Seems to be the nature of the beast sadly. Huberman, Attia, Ferris, to me all started in super niche subjects and now it's like anyone can come on. I've lost interest in almost all podcasts now because they've all converged into one hive mind of read the stoics, lift weights, do an ice bath, blah blah blah.
It’s the trap of the weekly science/academic podcast. There isn’t enough science, they eventually run through their expertise, their friends’ expertise, but they gotta keep cranking podcasts out. Quality inevitably goes downhill. Most of them become part of the book-promotional podcast circuit. Just look at EconTalk.
If you're going to attempt to provide information for maximizing the a human life experience and want to do so based on empirical data that is pretty much where you will inevitably end up.
Yes. Personally I don't care about title, institution or anything. If the claims are not verifiable and reproducible, then I am inclined to take it with a grain of salt.
We can do it in computer science, I'm sure it can be done in other fields of research also.
After hearing that he advocates for nicotine use to prevent Alzheimer's I'm pretty skeptical of him. He seems to entirely ignore the risks associated with nicotine drive vasoconstriction all for a possible minor benefit.
I suppose you don't need to worry about neurodegeneration if you die from a heart attack or aneurysm before you get that old
It has been known for a long time that nicotine, as well as caffeine and other stimulants can delay Alzheimer's. I don't think that Andrew's claim is novel or controversial, but he is making an observation not a recommendation.
Do you have a specific timestamp of him advocating for the use of nicotine? From the description and timestamp chapters this seems like a fairly reasonable episode on the effects of nicotine in the brain, which, given the topic of the podcast seems in his lane. It even dedicates a decent portion of runtime to quitting smoking and vaping, even though that isn't really on topic.
This alternate link to the same site seems more attuned to what you just asked.
(Not going to listen to it all myself...life's too short, then you do or don't get forgetful!)
That's not what the GP said. They said Huberman's incorrect statements on something they understood made them more skeptical regarding his other statements, not that these other statements were definitely wrong because the first statements were wrong. It's about judging Huberman's reliability as a source of information, not deciding whether he's correct or not, ie whether it makes sense to take Huberman at his word or whether one should doublecheck the things that he says.
I don't care who they are, Neil deGrasse Tyson, Michio Kaku, Andrew Huberman or Robert Sapolsky (especially him), I always take what they say with a grain of salt because the lure of the almight dollar corrupts their objectivity and why not? There's nothing wrong with making a buck and the general public needs to have information that is at least grounded in reality. If it's enertaining too they'll pay attention and learn something, which they didn't do in high school.
Because I watched him progress from a respected professor at Stanford to a self-promoter who sits on Twitter looking for mentions of his name, not that there's anything wrong with that. It's a personal experience for me, so it may not be generally true. I found his lecture on depression in the mid 2010's and it helped me a lot. By 2023, I mentioned on Twitter that I didn't buy his idea that we didn't have free will and a minute later he liked my tweet. I hope he's making good money with his no free will idea. He's out there promoting it enough.
What makes you think his promotion of the book was particulary motivated by making money rather than any other reason an author might promote their book?
Does this come down to the fact that you don't like the topic of his book? As you have said elsewhere that you're not going to criticize someone for wanting to make money.
Hacker News put a delay on my response to you because it thought we were arguing so I responded to user afpx. Yes, you're right. I vehemently disagree with him.
I agree with him on the notion that we have no 'free will' to speak of. In the end, we are just physical beings that must operate according to cause and effect, whether we are 'compelled' or not.
Sound depressing, but that gives us incredible freedom to investigate causes of human misery and correct them.
His book “Behave” seemed to be well done. He cites everything he claims (I’ve only looked at a few of them, but they seemed like legit studies). I haven’t followed much of his free will argument but it makes sense he’d go down that path because the premise of Behave is that our actions are just the result of many physical processes.
One thing that keeps me open-minded about free will is that, yeah my actions may be the result of natural processes, but I also have the ability to reflect upon those actions so that my responses change the next time. But, then again I would probably defend the idea of free will even irrationally. In my opinion even if I don’t have free will I still have to live like I do.
