Hi fellow psychonauts,

Less than a week ago I read an article in nature magazine titled: "Universities scrub names of racist leaders — students say it’s a first step" from 13th of August 2020

... which reminds me of another topic in nature magazine from 07 January 2020: "Check for publication integrity before misconduct"

The latter is related to a series of retracted papers not too long ago, by computational methods.

What do you think is the state of bias in academia today? Is the persistence of information today in computational medium a good starting point to remove prejudice and misinformation?

Is bias in academia related to the state of psychedelic research? Can it be traced to repressed WW2 trauma? Why is cannabis legalization taking so long, and is so politically oriented, instead of scientific?


Those are just some questions, but seeing the thread evolve into a general WW2 trauma discussion in conjunction with psychedelics would be appreciated from my point of view. Personally, the nature of my psychedelic experiences are all about personal bias reduction, understanding the nature of projecting, facing my delusions and fixing them (as opposed to hallucinating).

I think there is a bias is academia atm as well.

Most recently..

https://www.justice.gov/...d-whites-undergraduate#:~:text=The%20Department%20of%20Justice%20today,the%201964%20Civil%20Rights%20Act.

The topic of racism, and whatever actions people are to, or have recently taken is likely to not go away soon.

It would be useful for you to define with more clarity what you mean by WW2 trauma..I get the idea of what you are getting at but still especially with a topic like this it is in the best interest of healthy dialogue to expand a bit, I think.

It's a hotter political issue than psychedelics and medicine atm...just as here in Canada cannabis was legalized for polical reasons. There is little care here for it's medical value. It's a cash grab the liberal government can tax people to hell on.

Noone cares about psychedelic studies. The mention of race and what follows draws in a lot more attention.

Just because racism exists in the world, does not mean it's existence will inspire it's end. Unfortunalty, society today seems to be spiraling farther and farther down towards it's own narcissistic black hole.

I have little faith that real racial injustices are being addressed today. This is about money.

I think when it comes to racism or other social injustices, the problem in the academic world is that within the social sciences, some rather pseudo-scientific movements have almost monopolised these topics.
So views from pseudo-sciences like critical race theory have leaked into the academic debate.

This is far worse in the anglophone academic world than in mainland europe btw. It is now gradually beginning to take hold in europe as well, but it is by far not as bad yet, as in north america.
I don't know why that is.
Maybe because in europe, society is not as polarised as in the united states yet.
Or maybe because there has been a period where far-left terror groups like the german RAF showed far-left ideologies for what they realy are in europe, wich is not at all that different from the far right.