Discussion

12 Grams of Carbon

ambicapter: I think this author has a very different conception of what “sincerity” is than I do, but I guess that’s the difference between the east coast and the west coast.

Analemma_: Note that this post isn't just about peptides, it's more an overview of the SF social scene in general and what has changed in just the last year. So it includes things like "Tesla FSD actually works now" and "the right is uncool again and nobody talks about e.g. Curtis Yarvin anymore" (both true, IME).

righthand: The citrus party fervor just sounds like dead internet theory and social media ad targeting doing it’s job. If everything is peptides and ai then a citrus party sticks out. Wow it must be really ego-fulfilling to be rich and just party all the time in SF. And your momentum is that you experiment with drugs.

uxp100: 20% work in tech? I think that’s gone up quite a bit since I last spent a lot of time there in 2015. I would see these articles from time to time and think, people are getting the wrong idea if they haven’t been there, when I think of SF I think of middle aged Chinese people and alleycat bike races and music venues and book stores and drug dealing and gays, though tech bros are also present (and overlapping). But damn, 20%, that’s a lot bigger than finance bros, maybe tech really is ruining the city. Shoot.

Aurornis: This article is an anecdote extrapolated to something bigger: A type of lazy journalism where the writer has a single social experience with a group of weird people and then writes about it like it’s the common experience in a place.The writer went to SF for a few days and went to one party where a group of friends were into peptides. From the article, they were also particularly terrible people. Just read this quote:> “They change your personality, it’s literally made me less shallow knowing that we can just looksmax you.” “Ugliness is just a choice now.” “I shot up a twink with ozempic who did not need to lose any weight.”These people always exist. Go back a few years and they might be talking about nootropics or “research chemical” drugs that are analogs of methamphetamine or MDMA. Go back further and they might be bragging about doing steroids and importing testosterone from gray market sources. Go back before that and they’d be bragging about all the Modafinil they’re taking.The thing about drug user bubbles like this is that when you’re talking to them you’d be convinced that everyone is doing what they’re doing: Taking the latest on-trend drugs in large amounts and one-upping each other on dose, stories, or drug-fueled adventures.What’s not talked about is the long-term consequences of falling into these groups where excessive drug self-experimentation is normalized. The party doesn’t last forever and the mindset of being able to endlessly adjust your body and/or your mood with drugs starts to turn dark after the early years where hubris makes users feel like they’ve found the secret to better living through chemistry.If you’ve encountered groups like this you’ve also seen how the “everyone is doing it” mentality becomes embedded in their minds. That doesn’t mean everyone is importing various Chinese peptides and injecting them for “looksmaxxing” and whatever these people were on about about the “peptide party”. These are just garden variety young drug users riding the latest trend

halper: Sometimes I have been in situations in life where I think I must be insane, because everyone else sees something I do not. I got a bit of that feeling reading this article.

cjbgkagh: They did point out, with numbers, that the SF scene is a lot smaller than would ordinarily be expected. Additionally this is the party scene which is a subset of the general tech scene. These people have more time and money to spare than those who are busy working but the do form a bit of a nexus that channels information.I think it’s important to understand that AI, even at its current level, is revolutionary as are cheap Chinese peptides. This isn’t a crypto bubble, both of these will be world changing. I’ve been doing AI for decades and peptides for 5 years (treating an actual medical condition) so I was in this space before it was cool, happy SF finally caught up.

tptacek: This is a blog post, not journalism as such. It's someone humorously recounting their own personal experience. They have no responsibility to contextualize anything for you.

richard___: My issue with this article is the author writes about them in a frame that says “they are so quirky and this makes them cool / good” when really they are a bunch of degenerates.

keiferski: I really didn't get that vibe at all. If anything, he seems pretty balanced in his appraisal of SF.

keiferski: This pairs well with this recent article by NY Magazine: The AI Kids Take San Francisco: Brilliant, workaholic teenagers are flooding the city — and reshaping our future in their imagehttps://nymag.com/intelligencer/article/san-francisco-ai-boo...

