8 ms·

Erowid is great, but the trip reports were universally fanciful, typically having no discernible connection to the drug (often drugs) being described. They beca

Erowid is great, but the trip reports were universally fanciful, typically having no discernible connection to the drug (often drugs) being described. They became a literary form of their own, and something of an inside joke among psychedelics users. The general idea of training LLMs on forum archives seems promising though!

webel0 3y ago
Hmm, it appears that they relied on the quality control of forum moderators but didn’t do any of their own QC? From the methods section: > The database of drug narratives from Erowid’s “experience vault” is entirely anonymous. Rigorous quality control is conducted by trained experts with careful consideration given to “quality, credibility, and focus on effects or outcomes” (www.erowid.org). By means of that mechanism, all reports that provided the basis for the present investigation have successfully exceeded a standard quality filter.
Alex3917 3y ago
> Erowid is great, but the trip reports were universally fanciful IIRC they have moderators vet them and only a relatively small percentage get published. The founders and staff actually take their mission statement seriously.
- loeg 3y ago
  Yeah, a friend of mine used to moderate these posts.
stavros 3y ago
I was just playing a board game with a friend, and we spent a while looking through the (fairly complicated) rules. At some point, I had the bright idea to feed the manual to Claude, so we could ask questions about it. It all went great, Claude even gave references, until it hallucinated an innocuous but significantly game-breaking rule ("rest lets you heal one health for two stamina"). This just reinforced my lack of trust in LLMs, and I would sure as hell not ask an LLM what drugs were safe or not.
- NobleLie 3y ago
  I'd think the application would be used more for understanding the psychedelic experience. Not about safety. There is such a wide tome of experiences - there are going to emerge similarities to a knowledgeable AI that can load it all up at once. I'm very curious what patterns can emerge with up to date language models.
- _a9 3y ago
  I dont think erowid content would be good to tell safety of a drug, probably more what type of experience you'd get using a drug at certain doses. What would be interesting would be training using the data from PsychonautWiki[0] which has all sorts of good data about drug information & safety (and experiences) [0] https://psychonautwiki.org/wiki/Main_Page https://psychonautwiki.org/wiki/Main_Page
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
hackernewds 3y ago
> The general idea of training LLMS on forum archives seems promising though! I chuckled. Reddit data is THE gold standard for training something such as an RHCF model, properly up voted/downvoted data through an API. FWIW I'm sure a lot of ChatGPT data is trained there.
- jorvi 3y ago
  Vote communities have a horrible reputation in terms of upvoting good stuff. Echo chambers reign supreme.
  - WarOnPrivacy 3y ago
    Would you say they are the best tools in the worst hands?
    - jorvi 3y ago
      Yes, if we were homo rationalus (or if we are enforced to vote properly), voting systems work great. "tweakers.net" does something very interesting. They allow you to vote 'freely', but if you don't adhere to their voting rules repeatedly, you will have your voting rights locked away. Their current rules are: -1 = flamebait, troll, etc. +0 = irrelevant, inaccurate +1 = relevant +2 = informative, helpful +3 = must read comment If you constantly give +3's to mediocre comments because they agree with your bias, you will get a warning. Similar with -1 to dissenting opinions. After one warning, your vote rights are locked away and you will have to write a good justification on getting them back. To give an example on why voting sucks here for example (yes, I know) and it will sound a bit like sour grapes: I made a comment on how Sonos is great, because their voice assistant processes your voice completely locally. I get berated and told it is not private because you need an account (the EU would fine Sonos severely if they claim local processing but do not do so). I get downvoted to -2 (!), whereas the completely incorrect comment gets sent to +3. Similarly, another commentor says Sonos has horrible software lifetimes. However, they often update their products for ~10 years, which is a better support timeline than even Apple. I'm sent to 0 twice, incorrect commenter goes to +2. With the Tweakers system, Dang would swoop in and annihilate the voting rights of anyone who upvoted these people. Alas, HN loves being a bandwagony echo chamber, so the pain continues :)
akira2501 3y ago
Combine Erowid with SCP.
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
lynx23 3y ago
Agreed, trip reports have become their own art form, and I suspect that a good percentage is actually made up to fit the emerging art form. My favourite example for this is the following: https://erowid.org/experiences/exp.php?ID=97541 https://erowid.org/experiences/exp.php?ID=97541 The style of writing and the amount of stereotypes makes me convinced this is a rather hilarious piece of writing, not even false, but likely never happened.
sph 3y ago
> Erowid is great, but the trip reports were universally fanciful I can assure you that my lengthy description of waves of orgasmic bliss that descended into a hospitalised bad trip† while on 2C-I and cannabis is written as I experienced it, nothing fanciful about that. But I also don't understand how do you claim stories about people literally on drugs to be fanciful. What do you expect people to see and experience if they've taken strong psychedelics? I have no basis to doubt one has really spoken to the Alien God while on salvia. † thankfully it was only a panic attack, but they're a little bit scarier to have when the walls are melting.
- WarOnPrivacy 3y ago
  I had to look up 2C-I. Phenethylamines in general seem pretty interesting, encouraging even. I wish we were studying them with competency, in environments that were fully untethered from absolute profitism, LEO fear, politics and other non-medical agendas. We could use some better tools to address the negative effects of our increasingly complex (and decreasingly prepared) living.
  - sph 3y ago
    2C-I was pretty fun. I ordered it online from a Canadian research lab, paid with credit card, all above board, lol. The panic attack was because of cannabis; over the years I've had half a dozen cannabis-related panic attacks, 2c-I on the other hand was pretty mellow, with lovely visual patterns. Felt less "spiritual"/introspective than shrooms, so to speak. Also, after I got hospitalised, the ER paramedics returned the small bag of white powder to me. I don't know if that's common practice , but I appreciated the gesture.
    - benkillin 3y ago
      I think anything with iodine in it in a non dietary form should be avoided because your thyroid really likes grabbing onto iodine things and there is no telling if that could, for instance, cause hypothyroidism.
- cambaceres 3y ago
specproc 3y ago
I don't think they trained an LLM. This looks like TFIDF on a bag of words to me, possibly getting informative features from a prediction model. Did something similar on the same data at school many years back, but I used the category labels to try and predict good and bad trips. The model worked abysmally, but the features made for great word clouds.
brandall10 3y ago
It's been a long time since I looked at the site, but I was pretty active on it during the 90s. Arguably the prose could be quite interesting, but trip reports that were posted seemed quite congruent with the spirit of Alexander Shulgin's entries on which they were based?

