It does seem that people would wrongly associate the artificial influx of positive/warm feelings coming from a cannabis with increased task performance. Not unlike how people overestimate their own strength when drinking alcohol etc.
However, if it decreases their performance but improves their feelings towards the work, might that still be a net positive?
In other words, if you are going to be a little more pokey and error prone, but on the whole more eager to work and more resistant to burn out, that could be better than a non-cannabis user that makes fewer errors, while continuously stressing out and thinking about changing jobs.
My coding under the influence is for shit. Most times after trying this, I’ve had to redo what was done as it no longer makes sense and rarely worked. It was the epitome of the phrase “were you high?”
The opposite happens though for the more creative computer usage like video/photo editing, graphic design etc. there have been some severely boring projects that kept me procrastinating, but made tolerable with an influenced state
Is it better to medicate than make steps ("thinking about changing jobs") towards being happy sober?
I'm not against people using cannabis, I just don't think this is the right frame. It shouldn't be a bandaid for being in a bad situation and it's kind of sad if one would give up their aspirations for betterment because the high masks them caring enough about it.
Your point is valid in that being able to face life unaided by medicine is ideal, but often unrealistic.
Such that I think this comment of calling it a band aid for being in a bad situation is overblown, and that the situation in general is more comparable to drinking coffee to remain alert.
I'd be curious to know if you also think that drinking coffee to overcome tiredness at work is also equal to giving up aspirations for betterment.
I see cannabis less as a bandaid (though it can be used that way) and more as an experience enhancement. Sure, maybe data pipelines seem a little boring. But spend enough time working on them under the influence of cannabis and before you know it you’re having fun.
In the short term, for the individual: yes, it could be better to medicate.
However in the long run, it ends up giving license to shitty employers to continue being shitty, and perhaps to become even worse.
Such employers need to feel the negative consequences of their behavior. Their business needs to suffer from high turnover and poor quality work, and if they don’t change then they need to fold.
Businesses are, at the end of the day, just people - people who live together and participate in the same society. I can’t honestly say that the best outcome is for workers to medicate themselves to be able to tolerate their bosses. Work doesn’t have to be so toxic and awful, you know?
Well; I’m inclined to agree that my comment would indeed sound silly if you simply substituted antidepressants for pot. But in my mind that’s because it’s comparing apples to oranges. I just don’t see how they are comparable.
But you weren’t talking about pot. You were talking about people treating their work related depression and stress being a bad thing because it enables their employer to depress and stress them. At least, that was the message I got.
I was. I was replying to a comment that was talking about pot; and the comment I was replying to was on an article that was about pot. In context, I would have thought "medicate" would be understood as "medicate [with cannabis]".
> You were talking about people treating their work related depression and stress being a bad thing because it enables their employer to depress and stress them. At least, that was the message I got.
Nope, nope, nope. You brought up antidepressants - as I said before, I think that's an apples-to-oranges comparison. Recall the original comment I was replying to in the first place - it talks about being "more eager to work and more resistant to burn out" via pot and people "continuously stressing out and thinking about changing jobs". And I don't think it remotely bad to treat depression or stress with medication, at all.
Now maybe somebody is about to burn out and thinks about changing jobs because they're depressed, but that's reading a lot into it. My comment was trying to talk about leaving toxic and shitty jobs. You're bringing a framing into it that I do not agree with and didn't ever say.
This is a thinly veiled marxist-style call for collective class action. Aka unionising. I think it’s more dignifying to assume that ppl are capable of judging for themselves whether the solution to a shitty job is getting high, or quitting- without the socialist indoctrination, which is designed to benefit the political leaders who try to galvanise revolutions. Those revolutions typically devolve into unhinged violence, because they fabricate a narrative of anger.
If I wanted to make a marxist-style call for collective action, there’d be nothing “thinly veiled” about it.
What I was actually suggesting is that people should, in fact, decide for themselves; and that employers should reap the consequences of those decisions.
It sounds like you’ve mistaken me for someone you’ve been arguing with elsewhere. Maybe my comment vaguely resembles a fight you’ve been having before, but you’re reaching some conclusions that just aren’t supported by what I said.
It was the tone you used. Your post had strong statements like
> employers need to feel the negative consequences of their behavior. Their business needs to suffer
This is not merely encouraging personal autonomy. It’s the prescription of political action. It’s dialectical materialism. Could be a strange coincidence.