roxolotl: > Someone once said that SF is a town of extremely high sincerity, and all of its modern and historical weirdnessNot directly related to the piece but this explains so much. I’ve always seen it as high credulity. That is to say all lots of people are lying but lots of other people trust them. The missing part has been why would you take some of these people at face value. If there’s also a lot of sincere people it would then make sense that many would end up overly credulous.

lucaslazarus: Reminiscent of Joan Didion’s Slouching Towards Bethlehem:https://www.saturdayeveningpost.com/2017/06/didion/

Aurornis: Okay? Points still stand: It’s written as an authoritative exploration of a social scene extrapolated from a few days visiting a place and attending one party.If someone’s writing in journalistic style I think it’s fair to criticize it as journalism, even if it’s on Substack

stickfigure: It is not presented as authoritative anything, except perhaps one person's experience. And we should assume it is embellished.You are taking this far too seriously. It is a vignette which captures the flavor of a place at a particular time. And it is delightfully written.

Aurornis: > It is a vignette which captures the flavor of a place at a particular time.That’s my point: It captured a specific party with a small group of friends, but the blog goes on to wax philosophically about how it’s indicative of society and tech as a wholeIt’s a perfect motte-and-bailey setup where you’re supposed to read it as a big trend indicative of a place and a scene, but the second anyone criticizes the writing it becomes a retreat to arguments that we shouldn’t take it seriously, that’s it’s just a blog, that we should selectively believe it’s embellished however convenient to defuse any criticism.

tptacek: I think you're on tilt with this argument now. This is a personal essay. You disagree with some of its implications. That's fine. People disagree with each other. You should just write "I disagree with this", rather than try to critique it as formally bad journalism.

Aurornis: I think you’re too stuck on the word “journalism” in my post, as if reclassifying something as not-journalism means it must not be critiqued.If it helps, s/journalism/writing/gIf we’re not allowed to discuss posts in the comments, what are we even supposed to discuss here?

reincarnate0x14: JFC, that twink thing is freaking me out. My ex, objectively hot and already too thin due to a gallbladder problem, kept bugging me to get her various GLP-1 drugs and we had screaming arguments about how her drug abuse was going to kill her (recreational ketamine, GHB, cocaine, marijuana, whatever peptide stupidity her friends just read about, probably a few I'm forgetting). Fast forward and she's not my problem anymore. I have no idea what's she's on now, but I fully expect to get a call about her having ODed.

lanyard-textile: I'm inclined to agree.But...I'm also inclined to believe we are not the cool people being invited to these circles :)Looking at what has happened with wegovy etc, it doesn't seem impossible.

Aurornis: Maybe this hits different for me because I have been to a lot of parties just like this, without getting sucked into the culture.Thats why I wrote that if you go back several years you’d find similar small social scenes around different trends: Steroids, Modafinil (when it was new and rare), RCs like 2-FA and MXE, or psychedelics depending on the era. Each time the social scenes that emerge around these have the same beliefs that everyone is doing excessive experimentation and that it’s only improving their lives. The later outcomes are not so rosy.

dkarl: I don't think that's the way you're supposed to read it? I think you're supposed to read it as, the trendy extremes tell you something about a place, even if the details are silly and ephemeral. People with no filter, no shame, no interest in correctness or consequences, and no pole star except trends are like a cartoon guide to the trends and the mentality driving them.I think the author would agree with most of what you wrote.

weego: It's not journalism though is it, it's just someone's blog where they can tell any story they want, as has been the entire history of story telling. With that out of the way the rest of your post is just flanneling.

nipponese: this is likely to be the most interesting argument I will read today: is substack legit editorial journalism?certainly there is no organized journalistic outfit behind it, but also, a lot of legit journalists want their substacks to be taken as facts of record.

cyanydeez: the last decade of journalism has taken two comments on twitter to claim social zeitgeist.

iwontberude: In what way did SF catch up? I don’t see how people taking all these peptides and transforming into accidental freaks is a step forward for anything but another reason for the state to get involved bc it’s going to be kids using next and it will create an uproar. People with legitimate medical needs will be left up a creek.