webel0 3y ago

Hmm, it appears that they relied on the quality control of forum moderators but didn’t do any of their own QC? From the methods section: > The database of drug narratives from Erowid’s “experience vault” is entirely anonymous. Rigorous quality control is conducted by trained experts with careful consideration given to “quality, credibility, and focus on effects or outcomes” (www.erowid.org). By means of that mechanism, all reports that provided the basis for the present investigation have successfully exceeded a standard quality filter.

Alex3917 3y ago

> Erowid is great, but the trip reports were universally fanciful IIRC they have moderators vet them and only a relatively small percentage get published. The founders and staff actually take their mission statement seriously.

loeg 3y ago
Yeah, a friend of mine used to moderate these posts.

stavros 3y ago

I was just playing a board game with a friend, and we spent a while looking through the (fairly complicated) rules. At some point, I had the bright idea to feed the manual to Claude, so we could ask questions about it. It all went great, Claude even gave references, until it hallucinated an innocuous but significantly game-breaking rule ("rest lets you heal one health for two stamina"). This just reinforced my lack of trust in LLMs, and I would sure as hell not ask an LLM what drugs were safe or not.

NobleLie 3y ago
I'd think the application would be used more for understanding the psychedelic experience. Not about safety. There is such a wide tome of experiences - there are going to emerge similarities to a knowledgeable AI that can load it all up at once. I'm very curious what patterns can emerge with up to date language models.
_a9 3y ago
I dont think erowid content would be good to tell safety of a drug, probably more what type of experience you'd get using a drug at certain doses. What would be interesting would be training using the data from PsychonautWiki[0] which has all sorts of good data about drug information & safety (and experiences) [0] https://psychonautwiki.org/wiki/Main_Page https://psychonautwiki.org/wiki/Main_Page

deleted 3y ago

[deleted]

hackernewds 3y ago

> The general idea of training LLMS on forum archives seems promising though! I chuckled. Reddit data is THE gold standard for training something such as an RHCF model, properly up voted/downvoted data through an API. FWIW I'm sure a lot of ChatGPT data is trained there.

