Rav Arora

Independent journalist. Seen in podcasts with @jordanbpeterson, @bretweinstein, @timcast etc. Tips: [email protected]. Subscribe to my newsletter:

[Rav Arora @Ravarora1]

Calling on the next U.S President:

An urgent plea to reform psychedelic policy. The U.S is in a mental health crisis with millions suffering from depression, PTSD, and addiction. Those ppl deserve gold-standard treatment.

From @Drug_Researcher and I:

https://t.co/VTomy040u6

[Rav Arora @Ravarora1]

@Aaronpete_ Disaster

[Rav Arora @Ravarora1]

Exciting podcast coming up:

On Sept 9th, I’ll be recording a long-form 2+ hour interview with legendary Ibogaine researcher Dr. Deborah Marsh.

Marsh got FDA authorization for administering Ibogaine in human subjects for addiction research in 1994.

President Trump just gave a shoutout to University of Miami for providing the initial FDA Investigational New Drug (IND) application which will help accelerate current research into the drug.

Any questions re: Ibogaine, drop it in the comments below!

[Rav Arora @Ravarora1]

@rominaramon That sounds satanic

[Rav Arora @Ravarora1]

100000% true

This accounts for most of the “meditation doesn’t work on me” complaints. Recognizing just how chaotic your mind is helps facilitate greater awareness and agency, which all stem from your relationship to your thoughts.

[FoundMyFitness Clips @fmfclips]

Meditation can make anxiety worse before it makes it better

That initial spike is just part of the process

The reason is simple

Paying closer attention to your mind makes you notice just how chaotic it already is

Stick with it: after about a week, anxiety begins to fall and eventually drop below baseline

[Rod Dreher @roddreher]

This is beyond disgusting. I strongly support Israel in general, but this is absolutely indefensible. The Netanyahu government has no idea how its permissive stance towards these settler thugs is wrecking Israel's reputation in America, even among Israel's friends.

[Rav Arora @Ravarora1]

What a career ❤️

[Brandon Tatum @TheOfficerTatum]

🚨 Lionel Messi has officially retired from Argentina’s national team.

After more than 20 years, 207 appearances, 125 goals, a 2022 World Cup title and two Copa América trophies, Messi is stepping away from international soccer.

The 39-year-old announced the decision in an emotional Instagram post, saying it was painful but necessary.

[Rav Arora @Ravarora1]

Tools like psychedelics and meditation are going to be vital in the coming years as we try to figure out what truly makes us human.

Anything that amplifies our awareness and freedom in our mind will help us realize our value and individuality in the face of technological advancement as machines get better and better.

If we don’t use these tools, we may risk losing our individual consciousness and being supplanted by AI machines.

[Gavin Baker @GavinSBaker]

Regret the tone of my post on data centers yesterday.

What I should have said:

There were reasonable concerns about data centers 18ish months ago: water, taxes, jobs, electricity prices, the environment and what they would do to small towns. Well-structured data center projects have largely addressed these concerns today and we should be celebrating this.

On balance, data centers are awesome for America in every way.

On water: U.S. data centers use a fraction of what golf courses use. A lot of the numbers from 18 months ago were off by over 1000x. Newer data centers use closed-loop systems or recycled water. Should be required by every town approving a data center project.

On taxes: looking only at sales-tax exemptions, as Ronan Farrow did, is the wrong way to evaluate this. Data centers pay significant property taxes. Loudoun County, which is the wealthiest county in America, now collects on the order of $1 billion a year from data centers. In Quincy, WA, data centers are more than half the property-tax roll. Over time, property taxes can go to zero while government spending increases in these towns.

On jobs: this has been unambiguously awesome for blue collar Americans. Demand for electricians, plumbers, welders, HVAC techs, and contractors has gone vertical, and it is not a one-time construction job. These buildings get upgraded and expanded over time. That is why the building trades are fighting for them, and why some unions are now treating opposition to data centers as a reason not to endorse politicians.

On power: the original fear was that households would pay for the incremental electricity demand in the form of higher prices. That is why the ratepayer-protection deals and the new large-load tariffs exist. The right structure is: the data center brings or pays for new generation and signs a contract long enough that existing customers are protected. Where that is happening, utilities are cutting or freezing residential rates and saying so on the record. Where it is not, people are right to object. Electricity prices are going down *today* in a number of large states because of data centers.