lucaslazarus: Your criticism is entirely reasonable despite the pedantry. Yes, these people are bad people, but I think that could be the point here. Not to mention, this is just another chapter in SF's long history of being the vanguard of drug experimentation.You may enjoy Didion's 1967 Slouching towards Bethlehem[1], a similarly anecdotal (and substantially better-written) piece about the drug scene in SF's Summer of Love.[1] https://www.saturdayeveningpost.com/2017/06/didion/

mbgerring: I’ve lived in SF for over a a decade and I have no idea what any of this is. I hope I never meet any of these people.

adregan: I’m not really understanding the notion that these people are so sincere. Perhaps we have different definitions of sincerity.To my eye, the entire fascination of unsafely injecting peptides in a desire to change your being is largely the opposite of sincerity.

pphysch: Yeah, isn't the entire point of SF startup culture (for the last decade++) to build personal wealth through a successful exit rather than build a sustainable business that benefits society? It's a big speculative con game... Opposite of sincere.Of course we can warp the semantics and argue that these people are "sincere" in their desire to defraud retail investors or something, but that doesn't seem to be the author's argument.

hungryhobbit: The whole thing read to me like:"Let me tell you about the weird people in my social circle I've chosen to write about ... aren't they weird? Now I'm going to draw massive conclusions about everyone in the Bay Area based on the extremely weird group (that I self-selected)."

cjbgkagh: The state is already heavily involved, many gray market peptide suppliers were shut down this year, but demand just went to the black market. This would be harder to stop than the illicit drug market that the government has also consistently failed to stop. It’s so cheap that I’ve stockpiled many years supply so there is little worry about lack of availability for whoever needs it.I turned to peptides because of how slow research has been, my medical condition (hEDS) has been known about since Hippocrates yet still no official treatments, so it’s not reasonable to expect one any time soon. Gray/black was my only option and will likely continue to be for the foreseeable future.A lot of what we know about peptides comes from athletes cheating in sports and they’ve been doing it, some of them abusing it, for decades so the long term effects are not completely unknown. And this includes the GLP1As and the various combo stacks. Some people naturally have excesses of signaling peptides through genetic variation so they’re another good source of long term effects.Of the things gay people inject into each other, ozempic is probably one of the safer options.

chromacity: I know you edited your post, but I'm actually taken aback by people trying to argue it's a blog, not "journalism". I see no real difference between this and some of the most celebrated pieces of gonzo journalism.However, this cuts both ways. This format is how we get some of the most interesting pieces of reporting about culture and counterculture. It's someone who went to some parties or worked for some companies. What you refer to as laziness is what makes it valuable: it recounts specific experiences instead of trying to speak in generalities. And it's descriptive instead of moralizing.In the same vein, some of the most powerful exposes about neo-Nazi movements are just raw accounts of what's going on inside, without the author constantly repeating "and by the way, this is bad, and here are some statistics".The SF Bay Area culture is probably not a thing, but there are some pretty awful subcultures within it, and many of them revolve around performance-enhancing drugs and rationalism-as-a-justification-for-bad-things (Zizians, longtermism, etc). I think we should own it.

burnto: I want to defend my hometown a bit: most people who live in and around SF have nothing to do with any of this crap. SF is a diverse city of many ages, nationalities, and values. It is not a “high school,” not a tech scene, not a glib bunch of online assholes.

mh2266: WTF is any of this, is there some ELI5/OOTL explanation?I work in big tech and have never heard anyone talk about "peptides". Is this a startup scene thing or just an SF thing? (I live in New York)all of my coworkers are pretty normal, sure there are the stereotypical fitness types that are marathon training, cycling, or have a climbing gym membership but no one is talking about buying weird Chinese drugs

apsurd: On running an AI a startup in NYC vs SF:> Every single person that I met in SF was dangerously opinionated about AI best practices. It is impossible not to be! When everyone is constantly jumping from idea to idea, trying to stay on top of the Twitter firehose, you need some kind of opinion just to stay relevant and sane.SF-specific assumptions aside, this the most useful takeaway. Seems they're calibration and signaling costs to being in the center of everything.I read the whole thing. Good, easy writing style.