Well, if all it takes to be a marxist is suggesting that people take individual action to change a socially undesirable situation, I guess I’m a marxist.
But I mean with definitions that broad, who wouldn’t be? I guess it’s useful for trying to shut down conversation, but I’m not sure what other utility it holds.
But you didn’t suggest individual action. You set out objectives which can only succeed if enough ppl coordinate to do it. It’s the prototypical socialist revolution and it’s useful to know where that path can lead.
If your employees are stressed to the point of burnout and are turning over every few months, do you think new trainees will make more or less errors than experienced employees under the influence of cannabis?
Will their training costs be more or less than the errors made by the person using cannabis?
As the employee, if you are stressed out and hitting a wall, and suddenly imbibing cannabis motivates you to continue working more than 10 cups of coffee would, but without the jitters, that seems like a better outcome than simply feeling terrible and also not getting the job done.
I suppose there’s no certainty when dealing with a vague hypothetical, but probably both employer and employee? It’s not as if burnout and quitting is in anyone’s interest.
Can't recall where I read this off the top of my head, but wasn't a similar idea tested with musicians? If memory serves correct, the results were that while high, the musicians thought what they were making was great, but when they later revisited it when sober, they thought it was rubbish.
Methodology makes all the difference in those cases. Artistic output is an extremely complex psychological process and we haven’t comprehensively identified its components. It’s possible that some aspects of the creative process can show a limited benefit from cannabis, as long as they can be isolated from the negative effects.
Different drugs are different. Lumping them all together is dangerous:
- Kids who discover that one wasn't a big deal will then be motivated to try others and see what else they were lied to about (I did, got around to most of my checklist too).
- Taboo about drugs in general prevents harm-mitigating conversations from happening that might protect someone from one specific drug or another (I turned out ok because of conversations like that).
I really really really don’t like the “ideas are harmful” bent of your comment. Saying “drugs are bad” doesn’t harm anyone, even if you disagree, or think that it’s reductive or off base (because it is). Kids who grow up in homes where “harm mitigation” include sanctioned marijuana and alcohol use have worse outcomes than those who don’t.
Harm mitigation isn't about sanctioning anything, it's just about recognizing that sometimes prohibition doesn't work and not making things worse in those cases.
It's about not wrecking somebody's teeth by confiscating their pacifier while they're rolling. It's about not causing overdoses by limiting access to milligram scales (because trying to use a kitchen scale to measure a dose is dangerous). It's about creating an environment where people won't lie to you if you express concern about their habits.
Most drug problems are poor dopamine hygiene or mental health issues of some other kind. Let's focus on that instead of celebrating that somebody is "off the hard stuff" while the root cause remains and wrecks their life through a video game addiction.
If you're not seeing the harms caused by overbroad vilification of drugs in general it's because the people around you who are struggling with a substance problem are hiding it from you due to your attitude about such things. And if they're hiding from you, you can't help them.
I think you’re projecting a lot of things that onto me based on the one or two sentences I posted above. To clarify - I do drugs regularly (though I’m avoiding anything powdered until this fentanyl thing blows over), I have lost friends to drug overdoses, I have had friends choose to hide or open up about their problems to me (for whatever reason, people like to keep things a secret when it’s not going well, drugs or not), I live in a place where drugs have been decriminalized and recriminalized and I’m still nominally for decriminalizing them (mostly because I’m an accerationist). People die from taking drugs, they don’t die from video games or from not being handled with enough psychological care when it comes to harms reduction messaging. I was simply commenting that I don’t like the “dangerous ideas” thing and think that it’s very disingenuous to call verbal inclinations dangerous in comparison to methamphetamine or LSD (both of those are fun and dangerous). Different sports leagues, not ballparks.
Hard drugs are dangerous and I’ve seen a lot of people get burnt thinking they can abuse them freely. From time to time I burn myself as well, but have a penchant for stove touching, probably related to the accelerationism thing.
You're right, I apologize for being needlessly aggressive about it. I'm just watching my family make my cousin into a pariah over drug use that isn't even happening (not yet at least). They just need to have an enemy at all times... and maybe I pointed some of that frustration at you.
