The Importance of Documenting Your Experiences

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I was on a combination of drugs, including some dissociatives and some psychedelics. And I think that that felt significant to me in so far as it did not feel like a product of the drugs. This was now a combination that I'd used many times before. The morning after this first happened to me, I went out and bought a digital camera and basically recorded everything that happened to me for like a month after that. That's a sign of how deeply I believed that I had tapped into some fundamental truth about the universe that I had been blind to before.

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Is our adoption of beliefs primarily motivated by wanting to be the heroes of our own stories? Why do we have such a hard time understanding the stories other people are telling about themselves and the world? How can we reduce political polarization? How plausible are the various theories (conspiracy or otherwise) around the origins of COVID? Why don't the EA, Rationalist, and related communities focus more on transforming political landscapes? Free speech is incredibly important, of course; but does absolute free speech tip the scales in favor of misinformation, disinformation, and propaganda? Has the internet fundamentally changed the way we converse with each other, or has it merely scaled up and accelerated those conversations while preserving their original characteristics? Is there ultimately a way to land on a principled answer around free speech and censorship? Does a globally optimum free speech policy even exist, or are we stuck picking from a lineup of equally unsavory options?

Cate Hall is a co-founder and Chief Operating Officer of Alvea, a newly clinical stage EA biotech company. She is also the co-founder and President of Juniper Ventures, a biosecurity and pandemic preparedness foundry. She is a former Supreme Court litigator and former no. 1 female poker player in the world. She tweets at @catehall.

Staff