociality has evolved independently multiple times in hymenopterans.

I would speculate that the colony is more cohesive for this reason, and this may have an impact on why ants are so successful in so many niches.

Termites, on the other hand, have one key thing going for them: the ability to digest wood. This allows them to fill their specific niche well.

By 'best they can' I didn't necessarily mean 'self-actualize' or 'contribute as a net positive' but more like 'navigate the difficult demands of life.'

By that understanding, I think most people I encounter fit this description.

Apologies for the imprecision.

The disgust/disappointment you describe sounds to me like contempt. In this context the opposite of contempt  is compassion, which I would consider the point of empathizing with someone.

In the past, I'd feel the same kind of contempt when observing people demonstrating lack of skill in an area I had ability in, particularly when their lack would impact me in a (slightly) negative manner. That changed when I learned to have more compassion for myself despite my own weaknesses. Once I did that, the feelings of contempt for others seemed to diminish sign... (read more)

In my experience, that's pretty much what 5-HT2A agonists (hallucinogens) do but to a stronger extent: You see peripherally a curled leaf on the ground, and perceive it as a snake before you take a closer look, or you see patterns on a marbled tile, and the exact positions of the shapes slowly wobble.

My understanding is that this is because you assign a lower confidence to your visual inputs than usual, and a higher confidence to your priors / the part of your brain that in-paints visual details for you.

How might someone figure out what their blind spot (A or B) is and overcome it?

Federal highway officials hate us, tell local and state officials they must stop using humor and pop culture references on their road safety signs because they might ‘distract.’ That’s the point. You get people to pay attention. Also you brighten up their day. I sincerely despise people who issue rules like this. How do we fight back?

I strongly agree with the highway officials here. These are highway signs meant to warn of traffic problems, altered commute times, or potential hazards. Most of the time they are blank or (at least my area) they give co... (read more)

With reinvested dividends and rising price, it simply grew to become one of my bigger positions. I invested in a variety of industries and this is how it ended up. I did consciously increase my positions in NVDA, MSFT, TQQQ, and GOOG (Google) in light of recent AI advances though.

I'm the OP of that bigfoot discussion on r/ssc. My views haven't substantially changed on that subject.

I agree with the great-grandparent that aliens being real is an enormously bigger change from the standard worldview than bigfoot being real.

I give < 10% likelihood to these UAPs being genuine aliens as stereotypically imagined, and < 50% likelihood of being some significant scientific update (e.g. weather phenomenon, spoofing technology).

However, assuming actual aliens in spaceships were here and trying halfheartedly to hide from us, I would expect... (read more)

It's discussed in the Reddit comments, if you want more details, but briefly: A rare species with a long life might leave on the order of ~100 dead a year. If each corpse has, say 1e-5 chance (low but still plausible number) of being found by a person, then it could take a while.

I don't know of any claim that they would take care of their dead, but I don't see that as implausible.

If they exist, then they would have crossed the Bering land bridge at the same time as humans. They would never have lived anywhere without a human presence. And yes, similar sightings are known from across Asia also.

I wouldn't say I know it to be true, but read and reviewed books by experts (anthropologists, special effects experts, pro and con) and ended up concluding that bigfoot probably exists (~75%).

I wrote up my rationale in r/slatestarcodex a year or so ago:

link

Some more thoughts pertaining to limits of detection:

The Milky Way weighs 5.8e11 times M*, which itself is 2e30kg. Total mass of the galaxy = 1.2e42kg.

If all that mass were converted to energy with perfect efficiency, say via black hole evaporation, or annihilation with antimatter, then that's a total of 1.0e59 joules.

That many joules over 5 billion years (1.5e17 s) is a power of 7e41 watts. At a radius of 7 billion light years (6.6e25m), that's an energy flux of 1.3e-11 W/(m*m).

The sun puts out about 1400 W/(m*m)at our distance. So the sun would... (read more)