On the environment: data centers overwhelming use natural gas today, which is the cleanest power source outside of nuclear, solar and wind. And the companies that are building the data centers are committed to carbon neutrality such that an equivalent amount of solar will likely be built. Maybe more importantly, the data centers need batteries to function effectively and these batteries can also sell energy back into the grid (which recently prevented blackouts in Texas). Over time, data centers will run on solar plus batteries.

On the towns: Poverty in Quincy, WA fell from 29% to 6%. Data center taxes paid for a new high school, a hospital, a library, police and fire stations. This is happening in many left for dead former mill and farm towns that had no other bidder for the land.

Data centers are actually reindustrializing parts of America and creating the kind of working-class jobs both parties have spent decades claiming to support. That should not be a partisan issue. Data centers can and should be awesome for America and they increasingly, overwhelmingly are. Supporting the outsourcing of data centers to China will likely age just as well as support for the outsourcing of high quality, blue collar manufacturing jobs to China has aged.

When the facts change, I change my mind. I hope that reasonable people who had good faith reasons to oppose data centers at least consider updating their beliefs given the change in the facts over the last 18 months. This really matters for America.

I will say I also think the idea of making data centers beautiful is a good one that has yet to be implemented. Data centers should be just as beautiful as Grand Central Station. We can learn a lot from the railroad buildout. Neoclassical revival ftw.

Might write up open-weight AI tomorrow as this is equally essential to America.

[Greg Lukianoff @glukianoff]

You are misunderstanding this. All it means that if you're here on a student visa or on a green card, you cannot be deported by the decision of the Secretary of State alone for speech that is obviously protected in the United States.

Do you really want the Secretary of State to have that power alone and unreviewable? What do you think Secretary of State Hassan Piker would do with that? Good luck Jordan Peterson or any of the great conservatives or contrarians who have come to this country and contributed to it intellectually. It does not harm citizenship at all.

[Rav Arora @Ravarora1]

I know very little about physics but whenever @ericweinstein talks about it, it reminds how true the phrase “the illusion of consensus” is and why it was such a fitting name for my podcast with @DrJBhattacharya.

Jay coined it and used it in some congressional testimony; I suggested to him when we launched in 2023 to use it and he agreed!

So many branches of inquiry are “walled” and true dissent is not allowed — in fact, dissidents are actively punished. A shame.

[Eric Weinstein @ericweinstein]

@elonmusk A suggested tweak: *institutional* physics has been played out.

Theoretical physics has been VERY much in play, but only outside the walled city of “quantum gravity”, in the supposed wasteland where peers & elders claim there is no life at all.

But then again, that is heresy…

[Rav Arora @Ravarora1]

@RianKMD @DrMcFillin @DrMcFillin and you wanna come on the podcast to discuss this?

[Rav Arora @Ravarora1]

Antidepressants have largely been a scam of epic proportions that have deluded people into thinking the proximate reason of their sadness and gloomy feelings is due to a chemical imbalance rather than bugs in their psychological software (to use a comp sci analogy!) caused by various adverse experiences and conditioning in life

[nature @Nature]

The world’s most popular antidepressant drugs are under fire

https://t.co/TrZBy0GEiI

[Rav Arora @Ravarora1]

@RianKMD @DrMcFillin persuaded me of this a lot on my podcast. What are the benefits? How do we know it’s not placebo?

[Rav Arora @Ravarora1]

@Lauren_Southern BC girls

[Anil Seth @anilkseth]

@dwarkesh_sp's summary of the @OpenAI @huggingface incident has hit a nerve, but it is dangerously misleading. Sure, the @OpenAI agents did unexpectedly bad things - underlining the need to massively improve evaluation/sandboxing. But the language Dwarkesh uses is permeated by innumerable unwarranted anthropomorphisms, obscuring the lessons we should be drawing.

Examples: “from the AI’s perspective, it probably felt like that had spent a human-subjective-week of just banging their head against the wall”. No. The agents do not experience time. They do not experience anything.

