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Silicon Valley Avant-garde Have Turned To LSD in a Bid To Increase Their Productivity (1843magazine.com)
Every three days Nathan (not his real name), a 27-year-old venture capitalist in San Francisco, ingests 15 micrograms of lysergic acid diethylamide (commonly known as LSD or acid). From a story on 1843 Magazine: From the start, a small but significant crossover existed between those who were experimenting with drugs and the burgeoning tech community in San Francisco. "There were a group of engineers who believed there was a causal connection between creativity and LSD," recalls John Markoff, whose 2005 book, "What the Dormouse Said", traces the development of the personal-computer industry through 1960s counterculture. At one research centre in Menlo Park over 350 people -- particularly scientists, engineers and architects -- took part in experiments with psychedelics to see how the drugs affected their work. Tim Scully, a mathematician who, with the chemist Nick Sand, produced 3.6m tabs of LSD in the 1960s, worked at a computer company after being released from his ten-year prison sentence for supplying drugs. "Working in tech, it was more of a plus than a minus that I worked with LSD," he says. No one would turn up to work stoned or high but "people in technology, a lot of them, understood that psychedelics are an extremely good way of teaching you how to think outside the box." San Francisco appears to be at the epicentre of the new trend, just as it was during the original craze five decades ago. Tim Ferriss, an angel investor and author, claimed in 2015 in an interview with CNN that "the billionaires I know, almost without exception, use hallucinogens on a regular basis." Few billionaires are as open about their usage as Ferriss suggests. Steve Jobs was an exception: he spoke frequently about how "taking LSD was a profound experience, one of the most important things in my life." In Walter Isaacson's 2011 biography, the Apple CEO is quoted as joking that Microsoft would be a more original company if Bill Gates, its founder, had experienced psychedelics. As Silicon Valley is a place full of people whose most fervent desire is to be Steve Jobs, individuals are gradually opening up about their usage -- or talking about trying LSD for the first time.
Is the use of tools and technology not the key motivation behind human evolution?
Psychoactive drugs can be tools, and are most definitely technology.
Last I checked, it's still a Schedule-I narcotic which makes it unobtainable even with a prescription. What more does our anti-drug leaders need? It's a confession made free and clear in a news article. That should be more than sufficient grounds for a search warrant for house, car, and office.
I don't know about LSD, but Eric Raymond makes a plausible case for modafinil.
Ceci n'est pas une signature.
If you need them, you are doing something wrong somewhere.
Nobody needs LSD. But, some people believe that their quality of life improves with occasional use. Use of LSD can absolutely be a spiritual experience. Who are you to decide that what people are doing is right/wrong?
If you are claiming they are "okay" or "needed" for "work", you are a disgusting person.
Tell us what you really think! We're all dying for your approval.
Disclaimer: I haven't dropped acid in over 15 years.
He's getting rather old, but he's a good mouse.
1) This isn't new. Creative people have been doing this since the discover of drugs. It's a common trope of the drugged out artist. Tech people have always had more in common with artists than businessmen, so it's no surprise that techs prefer the artistic drugs over the businessman's drug (cocaine).
2) It doesn't work the way people think it does. You are not more creative under the influence of drugs, you are actually less creative. But you stop asking yourself "Is this a good idea?" and just do it. It's basically brainstorming for one person. They also make you stop worrying about outside distractions (failure, your marriage, etc.)
Drugs do not add anything to your mental capacity. Anything you do under the influence is something you could have done anyway without it, as long as you did not let your own personal demons get in the way.
But some people are ruled by their personal demons, so they do better work on the drug than off. Sad really.
excitingthingstodo.blogspot.com
May also explain "systemd" ;-)
Indeed, high people are usually not good at weighing complex practical trade-offs. How a green spider reacts to a given UI is usually moot because green spiders are not the target audience.
Perhaps the trips are to generate raw ideas to be evaluated later while sober, but too many trips could mess up your sober thinking also. For example, perhaps S. Jobs would not have been stupid enough to postpone visiting a cancer doctor, and still be alive today if he didn't fry his brain.
Table-ized A.I.
Didn't mass adoption of caffeine help spur on the Age of Enlightenment.
At to the main point, no. Acid doesn't give you 'profound' thoughts. It lowers the standard for 'profound' until stupid ideas seem profound to you. Write your profound insights down, so you won't forget, read them when you're sober. You'll just shake your head.
Can confirm. Experienced transcendental levels of profundity after hours of in-depth conversation. A group of us were convinced that we had obtained some new level of understanding which we had all managed to forget somehow.
A portable cassette recorder was obtained for the next session, and a recording made.
Upon playback, 4 fools were heard laughing and talking over each other saying "Yes! That's it! It *all* makes sense." Absolutely nothing profound was discovered.
While they're on it, agreed, most people are somewhere between pretty silly and slightly incoherent. However, in the days and week after, I think there can be some genuine carry-over effects on mindset and creativity levels. That same kind of carryover could also probably be accomplished by a long vacation, a creative bootcamp, a vision quest, an intense religious experience, and a bunch of other things, but this is one of many ways to shake things up and search for other perspectives. I'd like to see some studies before claiming with confidence it's a sure thing, or to what extent it's effective, but it's at least mildly plausible that there's some potential benefit.
