It is a shame that so many of these drugs are illegal and have been demonized, because they do have benefits for people at smaller doses as discussed. Some of the greatest work and innovation in the world has been created by people under the influence of one substance or another (from Picasso and his wormwood/absinthe to Steve Jobs and LSD).
In my own experience, I have used small doses of either amphetamines (both prescription and not), cocaine or various other narcotics (usually just dropped into a coffee) to take me through some big, demanding and complex projects. I know that this is not the 'correct' thing to say, but with self-control and knowledge about dosage, I can't think of a single downside to them being used in such a manner.
I can imagine that daily small doses would add up to a dependency which has its own ill effects.
Obligatory Bill Hicks quote:
“See I think drugs have done some good things for us, I really do, and if you don't believe drugs have done good things for us, do me a favor: go home tonight and take all your albums, all your tapes, and all your cds and burn 'em. 'cause you know the musicians who made all that great music that's enhanced your lives throughout the years.... rrrrrrrrreal fkin high on drugs.”
Don't understand this to be showing off or upvote as karma baiting, but I really need to say this:
I've written some marvelous code and completed gargantuan projects on my lonesome, battling thousands of lines of assembly and debugging hardware circuits and stuff.... and never used.
It's stupid to think your brain needs an external stimulus to be creative. You can be creative and withstand by just willing it - it's just not the easiest way out. When you take drugs you're either lying to yourself and pretending there is no harm in fucking up your brain - losing sense of priorities, time, yourself, and the world around you - or afraid of how it would feel without them.
Anyone can do anything without these drugs, and I'm speaking from experience. Staying up for 65 hours straight? Been there, done that with nothing more than coffee and cold showers. Write some brilliant hacks that do something genius in little lines of code? Check. Debug memory leaks and crashes across over 100k lines of C code going to and from different dynamically-linked libraries? Check. Writing your own OS Kernel? Check.
I pity those that feel you need drugs to accomplish, because that's just not true.
I don't really care about upvotes, I just voice my opinion based on my own experience.
The other replies to your post have already covered what I would have said, I would just add that having a fixed belief that if something is illegal, that it must be bad for you, is ignorant at best.
Almost all of the illegal drugs are also prescribed in some form of the other. There is the massive painkiller industry built on opiates, ADHD and amphetamine salts, Air Force pilots in the USA are given 'go pills' as were SS troops during WW2. There is a terrible double-standard in our society when it comes to drugs, where for some reason we are expected to believe that these use cases are somehow fine, or are somehow safer, than an individuals own experimentation with using the same substances for their own performance gains.
The human body was designed thousands of years ago, and evolved its capabilities based on having enough energy to gather enough food to survive that day. With no additional substances to give us an extra push, we simply weren't designed to be able to concentrate on complex tasks for 16-18 hours in day.
If you are able to with just coffee and cold showers, then good for you - there are some of us who, like the Air Force pilots, seek a bit more of a push. I don't distinguish between coffee, vitamin supplements or any other drugs, they all have a purpose and we all should be free to use or not use each as we choose.
> It's stupid to think your brain needs an external stimulus to be creative.
Your brain as well as your entire organism needs external stimulus to function. Food, coffee, oxygen, water. Many of these things affect your brain in obvious and noticable ways: coffee, oxygen. So what's the fundamental difference between substances that are legal and those that governments decided would be too luxury for the people to have freely available?
> I pity those that feel you need drugs to accomplish, because that's just not true.
I pity those who are not questioning the established propagandistic axioms. If you lived in the 15th century you'd never question the theory that the world is flat.
"Anyone can do anything without these drugs, and I'm speaking from experience."
No, you're not. You haven't been everyone, you haven't done everything, not everyone has done everything, and even if they had you wouldn't have been able to observe them closely.
You are ridiculous to think that, if you truly think that from your limited experience you can do anything without the aid of anything, and to think that your life experience is applicable to anyone else, is naive at best.
> I pity those that feel you need drugs to accomplish, because that's just not true.
How would you know? As somebody who has never used drugs you are unqualified to argue from experience about how they affect creativity and performance.
I pity those that feel you need drugs to accomplish
People who feel you need drugs are in the extreme minority if they exist at all. As far as I can tell, people tend to regard the use of (some) drugs as simply an enriching experience, as they would with seeing a great film, listening to certain music, or visiting a certain place.
As a non-user, you would be genuinely surprised at what strategic use of certain psychedelic drugs can do, even -- especially -- if your brain works great just the way it is.
Reliance on drugs is unfortunate, and in the case of psychedelics, it's ineffective as well. But don't think that e.g. LSD couldn't show you something new.
Before anyone rushes to try LSD[1], please do your research.
Please speak to people who have used it (like me) and can assess how you personally will handle it. I will say LSD is a broad-sword drug and should be used with care. It is not playful. It will last as long as the dose, which may be longer than you had planned to trip. Generally only sleep will stop you tripping, and if you are tripping hard, you will not e able to sleep. One does not 'sober up' like beer.
