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– t. Galkovsky
Sick burns. We're all living in America, though.
I've heard it asserted that European boxers were disgusted upon learning that Anglos do weight training to prepare for competitions. Those are supposed to be games, vigorous festivals of bodily perfection, causes for joy – the opposite of dreary displays of a peasant's work ethic or a merchant's cold numerate chase after marginal returns. Or something. Well you know how it turned out, and the role performance enhancing drugs play in competitive sports now. Moloch whose dumbbells are (mumble mumble), I guess. But don't the stunts of modern champions look positively superhuman? Don't those playful Chads of the all-natural era seem scrawny next to the optimized contemporary giants?
This jealous amazement underlies general American obsession with finding some edge, and specifically Silicon Valley fads like mindfulness meditation, diets and training routines, ADHD medication, microdosing LSD and now weirder prescription stuff. (A guy called Sam doing EMSAM, seriously?) The most egregious case was probably Serge Faguet. Like Sam, only on a much smaller scale, he crashed and burned thanks to his miracle enhancements (he had the bright idea of visiting Russia with LSD and amphetamine in his luggage). The most incredible bit of his story wasn't drugs – it was using fancy hearing aids without indications. To hear more than others.
All that being ridiculous enough, what is your actual objection? I may be wrong, but it seems you'd take issue with PEDs whether they work or not, regardless of their safety profile and side effects; they disgust you viscerally due to their inherent effect.
My hypothesis is that this is your lack of chutzpah talking. Fair play, equivalent exchange, no weird tricks, not trying to get something for nothing, not getting carried away with hypothetical astronomic returns, not gambling, not doing crazy drugs – those are reasonable defaults to avoid failure modes like St. Petersburging oneself, setting the community on fire or summoning Cthulhu. But like I've argued recently, chutzpah, the brazen rejection of those defaults, and pursuit of narrow unorthodox openings, can be instrumental for actually transcending the status quo. Sometimes it works, and works so well we've come to depend on it with all of our engineering and science and finance; it is reasonable, then, to ask if practicing it in a certain manner is justified in a specific case. This is a question of specifics.
Unfortunately, the specifics with current psychoactive drugs are pretty dismal even if they don't make you outright crazy. The brain is… complex; effects of any molecule peppered onto its mechanism are crude and untargeted. Using drugs to improve one's already healthy cognition is equivalent to using Curves in a graphical editor to «enhance» a picture, or naive transformations of sound: good enough if you have shit taste or sensory deficits, but it only destroys available information; wipes out subtle differences of pixel values by banding them; clips audio tones; reduces precision of inference; discretizes and roughens your thoughts. Across the multidimensional space of mental contents it erases the lion's share of possibilities and, may Allah forgive me for such mawkishness, the depth of human soul. It may work well enough in a predictable environment like school or the workspace of a linear worker, where prioritizing the few legible, measurable features the Boss cares about is a sensible trade-off. If you make high-uncertainty decisions, you may find that «production velocity» isn't as valuable as seeing clearly the road your'e on.
Drug enhancement does not disgust me any more than the normal condition. It is more noble to struggle against the limitations of human condition than to accept it. «Baseline humans aren't that cool» is something any transhumanist feels viscerally and seeks to remedy.
It is, however, prudent to acknowledge when you're being greedy and petulant in denying that the tech isn't there yet.
Or, well, that your scam is going tits up and you'd do well to liquidate it before collapsing the entire market.
In fairness it worked pretty well for Paul Erdös and Francis Crick too.
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If performance-enhancing drugs actually had zero side effects, there would be no need to worry about fair play. It's not a fair play problem when an athlete has to wear shoes to participate in most sports, even though shoes give athletes an unearned advantage over athletes who don't wear shoes.
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Some people can tolerate drugs well; for others it destroys them and even those around them. It's like a coin toss as to how someone will respond. With alcohol there is not as much variability compared to the more serious stuff, but it can still be pretty bad.
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As I mention in another reply, I'm actually still trying to parse exactly why I'm disgusted, which means that any answer is likely to be more rationalization than reality. I suspect that if there was truly no side effect, I wouldn't much care. In the case of these psychoactive drugs though, there always seems to be a side effect - in this case, there's video of SBF jittering in his chair like a crackhead. Worse still, the use of PEDs in this case isn't to some noble end, it's to spend more time running a harebrained financial scheme. I'm not disgusted by a cyclist taking EPO (even though it's cheating, I don't feel disgust), but I am disgusted by the inhuman looking freaks in bodybuilding taking steroids to make themselves that much more inhuman. Likewise, a caffeinated scientist doesn't disgust me, but a finance scammer on designer drugs does.
maybe he's autistic?
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IF you have a link handy, please give. I've got my treasured video of Hitler & George Floyd rhytmically jittering like crackheads, were I to add in Bankman the whole thing would be somewhat improved.
best I can do is a deepfake of Xi Jinping pulling his eyebrows out with tweezers, take it or leave it
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LOL, are you curating a Stereotype Paragon of the Race collection?
No, but well, now that you've suggested it..
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Honestly I think a big part of that is Sam knowing his accounting is fraudulent and he's about to be fried, and desperately putting up a front of a weird whiz kid who's got it all under control.
It is part of the branding. If he looked like some boring guy in suit he probably would not have gotten as much media coverage.
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I dunno, seems like he rode this horse into the ground, and seems to have had a pretty good time until now.
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