The Quirkz Handbook of Self-Improvement for People Who Are Already Pretty Okay
Microdosing isn't the same thing as getting high or tripping. You might barely notice the effects of 15 micrograms of LSD (1/10 the normal "tripping" dose) the first time you did it. But not the second time, three days later. If you've done some science showing a causal link between LSD and brain cancer, you should publish. It would be a first.
- None can love freedom heartily, but good men; the rest love not freedom, but license. -- John Milton
The article summary says it right there -- everyone in startup land is trying to be Steve Jobs. Elizabeth Holmes of Theranos fame even wears black turtlenecks to try to complete the look.
It's just the personality version of cargo-culting. Plenty of business types do this but most don't have the degree of success they think they will:
- Tons of people try for the Jobs personality, or the Linus Torvalds personality, etc. Most end up only picking up the mannerisms and not the intelligence part. (Linus acts like a jerk, but he's usually correct and doesn't seem capable of being nice about it.)
- Go into any airport bookstore and look over any of the books aimed at MBA types. Since most of the customers are consultants, it's a pretty easy predictor of what "brilliant innovative groundbreaking paradigm shifts" will be tried at their customers -- and subsequently by tons of others.
- Similarly, any executive who starts using other executives' direct quotes is definitely wishing for similar success. My favorite of late, which I've heard come out of tons of "thought leaders" is the "2 pizza team" concept that Jeff Bezos talked about when he referred to keeping product groups small enough to feed with 2 pizzas.
If it requires taking LSD, they'll do that too. It's just a bunch of MBA weenies emulating their heroes.
Disclaimer: I haven't dropped acid in over 15 years.
And you are proud of advertising that?
Not advertising. Disclaiming. I'm neither proud nor ashamed of trying psychedelics in college. Why should I be?
Drugs are "Spiritual"?
I didn't say "drugs" in general. I said LSD can be. The experience differs based on many circumstances and the determination on whether the experience was "spiritual" is entirely up to the user.
Sorry, but you are doing the same thing as TFA. Glorifying drugs!
Not all drugs are worthless. Not every drug experience is negative. Is that glorifying? I think it's just truth.
Will you next claim how I'm just a prude for being against drunk driving?
Nobody said anything like that. Obvious strawman is obvious.
He's getting rather old, but he's a good mouse.
I'm sorry, but you just come off as kinda silly, uptight and naive. The reason your moral high ground feels so hard to cling to is because you don't actually have any.
Breakfast served all day!
Caffeine, sugar, alcohol, nicotine, the list goes on and on.
Sugar is not a drug.
Alcohol is awful for society, as is nicotine.
Caffeine is mostly innocuous, and often mostly pointless. Once you become a regular caffeine user, you depend on it to get to your normal. People who drink x cups of coffee daily perform the same as people who don't drink coffee (or otherwise consume large amounts of caffeine).
Read the article. It does a much better job of explaining why people think microdosing is good for creativity than I could.
- None can love freedom heartily, but good men; the rest love not freedom, but license. -- John Milton
This account suggests different.
"while the news was not good, the upside was that the form of pancreatic cancer from which Jobs suffered (a neuroendocrine islet tumor) was one of the 5% or so that are slow growing and most likely to be cured. But Jobs refused surgery after diagnosis and for nine months after, favoring instead dietary treatments and other alternative methods."
Table-ized A.I.
I like my coffee, but the answer to your question is that it's hard to say because around the same time, clean drinking water/better sanitation practices also became available en masse in the major cities, reducing the need for people to drink beer instead of water. Factories and scientific research tend to run better when everyone isn't a little buzzed.
Claiming that certain drugs are okay because they "may" be Spiritual would be like saying loads of other extremely dangerous experiences are okay because they "may" be "Spiritual".
Most drugs are "ok".
Society/laws that outlaw them makes them not ok, unreasonable expensive, only available via criminal sources, polluted by substances to thin them out (and you can not go to the police and accuse your pusher "oh, he sold me 100% pure stuff, but it was not only just 45% but also contaminated with baby butt powder"), requiring you to become a half criminal as well, to acquire them, either because of black market or money issues or addiction, wich you probably would not have if you simply could get a nice shot every weekend from your pharmacy.
Sorry, but if you have no clue about drugs then stay out of the discussion.
Disclaimer: except alcohol and canabis I did not use drugs. But I don't know a single person that did not try LSD, mushrooms, Heroine or Cocaine. Well, now while I type this, I think I know one person who did not, perhaps two.
And guess what: none of them is an addictive drug abuser.
The idea about drugs in the US or mainstream european politics are just absolutely absurd.
Cost free eBook I read (by iBook/Kobo/Amazon/ObookO/Gutenberg etc.): "The Green Odyssey" by Philip Jose Farmer.
Well, at the latest, everyone should have realized that by 1994 when the IBM Simon came out. ;)
Ezekiel 23:20