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wouldbecouldbetoday at 2:21 PM2 repliesview on HN

When you take it, you understand, that if taken with the right approach it can lead to profound insights in changing your life and the effects described: helping with depression, addiction and accepting death are not far fetched at all. Yet it can also, if not guided or done on someone with anxiety have the opposite effect.

The more biological effects I agreed are not conclusion that can be drawn from that.


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D-Machinetoday at 3:09 PM

Right, when you take it, it becomes clear it just injects salience / profundity / meaning into whatever you happen to be focused on or have on your mind (EDIT: mostly this is the main effect, but there can be novel perspectives / insights, and other audio-visual changes, but IMO it is the felt meaning that primarily drives the more credulous claims). Without adequate preparation, this is likely to be worthless in most cases, harmful in other cases, and helpful in some again. However, not all causes of depression or addiction are about accepting death, or a salience / meaning problem, and even when that kind of issue is involved, a momentary experience of profound meaning is NOT actually necessarily transformative either (i.e. you can and in fact must still choose how to interpret that experience, once out of it).

So it would actually be very surprising if it was just a clear net positive overall

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ozgrakkurttoday at 2:37 PM

> When you take it, you understand

To be fair, this is not how medical research is done.

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