It’s ok, it’s easy to imagine who you’re talking to online in the worst light, or to externalize your frustrations with others beliefs onto other people.
I have a lot in common with your cousin: I had long hair, I skated, I had “out there” beliefs that my family encouraged or at least tolerated. My community typecast me as a pot smoker or a punk or a hippie, when the time came to it, I was like “hell yeah I’m gonna get high, everyone already thinks that I do anyway!” Unfortunately that set me down a bad path, and I’ve been insanely lucky and dodged a lot of bullets that could have severely fucked my life up.
For what it’s worth, my parents did a great job of saying “we will absolutely not tolerate you doing drugs, but we will give you the freedom to do your thing, and when you fuck up, we will ground your ass into oblivion.” I think that having that as a threat gave younger me a lot of good reasons to think about what I was doing and to do it in a more responsible way than some of my friends whose parents were more hands off with things.
billions of coffee drinkers would disagree with you there. If one chemical, framed differently, is able to enhance capabilities, why would all other chemicals automatically be an illusion? that seems illogical on the face of it.
I’m seeing the flaw with the study. Use a better drug. Cocaine gave us the 80s. In a re-appropriating of a phrase, just say no. Much rather had two 70s and skipped right to the 90s
The illusion can be good for initial inspiration and ideas and then it can be refined when sober. One of my favorite paintings I've done was after i got the idea from a mushroom trip.
I would be interested to see the studies on this and whether or not they controlled for non previously diagnosed ADHD when selecting participants.
I take Amphetamines for ADHD and narcolepsy so they obviously improve my performance- but I’ve also worked with people that abused them and felt like they were performing much better than normal but in reality were just delivering (anecdotally) sloppier pull requests at a faster rate.
reality is reality is reality. those illusions of enhanced capabilities can ultimately influence sober behaviors in a positive way too ya know. sometimes opening eyes to the true reality of the world and inspiring ideas. those ideas may have come to a sober subject as well but who's to say probability works that way. After all, (most?) every lifeform on the world is experiencing a perpetual trip called life from the constant inhalation of oxygen. getting off that wonderful and intoxicating inhalent would definitely lead to the end of an illusion, we all understand that. and so the cycle repeats. the illusion of life effects the next reality in some way, positive or negative, and so existence goes.
Multiple different drugs that are illegal to consume recreationally are being used with great results in therapy for depression, PTSD, etc. I don't think it's even remotely as clear cut as you try and make it out to be.
In my experience, being high enhances my musical (and I think generally creative) abilities. Music appreciation and analysis is especially better (maybe because it's the lowest effort thing). Many times when I was high I was listening to a song that I knew very well, but when high I was noticing more sounds in that song, like paying greater attention to guitars or bass in the background, that I wasn't paying attention to while sober. And since that "revelation", my appreciation of that song while sober was better, more detailed - I payed more attention to things that I first noticed while high. I'm also writing my own songs and often while high, the lyrics or melodies just spontaneously come to my mind, like when I'm not even trying to think about creating anything. Improvising music while high is great. But I can also say that there were cases when I created something that sounded bad when sober (but I think is rather an exception). But I'm rather not a neurotypical person so YMMV.
There are many examples of musicians that were making great music while high, such like of course the Beatles, and from the 60's I especially like Brian Wilson of the Beach Boys, but he's also an example of a guy that went "crazy" because of too much drugs (rather combined with preexisting mental issues). Large part of his best music is not well known because he became a victim of his perfectionism (couldn't finish what he was doing) and generally his ambitious work wasn't selling well - the Beach Boys were at the start a very non-ambitious pop/rock band, just like the Beatles, so going in more ambitious direction meant losing sales, and the rest of the band didn't like it. I think weed enhances curiosity, so it's helping in doing something that's not typical, experimenting with things and seeking new sounds - and that was something that Brian Wilson excelled at in the time when he was high all the time, the "Pet Sounds" album is a highly regarded classic that shows what I'm talking about. And unlike the Beatles, he was the producer of his own music (Beatles' ideas were "filtered" and realized by amazing George Martin who was well-educated and wasn't high, I think).
Coding while high on weed is not very good for me, it's hard to concentrate, thoughts flow in too many directions. So I think that in art weed can be a positive, but in other things that need precision and strictly logical thinking, it's negative.
