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Peter Gerdes's avatar

These medications are super interesting but the effect on addiction makes me wonder what negative side effects they have we don't understand yet. After all, cravings and other drug use behaviors leverage quite general mechanisms of reward, pleasure and desire in the brain and it's hard to imagine tuning those mechanisms won't affect other, potentially desierable behaviors. I certainly know that some people report anhedonia and it would be great if that could be validated or rejected with an RCT.

Those impacts aren't any reason to panic or warn people away -- there is alot of interpersonal variation in psychological traits and if consciously adjusting them helps someone live a better life great -- but I unfortunately suspect there is no free lunch here (just some good bargains).

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