A lot of the effects depend on your personality, id, self confidence and any bad experiences you may have locked inside. Your biological reaction may be the lesast of concerns.
LSD takes you on a journey, and you may not come the same person. It may give you a bad-trip, where your worst fears and memories manifest x 1000.
I have seen many stable friends flip out, even when having the same dose in the same environment.
Always have supportive straight friends who understand each time you are experimenting. Bear in mind you may be up for 36 hours as a result and they need to lead their normal lives.
What about if you take a low non-psychotic dose? I've read that if you take an extremely low dose it's non-psychotic but still has a number of positive cognitive effects. So, is this possible and, if so, is it true?
LSD starts as a liquid. Eating a drop or two is sometimes is how you take it. But frequently that liquid is dropped with an eye-dropper onto cardboard. This cardboard is perforated and torn into tiny squares.
Roughly one drop per square [also called a Tab of Acid ].
But there you go.
1. How concentrated is the liquid acid?
2. How much was put onto the little square?
3. How long ago was this all made?
4. How accurate was the (illegal) chemist who made the LSD in the first place?
I will say that one TINY drop of acid is enough to make you trip for 24 hours. And on the square of cardboard the LSD is not necessarily evenly distributed, so a corner of the square can be where 90% of the active ingredient is. The effects vary wildly: Some LSD is quite visual, some has almost no visuals but plenty of mind-messing.
All of these factors combine to mean it is EXTREMELY difficult for anyone to estimate what a low dose is. Especially someone experimenting for the first few times.
Please research carefully, and if you still decide to experiment, ensure you are in a safe environment with understanding people.
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I've read that if you take an extremely low dose it's non-psychotic but still has a number of positive cognitive effects
Please read my comment item?id=654676 carefully.
Non-psychotic depends a lot on who-you-are: not the dose. I don't know you, and further I don't know anyone else reading this in the future.
Depending on the type of person you are, you could flip out badly on any dose.
LSD can unleash things inside you. People who you love... you may see them as snakes/undead. You may see your face melt off. More importantly you will feel horrified when this happens. It takes a lot of training to overcome the horror (if it happens).
I am not going to give the green light for experimentation with something that has such power when the downsides are so grim.
All my friends who flipped out were sold on the Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds version of events. But the variability of the ingredients, their situation and their personality sometimes made it awful.
I achieve exceptional mental clarity by getting my sleep under control. I know I got everythign right if I wake up the exact moment the light from sunrise hits my window and feel fully rested. For the next 2-3 hours I can absorb twice the usual complexity with little effort.
I feel the same way. If I get the exact right combination of sleep, food, caffeine, and interesting work, my productivity is easily 100x that of a normal day.
I wish every day was like that, but the reality of the world (deadlines, distractions like HN) means that it only happens a few times a month.
Yes! Getting enough sleep is the #1 productivity enhancer, IMHO. All of the other tips and techniques are smaller terms in the equation.
The insidious thing about sleep deprivation is that people can be measurably more stupid, yet feel like "oh I'm just a bit tired -- I'll have a coffee".
My performance actually deteriorates if I stay in bed past certain threshold (>9 hours). I think it's not the quantity, it's a whole host of things that need to be finely tuned.
I ended up writing a C++ program that just made the internal speaker beep in an infinite loop, and tried to compile it with a C compiler.
I started laughing hysterically and I became quite scared that the C compiler was going to get angry with me, so I went outside and stayed away from my computer in fear.
To be fair to the government, unless you're selling or holding a significant amount, you wouldn't go to jail. You most certainly wouldn't be put in jail for taking a few micrograms of LSD in the comfort of your own home (or office).
Unless of course, you had said LSD on some kind of substrate, such as blotter paper, or god help you, a sugar cube.
Then the 'fair government' would weigh the entire product, and charge you for posessing that much LSD, which would weigh enough to charge you for distribution, thus sending you swiftly to the nearest PMITA Prison.
Fair enough. Though I suppose my point was, recreational drug use is only illegal if you're caught, and it is incredibly difficult to be caught. The government doesn't really care if individuals do drugs, they just get pissed when people distribute them without giving the government a cut.
The assessment is statutorily presumed to be valid and correctly determined. The burden is on the taxpayer to prove otherwise.
The criminal prosecution for failure to pay the drug tax and the civil tax assessment are separate actions. What occurs with the criminal case, for instance, does not necessarily affect the Department of Revenue's tax assessment.
There's been research that has shown quite reliably that sub-recreational doses of LSD and Mescaline (not combined) can induce incredibly vivid visions that can help a person visualize a problem they've been trying to solve, and in the end, make the problem solving easier if not trivial.
The experiment was done to see if the effects of psychedelics were merely "right-brained" and creativity enhancing, or if they could improve harder more technical cognition as well. It turns out they do improve technical cognition quite drastically.
Another interesting data point: Kary Mullis, the inventor of Polymerase Chain Reaction (PCR, aka DNA amplification), credits LSD with helping him to make his discovery -- and thanked Albert Hofmann, LSD's inventor, personally.
