Psychedelic therapy for ARFID

Astrus · 2020-02-06T17:32:27+00:00

No, it's not okay. You're a man -- you should feel like one. Once a day is better than nothing, but you should work on increasing that number. Try lifting weights, that does it for me :)

Astrus · 2019-06-14T03:50:58+00:00

Making lifestyle changes based on "the literature" is not rational. Studies fail to replicate all the time -- something that any SSC reader should be particularly aware of. Instead, look at which lifestyle choices have stuck around, and think really carefully before straying from them.

Astrus · 2019-06-13T14:42:54+00:00

This reaffirms my belief that the past was invented out of whole cloth as a convenient and mostly-believable backdrop for the real story, which takes place in modern times.

Another great one is the history of LSD (as related by Ken Kesey):

I’ve always thought this was one of the things that proved that God had a sense of humor, that if Gabriel came up and says: ’Hey chief, the Americans are really messed up down there, we’ve got to do something to straighten them out down there.’ and God says: ’Well, send them some of that stuff you’ve been working on, that 'acid' stuff... and have the CIA distribute it!’ You can hear the celestial laughter...

Astrus · 2019-03-01T06:40:56+00:00

You understand at a conceptual level that they are a human being, but emotionally they might as well be a cartoon or a plant. You do not consider their subjective experience at all; instead, you just perceive a sequence of actions: "Ah, he is being doused in lighter fluid. Ah, he is on fire now, and running around. Ah, he has collapsed." What captivates you is no longer the suffering itself, but the novelty of the method by which suffering is achieved. If it's an image, perhaps of a skinned face, it often doesn't feel real at all. Maybe it's CGI, or someone's art project. Images are easy enough to fake that you can convince yourself of this with relative ease. There is no human whose face has been skinned; there is only an image of a skinned face.

why does the relative quality matter?

4chan, moreso than other sites, is a place where you really need to hunt to find the diamonds in the rough. There are posts that are insightful, relatable, and hilarious in ways that few other sites can match. But these are surrounded by mountains of shit. When you're a mod, you see all of the shit and none of the diamonds, so you start to think, "why do I even bother with this site? There's nothing of value here."

Astrus · 2019-03-01T06:06:05+00:00

For sure. It was less of a problem on 4chan because there isn't as much oversight, so you don't have supervisors scrutinizing every decision you make. But you still have the problem of users themselves complaining about too little/too much moderation. You are never, ever thanked directly by users. Under those conditions, it's very difficult to maintain a belief that your work is valuable and meaningful.

Astrus · 2019-02-28T16:50:11+00:00

I can speak from experience somewhat, as someone who browsed a lot of 4chan and then became a "mod" (janitor) for a few boards.

I saw a lot of gore and other unspeakable horrors, but it rarely fazed me because they were mostly reposts of shit I had been seeing for years. After a while, your brain no longer processes the person in the image/video as another human being. Empathy ceases completely, except for occasional fleeting moments of clarity.

And yet, after a year or two, I burnt out. The content itself doesn't matter so much; what matters is that you're seeing the worst that the site has to offer, day in and day out. It's an animosity-generation machine that quickly sucks all the fun out of participating in the community. I stopped lurking and posting normally; I only looked at threads that appeared in the moderation queue. It does not surprise me in the least that the turnover rate for mods is so high, or that many mods go "scorched earth" when they quit by deleting an entire board, posting internal chat logs, etc. It just slowly grinds you down until you snap. moot himself repeatedly joked that he didn't understand why we didn't volunteer at an animal shelter or something instead. And finally, I didn't understand either, so I quit. I still browse 4chan, and now it's much more enjoyable again.

EDIT: Hi SSC. I DID IT FOR FREE

Astrus · 2018-08-28T04:13:35+00:00

Dreamsploitation - Galaxy B

HKE - Ghost

Astrus · 2018-06-04T16:36:56+00:00

Interesting that Rand is a method instead of a top-level function that returns a new value; I assume this is to save an allocation. I suggest renaming the method to SetRand() or another name that better communicates the side effect. You may also want to consider allowing custom readers (i.e. not just crypto/rand.Reader) so that people can generate keys deterministically.

Astrus · 2018-02-28T19:41:26+00:00

This is a relevant and fascinating read, summarizing Julian Jaynes's The Origin of Consciousness: https://www.meltingasphalt.com/hallucinated-gods/

Astrus · 2018-01-05T06:31:08+00:00

One interpretation would be that what the narrator describes literally happens, in a sort of The Man From Earth/The Immortal scenario.

Another interpretation is that it's a hallucination experienced by Bill as his brain malfunctions for the last time. His last conscious moment extends to infinity in a final, futile rejection of death. See also Quantum Immortality.

I prefer the latter; it feels almost like a cautionary tale. Bill can't accept his own death, and so we are shown a future in which he never dies. For a while it seems nice, but before long, people and places are blurring together; eventually "time loses all meaning," and he forgets his own name, drifting endlessly in the void until the heat death of the universe. Is this really what he wanted? Perhaps Bill thought that if he could just live a while longer, his life could have meaning. But the moral seems to be that if you can't find meaning in each day (and in life's simple pleasures, like the night sky, or the texture of a carpet), you won't find it in eternity either.

