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Comment by spectramax | Hacker News Reader

> Inspired by a mind-expanding LSD journey in 1985, I designed the HyperCard authoring system that enabled non-programmers to make their own interactive media.

I want to do this badly. Has anyone taken LSD here on HN? What can you share about this, almost sounds like an urban myth, claim that one can have revolutionary ideas, profound realizations that otherwise cannot be had?

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> I want to do this badly.

My advice is to stay far far away from psychedelics. I took LSD a few months ago after hearing about what great insights it can enable, or the euphoria it lets you feel.

I ended up having a bad, panic-inducing trip which caused something in my brain to flip and start having panic attacks and dissociation. The dissociation/depersonalization faded after a couple weeks (although those weeks were hell) but the anxiety and general feeling of weirdness still affect me.

I don't really feel like I've ever gotten back to how I've been before I took the drug. As some other commenter on HN said, "it's like throwing a wrench in your neurological cogwheels." The rewards definitely don't outweigh the risks.

Really sorry to hear that. Did you ever experience anything related (like mushrooms)?

Remember that his experience is just an anecdote. You should not base your reasoning upon someone else's experience. You should research and keep in mind that yes, bad trips exist and also that we're talking about banned compounds and as such their purity varies. God knows what he took. The only way to know for sure is to order from a (legal) EU lab, which makes a similar compound or something. With that said, my personal opinion is that it doesn't make sense to take something under researched, artificially isolated. As such, imo, you're better off growing your spores, again, ordered from and consumed in a legal place, such as, Holland. There was a thread about them both those things here on HN, with some great comments. You might wanna use HN search and sift thru the comments. But as far as spores, I think it's pretty accurate to say that what you'll experience is a dissociation from your ego, which, is a totally abstract concept, and quite unimaginable. Mhh, I'd say what happens is you see everything from the outside, you realize everything is a mental construction and feel like everything is connected. I recommend reading a piece on Santa Claus and the spores. Gives much more context than anything for what their use should be, and was, imo. Don't expect to turn an apple into a Macintosh.

I've done far-too-high doses of weed before accidentally, which I can describe as being similar and psychedelic. After the incident I cut out any psychoactive drugs, including caffeine and alcohol.

From my experience LSD basically amplifies what's already inside you plus the setting which is around you. So you need to be prepared. It basically real life "the zone" from stalker:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stalker_(1979_film)

So if you have some worries, even deep inside, and not acknowledging them, LSD will bring that up for you even if the setting is super relaxing and safe. Also the opposite, if setting is threatening, you will have bad trip.

This so much. Broken people shouldn't do psychedelics, or they might end up more broken. You really can't hide your flaws and issues from it. How to define who is broken and who is not is not for this post, or this site, more for good experienced psychologists. I've been disassembled down into atoms of my personality, 'saw' them dance and swirl on gentle shamanic music I played in the background and when coming down from the trip, assembled back again, piece by piece, sense by sense. Only then I realized that my mental state was perfectly OK and no hidden cracks looming beneath the surface. I would never recommend such a leap of faith to random people I don't know deeply.

Doing this with anybody else wouldn't achieve any of this insight, I presume a lot fo energy would be spent managing communication with other person or attempt to stay more grounded rather than let it go.

For rest of us, it is often a life changing experience and defining moment of our lives. It was for me (mushrooms grown from spores from Netherland, never did acid but should be +-similar). One trick with shrooms - raw lemon juice makes it way more intense and shorter experience, which is combination I prefer for introspection.

I'd wager a large percentage have ;)

it can be mind-bending for sure, it's hard to describe. You might have profound ideas, or not, it's hard to predict; and not all of these will seem so profound when sober the next day. It does seem to increase one's senses of curiosity and wonder and open-mindedness. You might also get new focus/energy/direction/ideas about your passions and life trajectory generally. art/music/nature are enhanced as well.

it almost certainly won't make you an overnight savant (speaking a new language, factoring 4096-bit numbers in your head). but if you're already good at something (musical instrument, painting, engineering/programming, etc) and you are able to spend a bit of your trip thinking hard about a problem you are trying to solve in that domain, you might indeed have some new perspective on the matter. Visualizing abstract CS/math-y things (data structures, networks, algorithms, linear algebra, etc) is great fun. Good luck!

Smile, relax, and remember that you are great.

