Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

College students lost access to legal pot and started getting better grades

washingtonpost.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

101–110 of 120 posts

Re: College students lost access to legal pot and started getting better grades

#101

Post by AstralStorm »

thaumasiotes wrote: post #81
_jal wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You know, this isn't a question of philosophy. We're not reasoning from first-principles. You might consider looking to the googles for an answer as to which nation-states currently ban alcohol, and then consider what commonalities they might share. I'll save you the first half of that effort: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_with_alcohol...

Those are Islamic countries. Do you think there's a reason the prohibition was made? Do you think there might be a reason it stuck? Alcohol is also frequently prohibited on Indian reservations. Why do you think that is?

Middle East countries used to have a huge problem with drinking and later caffeine. somewhere around early Medieval era. It so happens that alcohol ban got written into a religion that grew to be dominant and was even more brutally enforced than the coffee ban. Guess which one stuck.

Re: College students lost access to legal pot and started getting better grades

#102

Post by phaed »

rconti wrote: post #88
phaed wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm talking from personal experience. Your ability to keep a train of thought is impaired, you struggle to build the house of cards in-memory to do any kind of extended analysis, the cards you put down simply vanish from memory. You feel empirically dumber. At its worse, you start to talk about a topic, branch into a subtopic, and are unable to find your way back. You find yourself asking people "what was I talking a…

You mean, while you're actually intoxicated? No kidding! Or do you mean while NOT impaired, as a result of regular "after-hours" use?

Not only while medicated. The memory issue is cumulative, it is slow onset and stays with you until at least 3 months after complete abstinence.

Re: College students lost access to legal pot and started getting better grades

#103

Post by apexalpha »

xfiz wrote: post #100

Huh, I'm surprised they could do it, ban EU-citizen while still allowing Ditch nationals. I thought they aren't allowed to do that within the EU.

It is allowed, see EU court results here:

http://curia.europa.eu/juris/liste.jsf?pro=&lgrec=nl&nat=or&...

Re: College students lost access to legal pot and started getting better grades

#104

Post by em3rgent0rdr »

mejari wrote: post #97
em3rgent0rdr wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

well it would be hard with marijuana leaf. But you could have a vaping placebo, and compare that with vaping the real thing. Maybe the vaping placebo material could be made from marijuana but with the cannabis removed. I don't know enough how marijuana works, tbh, but something along those lines.

Except this isn't an experiment, where they control the conditions. It's monitoring natural behavior. Just saying "placebo" makes no sense for this kind of study. That'd be like asking for a placebo in a national poll. The kind of thing you're talking about would be an experiment, where they bring people in and use various measures to quantify various types of intelligence after smoking marijuana. In that situation y…

> "But even then it's not always appropriate"

It can be appropriate it you get consent to be part of the experiment. You don't have to have the whole student body be part of the experiment.

Re: College students lost access to legal pot and started getting better grades

#105

Post by em3rgent0rdr »

mejari wrote: post #97
em3rgent0rdr wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

well it would be hard with marijuana leaf. But you could have a vaping placebo, and compare that with vaping the real thing. Maybe the vaping placebo material could be made from marijuana but with the cannabis removed. I don't know enough how marijuana works, tbh, but something along those lines.

Except this isn't an experiment, where they control the conditions. It's monitoring natural behavior. Just saying "placebo" makes no sense for this kind of study. That'd be like asking for a placebo in a national poll. The kind of thing you're talking about would be an experiment, where they bring people in and use various measures to quantify various types of intelligence after smoking marijuana. In that situation y…

> "this isn't an experiment"

Well then this "study" is just an observation. So it probably doesn't warrant the amount of attention it is getting, to say nothing of people using this "study" as evidence. Observation is an early step of the scientific method, but now they need to perform a scientific experiment in order to make this newsworthy. (Well I guess it is "newsworthy" in that it makes for high click-through...)

Re: College students lost access to legal pot and started getting better grades

#106

Post by ZeroGravitas »

inpdx wrote: post #99
tommynicholas wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Once weed is legalized, as it should (obviously), these kinds of studies will be less political. Until then, you can't blame people.

I live in Oregon where it's legal, and if reddit posters on /r/portland are any example, legalization doesn't (at least instantaneously) stop this instinctive bias against anything negative. You'll see minimization, denial, and "it's better than alcohol" on every thread whenever a study even hints marijuana isn't a 100% universally beneficial, no-side-effects, perfect drug. It's fascinating to behold.

It's not technically legal in any US State, since it's still illegal at a federal level, and so exists at the discretion of the current federal governtment.

Re: College students lost access to legal pot and started getting better grades

#107

Post by beaconstudios »

owebmaster wrote: post #89
ntsplnkv2 wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's a study. It should be released regardless of agendas or politics or if it didn't agree with someone's worldview. If there are any negative effects from weed, I (and everyone) should want to know about it first or as soon as possible. We need more studies on everything to expand our knowledge. But this study compared people who smoked pot and people who didn't. I imagine many of them played video games, partied,…

> It's a study. It should be released regardless of agendas or politics or if it didn't agree with someone's worldview Not if the study is politics itself and a weapon to support someone's agenda. Studies and researchs don't grow wild in nature, you know.

that makes no sense - how can you be sure that any paper isn't somehow political? Any psychology paper could be argued to be political because there is a left-right opinion divide on the human mind. The only reasonable approach in my opinion is to publish everything and let the replication studies and meta-analyses sort the wheat from the chaff.

Re: College students lost access to legal pot and started getting better grades

#108

Post by richardknop »

tmnvix wrote: post #3

Still less detrimental to a life than prison, because let's face it - legal or not, students will smoke pot.

I don't think you go to prison for smoking pot. The only way I can imagine you end up in prison is if police catch you with some massive amount of weed which means you are a big time dealer / manufacturer.

A student with few grams of pot on him/her will not go to prison for sure.

Re: College students lost access to legal pot and started getting better grades

#109

Post by richardknop »

Another anecdote from personal experience. Smoking pot decreased my cognitive abilities quite dramatically (not only while intoxicated but for days/weeks after).

I am certain it is detrimental to your intellectual abilities at least temporarily. It would definitely lower your grades and I think it is also detrimental to any job where you do mental labour (e.g. software engineering).

Re: College students lost access to legal pot and started getting better grades

#110

Post by sverige »

flukus wrote: post #76
sverige wrote: post #67

I quit smoking weed years ago when I noticed when I was reading that I had forgotten the meaning of some words that I once knew. Smoking is great until it makes you stupid.

How do you distinguish what you forgot from smoking weed with what you just plain forgot? It's amazing what you can forget, even stuff that has been drilled into you. I'd forgotten how to do long division until recently, despite doing it over and over again in primary school to pick one example. The brain is very much "use it or lose it".

I had known these words for years. The feeling of knowing that you used to know what, say, "superannuated" or "collusion" or "hegemony" meant, but right now you haven't a clue, is distressing.

These words were in long-term memory. My memory was slowly restored after I quit. Smokers will readily admit that their short-term memory is damaged by marijuana use, but not much is said about damage to long-term memory.

Post reply on HN