Overall weed makes me more lazy. I think that most of the time when high, I'm just browsing internet (that's still not exactly negative because I usually learn many interesting things, but that's not what I would want to spend many hours of my time on). Recently I had a period of smoking too much, and then I was actually doing less music - after that, when I was sober in my free time, I started practicing guitar more, because I was more focused on my goals and more organized in what I was doing. But I'm generally a very chaotic person with a very chaotic life, so I think my experiences can't prove anything, even for me.
Back in the day, maybe 30-40 years ago, when possession of any amount of cannabis could get you thrown in jail, we needed a code phrase to use when we called a friend to ask if they had any.
So we would ask:
"Do you have any programmer's fuel?"
Also related, the phrase "fire an event" is a cannabis reference:
captain crunch would say "execute a nine-N instruction".. ask Woz! also the frat guy coders at Apple would openly hate on Andy Hertzfeld, who insufficiently hid his affection for an occasional toke in Palo Alto
I was friends with John Draper (Captain Crunch) in the 1970s.
But never as close a friend as he wanted me to be! (Anyone who knew John or the stories about him may know what I am referring to.)
He usually had some decent pot, so when I ran out, I would sometimes visit him at his Berkeley apartment and we would smoke and do some Forth hacking.
I never heard about the "nine-N instruction" though.
I ran into John again at the Computer History Museum's Homebrew Computer Club reunion in 2013. When I re-introduced myself, he didn't seem to remember me at first. Then his eyes lit up and he asked, "Did we work out?"
You and I discussed this before -- the phrase Draper used was "Let's execute some 1802 instructions". And yes he creepily and obnoxiously insisted on back exercises with me too. Yech! Beware.
Back in the days of the SFRaves scene, I and others would always keep some tobacco on us a "John Draper Repellent" in case he saddled up and tried to schmooze some weed.
Stratoscope on Feb 5, 2021 | parent | context | favorite | on: Dunfield 6809 Portable
> Sign extension (SEX instruction!)
We were definitely into SEX in those days.
In the late 1970s I was working at Tymshare, and one of my tasks was maintaining the assembler and linker. (I think this was on the PDP-10 but it could have been another machine.)
We wanted a "weak external" feature, somewhat akin to a "weak reference" in modern languages: instead of failing to build if the external symbol was not defined in another object file, it would link OK but leave a null value that you would check at runtime.
The assembly directive for a regular external was EXTERN. I thought of calling the weak external WEXTERN but that looked silly. So I decided to call them Secondary Externals, with the directive being SEXTERN.
And as far as I know, no one complained!
cjak on Feb 6, 2021 | next [–]
I just finished a project that introduced features for both signal injection and signal extraction. So now we can enjoy both SIN and SEX, sometimes at the same time.
DonHopkins on Feb 6, 2021 | prev [–]
The 1802 had a SET X REGISTER (SEX) instruction, as well as a GET HIGH (GHI) instruction.
John Draper (Cap'n Crunch) once creepily invited a friend of mine (who was a strapping young lad at the time) into the back of a van to "execute some 1802 instructions".
Stratoscope on Feb 6, 2021 | parent [–]
Ah yes, I knew John well in those days. Not nearly as well as he wanted to know me!
We used to drive around in his VW microbus finding interesting payphones. Then when he was learning to program, I visited him once in a while at his place in Berkeley to help him with his code.
My motivation was that he usually had some decent weed. Then one time he asked if I wanted to "work out". That lasted about two minutes until I found out what he really meant.
Many years later, I ran into John at the Homebrew Reunion. He didn't recognize me at first, so I reintroduced myself and mentioned how we used to hang out and write code.
as linked below, 1802 instruction set, "GET HIGH BYTE OF Register N" binary encoding had a "nine" as the first byte of the binary opcode, so the phrase was "Get 9N" or "Get High (byte)" instruction.. "execute a 9N instruction" was "get high" ..
> Second, our larger programming tasks were taken the LeetCode repository of skills-based interview questions. These questions may not be indicative of industrial practice (Behroozi et al., 2019). This is partially mitigated by the fact that they are indicative of programming tasks people carry out and study for in the hiring process.
It doesn't seem like they tested "boring" 9-5 programming, or programming net new features.
they should have tested building out some crud app in their preferred stack. leet code is hard if you're not high, and it's mentally challenging since every question is a new high complexity issue where normal code you might have a spot your stuck in, but the rest is easy to finagle.
