On 20 Apr 2014, at 15:09, Telmo Menezes wrote:
On Sun, Apr 20, 2014 at 11:22 AM, Bruno Marchal <marc...@ulb.ac.be>
wrote:
On 19 Apr 2014, at 20:48, meekerdb wrote:
On 4/19/2014 12:31 AM, Bruno Marchal wrote:
On 19 Apr 2014, at 00:52, meekerdb wrote:
On 4/18/2014 7:13 AM, Telmo Menezes wrote:
What society thinks has nothing to do with it, because weak
correlation-based scientific evidence is used selectively to
create laws that were desired a priori by some interest group.
That implies some nefarious motive and corrupt use of data known
to be wrong. In fact there was no nefarious 'interest group'
that wanted to ban marijuana or to ban alcohol or to ban heroin.
What? For marijuana, there were a lot. Anslinger was asked to find
eveidence that cannabis was worst than alcohol. he
destoyed the results which showed that cannabis is much less
dangerous than alcohol. Nixon, Chirac (in France), adn also people
in the UK, will destroyed such records too.
It is a made up since the start. That is why some people still
speculate on dangers, for which there are no corresponding
complains, with very few exception by person who abuse, and would
probably not in case it would be legal.
All these bans were initiated by people who believed in the ill
effects of these substances for individuals and for society.
I have no clue why you say this.
Because it's true. The people may have been mistaken -
particularly about the net ill effects on society - but there is
plenty of evidence that some people become addicted to pot just as
they become addicted to alcohol or tobacco and this has bad
consequences for them.
Sure. But it is the illegality which makes that into a problem. In
The Netherlands, a kid is very badly seen by his peers when stoned,
and considered as a total idiot when abusing pot. but where pot is
illegal, he is seen as a sort of hero. The numbers confirms this.
The Netherlands is the country were kids smoke pots the less, and
countries with severe repression are those where kids smoke the most.
For example, my wife's first husband became a habitual pot smoker
and lost all ambition and interest in other things.
One case is not a statistics. I might doubt if he lost all ambition
and interest because of pot, or if he became a pot abuser because
he lost all ambition and interest, for some different reason.
Yes. This was the point I was trying to make with ghibbsa before he
took offense.
Notice the cultural biases: it is common to tell the story of
someone who "starts drinking" because something in their life is not
going well*. With illegal substances we assume causality the other
way around: someone's life is not going well because of some drug.
Even with substances that most people don't see as "drugs", like
sugar, the bias is displayed. Here we have the archetype of the
woman who gets fat from eating too much chocolate or ice cream
because her boyfriend left her. If we replace chocolate with
cannabis, then people assume that the boyfriend left her because she
became a pothead.
It is always a confusion between "a in b" and "b in a", when you look
close. It explains why cultural prejudices are easy to create, and
hard to revise. In the short run, if you have to act, that confusion
can be helpful, and our associative memories exploits this. If you are
raped by a guy 42 km high, you will fear all guy 42 km high, by a
simple association, which is not a logical valid one, but locally it
makes sense.
Prohibition reinforces the bias because successful people are not
usually at liberty to discuss their illegal drug use. We make a
curious exception for artists, but that's all.
Of course none of this falsifies the hypothesis that the guy lost
ambition and interest in other things because of his pot habit.
Indeed.
It just tells us that we should remain agnostic on causality,
Absolutely. In all domains, on all matter. But we can try theories.
Causalities are well captured in modal logic by expression like [](p-
>q). There are transfinities of different modal logics, but there are
as much notion of causality.
unless we gain a deeper understanding of the neurochemical
mechanisms involved.
There is also a nocebo effect. If someone has already a tendency of
being lazy, and is told that cannabis makes people lazy, he might use
cannabis to explain (and most plausibly aggravate) his laziness. To
find an easy culprit which deviates from its original laziness.
* to be fair, in some cases people also claim alcohol as the cause
of problems, but the point is that causality is not automatically
assumed with legal substances, but is automatically assumed with
illegal ones. This strikes me as strong evidence of an irrational
bias in our culture.
People want to hear what other people want them to want to hear. I am
not sure it is just our culture. It is very general, and just more
global today.
It is very hard for most people to accept the idea that their belief
was the result of lies, and only lies. They will want to add always a
bit of truth to it.
People fear the new and the original, and it is easy for a demagog to
exploits this and get easy credits.
No worry for the long run, as truth has its ways to remind itself to
us. But what a waste of time, energy and lives meanwhile.
Bruno
When I was a young teacher, being still brainwashed, I was
dramatizing when kids were "druggy", and unconsciously provided to
pot the justification of the kids problem. But then I realize that
by saying something like "smoke as much as you want but don't use
that as a pretext to not study for the exams" was much more
productive. They stopped the druggy play when I stopped to see them
as druggie, but just as lazy kids searching reason to not study.
And even aside from such effects, there has been a strong Puritan
ethic in the U.S. that thinks of any kind of sybaritic pleasure as
sinful and bad for one's character.
Yes. That is part of the problem, perhaps even more so for
protestants than catholics which have the right to take as much fun
in whatever they want as long as they confess to the local
"authority" (!).
I tend to believe the contrary. It is a quasi "duty" to enjoy life
fully, as long as we don't interfere with other people ways to enjoy
themselves. Pseudo-religion uses sin as a manipulative tool. The
christian message according to which we have to love god, or to fear
him is everything but religious. It is an inconsistent psychological
constraint making impossible to develop genuine love.
Bruno
http://iridia.ulb.ac.be/~marchal/
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