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Discussion (44 Comments)Read Original on HackerNews
Surely the most straightforward way is to undercook the mushrooms and run a blind controlled experiment where participants eat the shrooms and report on hallucinations.
What stopped them?
> These mega-trips might help to explain why people in China, the Philippines and Papua New Guinea do not seem to have a tradition of purposefully seeking out L. asiatica for its psychoactive effects, according to Domnauer's findings. "It was always just eaten for food," Domnauer says, with hallucinations being an unexpected side-effect.
From when this same story was covered in January
https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20260121-the-mysterious-m...
I think you would have to dose people without knowledge of that phenomenon
So instead of a single experiment where half of the people get it and half don’t, the experiment will be repeated ten times with the same people over a few months, different meals each time and in total each person will get hallucinogens in their food either zero or one times.
And then you see what effects people report and if that correlates well with who was actually given the hallucinogens, and if there is a lot of placebo among the rest of the people each time that they were not given hallucinogens.
2. Multiple times per person over months risks attrition which gonna mess it up, and the statistical power increase you get could be offset by that (eg if a person gets it they may not be motivated to come again for the placebo). On the other hand ppl may be more motivated if they know they are gonna get it at least once so dunno.
3. Placebo with hallucinogens is always tricky. I would use psilocybin as (extra or only) control, esp if you test for little ppl. This way you can test if they report more timy ppl in the new mushroom vs psilocybin.
I guess you can be upfront about unknown unknowns, and most human experiments have some of those, but I assume there are standards to keep those to a minimum.
That being said one claim here would be that allowing self-experimentation would pressure people into self experimenting due to how our academia and labs are structured these days i.e. a junior scientists could be pressured into self experimentation by their superiors. So this is definitely not as clear-cut as one might think.
But maybe I'm reading too much into it.
Something isn’t ethical or unethical, somebody just doesn’t like it. They might have a reason for it at best.
There’s definitely scope for a horror story here…
I think those kinds of myths are just natural progressions of exaggerations and oral storytelling
Swedish tradition has it that trolls would replace human babies with their own babies. It does not take a long leap of imagination to to see how this could be used as an excuse for the practice of putting unwanted/deformed babies out into the forest ”for the wolves”. (Disclaimer: I don’t know how common that practice might have been, since it would presumably stem from prehistoric times)
Lilliputian hallucinations predate this mushroom. There are myths about tiny people in pretty much every culture's folklore. People have also reported these hallucinations from alcohol withdrawal, dementia, macular degeneration and other neurological conditions. So, it seems like this phenomenon is fundamental to how the human mind and brain work, but we don't know what causes it or how to treat it.
That's what makes this mushroom different — it reliably produces this effect
this tv show ( meet youself, cast by Liu yifei, who also played Mulan(2020)) has a short part is about the 'tiny people': https://www.youtube.com/shorts/jVoza_qE3ww