It really depends upon the dosage. If you get completely baked, of course you aren't going to be very productive. However, a lower end dosage can have a relaxing effect and sometimes stimulate ideas that might not be considered otherwise. The same is probably true of booze. A drink or two might have net positive effects but drink a 750 and you aren't going to do very much of anything good.
Don't really need a study for something you can figure out fairly easily on your own. I tried to smoke and program probably 3 times and results were always the same. Significantly less productive. Started working on tasks not aligned with larger goal. Had many ideas that seemed amazing at the time and later found out to be dumb. In that sense it is creative enhancement in that you consider more idea, but just in general most ideas are dumb. Difficult to stay focused on the most important task and makes me wonder more. Loss of focus.
The real question is: How do I use cannabis correctly? What can it actually do for you?
From my experience smoking once every 2 months has net benefit... It cannot help you program but it can help you higher level ideas related to programming. It can answer the why better than it can answer the how. It can be a reset and motivation and prevent you from burn out even if you are working more than 60 hrs a week. But it is dangerous in that you want to get the relief constantly, so from my experience once every 2 months is fine.
> The real question is: How do I use cannabis correctly? What can it actually do for you?
Excellent questions, and I think this is the right way to approach this substance: as a scientific inquiry, not a vice to feel ashamed of, or a godsend magic substance that solves all problems.
> smoking once every 2 months has net benefit
Strong agree. Specifically, what I've observed is after long periods of productivity with the brain "loaded" with a lot of context, a joint can help uncover lateral connections and find new perspectives and approaches. However when the brain is "empty" as on a Monday morning, smoking is just counter-productive, since there are no connections to be made, no new perspectives to be had, and the lateral thinking just means loss of productivity (focus on the wrong things).
The fundamental difficulty is with the "once" part of the plan. It's very easy to stay in the smoking loop after the first day of use (get the relief constantly like you say), and it can turn into a week of use. For many people, the risk of losing weeks to substance use loop + one more week to get back to baseline mood might end up as net negative, despite the initial benefits.
I credit cannabis edibles with burnout prevention and focus improvement. It seems likely that I have ADHD, and for whatever reason edibles keep me motivated in a similar way to adderall. I write SQL daily, if that’s considered coding in this context. Bugs are not really a concern with SQL, I triple check my results to make sure I’m not making calculation mistakes. One thing it doesn’t always help with is task avoidance (if it’s not something I want to do), pure stimulants are better for that. Everyone is different, but I have zero plans to alter course, edibles make my job more interesting and much less boring. I highly recommend Wyld brand sativa gummies.
I'm wondering to what extend the positive productivity that people report when working high are due to the momentary mental relief from psychological pain (anxiety, depression, negative self thoughts) and the general mood enhancement.
Such positive effects could outweigh the decline in cognitive performance observed in this paper. For example, let's say that being high has a -0.2 effect on cognitive performance, but a +0.5 effect on alleviating psychological pain, then the user is still +0.3 overall.
Too bad treating psychological issues through substance use is not a winning strategy in the long term (due to habituation), but maybe temporary and occasional substance use can be a helpful stepping stone toward finding more sustainable alternative strategies, although the dangers of addiction are a big risk too, so it could go either way.
In my experience cannabis has bimodal impact based on your individual biology.
In my personal case it is measurably and consistently transformative for focus, opennness and creativity. To the extent that it basically feels like magic at this point and I’ve only really been working with cannabis for a couple years.
Other people it just seems to put to sleep
I’m exceptionally rigorous with my dosing and have experimented with terpenes/cannabinoid profiles to the extent where I know the relative responses I should expect are more or less deterministic.
To be clear though I am not making a comment on the study, I would generally suggest that specific task focus is impaired.
Its more of a question of, what aspect of your mindset is holding you back from performance. If you need to be exceptionally detailed oriented like a surgeon then you should definitely not be high, but if you’re framing out the logic for a protobuf interpreter, you might actually work faster
I and several other women I know use cannabis to cut the boredom of cleaning. There's definitely an optimum, where your mind wanders and the tedium doesn't accumulate. But a little beyond that optimum, you either get off task or spend an hour on a single teapot. I'm reminded of a recent study on cannabis and running that resonated with me. Running is so boring, but if I'm just a little lit, it's fun and feels great.
