Side-note: this is a known failure mode of crowds that use psychedelics for spiritual growth. Sure, don’t trust everything your brain says on (or after!) psychedelics, but be especially careful of trusting a subculture that is “on” psychedelics. From a thousand miles away I can’t say for sure but it sounds like psychedelic drugs and their consequences are a load-bearing part, if not the center of this story. - PM_ME_UR_OBSIDIAN, comment to r/SlateStarCodex, 2022 old.reddit.com/…/my_experience_at_and_around_miri…

While we will never know the details until someone publishes a memoir, people in Bay Area LessWrong talk a lot about psychedelics. They were popular in the 1960s counterculture (there was a LSD-and-marijuana fuelled attempt to levitate the Pentagon in 1967). This is a jury-rigged substitute for the on-the-ground reporting, social history, and ethnography which we desperately need. The first part covers events up to 2018, when the movement and movement leaders were mostly sympathetic to better living through chemistry.

Some people who talk about psychedelics might mean LSD and related hallucinogens, others might include other ‘hippie drugs’ like marijuana. Many of my sources are either casual posts or memories of traumatic experiences hazed by substances and emotional and sexual abuse, so may not be precise and accurate.

The following quotes many posts by Scott Alexander. To my knowledge, he has never publicly encouraged anyone to take a controlled substance without a proscription, and never stated that he himself has used such substances. It might be possible to find similar posts on LessWrong and the parties’ Tumblr blogs but I only have so much time.

Early Posts 2011-2015

  • 2011: A Shannon F., who lived with her husband, the cofounder of the New York chapter of Less Wrong, and his wife, expresses desire to cut down on substance use:

If I cut down to once/week of pot smoking with possibly the occasional hallucinogen if I can get them working, then that’s only 1-2 nights of altered state/week,” choiceful.livejournal.com/970554.html as quoted at BetaBeat.com (the exact link to the LiveJournal is wrong).

F. and her housemates had multiple connections to Peter Thiel. F. at one time dated Yudkowsky. Her Livejournal is not fully archived but it has a “drugs” tag. My understanding is that the most popular hallucinogens in the US are magic mushrooms and psychedelics. Shannon F. was an Internal Family Systems life coach (an interest she shared with Andrew Critch at CFAR) and one of her partners was a libertarian Seasteader. One of her gurus told her she should hire servants and make sure she did not overpay (“So cool…”, Nov. 15, 2012"). It sounds like a standard take-my-expensive-classes-and-you-will-get-rich grift.

  • September 2012 to March 2013: gwern experiments on himself with LSD microdoses later written up gwern.net/lsd-microdosing
  • 30 September 2013: Scott Alexander posts Links for Octember. One paragraph is an intrigued but gently skeptical note on psychedelic therapy. David Gerard is in the comments.

Yet another article on the amazing therapeutic and nootropic promise of LSD. But this one has a twist – the idea of LSD micro-dosing! Take a tiny fraction of a regular dose – they suggest – and instead of merging with the Universal Fractal Consciousness, you just feel a little better, calmer, more productive, and more “in tune” during your day. A random person on Reddit reports success, and that’s good enough for me. Too bad I (SlateScott) am in a position of responsibility where I have to serve as a Positive Role Model for others and so probably shouldn’t try it.

He wrote this about the time he moved from the Bay Area to the Chicago area for medical residency.

  • 2014: while working as a camgirl in Masschusetts, Aella experiments with LSD (10 Months of Acid, 2016). She later says she became addicted so her doses were probably not micro- or not all LSD (her education ended in high school and her parents were fundamentalists in rural Iowa so I don’t think she was equipped to make the good stuff or test it herself). archive.ph/RvDdI As of time of writing she tweets annual recaps of her substance use and continues to use substances to alter her consciousness.
  • 11 April 2014: Scott Alexander posts Going Loopy

One of the most powerful serotonergic drugs in existence is LSD. And as I have learned from – let’s say long boring journal articles – the main effect of LSD is to make you literally loopy. Your thoughts loop in and become about themselves, your sense of time becomes cyclic, everything you see becomes a fractal or a spiral or both. And you end up in an extreme emotional feedback loop to infinity – either a “good trip” or a “bad trip”.

Alexander could be hinting that he learned about the effects of LSD from treating patients, or from other experiences.

Critical Period 2016-2018

Bay Area Rationalists reported a lot of drama between 2016 and 2018. MIRI spent a total of $280k on legal expenses in 2014 and 2015 to deal with Louie Helm and the miricult accusations (about ten times their usual legal budget). In January 2016 CFAR reiterated that its focus was teaching people to be rational, then in December it announced a pivot to preventing AI Doom. Michael Vassar of MIRI and MetaMed is said to have influenced the old CFAR curriculum but was drifting away from Bay Area LW. In 2018 there was another shakeup after various people pushed out Brent D. and the board members who had protected him. Julia Galef who seemed more naive than malicious also left CFAR in 2016 and dropped out of public view. Michael Vassar really needs to be interviewed, two representative links are lifeboat.com/ex/bios.michael.vassar and en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Michael_Vassar.

  • 1 March 2016: Scott Alexander posts 2016 Nootropics Survey results 109 out of 850 respondents comment on experiences with LSD microdosing compared to 314 respondents on Adderall

A bit under 15% of users got addicted to Adderall. The conventional wisdom says “recreational users” are more likely to get addicted than people who take it for a psychiatric condition with a doctor’s prescription. There was no sign of this; people who took it legally and people who took it for ADHD were actually much more likely to get addicted than people who described themselves as illegal or recreational users. In retrospect this isn’t surprising; typical psychiatric use is every day; typical recreational use is once in a while.

