If you're interested in the topic, I highly recommend the book "What the Dormouse Said", which explores amongst other things the impact of psychedelics on computing. http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/What_the_Dormouse_Said Timothy Leary also has a chapter in "The Art of HCI design" in which he explores parallels between psychedelics and computer interaction. http://www.amazon.com/The-Art-Human-Computer-Interface-Desig..…
If anyone cares, this is the complete Tim Leary photo archive. A while ago I was asked to help curate it, and my payment was getting to keep a copy on my site, as long as it doesn't show up on search engines.
This sounds quite incredibe. In fact, very incredible, considering you just registered that account and this is your only post. But I believe you may be telling the truth. Do you think the same could be applied for other disciplines, like programming and computer science?
Yes, this is a dummy account; my regular account here has 4497 karma, but is linked to my real name. The conservatism of some of my clients -- and the fairly public role I sometimes must play -- is such that I'd rather not have my former illegal exploits broadcast quite yet. Hopefully you can understand! In answer to your question: yes, I very much believe that it can be applied to programming and computer science --…
Love the choice of your dummy account name!
I immediately remembered it from the C64 days. Used in a FOR loop, poke 53281,x would create some marvelous color loops.... almost psychedelic ;)
In Fitzgerald's The Beautiful and the Damned , the protagonist's father is fond, in later years, of attributing his business success to his lifelong religious devotion. The hero doubts it. I have been temped in the past to equate this magnate character's conviction to PG's belief that it was Lisp which allowed Viaweb to do so well. I do not disaprove of religion, functional programming, or psychedelics. But in the in…
With respect to psychedelics, they actually do affect your brain. You'd be hard-pressed to tease apart what portion of the outcome was unaffected by the drug when claiming that the results were all due to the Placebo Effect.
Myself, I used LSD to learn calculus -- or rather, to overcome a lifelong crippling phobia/anxiety of mathematics, which allowed me to rapidly learn calculus. When I was 21, I encountered John Lilly's theories of cognitive metaprogramming with psychedelics, and I designed a trip to convince myself -- at a really primal level -- of the fundamental beauty, power, and accessibility of math. 12 hours after dosing, my fea…
I would like to read a detailed description of your experience, using a blog post or a gist if/when you have the time.
This sounds quite incredibe. In fact, very incredible, considering you just registered that account and this is your only post. But I believe you may be telling the truth. Do you think the same could be applied for other disciplines, like programming and computer science?
Yes, this is a dummy account; my regular account here has 4497 karma, but is linked to my real name. The conservatism of some of my clients -- and the fairly public role I sometimes must play -- is such that I'd rather not have my former illegal exploits broadcast quite yet. Hopefully you can understand! In answer to your question: yes, I very much believe that it can be applied to programming and computer science --…
> Yes, this is a dummy account; my regular account here has 4497 karma, but is linked to my real name.
Are you aware of browser/device fingerprinting? [0] Technology (i.e. we) has/have killed privacy (unless you take extreme steps to protect it).
Now the question is, whether you would have overcome your phobia without psychedelics.
Counterfactuals are always difficult, but in this case I am sure that the answer is somewhere between "no" and "after years of hard work". Certainly it wouldn't have happened overnight -- whereas with psychedelics it very literally did happen overnight. Even if the psychedelics were simply a shortcut, there was a lot of benefit in taking them: within a year of my trip I'd completed 15 credits worth of maths courses,…
I couldn't describe how fascinating I'm finding your experience! I don't want to burden you with questions, so I'll have parsimony: can you ellaborate on what did your experience with LSD change in your disposition with mathematics? Did it remove an emotional barrier, did it make you somehow solve things quicker, and in what sense did it do so? (were you just quicker, or the same speed but more intuitive?) were you instead more creative?
I'm specially curious because I love math. There's no emotional barrier between me and various fields -- I find so many things fascinating I could get lost for hours absorbing any theory pretty much. But I'm below average at math. My biggest issue, particularly, is that I'm awfully slow and make tons of mistakes. This doesn't go away with any amount of study (at least so far). If I lived isolated and didn't have to be examined and so on, I would happily pace at my snail speed and be happy with that, but since subjects evolve too quickly and most people are too quick for me, I feel pursuing math-intensive fields would be too demanding.
