Because this is an HBD-centric blog, I have maps:
Personally, I think he looks more French, eg Childeric II or Henry I–for a pig.
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The comments on Slate Star Codex’s recent post, “Why Were Early Psychedelicists so Weird?” contain a fair number of stories along the lines of “I took LSD/shrooms/other illegal drugs and had interesting, positive effects,” and a few stories along the lines of “I knew a guy who tried LSD and it fried his brain and turned him into a drooling idiot.”
Normally, I think it best to rate “I did X”-style testimony more highly than “I knew a guy who did X.” In this case, however, I want to urge caution, because there is an obvious selection bias in the kinds of stories you are going to hear: drooling idiots are bad at writing.
The people whose brains got fried on illegal drugs do not have the ability to get on the internet and write coherent, entertaining posts on the subject, and they certainly do not have the IQ points left to be part of the regular readership/commentariat on Scott’s blog. In fact, they aren’t writing a whole lot of anything. Which means that if you are reading about LSD-experiences in the comments section of Scot’s blog, you are only going to read stories from people who are still mentally with it, or people warning that a bad thing happened to a guy they knew.
I have no idea what % of people who try LSD end up okay, better, or worse afterwards, but for the sake of argument, let’s assume that 50% are fine-to-better and 50% end up in droolsville. The 50% who are fine go post on Scott’s blog, and the 50% who are not fine never show up because they can’t type anymore, except as cautionary tales from the few guys who know the details about a former friend’s illegal activities.
Maybe LSD researchers can tell you what percentage of people fry their brains on it, shrooms, or other psychedelics. But you certainly can’t make any good estimation based on a biased sample like this–so don’t.
And yes, I know, everyone with positive stories would probably say that the key is to be very careful about how much you use, purity, and allowing enough time between uses. But the people who fried their brains probably thought that, too.
I am not saying that these drugs cannot possibly have any positive medical uses. I am saying that you should avoid using biased datasets when formulating any theories on the matter.
Watching the liberals lose their shit over the Angry Birds Movie has been rather entertaining and proof of just how absurdly out of touch with reality they’ve become.
The movie is limited by the game’s single conceit: the pigs stole the birds’ eggs, and the birds are flinging themselves at the pigs to get back the eggs. You can’t have reconciliation between the pigs and birds because, as is obvious if you’ve played the game, the pigs steal those eggs over and over.
Critically, the pigs are not refugees or economic migrants seeking a better life. They are invaders stealing the birds’ eggs. Liberals can no longer distinguish between the two. They are not freaking out over the birds attacking a group of peaceful refugees, but over the birds defending themselves against actual invaders.
The right of self-defense against people who attacked you unprovoked is not even right-wing; it is accepted by almost all moralists and is about as mainstream a view as you can find. I can understand the left’s humanitarian logic for accepting refugees/economic migrants, but to toss out the right to self-defense is just plain delusional.
(Comment originally posted in reaction to Gregory Hood’s Review of the Angry Birds Movie.)