LSD is a tool, not a toy. Bandsaws are fun too, but people lose fingers.
Fascinating. I notice that he is associated with "trance research", of a sort that's hard to evaluate from a couple minutes' googling. Trance and psychedelics do partly resemble each other.
I studied trance pretty intensively with a student of Milton Erickson's. Part of what drew me to it was a sense that it might be connected in interesting ways to the creative process. As it turned out, it was. But I don't use it very often.
I'm not one to poo-poo a good hacker story from the 70s nor something that challenges the US government's woeful drug policy. But I couldn't help thinking: how many complicated computer problems have been solved _without_ the use of psychedelics?
Admittedly I've never written a compiler in 360 assembly on or off LSD, but it seems like the better thing to do would be to take a step back and think through the design better (that would have been my first reaction at least...).
That's exactly what he was doing. The codebase had reached the point where it was overly complex, and he wanted to simplify the design. If look at his conclusion he only refers to making design decisions, not writing new code or designing algorithms.
"All human beings, all persons who reach adulthood in the world today are programmed biocomputers. None of us can escape our own nature as programmable entities. Literally, each of us may be our programs, nothing more, nothing less. "
Readers may also be interested in this more in-depth article about LSD being used to solve engineering problems encountered by Kevin Herbert, a Cisco engineer:
Ooh, John Lilly. The original dolphin-researching, consciousness-exploring, LSD-experimenting, sensory-isolation-tank-inventing counterculture hero. HN goes DFH!
In the province of the mind, what one believes to be true is true or becomes true, within certain limits to be found experientially and experimentally. These limits are further beliefs to be transcended. In the mind, there are no limits.
Edit: interesting use of the term "metaprogramming" in 1972, no? And typical Lilly: extremely plugged-in metaphorically and just as hard to pin down.
"metaprogramming" in that sense refers to self reprogramming itself, usually with the assumption that a lot of personality is imprinted, rather than just behavioral. A firmware change, so to speak.
Robert Anton Wilson's _Promethius Rising_ talks about that stuff, but doesn't run screaming at full speed towards occult mumbo jumbo the way many "consciousness" books do.
Also: Isolation tanks are neat. (Just don't leave your cell phone on vibrate on the chair next to the tank... :) )
That's just remarkable. I've always wondered if one could get objective information from a psychedelic experience, but most of the time, the stuff you bring back makes no sense once sober. I guess the dosage is very important, you want just enough to get enhanced senses...
The biggest problem with using LSD in such a way is that the dosage is incredibly small even when full-blown tripping. It'd be very, very difficult to get a small, measured amount from anything you get off the street. I guess you could do it from a sugarcube, but good luck. I guess it's not all bad, though; even if you don't hit your goal, you'll get a good time out of it.
LSD is not the kind of drug you take to have a good time. It is possible that a trip will be a lot of fun, but it is also possible that the trip will put you in a state of mind that will take you weeks or even months of very hard work to recover from. I speak from personal experience.
If I had to do all over again, I would take LSD again when I did. (I went on about 4 or 5 trips over the span of a month or two.) It caused a very desirable change in my outlook on life and for a time made me more open to new experiences. But it probably also caused me to do things that alienated my girlfriend of the time, causing that relationship to end. And if I had to perform somehow, e.g., find a new apartment or sue someone to protect my rights, in the months after the LSD, I might not have been able to perform adequately.
I was 32 when I dropped. That was over 15 years ago, and I have never seriously contemplated dropping again because I judge the temporary reduction in functionality not to be worth it because subsequent trips will probably not be as valuable or as transformative as the first trips were.
While it's true that the potency of LSD is ridiculous (normal doses being a thousandth of what other drugs usually require), the effects are not limited to LSD. Mescaline and other psychedelics produce similar improvements in cognition, and have higher dosage requirements. Mescaline, for instance, requires around 100mg for a light dose, while for LSD it's over 1000 times smaller at about 20-70ug. So if you're concerned that LSD is just too easy to fuck up, in terms of dosage, try Mescaline instead.
In 1987 Peter Molzberger did a series of interesting experiments combining programming with MDMA and NLP at the University of the Armed Forces in Munich (Universitaet der Bundeswehr).
In my own experience, I have used small doses of either amphetamines (both prescription and not), cocaine or various other narcotics (usually just dropped into a coffee) to take me through some big, demanding and complex projects. I know that this is not the 'correct' thing to say, but with self-control and knowledge about dosage, I can't think of a single downside to them being used in such a manner.
I can imagine that daily small doses would add up to a dependency which has its own ill effects.
Obligatory Bill Hicks quote:
“See I think drugs have done some good things for us, I really do, and if you don't believe drugs have done good things for us, do me a favor: go home tonight and take all your albums, all your tapes, and all your cds and burn 'em. 'cause you know the musicians who made all that great music that's enhanced your lives throughout the years.... rrrrrrrrreal fkin high on drugs.”