Edit: I just googled Behave citations and one of the first things to pop up was someone claiming he has bad sources. But, I didn’t investigate that person’s claims either. So, be skeptical I guess.
I am not a religious person but I experience the Universe as a consciousness that pervades the entirety and contains all the intelligence required for it's operation. I agree with Erwin Schrodinger that "“The total number of minds in the universe is one. In fact, consciousness is a singularity phasing within all beings” and I call that singular consciousness God. Our brain does produce consciousness but tunes into it.
So you can see why I might vehmently disagree with people like Saplosky who attemt to reduce us to mere machines. How depressing, which is ironic, since Saplosky's Stanford lecture on depression really started me on the road out of my depression.
Does it really matter if there are many minds or one? That just shifts the question to whether this "universe mind" is fundamentally mechanistic or not.
I'm confused by your question. I'm hearing it like "does it matter if there are many gravity wells or just gravity?" because I believe science will once day find consciousness is the 5th fundamental force, perhaps the one the ties the other four together
So you're saying a conscious Universe could still be Newton's "clockwork universe"? Well, Einstein did say "God does not play dice with the universe" but I think the quantum direction is where the riddle of consciousness may be be found. The beauty and terror of our own minds is the uncertainty that lies in the choices we make and the outcomes we get from those choices.
I don't think quantum mechanics fundamentally changes things, either. If you look at it from the Copenhagen perspective, sure, you get randomness, but I don't think many people would seriously argue that adding a true RNG to an otherwise mechanical contraption makes it any less mechanical, even if it becomes unpredictable - the real question behind "free will" is not whether branching is deterministic, but rather whether the entity has any degree of control over it. And if you look at it from the many-worlds perspective, then you just have parallelized determinism.
My personal take on this is that the question itself is meaningless because we cannot define "free will" in any coherent way that is actually testable. It all boils down to defining what "conscious" and "self" mean, which are themselves very fuzzy concepts that elude clear definitions. My solution to all this is to just stop wasting time on it, since I don't think there are any practical implications to it (and if there's no free will - whatever that means in practice - then my opinion is itself predetermined in any case).
I agree with you that the question of free will is a waste of time, which is why I generally avoid it. Maybe if you are a student of Catholic Church doctrine and have a final exam coming up? Sapolsky does not write from a Catholic perspective, but his audience might have been brought up with it so his writings might be provocative for them and thus profitable for him. I've been watching his career with more amusement than irritation. He is classic case of a regular guy becoming an "influencer." The same thing happened to Jordan Peterson. At the same time [2015] I found Sapolsky's lecture on depression I found Peterson's. Both not well known at the time. Both lectures really helpful. Both now well known influencers.
It’s natural for human brain to find explanations for the supernatural. We are born with a “God” placeholder in our brain, just as infinity is a concept.
The idea that consciousness is 5th fundamental force sounds great but doesn’t make any sense.
Everything in universe is interaction of particles in force fields. We have mathematical definitions for them in standard model of physics.
And consciousness is what we experience in our brains as a model of reality. It’s a much more complex emergent concept arising from how neurons are wired together to process input -> output signals. Consciousness boils down to signal processing. Which down the stack of atoms and subatomic particle requires the fundamental forces.
Very different things. Put in a different way, they are fundamental because they explain everything in observable universe.
I regard consciousness as fundamental. I regard matter as derivative from consciousness. We cannot get behind consciousness. Everything that we talk about, everything that we regard as existing, postulates consciousness.
Do you often discount studies and science when it comes to ideas that don’t align with your natural instinct?
Is addiction a disease or a moral failure? Is depression a chemical imbalance or is it your own fault, maybe just “exercise and smile more”?
Questions of that nature are fair but simply being against a researcher or author because they have a viewpoint different your own is entirely what’s wrong with so much of discourse today.
You're implying that Robert Sapolsky speaks the truth the contradicts my belief system. Maybe you're thinking I'm Catholic (I'm not) who see free will as a gift from God that allows humans to freely choose to love and obey Him. Catholic doctrine holds that free will is granted to humans by God as part of being created in His image and likeness. Without free will, humans could not be held morally responsible for their actions. The ability to choose between good and evil is fundamental to Catholic understanding of sin and redemption.
