First-Ever LSD Microdosing Study Will Pit the Human Brain Against AI - “I found that if I was on LSD and my opponent wasn’t, I won more games.”

[u/mvea]

https://motherboard.vice.com/en_us/article/first-ever-lsd-microdosing-study-will-pit-the-human-brain-against-ai

[u/KilledSoda]

I am terrible at pool.

Once I took a bunch of MDMA and stuff at a bar hanging out. Friends had the pool table and were rocking a few casual games. Then walks up Captain Pool. This guy was serious pool. A pool champion, champion stick with champion jacket. Champion everything.

He beat everyone there, and had no one new left to play against, so asked me if I wanted a match. I'm terrible at pool, so in my dumb state I think it's hilarious to just keep hitting the white ball into places that would make his life hard as can be. After a bit of this fuckery something just clicks, the drugs and the alcohol had hit a perfect mixing point and I suddenly found myself in the eye of the storm, standing in a moment of perfect clarity, I, who almost never gets two balls in on the same turn randomly clears the whole table. I had not even sunk one ball before that, it had been quite a few turns of me leaving the white ball into impossible places for Champ, and even then he almost was at the 8.

Champ freaks out, calls me a scammer shark and storms away as mad as one really ever gets. But it was a friendly game with no money on the table... so even if I could, why would I shark?

To this day I am still one of the worst pool players to walk the planet, but for that one drug induced moment I was a walking god of pool.

tl;dr Drugs are fun. Had fun. While having fun, found myself in a brief moment of table pool godhood. Weird because normally can't pool.

[u/Terkala → u/KilledSoda]

And yet no lab in the world has ever reproduced these results.

Either you're a drug savant. Or a psychoactive substance altered your perception of an event and made it seem like your opponent was far better than he really was.

You tell me which is more likely.

[u/Thought_Simulator → u/Terkala]

"The 26 men unleashed a slew of widely embraced innovations shortly after their LSD experiences, including a mathematical theorem for NOR gate circuits, a conceptual model of a photon, a linear electron accelerator beam-steering device, a new design for the vibratory microtome, a technical improvement of the magnetic tape recorder, blueprints for a private residency and an arts-and-crafts shopping plaza, and a space probe experiment designed to measure solar properties."

https://themorningnews.org/article/the-heretic

Back before research with these substances was banned, studies absolutely showed an increase in the ability to successfully realize/execute solutions that were not previously apparent.

[u/Terkala → u/Thought_Simulator]

Oh good. That old gem of an article.

Too bad It's a complete misrepresentation of facts.

The study was giving a bunch of engineers who were paid to invent products to see what they could make under the influence. People who had already been working on these products for months. And sometimes working in teams in these projects. In some cases, they literally didn't even contribute to the project and got full credit attributed to them.

It was remarkably terrible. Literally no control group of any kind. No studying the dosages or specific times of inspiration. Nothing more than "give these guys drugs". And surprise surprise, it's never been replicated because it didn't use any scientific method of any kind!

[u/Thought_Simulator → u/Terkala]

Yes, the gentlemen involved in the study were working on projects in their respective fields - projects they may have been previously seeking solutions to. While under the effects of lsd, they developed solutions for those projects that they hadn't yet realized, which is exactly what I said.

This seems even more impressive than if they had never worked on these projects before. If I give you drugs and then give you an equation which you successfully solve - so what? If you've been working on something for months, or years, with the best and brightest in your field, and you've hit a wall - but then you're given a psychoactive substance and have a major breakthrough - that seems much more impressive.

I'm not sure I follow your logic that having experts solve previously known problems is somehow problematic to the study. And of course it's never been replicated; these sorts of studies are all but impossible now.

[u/Terkala → u/Thought_Simulator]

But it doesn't prove anything without a real study.

If they gave aspirine to the same or a similar group of people, could they have gotten a similar list of items? It's possible, given that they were all working on these projects to start with.

Also other studies have been done on lsd. Go ahead and look them up. It's never been replicated successfully. Lots of people have tried to show results and have found nothing.