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Overcoming Bias Commenter's avatar

"Can you suggest topics for this list, and reasons why they should be considered more seriously?"

Sorry to be so late, but I'd like to nominate self-directed education, or unschooling. As long as our institutions of social science are bound up with our schools, it's probably going to be difficult to get good science about alternatives to schooling.

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Overcoming Bias Commenter's avatar

Or even: can we manufacture new drugs, that have heightened psychedelic effects, while minimizing harmful side effects? The psychedelic effects ARE harmful side effects. The price is acceptance of what you're seeking to purchase.

If you change the course of a river, the new ground it flows across begins to erode. You cannot cause the brain to malfunction without causing it harm, if only because the wiring of the brain is part of a feedback mechanism. Alter its functioning and you alter its structure. Trip on LSD, cause the activity of one subsystem to spill into another, and you've sensitized the connections between them, potentiated a new set of relationships. Divert the river and you carve a new course.

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