If you are seriously concerned that marijuana will cause permanent brain damage after one use, then it is irrational to think that consuming psylocybin is a good idea.
That sounds like an extremely bizarre belief to have and definitely not one that I have expressed. Why on earth would I think that one use of maijuana would have a significant long term effect? I no more believe such a thing as believe one cigarette will cause lung cancer.
My main dispute was that your source for evidence was bad because it confused classes of users. I think you are also confused about this.
You have made an incorrect assumption about my beliefs. I supplied a basic reference to the well known consequences of heavy marijuana use from a random google from many similar references including wikipedia result because saying 'just f@#$ google it' would be rude. It wasn't an argument and if it was treated as such the flaw would be the 'appeal to common knowledge' conversation halter.
The study of psylocybin at Johns Hopkins involved giving middle aged, religious people psylocybin under carefully controlled settings.
My claim was (and is) 'it actually gives long term benefits in controlled circumstances'.
I suspect that similar results would have been observed if cannabis extract or THC compounds would have been administered as an alternative in the Johns Hopkins psylocybin study.
I don't think you have updated on the significant part of the findings of the research. A single use of the drug gave significant measurable benefits even months later. That is something that is basically unheard of in any drug, natural or pharmaceutically manufactured. There has never been any such finding for cannabis and expecting one makes a mockery of the prior.
I would confidently bet on the results of an experiment on a single use of marijuana vs a single use of psilocybin vs a control, all under positive and controlled circumstances. After three months had passed I would expect no difference between the marijuana group and the control group. I would expect positive improvement in the reported wellbeing and life satisfaction of the psilocybin group. That is absolutely fascinating and worth more research and possibly consideration by those who a comfortable tweaking their brains.
If the research subjects were instead administered psylocybin twice a week for a year, many of them would go crazy.
Probably. Don't do that.
If you are seriously concerned that marijuana will cause permanent brain damage after one use, then it is irrational to think that consuming psylocybin is a good idea.
Marijuana is something I would never consider for anything except possibly the traumatic experiences that I mentioned. In that case I would use it for much the same reason I would use radiation to treat cancer. Let it mess with the bad stuff in a controlled way. As a recreational drug it is of no use to me. I have dozens of compounds sitting on my shelves that would give a better experience with less negative side effects in either the short or long term. Marijuana is strictly inferior. Psylocybin on the other hand I may have a use for. It achieves something that no other substance I am aware of can manage.
Sorry if I've been overly argumentative, our posts and the karma points do not express the sentiment that our actual beliefs are actually probably really close. Again, I was mostly just annoyed about that list of side effects.
Human beings are all crazy. And if you tap on our brains just a little, we get so crazy that even other humans notice. Anosognosics are one of my favorite examples of this; people with right-hemisphere damage whose left arms become paralyzed, and who deny that their left arms are paralyzed, coming up with excuses whenever they're asked why they can't move their arms.
A truly wonderful form of brain damage - it disables your ability to notice or accept the brain damage. If you're told outright that your arm is paralyzed, you'll deny it. All the marvelous excuse-generating rationalization faculties of the brain will be mobilized to mask the damage from your own sight. As Yvain summarized:
I find it disturbing that the brain has such a simple macro for absolute denial that it can be invoked as a side effect of paralysis. That a single whack on the brain can both disable a left-side motor function, and disable our ability to recognize or accept the disability. Other forms of brain damage also seem to both cause insanity and disallow recognition of that insanity - for example, when people insist that their friends have been replaced by exact duplicates after damage to face-recognizing areas.
And it really makes you wonder...
...what if we all have some form of brain damage in common, so that none of us notice some simple and obvious fact? As blatant, perhaps, as our left arms being paralyzed? Every time this fact intrudes into our universe, we come up with some ridiculous excuse to dismiss it - as ridiculous as "It's my daughter's arm" - only there's no sane doctor watching to pursue the argument any further. (Would we all come up with the same excuse?)
If the "absolute denial macro" is that simple, and invoked that easily...
Now, suppose you built an AI. You wrote the source code yourself, and so far as you can tell by inspecting the AI's thought processes, it has no equivalent of the "absolute denial macro" - there's no point damage that could inflict on it the equivalent of anosognosia. It has redundant differently-architected systems, defending in depth against cognitive errors. If one system makes a mistake, two others will catch it. The AI has no functionality at all for deliberate rationalization, let alone the doublethink and denial-of-denial that characterizes anosognosics or humans thinking about politics. Inspecting the AI's thought processes seems to show that, in accordance with your design, the AI has no intention to deceive you, and an explicit goal of telling you the truth. And in your experience so far, the AI has been, inhumanly, well-calibrated; the AI has assigned 99% certainty on a couple of hundred occasions, and been wrong exactly twice that you know of.
Arguably, you now have far better reason to trust what the AI says to you, than to trust your own thoughts.
And now the AI tells you that it's 99.9% sure - having seen it with its own cameras, and confirmed from a hundred other sources - even though (it thinks) the human brain is built to invoke the absolute denial macro on it - that...
...what?
What's the craziest thing the AI could tell you, such that you would be willing to believe that the AI was the sane one?
(Some of my own answers appear in the comments.)