Depression (anxiety et al) seem, to me, like a contributing factor. This article triggered me yesterday:
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2021/apr/20/psychedelics-depression-treatment-psychiatry-psilocybinBut more relevant to tragic story-telling and pessimism is the effect psi has on the terminally ill, which was also broached in the Chiang interview, quoted below. The important part re: psychedelics is the last sentence about *limited information*. Perhaps psi simultaneously *loosens* up your eschatological tendencies, provides more degrees of freedom, wiggle room, while doing so in an abstracting way, which limits the concrete detail. Optimists are notoriously NOT concrete thinkers, glossing over externalities and unintended consequences. But pessimists, realists, are imprisoned by their concrete detail ... like a terminally ill person who not only knows the date they'll die, but precisely how, what time of day, and the entire (deterministic) causal mesh. By splashing all that around, the psychedelics may allow in a little more optimistic thought.
"EZRA KLEIN: Let me ask you a question that I think about fairly often, I think partly because I’m Jewish culturally. If I could tell you, if you could know with certainty the date of your death, would you want to know it?
TED CHIANG: Yeah, I probably would. I probably would.
EZRA KLEIN: Really? Oh, I would not, under any circumstances, want to know.
TED CHIANG: I mean, it seems like it might be useful so that you could make some preparations. It might be good to get your affairs in order. We’re not talking about a lot of detailed information because I think the more information you have, yeah, the more that it’s going to mess with you. The more information you have, the closer we get to this situation that I sometimes write about, where, yeah, if you have perfect knowledge of what’s going to happen to you, yeah, that, I think, is kind of incompatible with human volition. But very limited pieces of information could be helpful."
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