jorvi 3y ago
Vote communities have a horrible reputation in terms of upvoting good stuff. Echo chambers reign supreme.
- WarOnPrivacy 3y ago
  Would you say they are the best tools in the worst hands?
  - jorvi 3y ago
    Yes, if we were homo rationalus (or if we are enforced to vote properly), voting systems work great. "tweakers.net" does something very interesting. They allow you to vote 'freely', but if you don't adhere to their voting rules repeatedly, you will have your voting rights locked away. Their current rules are: -1 = flamebait, troll, etc. +0 = irrelevant, inaccurate +1 = relevant +2 = informative, helpful +3 = must read comment If you constantly give +3's to mediocre comments because they agree with your bias, you will get a warning. Similar with -1 to dissenting opinions. After one warning, your vote rights are locked away and you will have to write a good justification on getting them back. To give an example on why voting sucks here for example (yes, I know) and it will sound a bit like sour grapes: I made a comment on how Sonos is great, because their voice assistant processes your voice completely locally. I get berated and told it is not private because you need an account (the EU would fine Sonos severely if they claim local processing but do not do so). I get downvoted to -2 (!), whereas the completely incorrect comment gets sent to +3. Similarly, another commentor says Sonos has horrible software lifetimes. However, they often update their products for ~10 years, which is a better support timeline than even Apple. I'm sent to 0 twice, incorrect commenter goes to +2. With the Tweakers system, Dang would swoop in and annihilate the voting rights of anyone who upvoted these people. Alas, HN loves being a bandwagony echo chamber, so the pain continues :)

akira2501 3y ago

Combine Erowid with SCP.

deleted 3y ago
[deleted]

lynx23 3y ago

Agreed, trip reports have become their own art form, and I suspect that a good percentage is actually made up to fit the emerging art form. My favourite example for this is the following: https://erowid.org/experiences/exp.php?ID=97541 https://erowid.org/experiences/exp.php?ID=97541 The style of writing and the amount of stereotypes makes me convinced this is a rather hilarious piece of writing, not even false, but likely never happened.

sph 3y ago

> Erowid is great, but the trip reports were universally fanciful I can assure you that my lengthy description of waves of orgasmic bliss that descended into a hospitalised bad trip† while on 2C-I and cannabis is written as I experienced it, nothing fanciful about that. But I also don't understand how do you claim stories about people literally on drugs to be fanciful. What do you expect people to see and experience if they've taken strong psychedelics? I have no basis to doubt one has really spoken to the Alien God while on salvia. † thankfully it was only a panic attack, but they're a little bit scarier to have when the walls are melting.

WarOnPrivacy 3y ago
I had to look up 2C-I. Phenethylamines in general seem pretty interesting, encouraging even. I wish we were studying them with competency, in environments that were fully untethered from absolute profitism, LEO fear, politics and other non-medical agendas. We could use some better tools to address the negative effects of our increasingly complex (and decreasingly prepared) living.
- sph 3y ago
  2C-I was pretty fun. I ordered it online from a Canadian research lab, paid with credit card, all above board, lol. The panic attack was because of cannabis; over the years I've had half a dozen cannabis-related panic attacks, 2c-I on the other hand was pretty mellow, with lovely visual patterns. Felt less "spiritual"/introspective than shrooms, so to speak. Also, after I got hospitalised, the ER paramedics returned the small bag of white powder to me. I don't know if that's common practice , but I appreciated the gesture.
  - benkillin 3y ago
    I think anything with iodine in it in a non dietary form should be avoided because your thyroid really likes grabbing onto iodine things and there is no telling if that could, for instance, cause hypothyroidism.
cambaceres 3y ago

specproc 3y ago

I don't think they trained an LLM. This looks like TFIDF on a bag of words to me, possibly getting informative features from a prediction model. Did something similar on the same data at school many years back, but I used the category labels to try and predict good and bad trips. The model worked abysmally, but the features made for great word clouds.

brandall10 3y ago

It's been a long time since I looked at the site, but I was pretty active on it during the 90s. Arguably the prose could be quite interesting, but trip reports that were posted seemed quite congruent with the spirit of Alexander Shulgin's entries on which they were based?