Your point was that the rest of the world is benefiting fine is just wrong. Europe has a worse labor problem than the United States. China has a tremendous oversupply of college graduates who cannot find work. The simple fact is that there is not enough work on the planet to support the large number of educated would-be professionals that want it. And this problem is exacerbated when you concentrate wealth into the hands of a tiny percentage.

Are you one of those sad, sad people who think that a shiny technological device is a necessity because it's so very, very shiny?

Why do people on the Far Right Fringe incessantly capitalize Words that Don't Need to be capitalized? And actually, the US is far less of a "Leftist Welfare State" than it was in the 70's.

Never been to Europe, have we. Or China.

Technology allows jobs to be done with less manual effort. By its very nature, it leads to less jobs; if it didn't, it wouldn't be adopted. Replacing 50 auto workers with 1 robot may create 1 robot repair tech job, but it's not going to produce 50. Otherwise you'd keep the auto workers on the job.

Provided that it is a creative, copyrightable work, that's true, and I didn't say otherwise. What I said was that merely investing effort into creating a work isn't a justification for copyright. In Feist v. Rural, the case that finally killed off sweat of the brow in the US, it was argued (and the lower courts had agreed!) that compiling a completely non-creative telephone book deserved copyright because it was a lot of work to do. It was certainly original and fixed in a tangible medium of expression. But it lacked creativity, and that's what did it in.

As it turns out, whether it takes a lot of work or virtually none at all makes no difference. The work must be creative, original, of a copyrightable type, and fixed in a tangible medium; that's what merits a copyright.

To be completely honest (and I hope as an AC you come back to read this), I think that you may benefit quite a lot from a supervised psychedelic experience - whether it be with an MD or simply a very experienced individual.

I do agree however that uncontrolled use may be quite detrimental in your case.

I don't want to appear to be 'pushing' my book, but you'd probably find it a very interesting read. You can use the 'look inside the book' feature on Amazon to get an idea of the book's content without having to buy it.

This is EXACTLY what I was talking about...

I most certainly have experienced an out-of-body experience while on psychedelics. I have also experienced complete ego-death whereby the words "I" and "me" would have been meaningless had I encountered them. I have also watched the inner workings of my mind from the perspective of an outside observer. I have felt 'the universe embracing me'. I have experienced a feeling that I can only describe as 'the bliss of existence as a part of a universal consciousness'.

In short, yes, I have experienced some seriously 'insane shit'.

But I know that there is a rational and logical explanation without needing to resort to mysticism. I know that there is no 'universal consciousness'; I know that the universe is a not capable of emotion or 'embracing'; and I know that there is no way to physically see myself from outside (other than mirrors and so forth of course).

Therefore I can use these experiences to better understand reality and examine myself. I can use them to learn about myself and teach myself how to best live my life to achieve in it what I want to achieve. I can use them to further my understanding of the world around me. I can use them to enhance the creative aspects of my life. However at no point does 'mysticism' come in to it.

I don't deny or devalue these experiences on psychedelics - they are in fact why I take them. I just think it's both intellectually weak and devaluing to the experience itself to say that there are 'great spirits' or 'second bodies' or any other mumbo-jumbo bullshit.

As my current book is targeted at beginners, I don't go in to this at great length - only enough to make the point - but in a future book, I intend on exploring this particular theme more fully.

Essentially this is what I do every time I use psychedelics in the higher dose range. My preferred substance is LSD, because I find it to be more introspective than the others, however I have taken many other substances (including all the ones you listed) in varying quantities. I submit that 'thinking critically' about the experience is what has allowed me to understand it and the benefits that it gives me without resorting to the mysticism. Deriving a belief in mysticism from the experience, from my point of view, shows that the person did not think critically about their experience.

But we don't have to have those things. And we don't have to have those things at the level we have them at now.

If my art were sculpting the moon, but this was only economically feasible for me to do if everyone in the world owed me hefty royalties forever, people would probably tell me to go do something else. Even if my work was really good.

If we tire of having copyright to the extent we have it now, or even at all, that's a valid choice. If it reduces the number of works created and published, then that may nevertheless be the best option, if those works would otherwise come at too high a price.

And big budgets and high production values are not mandatory. Shakespeare did his best stuff on a stage with a handful of actors doubling up on parts, costumes that were hand-me-down clothing, minimal props, and no sets.

I agree, although I think that we ought not to treat copyright as a monolithic entity. We could amend copyright to allow at least some of what is currently seen by most people as non-objectionable piracy, such as natural persons, engaging in non-commercial infringement, while still preserving copyright in other respects, e.g. as to commercial infringement, which is less kindly looked upon by ordinary people. By tailoring what is and isn't protected according to our shared norms about copyright, we could preserve respect for it generally, while still allowing other behavior that if prohibited, would engender disrespect.