I am not a MD or pharmacist, but isn’t another important difference that recreational users can use as much as they can afford while medical users have a controlled rate of consumption supervised by someone familiar with its effects and no financial interest in how much they consume? There is also a difference between a student popping Adderall during exam season, and a finance worker taking it daily. Most research on substance use distinguishes people who tried a joint once and people who use it every week.

To drop in my (Gwern’s) anecdote: as part of my 2012 LSD microdosing experiment, I (Gwern) had taken a (very short) Big Five inventory (the YourMorals.org one) which put my Openness at 87th percentile several months before; 2 days after my LSD trip (with no mystical experience), I retook it and also got 87th. (That was my first and so far only psychedelic experience, excluding obviously the microdosing itself, which had no perceptible or measured effects. It was enjoyable and helpful, I thought, but I haven’t been able to do another because Reasons.) Several months later, I took it a third time and got a 93rd percentile. So it’s at least directionally consistent. I have not noticed any particular change in my beliefs or ideologies I could ascribe to the one trip, also consistent with the idea that it’s a lot of heroic doses which sends people off into Mullisland.

  • 21 August 2016: Aella posts 10 Months of Acid about her self-experimentation in 2014. She assures readers that although her LSD use damaged her, “disclaimer: this is not typical acid use. There are many concretely ‘beneficial’ effects from lower, more infrequent doses”

As time went on, I stopped viewing myself as a being separate from the universe. Sensations became interesting to watch, not motivating. I entered such a permanent state of utter peace and contentment that I stopped wanting anything at all. And by the end of it, I barely got out of bed, barely ate. My sleep schedule became erratic, as I woke and slept as I wished. I had vivid lucid dreams. I had stopped working almost entirely and was living off slowly depleting savings. Why would I work? Why would I do anything? I was…. not happy, not sad, I simply was. I was free of desire. I did not fear death.

(… she decided to turn away from oblivion …)

I’m mostly normal now(wpl:citationNeeded), with only a few remnants. Sometimes certain types of conversations will trigger it, where I’m sitting there and suddenly the eye of the universe has turned on me and I am melting away. It is very intense. I don’t mind, though. That’s a fundamental part of the feeling, really – that I don’t mind when it’s happening.

  • 15 August 2016: Scott Alexander posts Tolerance Troubles, an essay on why you need increasing doses of some substances to get the same effect. Several handles in the comments describe their experiences with LSD.

  • 2017: Jessica Taylor says that this was the year when she both got a job with MIRI/CFAR and self-medicated with psychedelics. As she remembered in 2021:

the psychotic break was in October 2017, and involved psychedelic use (as part of trying to “fix” multiple deep mental problems at once, which was, empirically, overly ambitious); although people around me to some degree tried to help me, this “treatment” mostly made the problem worse, so I was placed in 1-2 weeks of intensive psychiatric hospitalization, followed by 2 weeks in a halfway house. This was followed by severe depression lasting months, and less severe depression from then on, which I still haven’t fully recovered from. I had PTSD symptoms after the event and am still recovering. (“My experience at and around MIRI and CFAR (inspired by Zoe Curzi’s writeup of experiences at Leverage)”)

In a comment she says that someone close to CFAR hinted that CFAR encouraged people to use psychedelics. The discussion thread contains many of our dear friends all mutually recriminating and contradicting (some want to blame Michael Vassar, others the main faction of CFAR). Taylor posted a second time pushing back against Scott Alexander’s attempt to blame Michael Vassar. I talk more about this under A Bad Trip in Berkeley.

She does not say where she got the idea to self-medicate with these substances, or that anyone encouraged her to do so, but the idea of self-medicating with psychedelics was certainly part of LessWrong online culture by 2018 and people tend to be more willing to talk about illegal activities than post about them. 2016-2018 was the period when CFAR switched to focus on AI risk and was run by people close to Brent Dill, and Michael Vassar was still close to MIRI and CFAR although no longer an employee or board member.

I recently worked with a man who took LSD once in college and never stopped hallucinating. It’s been ten years now and it’s still going. We can control it with medication, but take the meds away and it starts right back up again.

This seems to be the first time that a prominent rationalist warns the Internet that drugs can eff you up for life.

I know, personally, two women who have not publicly come out about their abuse but were basically held emotionally hostage by Yud with a mix of LSD, “You will die without me”, and kink practiced with or without their consent.

As far as I know nobody who was present in Bay Area Rationalism has publicly accused Yud of similar things.

I was 19 when I entered the rationalist community. Brent was 40 when we met each other. I moved into the same house as Brent, dated Brent for 2 months, and then lived with him for a year and a half after. … With Brent, I did acid and MDMA for the first time. Some of the explicit agenda around me taking MDMA was to restore subconscious faith and attraction in him, which did not work. I came away from this with the story that I was pressured into taking MDMA by Brent.

In this context acid usually means LSD. A post called Quis cancellat ipsos cancellores? says that Brent was expelled from the community and the CFAR organization lost several staff and its position as a central social hub in Bay Area rationalism.

Later this summer: perigee, in which our friends start whispering that their community norms around substance use should change