No, I think Robert Sapolsky's focus is too narrow and materialistic, ignoring almost everything that makes us human. In the story of the seven blind men and the elephant, Robert Sapolsky is the blind scientist that feels the trunk and proclaims the elephant is a snake. Robert Sapolsky's science is flawed. If human behavior can be explained by chemicals then why do we need his colleagues in other departments at Stanford, such as the psychologists?
My point was he was doing what he does to make money Malcolm Gladwell style and I thought there was nothing wrong with that but that was a reason why I didn't take him seriouly.
The topic about free will is similar to debating “are we in a simulation?”
In a perfect simulation, there is absolutely no way to escape it. A simulation is essentially like a virtual machine running some opcodes. There is absolutely no way to escape it unless the programmer is shit at implementing the opcodes with buffer overflows.
If we cannot computationally reduce, we have no option than to let the simulation play out. So far our universe is not computationally reducible. I.e we cannot compute where subatomic particles will be faster than letting them actually play out.
Whether we have free will or not doesn’t matter. If we cannot computationally reduce, person B cannot compute ahead what person A will do with absolute certainty.
To compute the future, we need to simulate every subatomic particle in universe faster than the the natural speed of universe with fewer particles. That itself is impossible.
We can approximate, yes! But not absolute certainty.
So we have no free will because universe is deterministic. But we also have free will because we need a universe sized computer to know what will happen and the only way to do that is to let the universe play it out. We cannot do that faster than the universe if we are inside the universe.
We are in a simulation. But it does not matter because it makes no difference if we are in a simulation or not.
God exists, but God also doesn’t exist. If God is non-interfering then it absolutely doesn’t matter.
I read one of his books when I was a teenager and it’s probably why I chose to do physics.
However, I follow a very outspoken and accomplished IBM quantum information leader on LinkedIn and she has had harsh words on his recent comments on QIP and just his later career in general.
Not sure if many contemporary practitioners take him seriously anymore.
Angela Collier (a theoretical physicist) is also pretty harsh on him [1]. The main critique of him is that he happily keeps talking authoritatively and confidently about scientific topics that he has very little knowledge about (e.g., quantum computing).
You must listen to Andrew Huberman and Dr. Jack Kruse on Rick Rubin's Tetragammon or whatever his podcast is called. Huberman quite literally knows next to nothing compared to a real Doctor. He embarrasses himself over the course of four hours. If I were Stanford, I would pull his tenure.
Some of the cannabis researchers interviewed for the article have legitimate complaints about facts that he is claiming; but in other cases it’s about use of language that could be construed inaccurately. The latter is a risk of popularizing science, so the complaints are a mixed bag.
Overall, I take his recommendations for ingestion of any substance with skepticism. He often bundles his health recommendations into “protocols” or combinations of interventions which may have been studied in isolation but likely not in combination. Yet the term “protocol” carries a weight, that suggests that the bundle of interventions is better studied than they are. But maybe that’s just me. And one can make what one will about his financial association with supplement suppliers. Of course, it’s all disclosed; so listeners can decide for themselves whether or to what extent bias may enter the picture.
So in summary, all of the few “experts” on the drug are getting paid to say it’s harmless, so we should believe them, and the generalist neuroscientists that study intelligence, as well as the subjective experiences of most people, are wrong, but not in any specific way; just everything is wrong - stop thinking and smoke. Okay thanks journalists.
I don’t disagree with the article. There’s almost no content to disagree with. The journalist picked bad experts and provided nothing but character assassination persiflage under the appeal to authority fallacy. This is a top-level publication, so it’s not unreasonable to suggest commonality with the profession.
Why say this? Because I’ve learned that the mendacity of paid experts and journalists goes unchecked when ordinary people say nothing, and quite often the crowd opinion of people with nothing to gain is more trustworthy.
