Miscellaneous Looking for help creating a psychedelic archive

[red22]

I've been collecting psychedelic-related content and I want to sort through it and make an archive out of it or contribute to an existing one. I've been having a lot of trouble focusing on this task, so I thought it would be easier if I could work with a like-minded person, in person. I can reside in your residence or you could provide me with a van or camp site. I can pay for my food.

 

[funafternoon666]

nice idea
can you elaborate your plan? what content have you collected?

 

[Pfafffed]

I like the idea, at least the broad contours that you've shared.

One thing to consider when structuring your project is the role of LLMs like ChatGPT as digital librarians going forward. They are getting better and better and crawling through the depths of archived forum content online, and can synthesize that material or make it searchable. I think that the role of digital archives is going to change dramatically in the next few months as everyone gains access to low-cost automated teams of digital research librarians.

 

[iom]

Doesn't Erowid already fill this role?

And IMO skilled human librarians are far superior to any kind of software that essentially exists in a world of text. LLMs can appear convincing because of their ability to synthesize "believable passages" from the material they are trained on, but their ability to conceptualize is entirely dependent on textual relationships. Humans conceptualize on the basis of our lived experiences in which we are immersed in all of our senses and in which we also interact with other beings of awesome biological complexity. From an pure information standpoint, we are "trained" on far far more raw information than any LLMs can even come close to.

 

[funafternoon666]

Doesn't Erowid already fill this role?

And IMO skilled human librarians are far superior to any kind of software that essentially exists in a world of text. LLMs can appear convincing because of their ability to synthesize "believable passages" from the material they are trained on, but their ability to conceptualize is entirely dependent on textual relationships. Humans conceptualize on the basis of our lived experiences in which we are immersed in all of our senses and in which we also interact with other beings of awesome biological complexity. From an pure information standpoint, we are "trained" on far far more raw information than any LLMs can even come close to.

and psychonautwiki, plants of the gods, pihkal, tihkal... so my first thought was exactly the same, but maybe @red22 is up to something new, a new format, whatever actually... erowid for one was my bible when I was 16 (the year 2000) and it will always have *a special place in my heart*, but that doesn't mean that I don't check psychonautwiki...

so @red22 tell us more about your project

 

[Pfafffed]

Doesn't Erowid already fill this role?

And IMO skilled human librarians are far superior to any kind of software that essentially exists in a world of text. LLMs can appear convincing because of their ability to synthesize "believable passages" from the material they are trained on, but their ability to conceptualize is entirely dependent on textual relationships. Humans conceptualize on the basis of our lived experiences in which we are immersed in all of our senses and in which we also interact with other beings of awesome biological complexity. From an pure information standpoint, we are "trained" on far far more raw information than any LLMs can even come close to.

Well put. To be clear, I mostly meant using them as super-powered search engines. The fact that they can in seconds scour the depths of Usenet drug user threads from the 90s in seconds to bring up not just results that are directly tied to my search terms, but things that are adjacent that I would never have thought to look for, then cite the sources for me to do my own follow up? That's insanely powerful from a research perspective.

 

[boti420]

Well I have basically every book published not just on psychedelics but all drugs in e-book format. I've spent years doing indepth research on how drugs work and specifically psychedelics. I've probably learned more about psychopharmacology and the workings of neurons, receptors, the overarching lattice that connects every part if the brain with any other as well as the structure of how there's 5 layers of neurons stack on top of each other and each level receives an input form the layer above and does it's only specific set of calculations sending that result down the layer. That's why our brains are wrinkled cause each layer is actually a sheet of neurons there they need to be crumbled up to fit in the skull.

I apologize for rant I'm just very passionate about the workings of drugs. Anyways I've spent hundreds of hours combining thru and reading academic papers and studies on this topic. I would download and save many of the studies so I also have a collection of studies on psychedelics and drugs i have several hundred pdf's of scientific papers saved. I've considered putting everything into a torrent and streaming it as it took me years of locating and reading these studies to finally gain an understanding of the actions of psychedelics. I've always understood that lsd binds to the 5htp reception which causes changes that makes you trip. I'd be able to describe itvin enough detail that most people learned stuff about the mind. The thing is while I could recite that mechanism what does it "really mean"? What exactly is a receptors and how does a psychedelic bond to it etc... Well know I know. I attribute that to these books and pdf studies. They functionally gave me the education of a neuropharmacologist. There for I wanna share all this material so others can also educate themselves on the biochemistry of drugs.

So if you want I can compress it all into a rar file and send it to you. Actually if those of you here are also interested I can can think of some way of putting it up here for download. Downloading everything one by one would take you probably half a year if one devoted all their free time to reading through all this material. it took me personally approx 10-15 years of looking for and then downloading then reading everything. there's a lot I didn't download but that's only cause I'd get distracted by some information about a drug study i found interesting.