So in my view, cannabis can help alleviate tedium and improve task focus for the most boring and monotonous tasks. But any time I've tried to tackle a thinking problem stoned, the results are generally zero to negative.
It’s a subpar way to treat ADHD and similar issues with focus/attention. Subpar because other medications or non-medication treatments are usually better - but many use it as an accidental coping mechanism.
I once got stoned and watched a washing machine wash a load from start to finish. Utterly fascinating and no way I'd have that focus unaltered. It's not clear whether it was a good use of time though.
I’ve had moments like those back when I used to smoke over a decade ago, but they’ll come to you regardless (they still come to me from time to time). The “utter fascination” is like a direct link to reality, the interconnected perception of sound and motion and abstract shapes and colors and reflections and other things is just fucking bewildering. We are just observers of something spectacular.
Yeah, but you can translate that into constructive focus on the level of normal high-level tasks such as programming, or reading, or mathematics or music or things of that sort?
use it for years, understand its nuances, learn to recognize an appropriate amount and its effects, and channel them into all the various positive ivities. It definitely works on my machine!
Hear hear, if you think you're coding better when you're stoned, you're only thinking that when you're stoned. Studies have shown that while cannabis makes you think you're more creative, it actually makes you less creative. This, combined with losing train of thought and having to reread code to find your place before you zoned out makes for a whole lot of wasted time. And it churns out the kind of code you revisit and think "how did this take me 2 hours?". It's a libation, it doesn't mix with work plain and simple.
that's me on a normal day without ADHD meds... and even then if I'm in a depressive funk, I can't think for shit. Hyper focus though can be glorious and make me feel like a 10x programmer for a few days lol..
The study is also not about user-facing software development, it's about leetcode algorithmic puzzles as performed mostly by students still in education and without professional experience. Despite their prevalence in interviews and impassioned defense of relevancy, at least I encounter very little of that sort of coding in day to day applications development of any sort.
I'm also curious to see a study focused on psychoactive substances considering their proven track record of 'enhancing creativity'. It's also well known that early silicon valley was filled with microdosing enthusiasts.
All good and great but I think it’s a bit misleading. The participants were asked to do LeetCode—which limits this study to the suggested effects of cannabis on arbitrary and abstract programming tasks.
In terms of programming, LeetCode is quite likely to be harder than your day job.
Most developers mid level and upwards from majority of the companies I have held a role in are not spending the majority of their day coding, they're writing specs, doing meetings, providing guidance to their junior counterparts, assisting in support tickets on call, and if you had time, documentation. You were quite lucky to meet 30% time in any day/week/month/year spent writing code. The vast majority of developers were also not developing new, foundational code either.
So I disagree, its not misleading, its actually relevant, and arguably even more mentally stimulating than all the cruft that you actually do every day. At the least you're reusing and thinking about all the DSA knowledge everyone has lost touch with from decades ago.
> In terms of programming, LeetCode is quite likely to be harder than your day job.
It's orthogonal to your day job. The "cruft" you talk about is how we remove ambiguity and fill in details so that work isn't a series of free-floating gedanken experiments. If you're able to apply codified knowledge like LeetCode to a programming task it means someone else has already done the heavy lifting.
We "lost touch" with DSA knowledge because it turns out that it's easier to work things up from base principles using the scientific method than memorizing crap that worked for the vacuum tube generation. We don't *need* a reductive LUT approach to the process anymore.
That's great and all, but this is quite irrelevant conjecture, you can argue your point all you want, it does not matter to me. I don't care about what you do, and I probably never will.
The research performed in this study is relevant, and no one so far has demonstrated that it is "misleading", "bad or poor quality research", or really anything to demonstrate to me that it's results are questionable, going back to the parent thats what I address.
From personal experience, logic skills are significantly impaired, but when I’m stuck on a problem and high I can think of „out of the box“ solutions more easily that I later implement.
However, if it decreases their performance but improves their feelings towards the work, might that still be a net positive?
In other words, if you are going to be a little more pokey and error prone, but on the whole more eager to work and more resistant to burn out, that could be better than a non-cannabis user that makes fewer errors, while continuously stressing out and thinking about changing jobs.