Andrew provides citations for all of his claims from scientific journals, very often clarifies when there isn't enough good science to make certain claims, and also provides a mechanism for other researchers to reach out to him when they feel that his claims are inaccurate.
I don't know whether he is right or wrong in this specific instance, but he deserves some amount of credit and this Rolling Stone article (and this thread) are mostly full of dismissive invective.
I saw a video just this morning where he said that the chance of getting pregnant when having unprotected sex is 20%, so if you have sex 5 times and are not pregnant then you should see your doctor because something is likely wrong with your eggs or your partners sperm.
Was the second part of that statement ("so if you have sex 5 times") what he said or what you inferred from what he said? If he said that exactly, that's pretty bad.
See comment above with link. He said if it doesn't work the first time, "she should probably repeat that 5 or 6 times" and then said something about it being cumulative because 20 + 20 + 20.... is 120%.
He said "the probability of getting pregnant on any 1 attempt to conceive is 20%"
with a heavy emphasis on "1 attempt" I figure he was talking about sex. Either way, the logic isn't correct if he was talking about cycles either.
People are thinking in terms of the male mechanism of reproduction and not the female mechanism of reproduction.
Trying to conceive is heavily reliant on timing the cycles so I doubt this something Huberman was unaware of. 6 cycles sounds about right as well. People shouldn't wait around when they're running out of time to have kids.
What you’re saying is he’s selectively quoting evidence an thereby lying by omission. For most claims in medicine “studies” exist that show the exact opposite of those claims. Quick, tell me, is butter good or bad? How about eggs? Nicotine maybe? Drinking salt water in the morning? Etc etc.
Hill and Klumpers are two of the most intelligent people in the world on the subject. Both are ICRS alumni. If they’re pushing back, Huberman should get ready to be properly educated.
Even though he cites his claims, and adds warnings of them being new or lacking other supporting evidence to live by, it is weird to then have still be elevated by him on a health podcast that people often apply to their lives.
I try to think of it like if there was a programming content creator saying Elxir is powerful and ready enough to use everywhere. Though it is true enough that it can be used anywhere, but anyone here could probably point out a bunch of situations you really should never ever use something like it. But imagine someone without that experience not knowing and taking their word for it and put it into prod blindly, it be a huge waste of time and money. Time and money is one thing but in health, knowing media and reading literacy is dropping, its just something if I where in his position I would see it as irresponsible to even mention some of the stuff he does.
You lost me on the Elixir analogy. Elixir is great . I'll concede Elixir would not be well suited for a 3D physics engine or for writing hardware drivers.
Fair enough, my point is mostly that even though it is great we have evidence it's great, but without context of a professional insight it can be terrible. Alot of those studies are the same situation, it is great in their context, terrible outside of it only doctors and most of the time specialist will be able to tell.
Then that information is structured for a layman, like imagine brand-new devs walking into a bootcamp thinking Elixir is safe main language to learn based on YC hype. As good as it is, it doesn't have a big job market, has specialized use cases, and has the same dev environment/knowledge base of node/js in the late 2000's early 2010's.
Cannabis research is highly politicized. Researchers go in that field with an agenda. That's at least my experience with that field.
Most weed users will nitpick research that shows weed is safe and good for you while most detractors will find research that says the opposite.
I don't know the science but at least to me it "feels" like the weed benefits have been pushed a bit too much too widely lately (legalization lobby) and we are now seeing a huge backlash. I'm seeing the same trend happening with Mushroom/Psylocibin (about to get legal so a ton of research/articles to make it look perfectly safe).
> weed benefits have been pushed a bit too much too widely lately
Totally agree. The entire legalization political momentum started because cannabis has real medical benefits. Early legalization efforts focused on cancer, and AIDS, because the benefits there are very real. Marinol is a synthetic cannabis drug.
Then some how the movement lost the plot and people started purporting benefits for things like ADHD, insomnia, and anxiety. I am confident the large majority of medical professionals would claim there are better drugs for those conditions. Then legalization was sold as a better alternative to alcohol and opiates (which it is). But some how the low addiction rate got sold as no addiction. There are scores of people who are probably making their anxiety worse with daily cannabis use, who are under the impression they are self-medicating their anxiety. When they quit they might go through withdrawals, despite believing it's not addictive. I think the science is fairly clear and maybe not settled in certain places, but I think the pendulum has swung from the misinformation of DARE to the misinformation of the Cannabis lobby.
