https://www.reddit.com/r/Showerthoughts/comments/zs77l4/your_brain_is_able_to_know_you_forgot_something/

https://www.reddit.com/r/Showerthoughts/comments/11l2a1l/your_brain_is_able_to_know_you_forgot_something/

https://www.reddit.com/r/Showerthoughts/comments/iov47y/the_brain_can_remember_that_it_forgot_something/

https://www.reddit.com/r/Showerthoughts/comments/jc4syo/its_frustratingly_inconvenient_that_our_brains/

https://www.reddit.com/r/Showerthoughts/comments/govgbu/your_brain_often_remembers_that_youve_forgotten/

https://www.reddit.com/r/Showerthoughts/comments/ip1dm4/the_brain_remembers_how_important_something_you/

https://www.reddit.com/r/Showerthoughts/comments/12755qq/your_brain_rembembers_you_forgot_something_but/

"Listen up, teachers. It's time to begin our staff meeting. Today, we're fielding ideas for helping the kids learn to spell. Who wants to go first?"

"Okay, hear me out... I was thinking maybe it would get them really focused if we make learning feel like a matter of life and death..."

If you've ever read Intuition Pumps And Other Tools For Thinking by Daniel Dennett then you may recall his idea of the Surely Alarm. Basically, when somebody speaks the word surely, they're usually implicitly asking you to grant them an assumption on which the rest of their argument rests. I've extended this notion to a number of other concepts for which I've set other mental alarms and the word utopia is one of them. When I encounter it, there's a little voice in the back of my mind reminding me that the word means "no place" - i.e. it doesn't exist.

Achieving a perfect society is impossible and it's foolish to think of perfection as anything other than an ideal. Just as with personal growth, so too is social progress a perpetual process. There's no final solution. No finish line. There will always be room for improvement. That's why we've evolved practices like reformism and incrementalism, as opposed to radicalism or revolutionism. Because real progress - meaningful, lasting progress - happens gradually. A discovery here. An innovation there. A social program there. And all these things compound and interact to create new discoveries and innovations and reforms. Over and over until, eventually, we take a step back and notice how much better off things are. Like going to the gym every day but not noticing the progress for weeks or months at a time.

Frankly, you'll do yourself a favor staying away from cynics and doomers like the people who hang out in places like r/collapse. Run with the dogs and you're gonna get fleas. Take control of your information diet. Be selective about the things you put in your head and the mental habits you cultivate. In the motorcycle world, there's a saying that you go where you look. If you fixate on the pothole or swerving car then you're going to ride into it and crash. Focus on the route you want to ride.

It depends what kind of conversation you want to have. If you want to talk about what's possible then I believe all that great stuff is on the table. If you want to talk about what's likely or what it just so happens to seem is going to happen from where we stand right now then I admit that things often appear pretty bleak. But then again, we've got to be mindful of our negativity biases and availability biases and the limitations of human attention and imagination. In learning about history, I've noticed that fearing it's the end of the world is a common occurrence for nearly every human generation. The current one's no more or less millenarianist than any of the others. Here's a bit of light reading on that, if you like.

Cutthroat Island Strikes Back

To my knowledge, it's the sort of rare thing a very small percentage of people with preexisting neurological conditions would have to worry about (e.g. heritable schizophrenia risks). Generally speaking, that "neverending trip" stuff is fear-mongering anti-drug propaganda from the days when the War On Drugs first started and programs like DARE were used to try and scare kids away from experimentation. But don't take my word for it; Spend a bit of time learning about psychedelic compounds and how they interact with the brain. It's pretty interesting stuff, actually.

"Bad batch" means one ate mushrooms that aren't psilocybe. I've done that before. When I was a teenager, we gathered our own mushrooms from a cow pasture near my high school and I once made the mistake of picking a few of the wrong species. But they're not going to cause a bad trip, per se. They'll cause physical discomfort and vomiting, and that can in turn cause a bad trip as a result of the emotional distress. But it's not a physiological phenomenon in the sense of being directly neurochemically induced. It's not like the psilocybin "goes bad" and causes a bad trip the way food goes bad and causes vomiting.

