
Use of LSD-25 for Computer Programming - kf
http://www.maps.org/news-letters/v18n1/v18n1-MAPS_24.pdf
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nikblack
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 f __kin high on
drugs.”

~~~
ComputerGuru
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.

~~~
biaxident
Coffee is still a drug.

~~~
APLonDrugs
So when will the gov. ban it like the rest? I'd hate to lose coffee too:-(
seems like prison for everything these days.

------
tezza
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.

\------------

[1] Or increase your dose significantly

~~~
petercooper
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?

~~~
tezza
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.

\-------

 _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.

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DenisM
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.

~~~
JabavuAdams
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".

~~~
DenisM
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.

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Zarathu
I tried to code on shrooms once.

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.

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jrockway
I'm sure glad that my government will put me in jail for trying to replicate
these results. I feel safe now.

~~~
tdavis
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).

~~~
PhilChristensen
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.

~~~
tdavis
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.

~~~
dmoney
How should you give the government a cut? Report the income on your tax
return?

~~~
brl
<http://www.ksrevenue.org/faqs-abcdrugtax.htm>

No personal checks are allowed!

~~~
dmoney
Interesting:

 _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._

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psygnisfive
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.

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gamache
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.

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gruseom
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.

------
AndrewO
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?

[Insert obligatory joke about Linux, BSD, Perl, Lisp, C, etc here...]

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...).

Put another way: I'd say LSD is code smell. :)

~~~
sjf
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.

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csbartus
Going further, and to know why LSD-25 helps sorting out complex things I
recommend John C. Lilly's (<http://www.johnclilly.com/>) book "Programming and
Metaprogramming in the Human Biocomputer"
(<http://futurehi.net/docs/Metaprogramming.html>)

The first pharagraph sounds like:

"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. "

~~~
gruseom
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.

~~~
silentbicycle
"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... :) )

------
cloudhead
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...

~~~
daeken
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.

~~~
lsd25
(Posting anonymously.)

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.

~~~
brl
If you could go back and change your decision, would you decide not to use
LSD?

~~~
lsd25
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.

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zeugma
He did reach the Ballmer Peak : <http://xkcd.com/323/> Just s/alcohol/LSD/g
(may be the peak is higher, then)

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fluffster
Reminds me of [http://steve-yegge.blogspot.com/2009/04/have-you-ever-
legali...](http://steve-yegge.blogspot.com/2009/04/have-you-ever-legalized-
marijuana.html)

~~~
andreyf
In the sense that those who legalize marijuana should drop a little acid to
help them along? ;)

------
kragen
This is a fantastically interesting post. Too bad it will probably be killed
because it's about illegal drugs.

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mooneater
Everyone can use a little extra perspective now and then =)

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lispmeister
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).

