[ExI] Religious Idiocy Triumphs Over Science Yet Again

[Adrian Tymes]

On Tue, Dec 15, 2015 at 2:40 AM, Max More <max at maxmore.com> wrote:

> So, I think your comments are mostly but not entirely true. We may be able
> to gain more value (apart from simple enjoyment/joy/engagement -- also
> worthy outcomes) from mind-altering drugs if we (a) could design them with
> greater specificity, and (b) had a much better understanding of how they
> would affect any specific individual.
>

Readily agreed.  As things are now, the information I have largely suggests
that mind-altering drugs, if one has to make a broad general argument (and
one often does in these matters, unfortunately, for any admission of nuance
is too often seized upon to fabricate support for the opposite of what one
claims), tend not to be useful...but it would certainly be theoretically
possible, and perhaps not even all that difficult, to tailor their use and
design to strictly positive use.

Alas, most attempts to do so have fallen to those who abuse without care in
order to make money.  I suspect that designing a method to solve this
problem would take policy engineering as well as biomedical, with some sort
of automated enforcement (which will be highly difficult to design) to cut
out the abuse even if the facilitators buy off most of the regulating
people.
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://lists.extropy.org/pipermail/extropy-chat/attachments/20151215/516fb977/attachment.html>