In other words, the psychological phenomenon of the bad trip occurs as a mirror image of the physiological phenomenon of the food poisoning. And since vomiting is a common occurrence at the beginning of trips, it's useful to learn to accept that "purging phase" without panicking and spiraling into a bad trip from the fear of potential food poisoning. Just trust your body to be able to process what you've put in it and you'll come out the other side all the stronger. It's important to learn the basics of the science involved with tripping. For example, the physiology of food poisoning and what one's body does to deal with it. Knowledge is power and it will help you overcome fear borne of the unknown. If you go to the hospital, they're just going to pump your stomach and rehydrate you intravenously. It's scarcely different from what you're already naturally going to want to do instinctually, which is vomit and drink lots of water.

And ultimately, if you are actually poisoned, there's not much anybody can do for you. Accept the L and die with grace on the forest floor. It's better than dying in a hospital bed surrounded by cops and moms. At least, that's my personal opinion.

There's no simple answer because "bad trip" refers to a category, not a specific phenomenon. Some bad trips are a result of circular thought patterns. You'll hear people say things like "I got stuck in a loop". Other bad trips are a result of fighting against intrusive thoughts. Usually, they're memories of or residuals from unresolved trauma that the person refuses to confront and integrate. Still other bad trips are caused by fear and anxiety. Maybe the person's not in a safe, comfortable environment and they enter a sort of "fight or flight" mode in which they begin to hallucinate manifestations of their fears. This is why people advocate the principle of Set & Setting as a tool for avoiding bad trips.

Generally speaking, a bad trip is an experience primarily characterized by unpleasant emotions. Interestingly, even though there's not a single cause, there is a single solution: Let go of fear and accept the experience. It's mental, it's temporary, and it's part of you but it's not you. You are not your thoughts, emotions, and experiences. They are an object of your consciousness, they are a reflection of your mind, and they are trying to show you something about yourself. Sit, breathe, listen, observe, and let it flow over and past you.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parentification

Assuming for the sake of discussion that this is only given to addicts so they can break their addiction then I don't think that would be any more of a strain on hospitals than preexisting exceptions demanding special consideration, such as allergies and natural treatment resistance. It's already common for people to know when they can't be administered a given medication and to inform first responders and doctors. It's also already common for that information to sometimes not be provided and for a patient's treatment to fail. Unfortunate, yes. But also, we weigh these sorts of cost-benefit considerations all the time. It comes with the territory of living in a society. The possibility of that occasional misfortune doesn't seem to outweigh the benefit of helping millions and potentially ending the fentanyl crisis.

>try to keep people from dying

This is even better than an antidote; It's being referred to as a vaccine because it actually stimulates immunity to fentanyl. That means there'd be no point in taking it and no point in using it to cut other drugs because it would be inert, altogether negating its function as a cutting agent.

It's explained in the article:

>The immunized animals could produce anti-fentanyl antibodies that stop the drug’s effects, allowing it to exit out of the body via the kidneys. This blocks the “high” caused by fentanyl, and it would theoretically make it easier for people to quit using the drug or avoid a relapse.

The study: An Immunconjugate Vaccine Alters Distribution and Reduces the Antinociceptive, Behavioral and Physiological Effects of Fentanyl in Male and Female Rats

The Wikipedia on conjugate vaccines.

In short, it causes immunity to fentanyl (i.e. immunization). Ergo, it's a vaccine.

Sounds like you didn't even read the article.

Are those two approaches toward addressing this issue mutually exclusive? And are either one plausibly regarded as a silver bullet solution?

Or is this a complex problem that's going to require multiple remedies working in conjunction to address all contributing factors?

Some people really hate Valentine's Day.

Every new scientific and technological advance comes with risk. Pretty much everything in life comes with risk. But that's no reason to give up on seeking solutions to the challenges we face.

Medicine is moving in the direction of things like bioengineering. It's not going away. Same with our fears over AI and nuclear energy; We need to set aside our fears and develop safeguards so we can implement these technologies responsibly. Burying our heads in the sand leaves the task to less cautious people who aren't going to burden themselves with responsible research.

And on top of all that, we've spent decades leaving these problems to the cops. Look how well that's worked out. Maybe it's time to put down the guns and consider scientific solutions. We lost the "War On Drugs" because it's not a problem that makes sense using a metaphor of combat. But it is almost certainly a problem that makes sense when considered as a matter of health and well-being. Which is why we've begun to use terms like "addiction epidemic", etc.

I thought they were removing a bunch of those dams. Saw an article recently but didn't pay too close attention to which dams specifically were slated for removal.