An interesting psilocybin grant

Psilocybe semilanceata (Creative Commons photo, source). 

At the Astral Codex Ten Substack, Scott Alexander has announced his latest round of grants. I thoughts some of you might find this one interesting:

"Eli Elster, $13K, to research traditional psilocybin use in Africa. Psilocybin, aka magic mushrooms, is in the process of being integrated into mainstream psychiatric practice; it is already approved for treatment-resistant depression in Australia, and undergoing (currently promising) FDA trials in the United States. Much of what we know about the preparation and administration of psilocybin - including widespread ideas about 'set and setting' and 'integration' - comes from traditional use by the Mazaetec Indians. In 2023, anthropologists discovered that traditional healers in Lesotho, Africa also use psilocybin mushrooms - the first time such a practice has been found in the Old World - and that they seem to prepare and administer it differently from the Native Americans. Eli and his collaborator Betsy Sethathi conducted the first in-depth fieldwork on the topic earlier this year; our grant funds a return trip to Lesotho to further investigate their ethnobotanical practices and see if we can learn anything from them."

There are other interesting grants listed in the newsletter, including "a new asteroid-hunting algorithm," "free speech in the UK" and " a secret project involving snakes."

More on basic income

 

The links-with-commentary is one of my favorite items in the Astral Codex Ten Substack, and the "Links for September 2025" did not disappoint. After I did the recent posting on new basic income information, and read the comments that followed, I discovered that Scott also had covered the recent controversy (item No. 54). Scott adds this bit:

"GiveDirectly, a charity involved in basic income experiments, has a response here; they say that some studies are positive, and that the ones that aren’t might have tried too little cash to matter, or been confounded by COVID making everything worse. They also point out that basic income is harder to study than traditional programs like giving people housing, because if you’re giving housing you can measure housing-related outcomes directly and have a pretty good chance of getting enough statistical power to find them, but since everyone spends cash on different things, the positive effects might be scattered across many different outcomes (and therefore too small to reach significance on each).

"Everyone involved in this debate wants to emphasize that the poor results are for First World studies only, and that studies continue to show large benefits to giving cash in the developing world."

There are also other points Scott makes.

Also in the same newsletter, interesting news about AI, age of consent in different European countries and other matters, including the observation, "Andy Masley’s AI art is good." An example is above.