Cannabis comes in many shapes and forms and it can absolutely help relieve anxiety. You need to ingest or smoke a high CBD strain with low THC.
I generally buy the legal CBD stuff I can get here and mix it with street weed which is generally high on THC and it does wonders to relieve my anxiety and stress. Smoking CBD itself is great but has a much more limited effect, in my experience.
I think goes further than cannabis research. People hear what they want to hear to support their side.
The few Huberman podcasts I have listened too I find he hasn't really taken a stand on anything and typically reads from a paper that claims things. Just reading the results of a study, or saying something is interesting and should be explored more is now an endorsement by him for some reason.
This is 99% of research in 2024, except the research that was directly sponsored by corporations to get a competitive edge and make more money. Ironic how BigCo is now more trustworthy than navel-gazing academia. Although it's hard to feel sorry for them for this self-inflicted wound.
People just don't understand the concept of cherry picking studies anymore and reasonable in-the-middle discussions have gone extinct.
Ive seen some of his content. Generally I find that he regards science and such well.
Something I've noticed going through a cannabis legalization. What we were told in the 1990s about cannabis was completely wrong. In their defense, because of it's classification it wasn't possible to do any studies. Only now can researchers actually research with it and we're overthrowing a great deal of ancient science from the past. But also paving way for future understandings.
Looking at the allegation, his main assertion is 'there is literally no research that has ever been done"
Sure because it was illegal. Now the studies are coming in and perhaps the best argument is that it's not settled science? Or perhaps that Andrew overstated positions?
A few colleagues are fully enthralled by Hubermann, I forwarded the hit-pieces about his infidelities, the colleagues did realize that humans need more than drink green goo and see morning sunlight to feel right :-p
I saw a Huberman clip this morning where he said that because women under thirty have a 20% chance of getting pregnant after a single attempt that they should try five times before seeing an OBGYN because 20% x 5 = 100% and that six times would be 120% but "that's something totally different".
It blows my mind that a Professor at Stanford could have such a terrible understanding of statistics.
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[ 3.9 ms ] story [ 149 ms ] threadI mean, these are generally true so kind of good they are part of hive mind.
We can do it in computer science, I'm sure it can be done in other fields of research also.
I suppose you don't need to worry about neurodegeneration if you die from a heart attack or aneurysm before you get that old
Could you source this?
It has been known for a long time that nicotine, as well as caffeine and other stimulants can delay Alzheimer's. I don't think that Andrew's claim is novel or controversial, but he is making an observation not a recommendation.
https://ai.hubermanlab.com/s/dqcKio7m
AFAIK he's just a biology professor convinced that we don't have free will.
a) extremely passionate about the idea that we have no free will
b) loves the paychecks that arrive after appearing on podcasts and selling books
c) is compelled to do all these things because he has no free will
edit: formating, code blocks don't work anymore?
Sound depressing, but that gives us incredible freedom to investigate causes of human misery and correct them.
One thing that keeps me open-minded about free will is that, yeah my actions may be the result of natural processes, but I also have the ability to reflect upon those actions so that my responses change the next time. But, then again I would probably defend the idea of free will even irrationally. In my opinion even if I don’t have free will I still have to live like I do.
Edit: I just googled Behave citations and one of the first things to pop up was someone claiming he has bad sources. But, I didn’t investigate that person’s claims either. So, be skeptical I guess.
So you can see why I might vehmently disagree with people like Saplosky who attemt to reduce us to mere machines. How depressing, which is ironic, since Saplosky's Stanford lecture on depression really started me on the road out of my depression.
My personal take on this is that the question itself is meaningless because we cannot define "free will" in any coherent way that is actually testable. It all boils down to defining what "conscious" and "self" mean, which are themselves very fuzzy concepts that elude clear definitions. My solution to all this is to just stop wasting time on it, since I don't think there are any practical implications to it (and if there's no free will - whatever that means in practice - then my opinion is itself predetermined in any case).