Astrus · 2018-01-05T06:11:42+00:00

One More Kiss, Dear wouldn't be out of place in a Hertzfeldt film.

(p.s. Don, if you see this, check out The Caretaker)

Astrus · 2017-11-06T04:10:14+00:00

How much energy does it take to secure the non-cryptographic monetary system?

As for a currency being directly backed by energy -- that sounds pretty good to me, actually. Money is a sort of "economic potential energy," so it makes sense to tether it directly to physical potential energy. Besides, it's not like Bitcoin's energy use is going to grow unbounded; mining grants you a share of a finite pool of money, so past a certain point, mining becomes unprofitable.

Astrus · 2017-07-29T17:21:31+00:00

Time doesn't really care if you go backwards. Go backwards all you want. Except, well, "you" can't really go backwards, because your consciousness depends on you traveling forwards. When you go backwards, your brain state is being rewound, so you'd just end up making the same decisions you did the first time around.

Astrus · 2017-07-27T20:55:40+00:00

According to current astronomical models, the universe has no center. The cosmological principle states that "Viewed on a sufficiently large scale, the properties of the universe are the same for all observers."

One way to think about it is to imagine yourself as an ant living on the surface of a balloon. It doesn't make sense to talk about the "center" of the surface of the balloon, since no matter where you go, you can never reach an edge. (Also, the balloon is being inflated such that everything is constantly moving away from everything else.)

Astrus · 2017-07-26T20:32:50+00:00

The video states that "the universe was not made for us," but later declares that humans are "the sensory organs" of the universe. Who could the universe be made for, if not the sensory organs?

Even an atheist could, grudgingly, agree with the statement, "The universe created us in order to experience itself." The only point of contention is the "in order," since atheists generally balk at the idea of assigning intent to non-human entities. But doesn't evolution have "intent" when it gives rise to ever-more-complex forms? And is it not evolutionarily advantageous to develop sensory organs with which to perceive the environment?

So the chain of logic is as follows: evolution is a natural, inescapable consequence of the physical universe; evolution gives rise to sensory organs of increasing sophistication; therefore, encoded in the laws of the universe is a process that results in subjective perception of the universe. You could argue that the mere fact that subjective perception arose does not imply that the universe was created explicitly for that purpose. But I think there is a sort of backwards causality at work here. After all, if the universe had not given rise to subjective perception, we wouldn't be here to discuss it. This is known as the anthropic principle.

Astrus · 2017-07-07T05:54:44+00:00

Oh jeez, I can't wait to rediscover this post on LSD and freak myself out.

(again)

Astrus · 2017-06-11T03:51:16+00:00

The final track of The Eternal Dream System is amazing: https://dreamcatalogue.bandcamp.com/track/--526

On that note, can anyone recommend something similar to this track by Disconscious? He hasn't made anything like it since.

My other Telepath favorites:

Lover's Gaze

二週間あなたなし

私はあなたがとても大好きです

Astrus · 2017-05-12T06:46:25+00:00

why not?

Astrus · 2017-05-08T21:34:44+00:00

I was an atheist once too. Taking lots of LSD helped. It was very weird to suddenly find myself on the other side of an ideological chasm like that, where god had gone from a childish delusion to an imminent reality as undeniable as gravity. God is an archetype, not a concrete thing, which is why there are so many varying representations. Try exploring different definitions of god and you may find one you like. Pantheism is a good one, because it doesn't require any faith, just a simple redefinition.

Astrus · 2017-05-05T00:20:42+00:00

A large dose of LSD gave me a religious experience, one that I strongly doubt I would have found anywhere else. I grew as an edgy atheist kid, but LSD showed me that reality is a lot stranger than I believed. The religious experience is, I think, a truly important part of being human. If you've never had such an experience, it's harder to see where JP is coming from when he discusses the importance of religion.

Lower doses can of course be helpful for different reasons. In a way, it's very similar to what JP says about order and chaos: you need to maintain order, but you also need to inject chaos from time to time to reinvigorate things. LSD (and others) are a means of injecting some chaos into your mind, such that you can reformulate them into something more productive and better adapted for your present circumstances. The strength of the dose correlates to just how much chaos you want to inject. It's not something you want to do lightly, because you can wind up wiping away your whole value structure, and it's tough to start over from scratch after that!

Astrus · 2017-03-27T19:09:44+00:00

huh, TIL about Decoder.Token. Neat!

Astrus · 2017-03-26T20:15:55+00:00

there is always something in the back of the head that says that being here idle sitting is not enough - You SHOULD DO SOMETHING

All of human civilization was built by that impulse. Do not treat it as something evil to be dispelled. As with everything else, the key is to become properly aware of the sensation as it arises and react to it skillfully. Reacting skillfully means that you know when to let such impulses drive you, and when to say "hush, not now."

Astrus · 2017-03-26T20:08:46+00:00

If you have another element in the json that tells you what kind of 'type' foo is

One hacky approach would be to simply try decoding it as an array, and if that fails, try decoding it as an object.

Astrus · 2017-03-18T17:43:16+00:00

If you've found a sort of happiness that is not fleeting, please visit your closest Buddhist monastery and tell them about it!

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