patrick.net

richwicks says

90% of the population here, of well educated people,

What's well educated? Education has no bearing on being high either. I've tended to find if I'm sober that an educated person is just as dumb as the redneck that doesn't even have a GED while high. Honestly people that "think" they're smarter are usually the dumbest on weed is my observation.

Also different strains help with sleep. I'm no aficionado, but I know what works for me, and it definitely works. Pre-legal weed I'd occasionally smoke it here and there. I've found a brand/strand of edible that puts me the fuck to sleep for 8 hours. I usually would sleep 3-4 hours on average without it. I don't need it every night, so not addictive. Only do it when I can tell I'm out of whack with sleep. I generally only experience the high for 10 minutes and I'm out. I do feel more hung over on weed though compared to beer. I never get hung over on beer. Literally ever. Only hard liquor, which I don't consume anymore.

My point is pre-legalization, I highly doubt 50% of engineers did weed. At least consistently to build a tolerance. They smoked some ditch weed in the 90's. Got high. Laughed and goofed off. 2020, the game has fucking changed. I didn't hallucinate on acid or mushrooms. I've hallucinated on dispensary edibles multiple times. The game has changed.

Either way I think more people are doing it is the point. I've talked with lots of people and paranoia is the first side effect almost anyone mentions. Now throw a airborne virus into the mix and your government is telling you you'll basically die, that's not a good mental state while high on current THC content.

As far as creative drug, totally disagree as a drummer. It's the absolute worst for creativity. Having recorded probably 50-100 sessions, 4 albums high as fuck, we played better sober. Anecdotal for sure. Maybe guitar. But bass and drums need to be mostly sober. Keys too, but I don't play them. Guitar I think you can get away with it. I have zero issue with people smoking or doing edibles, but I wouldn't have them working on my website or programming while high. As someone that's played live shows as a drummer, being high is awful. You think you're doing good, but you're not.

WookieMan says

As far as creative drug, totally disagree

This. Thinking that pot makes you creative is like the drunk at the bar that thinks he now has James Bond appeal to the ladies.

I think weed really does somehow encourage creative thinking. You come up with insights you might not have had otherwise. They might be stupid, but they tend to be new.

Based on the fact that you literally cannot kill yourself with weed no matter how much you take at a time, I think it should be legal if alcohol is legal, for consistency.

Yes, you can stay stoned all the time and impair your memory and your ability to do good work for your overlords, but people should have the right to fail. Even the memory impairment goes away after you stop getting stoned all the time.

My one objection to weed is that it might be linked to psychosis in teens. But I think even that is rather rare.

WookieMan says

What's well educated? Education has no bearing on being high either. I've tended to find if I'm sober that an educated person is just as dumb as the redneck that doesn't even have a GED while high. Honestly people that "think" they're smarter are usually the dumbest on weed is my observation.

What I'm finding is that the LESS educated a person is, the smarter they actually are.

I have a hypothesis on this. People who are "highly educated" MUST be gullible because they are trusting authority for their education. I can still do polynomial math, and what freaking use does that have? Well, it can be used for CRCs and generalized equations of arbitrary powers. When I learned this I was in 9th grade, and I still remember how to do it. SMARTER people were "what the fuck is this useful for???" and they were kind of right.

In any case, I'm more likely to have a ditch digger agree with me over this covid nonsense, than a PhD. I literally know a biologist (semi-famous one) that thinks the vaccines are a good idea.

HeadSet says

WookieMan says

As far as creative drug, totally disagree

This. Thinking that pot makes you creative is like the drunk at the bar that thinks he now has James Bond appeal to the ladies.

I did most of the design of a VLSI arithmetic logic unit when I was stoned.

I would get stoned on Friday, on Saturday I'd go through my notes and discard the nonsense (90%), Sunday I'd fully recover, and the week I'd implement.

My professor thought I was a fucking genius.

Being CONSTANTLY stoned certainly doesn't help, but screwing up your neurons DOES make you creative, at the expense of making you stupid. I came up with LOTS of stupid ideas while I was stoned, but not all of them were. Some ideas were brilliant. I'm insanely curious when I'm stoned, and I'm curious when sober. Just talked to a Russian 20 minutes ago I ran into, and we had an interesting discussion on the mess in Ukraine.

