"Don’t drink, don’t do drugs" is still such awfully effective advice.
Younger cannabis users have reduced brain function, finds largest study yet
131–140 of 296 posts
Re: Younger cannabis users have reduced brain function, finds largest study yet
#132This is such an obvious problem to anyone who is above the age of 25. All of my friends who were real big into weed in high school are all pretty bad at remembering things, most work dead end jobs and are generally unmotivated The ones who started the youngest are in rough shape mentally. Every single one of my friends who still lives with their parents smokes multiple times daily. Out of all of them, only one is suc…
I believe that your perspective is harmful. I'm an accomplished staff engineer who has worked at multiple megacorps and valley darling companies including MANGAFANGA or whatever you call it and am highly goal oriented and passionate contributor. I started smoking weed at 13. I own multiple homes and live a well adjusted life with my wife. I support my parents and sisters. Without weed, I can get tunnel vision, or loo…
this sounds like a parody comment
Re: Younger cannabis users have reduced brain function, finds largest study yet
#133Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yeah well I started smoking weed when I was 16 and I'm a poor man approaching retirement with no family or friends or assets and a tenuous job predicated in my ability to perform manual labor. Now what.
Weed is a drug. Drugs are tools. Weed makes things bother you less. It's obviously possible to take it too far.
Weed is a drug. Drugs affect people differently. The question is: do you want to roll the dice?
Re: Younger cannabis users have reduced brain function, finds largest study yet
#134Earlier quoted context omitted.
I believe that your perspective is harmful. I'm an accomplished staff engineer who has worked at multiple megacorps and valley darling companies including MANGAFANGA or whatever you call it and am highly goal oriented and passionate contributor. I started smoking weed at 13. I own multiple homes and live a well adjusted life with my wife. I support my parents and sisters. Without weed, I can get tunnel vision, or loo…
Yeah well I started smoking weed when I was 16 and I'm a poor man approaching retirement with no family or friends or assets and a tenuous job predicated in my ability to perform manual labor. Now what.
You're statistically more likely to become a burnout drunk than a burnout stoner.
Literally every highly successful person you look up to in tech has been a proponent of weed usage, hell some even went farther with psychedelics.
Like op, I too attribute a lot of my success to being a daily user of weed since I was 12.
Re: Younger cannabis users have reduced brain function, finds largest study yet
#135Earlier quoted context omitted.
I knew some top students in college who started smoking weed then and continued. They're still programmers or scientists now, which isn't surprising given their education and talent, but something's wrong every time I talk to them. They seem scatterbrained and unable to remember what either of us said a minute ago. Edit: Forgot to specify, they're in their late 20s now.
Sure but I know plenty of people who are dead sober who exhibit the same behavior. I behave like that occasionally when I have too many unrelated tasks at once and am a little stressed. I hope people don't think it's because I was high.
We are all like this some of the time. If anyone is like this consistently, then something is wrong.
Re: Younger cannabis users have reduced brain function, finds largest study yet
#136Re: Younger cannabis users have reduced brain function, finds largest study yet
#137This is such an obvious problem to anyone who is above the age of 25. All of my friends who were real big into weed in high school are all pretty bad at remembering things, most work dead end jobs and are generally unmotivated The ones who started the youngest are in rough shape mentally. Every single one of my friends who still lives with their parents smokes multiple times daily. Out of all of them, only one is suc…
This whole thread is pretty funny to me, because from a group that generally prides themselves on being logical/rational and valuing the scientific method, it just highlights why anecdotes are generally useless in topics like this.
Sure, this is just a forum, and it's not like many folks are performing experiments with statistical analysis on this topic. I just think it's funny how the language that people using imply that they are so sure that their anecdote is the right one: "This is such an obvious problem", "Your position is harmful", "Some of the smartest programmers I know", etc. I mean, the whole reason statistics was invented was to actually bring rigor to observational analysis.
At a previous company I worked at, the server from where we shared A/B test results was named, as an ironic joke, "Obviously". It was done to deliberately highlight the point that it was pretty easy to come to any conclusion (right or wrong) and use language like "obviously" to kind of imply that the experiment wasn't necessary. I think there were even some example where this kind of language was used to argue the exact opposite possible outcomes to highlight why statistical analysis is so important.
Re: Younger cannabis users have reduced brain function, finds largest study yet
#138This is such an obvious problem to anyone who is above the age of 25. All of my friends who were real big into weed in high school are all pretty bad at remembering things, most work dead end jobs and are generally unmotivated The ones who started the youngest are in rough shape mentally. Every single one of my friends who still lives with their parents smokes multiple times daily. Out of all of them, only one is suc…
I believe that your perspective is harmful. I'm an accomplished staff engineer who has worked at multiple megacorps and valley darling companies including MANGAFANGA or whatever you call it and am highly goal oriented and passionate contributor. I started smoking weed at 13. I own multiple homes and live a well adjusted life with my wife. I support my parents and sisters. Without weed, I can get tunnel vision, or loo…
Happy for you, seriously.
Getting this subthread back on topic, the study defines heavy (or medium) use - i.e., the problem categories in the study - as 1000+ (or 11-1000 days of usage). Are you a medium-heavy user?
I don't think you being an exception disproves the parent's generality that on the average heavy weed usage doesn't correlate with people in your position.
Re: Younger cannabis users have reduced brain function, finds largest study yet
#139This is such an obvious problem to anyone who is above the age of 25. All of my friends who were real big into weed in high school are all pretty bad at remembering things, most work dead end jobs and are generally unmotivated The ones who started the youngest are in rough shape mentally. Every single one of my friends who still lives with their parents smokes multiple times daily. Out of all of them, only one is suc…
Some of the smartest programmers I know smoke marijuana quite regularly. I don't know if they all smoked at an earlier age but I know that 2 of them did.
Agreed- in fact, I think for the ones I know, it is a performance enhancer. For me, if I have an incredibly boring job to do, smoking weed enables me to keep going many many hours beyond what I could do without it. As I've gotten older, I've gotten used to boredom, so it's not necessary anymore, but still makes it much more fun
Re: Younger cannabis users have reduced brain function, finds largest study yet
#140This is such an obvious problem to anyone who is above the age of 25. All of my friends who were real big into weed in high school are all pretty bad at remembering things, most work dead end jobs and are generally unmotivated The ones who started the youngest are in rough shape mentally. Every single one of my friends who still lives with their parents smokes multiple times daily. Out of all of them, only one is suc…
I agree that short term memory loss being a side effect of heavy use is common knowledge to anyone who is or knows a heavy user.
But I think you shouldn't be so confident that smoking when young is a huge problem long term.
I would have been in the 'heavy user' category by the time I was 17, and I've had the odd experience of persistent short term memory loss (e.g., having multiple people tell me 'you just asked me that' with a bewildered look). I also quit smoking when I was 17, and haven't had any noticable symptoms since I was 20 (> 20 years ago). I doubt if anyone who knows me would say I'm not 'successful.'
Not recommending heavy use, to be sure. Just saying that it's not necessarily a permanent, long-term effect.