Ask A Genius 794: LSD, SAT, Substance Use and Misuse
Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen and Rick Rosner
Publication (Outlet/Website): Ask A Genius
Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2022/09/18
[Recording Start]
Scott Douglas Jacobsen: I started doing this series on substance use and misuse; others would say substance use and abuse. However you might use the terminology this brought to mind something that you’ve talked about as a one-off on using LSD for a second attempt at the SAT and still scoring very high on the older SAT in the upper 1500s.
Rick Rosner: I did upper 1500 even.
Jacobsen: You did?
Rosner: Yeah.
Jacobsen: Okay. So you scored 1500 even.
Rosner: Which was really good back then when it was harder to get into the 1500s. They made the SAT easier; they’ve increased the standard deviation basically. So more people got perfect scores which makes sense in terms of differentiating kind of in the… really you want to differentiate among most of the people instead of making it so hard that you’re differentiating among the top one-third of one percent and also it makes people feel better about themselves so they probably feel better about the SAT and the SAT is kind of bullshit anyway.
Jacobsen: Regardless, this brought to mind the series that I’m doing which came from an article I wrote over more than two years ago on a Christian recovery center. The son of the founders sent me the longest email I’ve ever received; it was ten thousand words. I responded relatively quickly and this sparked conversation meeting with one of his workers in a way or stats organizations workers for coffee for about two and a half hours. This ended up starting a series called Portraits in Substance Misuse and Use on In-sight publishing. So I want to ask you more generally not about some intractable issues with substance misuse in the United States.
Rosner: No, you started our discussion by talking about this and I said I don’t know anything particular about substance use and abuse but I thought it brought up the subject of intractability in general.
Jacobsen: Yeah. Okay, let’s start on the social issues there for that one then. What do you think about things that are deemed intractable or that seems intractable?
Rosner: All right, here’s the deal. People like to think of themselves as masters of their own destiny and that’s both true and not true. We can choose what we’re going to do, it’s not exactly free will but it’s informed will. We can figure out within reason what we should do and maybe what we shouldn’t do and then either choose the best way to go or succumb to temptation but there are constraints on our choosing our own destiny. One is that throughout history humans have died a lot. It’s hard to follow your destiny if you’re dead by 28. It’s hard to follow your destiny if you get embroiled in wars. Humans probably have more agency now than they did 200 years ago because we live longer, we have access to more information, there’s more freedom in the world on average. So stuff is still shitty for huge numbers of people in the world but probably on average and just in the aggregate numbers.
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More people in the world have freedom than ever before because there are eight billion of us and maybe only two billion have serious constraints on their freedom. We have an average of 80 years to pursue our destinies but there are new forces that constrain us. And you can see some of those things in America where one-third of American adults are or are obese which is very overweight, another third are just overweight which suggests that we don’t have control over our eating behavior on average that food is inexpensive and increasingly delicious. So we can’t resist it and so that’s an area where we’ve lost control and for most people being overweight, if you consider that a problem, is a problem that they won’t solve. Most people who are overweight are going to stay overweight. So that suggests a certain amount of intractability. We’re not resistant to data. We’re increasingly not resistant to the information that we absorb via social media. We get increasingly personalized information; we get increasingly sophisticated information that’s increasingly able to manipulate us. So, being resistant to being manipulated and by information is increasingly intractable.
You talked about drugs. The Fentanyl that’s coming into the country is 100 times more potent than heroin. So if people put Fentanyl in your drugs, you’re likely to die because most people can’t handle a dose of heroin times a hundred. If you’re lucky somebody’s there and can get you help, get you shot up with that stuff that brings you back. Anyway, being resistant to drugs, getting off of drugs, surviving a drug habit is an increasingly intractable problem and just following your own destiny as someone who who’s a member of the most computationally powerful, the most powerful thinkers… all of human civilization, humans have been the smartest beings on the planet and if you consider that part of having a destiny, that’s going away. Unaugmented humans will be increasingly at the mercy of more powerful and sophisticated thinking entities and will be pushed around by them and manipulated. And that’s a very intractable problem because the increasing power of information processing entities is not going to stop. So the only way to keep up with it, if you want to be a Colossus to stride the world is to augment oneself or to be lucky enough to be one of the newer Alpha thinkers in the world. So there have always been constraints on humans trying to be masters of their own lives but the nature of intractable obstacles to that is rapidly changing.
[Recording End]
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