Shakespeare had no copyrights. Homer had no copyrights. Michaelangelo had no copyrights. Copyright cares about quantity not quality. The more works there are, the more quality works there are. But you can't just incentivize only quality works. If for no other reason than because it is subjective, and no one really wants the government making those sorts of decisions. God knows there's plenty of shit now. But we can ignore it.

No; that takes effort. No one is going to do that unless they really care about that.

Better to make copyright opt-in. Then only authors who really cared about having one would make the minimal but material effort to get one. The rest wouldn't bother and we would profit from their laziness. Since it would be their own decision (or lack thereof) it's totally unobjectionable.

So when you say:

That's wrong. Most authors don't choose a damn thing, and they automatically get copyrights anyway.

We have that anyway. And culling slush piles into published works is the opposite of what copyright seeks. If anything, publishing everything indiscriminately is more in line with ideal copyright policy. (Think of all the time wasted by works that turn out to be good but which get rejected by publisher after publisher for years and only ever become known due to the doggedness of the author; we could skip all that!) Plus, plenty of bad works get published anyway. And there's not much agreement as to what's good and what's bad.

If curation is what you want, go pay a critic. But that has nothing to do with copyright.

Well, that's not how copyright works now.

The idea that people deserve copyrights based solely on the fact that they put in effort into creating something is the sweat of the brow theory; it's unconstitutional in the US.

Further, copyrights don't guarantee fair compensation. In fact, even if everyone respected copyrights completely, most authors would still not be fairly compensated for their effort, because most works don't sell very well. The vast majority of them have no copyright related economic value. Of the few that do, the vast majority have relatively little. Of the few that have more than a little, the vast majority are just middling, and so on.

There's a reason why there's a stereotype about starving artists.

All copyright does is concentrate some of the revenue derived from the work toward the copyright holder. How much the work is worth depends on the public. The recent Lone Ranger movie was a flop. Disney made a crappy movie and doesn't deserve fair compensation for the hundreds of millions of dollars of effort they put into making it. They deserve to lose big time, and so they have.

Copyright is all about increasing the number of works which are created and published, and then limiting the public use of those works as little as possible, as briefly as possible. If a degree of protection which you feel is less than fair nevertheless produces the greatest public benefit, then that's what we ought to have. Helping authors is merely a side effect because they are, so far, unavoidably involved. But they're not a priority.

"If you don't like that, consider the alternatives. No, let me correct that, the alternative. "NO IPHONE IN CHINA.""

That's a better alternative.

I - as you can probably tell from my sig - am very interested in psychedelic substances and the effects they have on the mind. Generally speaking, I'm a proponent of their responsible use.

However, I find that in the realm of psychedelic research, there is a great deal of pseudoscience and mysticism. Just because someone has a 'mystical experience' on LSD or other psychedelics, they then start going off and believing a whole lot of rubbish that just makes no sense. I myself have had plenty of such experiences, and they can be very profound, deep and wonderful learning exercises - I wouldn't be the man I am today without having had these experiences. What they are not however is evidence of something 'beyond our world'.

Essentially, this is just another facet of people's failure to use critical thinking and logic, but it tends to be even more pronounced when it comes to experiences and feelings from within rather than when examining external matters.

Where this causes the most problems is when people start promoting psychedelic use as a snake-oil to help someone 'get closer to the spiritual world' or 'attune yourself to nature' or so on. It's a problem because it works. If you go in to the experience believing this rubbish, there's a good chance that what you experience will reinforce it quite strongly. If however you go in to the experience without believing this rubbish, you can learn an amazing amount about yourself without the need for attributing things to mysticism and superstition.

I've been studying this (publishing) for some time, in the context of learning, verifying assumptions, and the scientific method.

It turns out that there is really no bar in scientific publishing. It doesn't have to be understandable, nor innovative, nor even correct. You only need to be ethical (ie - don't lie about the data), cite anything that you got from other sources, and show that there is less than a 1-in-20 chance that you are wrong (p > 0.5).

What exactly do we want in a published paper, anyway?

Many cancer studies can't be reproduced. Many studies are statistically significant but valueless (the IQ of people in NYC is higher than Chicago by 1 point: this can be statistically certain but have no practical significance). There are lots and lots of ways to frame the conclusion the wrong way such as confusing correlation with causation, reversed conditionals (if the defendant is innocent, there is a 1 in 1 billion chance that this evidence is wrong), and other logical errors.

Then there's the enormous economic incentive of needing to publish to keep your job, that reviewers will oppose maverick thought and agree with community beliefs, and that no one examines their assumptions.

Would you like to publish a paper? MathGen will write one for you. Pass it around and chances are it will be accepted.

So when I talk to people about my research, the inevitable comment is "you should publish". And my inevitable answer is: why?

What do we want in scientific papers? What are they even for?