All of secondaccount314's Comments + Replies

Well, yes, people feel safe doing things that didn't hurt them yet, and that is sometimes how they get hurt. It even makes sense from certain perspective: if the thing you randomly chose is better than average (evidence: you didn't get hurt yet), it is on average better to keep doing that, rather than to randomly choose something else. But that is a very low bar. You can get much better estimates if you look at your reference group. How many ping-pong players get hurt per year? Suppose you had 10 friends at school that liked to play ping-pong. Now that you try to contact them a few years later, you find out that 4 of them are dead, because the ping-pong ball crushed their brain, or something like that. It would probably scare me so much that I would stop... even if nothing bad happened to me yet. Even if I could make an excuse like "they probably held the racket wrong, that could never happen to me". Similarly, if I knew in person someone who died in a plane crash, especially multiple people at different crashed planes, I would probably stop using planes, even if one never crashed with me (which is the evidence I cannot get without also getting hurt). What is the right reference group for drug use? When people say "I read a research, and it showed...", they kinda imply that the participants in the research are their reference group. Which is nonsense in my opinion. Participants in a research are probably getting their drugs from a reliable source, carefully measured, probably have their health checked, and are not subsequently encouraged by the organizers to go try also something else. This is not what will happen to you, if you start experimenting with whatever seems safe after reading some research online. (By the way, are we going to "trust the Science" on safety of drugs? What happened to the usual skepticism and comments about replication crisis?) So who is your reference group? Rationalists who use drugs? Here, I find it important to openly push back aga

This is true for most sex-related crimes, I think.

Sounds like Aella. I remember reading her profile. Tapping the untapped market in a certain social circle. Not saying I've not seen similar patterns in the computer labs, but she sounds like she's a smart woman. Bravo

Polyamory is ethically superior to enforced monogamy rooted in jealousy, not to voluntarily chosen monogamy as an expression of devotion in the presence of emotional maturity and the ability to choose compersion instead. As for the psychedelics one, I agree wholeheartedly.

ooh those are spicy. I'm not sure I agree about ethical superiority of poly; I think it's perfectly reasonable for two people to reflectively consider how many emotional bonds their brain would be best shaped by, and then seek to have that many. But I also think a lot of people lie to themselves about it due to feeling that poly is morally unacceptable, or due to not filtering their partners on it and ending up wanting to have an open (intermittently more than two) or poly (durably more than two) relationship in a context where they've claimed they want to have and agreed to only have the pair. re psychedelics, I agree that it can be used well, but I'd caution that they are not a generally safe toy. While they're safer than is generally accepted right now in many ways, MDMA in particular is able to be quite chemically injurious, and can be habit forming or cause depression if one doesn't know the limits and safety practices going in. many psychedelics can degrade agency, causing the person to have less opportunity through their lifespan to experience the awe, fun, beauty, or learning of psychedelics because of the learning it induces causing their skills to degrade; this is hardly the only possible outcome, and those who report that the good experience helped their life are probably often correct, but it's easy for the constant surprising beauty feeling to be confused for constant true insight. Babble needs to be paired with prune or some of the apparent beauty will turn out to have been misunderstanding. Also, it's very important to remember that all illegal drugs are potentially quite deadly, and side effects should be considered carefully.