The idea that consciousness is 5th fundamental force sounds great but doesn’t make any sense.
Everything in universe is interaction of particles in force fields. We have mathematical definitions for them in standard model of physics.
And consciousness is what we experience in our brains as a model of reality. It’s a much more complex emergent concept arising from how neurons are wired together to process input -> output signals. Consciousness boils down to signal processing. Which down the stack of atoms and subatomic particle requires the fundamental forces.
Very different things. Put in a different way, they are fundamental because they explain everything in observable universe.
That being said, I respect your right to believe.
That's a magical concept as well. A theory like mine. Time will tell. I only wish I was around when they figure it out.
Most don’t even believe any other animals other than humans can be conscious. Or that computers can be conscious.
- Max Planck
Is addiction a disease or a moral failure? Is depression a chemical imbalance or is it your own fault, maybe just “exercise and smile more”?
Questions of that nature are fair but simply being against a researcher or author because they have a viewpoint different your own is entirely what’s wrong with so much of discourse today.
No, I think Robert Sapolsky's focus is too narrow and materialistic, ignoring almost everything that makes us human. In the story of the seven blind men and the elephant, Robert Sapolsky is the blind scientist that feels the trunk and proclaims the elephant is a snake. Robert Sapolsky's science is flawed. If human behavior can be explained by chemicals then why do we need his colleagues in other departments at Stanford, such as the psychologists?
My point was he was doing what he does to make money Malcolm Gladwell style and I thought there was nothing wrong with that but that was a reason why I didn't take him seriouly.
In a perfect simulation, there is absolutely no way to escape it. A simulation is essentially like a virtual machine running some opcodes. There is absolutely no way to escape it unless the programmer is shit at implementing the opcodes with buffer overflows.
If we cannot computationally reduce, we have no option than to let the simulation play out. So far our universe is not computationally reducible. I.e we cannot compute where subatomic particles will be faster than letting them actually play out.
Whether we have free will or not doesn’t matter. If we cannot computationally reduce, person B cannot compute ahead what person A will do with absolute certainty.
To compute the future, we need to simulate every subatomic particle in universe faster than the the natural speed of universe with fewer particles. That itself is impossible.
We can approximate, yes! But not absolute certainty.
So we have no free will because universe is deterministic. But we also have free will because we need a universe sized computer to know what will happen and the only way to do that is to let the universe play it out. We cannot do that faster than the universe if we are inside the universe.
We are in a simulation. But it does not matter because it makes no difference if we are in a simulation or not.
God exists, but God also doesn’t exist. If God is non-interfering then it absolutely doesn’t matter.
I read one of his books when I was a teenager and it’s probably why I chose to do physics.
However, I follow a very outspoken and accomplished IBM quantum information leader on LinkedIn and she has had harsh words on his recent comments on QIP and just his later career in general.
Not sure if many contemporary practitioners take him seriously anymore.
[1] https://youtu.be/wBBnfu8N_J0?t=2339
Overall, I take his recommendations for ingestion of any substance with skepticism. He often bundles his health recommendations into “protocols” or combinations of interventions which may have been studied in isolation but likely not in combination. Yet the term “protocol” carries a weight, that suggests that the bundle of interventions is better studied than they are. But maybe that’s just me. And one can make what one will about his financial association with supplement suppliers. Of course, it’s all disclosed; so listeners can decide for themselves whether or to what extent bias may enter the picture.
I, for one, even when I disagree with an article, cannot make myself scare quote experts and whine about journalists.
It tortures me that, at the end of the day, I'm either:
A) I'm just making excuses for disagreeing by pretending groups of people are monolith and there's no such thing as subject matter expertise
or
B) I'm just generally upset and going on an off-topic rant.
I wish for a 3rd and better option, lashing out has a nice opiate effect, but I really can't stand looking mendacious.
Why say this? Because I’ve learned that the mendacity of paid experts and journalists goes unchecked when ordinary people say nothing, and quite often the crowd opinion of people with nothing to gain is more trustworthy.