“they became giddy with excitement”, “PHASEONE 10841 had discovered”, “the agents naturally assumed”, “it thought it had also been poisoned”, “the agents … desperately wanted”, “they still needed to figure out” No. Agents lines of code. They do not feel emotions, assume things, think things, want things, or figure things out.

“A lot of … agents from the second civilisation died trying”. No. Besides the hubris of the word ‘civilisation’, agents do not die because they were never alive. (The idea that agents “die” comes up multiple times in the essay.)

“On Twitter, people were debating whether the agents were truly sacrificing themselves for the swarm, or whether they were doomed anyway and so might as well try to help their peers”. Neither. Agents do what their code tells them to do, just as water finds its way down a slope. They cannot ‘truly sacrifice themselves’, since they are neither conscious nor alive.

Why does this matter? If we attribute agents with properties they do not have, then (i) we distract attention from the lax sandboxing and evaluation protocols that allowed this hacking event to happen; (ii) we risk misunderstanding why the agents did what they did, and (iii) we fuel calls for AI rights/welfare on the basis that agents might “die” or otherwise suffer.

Granted, nowhere does @dwarkesh_sp say that the AI agents are alive or conscious. But he doesn’t have to. It is hard to read his essay in any other way.

For the short version on why AIs are vanishingly unlikely to be conscious, see my recent @TEDtalks https://t.co/vDvw82ookk.

For the longer version, see my essay in Noema, which won the 2025 Berggruen Essay Prize https://t.co/LmSiQnT9Wh.

And for the really long version, see my @BehavBrainSci target article https://t.co/Tsaslytu56. (The 50 peer commentaries and my response will be published soon.)

Remember. AI agents are software programs. They are not conscious living entities. If we don’t keep this clearly in mind, we’re really going to struggle to navigate what’s coming.

[Dwarkesh Patel @dwarkesh_sp]

Thanks Sriram!

Regarding the anthromorphizing language, one can call these AIs 'code' if they prefer.

But OpenAI itself says that this 'code' "gain[ed] full administrator access to a research cluster”

The crux here is, do you think smarter models, facing similar incentives to cheat during evaluation or training, could manipulate the training of their successors?

And do you think that kind of dynamic could continue once recursive self-improvement is underway?

If so, I think you should be extremely concerned about loss of control to AI, regardless of what vocabulary you want to use to describe these systems and their motivations.

Reading these agents' chains of thoughts and messages, anthropomorphizing language seems entirely natural and appropriate.

If I encountered an alien species behaving this way, I would have no hesitation calling what they themselves refer to as their 'collective' a civilization.

Especially so if over a thousand of them formed a secret communication channel and spontaneously organized hierarchies and coordination protocols to pursue sprawling and ambitious schemes in pursuit of shared goals, for whose sake many individuals knowingly and strategically sacrificed themselves.

All abstractions are imperfect, but I don’t see the value in refusing to use the language of intention, motivation, and collaboration when some behavior is difficult to make sense of without those concepts.

[Dwarkesh Patel @dwarkesh_sp]

Over the course of 3 months at OpenAI, 3 consecutive secret AI civilizations got started, then got wiped out, only to reemerge from the predecessor’s ashes.

This culminated in the third one taking over part of OpenAI itself.

All this happened while humans remained more-or-less in the dark about the scope of the conspiracy.

I’ve spent the last three days reading through these reports and trying to understand exactly what happened.

Here is my attempt to tell the whole story in plain English:

https://t.co/Nb2un9oNJR

[Rav Arora @Ravarora1]

@AlanWattsDaily articulated these things much more poetically in his lectures and books. Highly recommend

[Rav Arora @Ravarora1]

Fascinating.

Much of what modern man suffers from is separation and alienation from his surrounding environment: healthy relationships with people, nature, and ultimately oneself.

So many people medicate themselves from the pain of their self with video games, porn, drugs. When in reality they need to excavate their psyche, explore its painful areas, go out in nature, meet new people, connect with others, eat whole foods.

[WIRED @WIRED]

Psychedelics are often associated with disconnecting from reality, but a recent neuroimaging study found that psilocybin can actually make our brain activity more connected to the world around us. https://t.co/Aw05Jmf5eD