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2026-11-04

High-dimensional psychopharmacology

Disclaimer

• personal
• target audience - strictly myself

Main

• Heavy regulation is a major factor for why psychopharmacology hasn't progressed that much.
• But also, it is obvious that a more advanced civilisation than ours would be masters at it.
• There needs to be something in between our current way of doing psychopharmacology, which is like taking a sledgehammer to a plant, and full white-box interpretability.
• Full white-box interpretability of the human brain is just going to lead to recursive self-improvement and arms races and values unstable on reflection and alignment problems and so on.
• Whereas our current sledgehammer approach is too primitive and isn't actually helping that much. Like sure, people have fun while on drugs but I don't think we have figured out a permanent way to improve human baseline experience using drugs for example.
• There needs to be something in between. Like, imagine a PID controller that varies how much of various neurotransmitters to inject into the brain, depending on signals read. Or maybe even a small ML model that controls this.

Note to future self

• maybe read if similar experiments have been done already

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