I don't think it's respectful to you to pretend there's no content in the article.
I don't think you're foolish, and simultaneously believe A) nothing was said B) nothing disagreeable was said C) they were paid to say lies.
That'd be an incoherent rant, and you're perfectly legible.
I don't know whether he is right or wrong in this specific instance, but he deserves some amount of credit and this Rolling Stone article (and this thread) are mostly full of dismissive invective.
Just terrible advice.
[0] https://twitter.com/Andercot/status/1788605009535655951
Be less cynical.
Trying to conceive is heavily reliant on timing the cycles so I doubt this something Huberman was unaware of. 6 cycles sounds about right as well. People shouldn't wait around when they're running out of time to have kids.
I try to think of it like if there was a programming content creator saying Elxir is powerful and ready enough to use everywhere. Though it is true enough that it can be used anywhere, but anyone here could probably point out a bunch of situations you really should never ever use something like it. But imagine someone without that experience not knowing and taking their word for it and put it into prod blindly, it be a huge waste of time and money. Time and money is one thing but in health, knowing media and reading literacy is dropping, its just something if I where in his position I would see it as irresponsible to even mention some of the stuff he does.
Then that information is structured for a layman, like imagine brand-new devs walking into a bootcamp thinking Elixir is safe main language to learn based on YC hype. As good as it is, it doesn't have a big job market, has specialized use cases, and has the same dev environment/knowledge base of node/js in the late 2000's early 2010's.
Most weed users will nitpick research that shows weed is safe and good for you while most detractors will find research that says the opposite.
I don't know the science but at least to me it "feels" like the weed benefits have been pushed a bit too much too widely lately (legalization lobby) and we are now seeing a huge backlash. I'm seeing the same trend happening with Mushroom/Psylocibin (about to get legal so a ton of research/articles to make it look perfectly safe).
Totally agree. The entire legalization political momentum started because cannabis has real medical benefits. Early legalization efforts focused on cancer, and AIDS, because the benefits there are very real. Marinol is a synthetic cannabis drug.
Then some how the movement lost the plot and people started purporting benefits for things like ADHD, insomnia, and anxiety. I am confident the large majority of medical professionals would claim there are better drugs for those conditions. Then legalization was sold as a better alternative to alcohol and opiates (which it is). But some how the low addiction rate got sold as no addiction. There are scores of people who are probably making their anxiety worse with daily cannabis use, who are under the impression they are self-medicating their anxiety. When they quit they might go through withdrawals, despite believing it's not addictive. I think the science is fairly clear and maybe not settled in certain places, but I think the pendulum has swung from the misinformation of DARE to the misinformation of the Cannabis lobby.
I generally buy the legal CBD stuff I can get here and mix it with street weed which is generally high on THC and it does wonders to relieve my anxiety and stress. Smoking CBD itself is great but has a much more limited effect, in my experience.
The few Huberman podcasts I have listened too I find he hasn't really taken a stand on anything and typically reads from a paper that claims things. Just reading the results of a study, or saying something is interesting and should be explored more is now an endorsement by him for some reason.
This is 99% of research in 2024, except the research that was directly sponsored by corporations to get a competitive edge and make more money. Ironic how BigCo is now more trustworthy than navel-gazing academia. Although it's hard to feel sorry for them for this self-inflicted wound.
People just don't understand the concept of cherry picking studies anymore and reasonable in-the-middle discussions have gone extinct.
Something I've noticed going through a cannabis legalization. What we were told in the 1990s about cannabis was completely wrong. In their defense, because of it's classification it wasn't possible to do any studies. Only now can researchers actually research with it and we're overthrowing a great deal of ancient science from the past. But also paving way for future understandings.
Looking at the allegation, his main assertion is 'there is literally no research that has ever been done"
Sure because it was illegal. Now the studies are coming in and perhaps the best argument is that it's not settled science? Or perhaps that Andrew overstated positions?
It blows my mind that a Professor at Stanford could have such a terrible understanding of statistics.