With pot, there's use, and there's abuse. I never did "wake and bake". I'd use it maximum once a week, and I hardly ever use it now.

Alcohol does nothing for me intellectually. I'm having a beer now.

Pot is useful when you're working on a problem, and it does give you insights into how to do it, just because it's messing up your brain, you come up with ideas you otherwise couldn't. Even stupid ideas can be useful. You have to be working on a problem that takes time to figure out. Again, 90% of what I came up with was nonsense, but the next day I could see the false paths to avoid them, and I had ideas that might work, which I otherwise just couldn't come up with. I don't think being stoned would help me learn to repair a car, but it does help in some areas where it requires creativity. For me, I had severe limitations on chip size, so I had to get clever on how to do things in minimal space.

BTW - I can't do actual work when I'm stoned. I can't write code when stoned, nothing that requires attention to detail. Just over-view ideas.

richwicks says

Being CONSTANTLY stoned certainly doesn't help, but screwing up your neurons DOES make you creative,

I like to make the comparison here to old style computer punch cards.

Imagine you have a stack of 2,000 punch cards, each card is a line of code. That line may be an equation, a line of graphic, or just text. Now imagine you run the batch and it works perfectly. Now you take out a single card and it still works. Next, you take out 5 random cards, and the program still works, but an obscure piece of text is missing from a label. Since the program still runs, would you conclude that randomly taking out cards does no damage, or just damage you can tolerate so far? Now take out a handful of cards from the middle, shuffle them up, and put them back in the stack. Do you think this will improve the program in "creative" ways?

HeadSet says

richwicks says

Being CONSTANTLY stoned certainly doesn't help, but screwing up your neurons DOES make you creative,

I like to make the comparison here to old style computer punch cards.

Imagine you have a stack of 2,000 punch cards, each card is a line of code. That line may be an equation, a line of graphic, or just text. Now imagine you run the batch and it works perfectly. Now you take out a single card and it still works. Next, you take out 5 random cards, and the program still works, but an obscure piece of text is missing from a label. Since the program still runs, would you conclude that randomly taking out cards does no damage, or just damage you can tolerate so far? Now take out a handful of cards from the middle, shuffle them up, and put them back in the stack. Do you think this will improve the program in "creative" ways?

I wasn't stoned all the time and I'm not just a machine.

Let me explain how an evolutionary program works. You create an algorithm with a bunch of variables, and run it to do some task, like chip routing. It produces a result, but it's not ideal, so you randomly change the variables by a little bit and you do this with 20 copies (children) of the first algorithm. You then run the algorithm of all 20 children, and find the best 5 results. Then you add randomness and combination to THEIR children to create 20 copies, and run it again.

You do this over and over and over and over again, for 10,000 generations. This is just an evolutionary algorithm.

And you end up with a very good solution in a week. And I mean VERY GOOD, what it produces 100 engineers couldn't make in 100 years.

I can't COPY myself of course, but adding in that mutation, throwing off a bunch of variables, can help sometimes.

When stoned, you can think in completely STUPID and (rarely) brilliant ways but I needed a day off to recover from it. I don't think pot effects me the way it does for most people. Many people say they are "sleepy" when they get stoned, I'm anything but. I end up always researching and reading when I'm stoned - I don't retain much, but I do take notes. I can make connections. Sometimes the connections just don't exist, and I'm making tenuous connections that are bullshit, but I can also make connections that DO exist, and I just didn't see it previously.

It's a drug I RARELY use. If I want to sleep and can't, melatonin works for me. Pot sure as hell does not.

It's only a drug useful for LIMITED creativity. You can't learn on it, you can just use the knowledge you already know.

When I had my two dogs, it also made me more gentile and nice. Because I had reduced my intelligence, I could see the world for a few hours though their eyes. I used to get stoned once a week with my cousin and take my dogs for a walk. They LOVED being outside and going for long distance walks, and it rubbed off on me. I was happy, they were happy, and I loved everything around me. People who can get stoned and are violent, that's a psychopath. I just wanted to be nice and kind to everything and everybody. That's not a bad experience at all. No guard up at all for a few hours. It's very pleasant.

It's not an entirely negative drug but it does have to be used sparingly. It intensifies emotions, allowed me to have better empathy, it made me ENTIRELY non violent and made me stupid. Not everything is intellect.