psychedelics do have enormous relevance to EA, it’s rather surprising there isn’t more happening there
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other EA peeps who have written about this: , , ,
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I wonder if the problem is that EAs are likely either very shortterm focused (global health interventions) or longtermist (eg make lightcone happy) and psychedelics fall in the middle somewhere
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Other hypothesis is that qualia changes are very very hard to describe in language (eg hard to truly describe even depression to someone that hasn’t been depressed, nevermind psychedelics) and so it’s a meme that’s less likely to spread in such a thinky/language heavy ecosystem
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Relatedly, slightly spicy take but I don’t think most EAs know what really happy people are like and what they feel, bc they don’t exist in the ea community. I think ea’s largely literally picture smiling
Compared to say the deep investigations into valence has done
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I think this is wrong!
I think EA attracts abnormal people and that includes abnormally happy people.
2-3 names come to mind from the community (incl. !) and I'd count myself as unusually content, though not experiencing extreme joy/bliss a lot.
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I think it's easier than most think for people to experience richly - even if they're not Anders -and most EAs haven't figured that out due to worrisome memeplexes and incentives. The exceptions seem mostly to have gotten lucky, but many more could be with marginal effort.
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“most EAs haven't figured that out due to worrisome memeplexes and incentives”
per ’s q, what’s the evidence for this? fine if it’s just an impression or anecdata, but I’d want to hear your evidence
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Replying to @AaronGertler @nickcammarata and 8 others
I run a big polling group for the community. Is there a question I could ask that would get to the heart of whether people are "really happy"?
(When I think of all the people I've worked with in EA, most of them seem really happy in a way that has nothing to do with smiling.)
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I've lived with various EAs and done 4 years of community building in CH. Comparing to my non-EA friends, EAs are much more risk averse, conflict averse and fine with just being content. Less drawn to extreme experiences, more tolerant of depression-like states as a constant.
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the entire EA memeplex is fundamentally based on guilt about not being a better person and doing more for the world. there's a reason peter singer's child-in-a-pond argument is central. people attracted to that memeplex are ime usually a specific recognizable flavor of neurotic