Yes, this is a dummy account; my regular account here has 4497 karma, but is linked to my real name. The conservatism of some of my clients -- and the fairly public role I sometimes must play -- is such that I'd rather not have my former illegal exploits broadcast quite yet. Hopefully you can understand! In answer to your question: yes, I very much believe that it can be applied to programming and computer science --…
> Yes, this is a dummy account; my regular account here has 4497 karma, but is linked to my real name. Are you aware of browser/device fingerprinting? [0] Technology (i.e. we) has/have killed privacy (unless you take extreme steps to protect it). [0] https://panopticlick.eff.org/
Oh yes, I'm aware of that stuff. If somebody reasonably competent wanted to resolve my real name from this dummy account, I have no doubt that they'd be able to do it. My concern, however, is not that malign people reading Hacker News will try to discover who poke53281 really is (surely I'm not that interesting); rather, it's that I don't want clients Googling for my real name to easily turn up accounts of my drug-taking exploits. It is probably still possible to start with my real name and find this account, but that would be a vastly harder task -- a much smaller needle in a much larger haystack -- and again I can't actually imagine anybody being sufficiently motivated to do so.
Counterfactuals are always difficult, but in this case I am sure that the answer is somewhere between "no" and "after years of hard work". Certainly it wouldn't have happened overnight -- whereas with psychedelics it very literally did happen overnight. Even if the psychedelics were simply a shortcut, there was a lot of benefit in taking them: within a year of my trip I'd completed 15 credits worth of maths courses,…
I couldn't describe how fascinating I'm finding your experience! I don't want to burden you with questions, so I'll have parsimony: can you ellaborate on what did your experience with LSD change in your disposition with mathematics? Did it remove an emotional barrier, did it make you somehow solve things quicker, and in what sense did it do so? (were you just quicker, or the same speed but more intuitive?) were you i…
Primarily it instilled that love of math, where previously there had been anxiety and ennui. This was sufficient to get me actually complete the work -- and do some extra work for fun -- which was more than enough to get through the math in my university coursework. I didn't get into more advanced maths in university, and for the fields that I've ended up in (and here I need to omit some otherwise too-revealing biographical details), I'm undoubtedly sub-par at mathematics. When it comes to calculation, I'm still definitely slower and more mistake-prone than my colleagues. I attribute this to avoiding mathematics for my first two decades; if math is a language, then I learned it at an age when having a thick accent is unavoidable. I make up for these deficiencies by being much more stubborn than my colleagues -- just hammering away at problems until they're done -- and also having an excellent intuitive grasp of certain domains, which I can then implement via coding rather than formulae. (I learned to code when I was very young, so that's something which I'm much more natively fluent at). After I've solved a problem via intuition and code, I usually try to prove (or at least investigate) it with proper math, to reassure myself that the solution is efficient and correct. That's far slower and more painstaking, but I eventually get there (and nine times out of ten, my intuition was correct). That's probably the wrong way to do things, but it works. I wouldn't be able to have a job where the math necessarily came first, however!
Yes, this is a dummy account; my regular account here has 4497 karma, but is linked to my real name. The conservatism of some of my clients -- and the fairly public role I sometimes must play -- is such that I'd rather not have my former illegal exploits broadcast quite yet. Hopefully you can understand! In answer to your question: yes, I very much believe that it can be applied to programming and computer science --…
Love the choice of your dummy account name! I immediately remembered it from the C64 days. Used in a FOR loop, poke 53281,x would create some marvelous color loops.... almost psychedelic ;) http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Tar8kV39P2E
I personally haven't had any adverse effects aside from a sore jaw and a mild ~36-hour serotonin depression following a trip. In the company I took it -- fellow "psychonauts" who always made a serious effort to control the quality of the environment, the quality of the drug, and the quality of their own mental state -- I've never seen anybody else have serious adverse affects, either. We all benefitted from it to var…
> It basically gives you the ability to bypass and/or rewrite elements of your brain's BIOS, which is just as powerful and potentially dangerous as it sounds. What does it mean? Is it possible to convince your brain to "choose" different sexuality, for example, while high on psycs?
Timothy Leary claimed that he could and did help people change sexual orientation. I don't know how verifiable any of his claims are.