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This isn’t culture war for today. It was between roughly 1918-1930’s. It’s short and about why he quit drinking alcohol. In my opinion he hit all the key points on the subject, his logic is correct, and wrote it in a very concise way.
He does seem to miss drinking alcohol. I have to agree as a mild alcoholic he’s correct. I think he’s also correct that cannabis isn’t the great substitute society now claims it is. Shrooms I am far less sure on.
It’s not culture war today but I’ve grown a lot of respect for the prohibitionists as being basically correct. I also wanted to post this as I felt like it’s a good example of fantastic writing.
https://pmarca.substack.com/p/on-pausing-alcohol?r=h8x
Edit: should we either more explicitly allow less culture war subjects or have another thread. Sitting on an Afghanistan article I found that was good journalism but it’s not heavily culture war
He made a followup post: https://pmarca.substack.com/p/followup-on-pausing-alcohol
As an alcoholic (not physically addicted, but sure am mentally), I've been experimenting with not drinking. I feel just like Marc does. I sleep and exercise and just generally live MUCH better when not drinking. But fucking hell, I'm less happy. I love the depressed/self-destructive/edge-off/dopey feeling of being drunk.
I feel like people who really get his comments have had some alcoholism in there life. I personally can’t buy a bottle of alcohol without finishing the whole thing in 24 hours. I end up talking myself into having a glass of whiskey to relax at the end of the night and it’s all gone the next day.
Does seem like he’s on to something about finding new drugs. Humans do need a social lubricant. I think the evolutionary biologist would say it arised from a natural fear of strangers or something like that. In the modern world where strangers are not dangerous a relaxant is needed. Something ideally without long term health problems from consumption and preferebly with low or no risks of addiction.
I sort of want to write a reply here as a woke prohibitionists using their rhetorical tricks. Scolding people who drink fine and not wanting it banned because a lot of other Americans suffer from the abundant availability of alcohol.
He seems to be writing this from the perspective of someone who knows he has some troubling drinking issues. And isn’t quite capable of taking away the bigger negative side effects on binge drinking. Seeing other comments some people just get this because they do it themselves. And some write in a style where they don’t get it and likely don’t have the same issues.
It didn't make sense to me, but he never said how much he was actually drinking. If I buy a .7l bottle of slivovitz, it lasts me 2 weeks at least, usually. Is that sort of drinking actually harmful ?
Unfortunately, yes, small amounts of alcohol have a detectable effect on brain white and gray matter volume:
Here "one unit" means 10ml of ethanol, slivovitz has 50% abv, so you're drinking 350ml ethanol per 14 days = 2.5 alcohol units per day. The paper I linked has a bunch of interesting figures (fig 3 in particular is nice), and they provide this useful comparison:
Going from 0 to 1 daily units doesn't have any measurable effect in that study, but going from 1 to 2 and 2 to 3 does. So with your 2.5 units/day, it's equivalent to an aging-related decrease in brain volume of around 3.75 years. Not world-ending in any sense, but still not nothing.
(I'm slightly confused by the study, since presumably the effects should depend on how long you've been drinking alcohol, and not just provide a flat decrease in brain matter, but I'm not seeing any such effect reported in the paper)
I mean, alcohol accounting for 0.4% of variance doesn't seem very important.
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My first thought is that this implies reverse causality. If a snapshot shows the result without expect to duration, a parsimonious explanation would be that people with diminished brain matter tend to drink more rather than that drinking causes diminished brain matter. Feedback loops would be unsurprising as well.
Yeah that's what I thought too, but they super-duper promise they accounted for confounders:
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