I'd encourage you to read at least the trip reports on erowid[1] and The Psychedelic Explorer's Guide by James Fadiman.[2] You might also be interested in reading LSD, Spirituality, and the Creative Process: Based on the Groundbreaking Research of Oscar Janiger.[3]

Then, if you decide to try it, prepare yourself for a very special journey -- one that you'll only be able to go on once in your life (as you'll never again have a first time with that particular substance.. an experience many chase over and over again later in life, but few ever manage to recapture it). You'll want to be in a safe, supportive environment, ideally with an experienced trip sitter you like and trust, and without any prior commitments for that day and ideally the next. The Psychedelic Explorer's Guide has more specific advice on how to prepare.

[1] - https://www.erowid.org/chemicals/lsd/lsd.shtml

[2] - https://www.amazon.com/Psychedelic-Explorers-Guide-Therapeut...

[3] - https://www.amazon.com/LSD-Spirituality-Creative-Process-Gro...

Have not myself. Many of my friends have. The revelations are often profound and positive but directly tangible results like "LSD --> Hypercard" seem to be quite the exception and I suspect Atkinson left out many steps for the sake of brevity.

Standard psychedelic advice is to try them with experienced friends if at all possible when getting started. Trips can also be bad and scary (and sometimes, that is a necessary step on the road to positive change)

I dream of someone taking psychedelic drugs and coming back with an invention completely beyond their capabilities and a memory of it being gifted. I don’t mean a talented scientist being inspired to make HyperCard. I want a cashier to be handed the plans for a more efficient rocket.

I know you're joking, but to be clear for others, it doesn't work that way. =)

Best case scenario w.r.t. real-world engineering challenges, drugs enable some lateral thinking and allow you to make connections you might not have otherwise. Very often this best case scenario is not going to be the case though ha ha ha.

Well, I’m not joking. But, I said “I dream” because I agree it absolutely doesn’t happen this way. I don’t think it ever has.

People on DMT have experiences of being given messages, but it always seems to be things about themselves (stop worrying or whatever).

A drug induced discovery that couldn’t possibly be explained by lateral thinking would be an incredible event.

Many many times, all a long time ago.

For about three years it was my favorite thing, but after that it didn't do much for me. Not because the drug wasn't working, but because it wasn't showing me anything new anymore.

I did it a lot for those three years. Often enough to discover that taking it more than about once every four days was self-defeating, because I built up a tolerance so fast.

You can have what seem like revolutionary ideas and profound realizations, and later discover that they were no such thing. That experience is common enough to be a running joke.

You can have legitimate revelations, too, but you can also have those without a drug.

It seems to me like the main effect it has on inspiration is it temporarily disables some of your machinery of categorization. For a little while, your thoughts and feelings and sensations don't stay in their lanes, and the resulting mishmash can offer some new looks at things that you might not have experienced otherwise. I think that's probably mostly randomness at work, and if you want that, there are other ways to get it.

It feels like amazing cosmic revelation, but that's probably at least partly because of the way it amplifies your emotions. That amplification is probably also a cause of bad trips. Bad trips are rare--according to the medical literature in 1978 when I wrote a paper about the subject, they were somewhere around one in a thousand--but I can testify that they are very unpleasant indeed. It's about six or eight hours of unadulterated terror and hopelessness, so be advised.

I don't regret my experiences with it. On the other hand, I don't miss it, either. I am glad that responsible researchers have lately managed to start studying psychedelics seriously. They seem promising for treatment of alcoholism, depression, anxiety, and maybe some other things. There might also be a place for them, wisely and judiciously applied, in making the lives of some healthy people better.

I wouldn't recommend doing what I did with it. I was lucky, but not everyone will be lucky.

There's some interesting stuff about LSD and psilocybin that you can find by googling for something like "LSD OCEAN personality traits". A few researchers have tried measuring the Big Five personality traits before and after psychedelic therapy. They have generally found that psychedelics move some of the trait scores significantly, which is a big deal in personality research, because conventional wisdom is that nothing other than horrific trauma makes much difference in the Big Five.

(The big five correspond to the acronym OCEAN: Openness, Conscientiousness, Extraversion, Agreeableness, Neuroticism--all measurable personality traits that tend to remain pretty stable over time.)

Some papers claim that psychedelics cause lasting shifts in the traits. This one:

  https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1111/acps.12904

...claims that they significantly increased O, C, and E, left A unchanged, and decreased N.

If true, that's probably a further reason for caution. Those reported changes might seem good (they seem pretty good to me), but if it's true that the only other thing that makes significant changes in the Big Five is horrific trauma, then maybe we ought to regard a drug that can do it with some wariness.

HyperCard is just as mind expanding as LSD, and you can make it stop whenever you want, and come back to it in the exact same state when you're ready for more.

Be aware: Unless you have very good connections, the psychedelic “LSD” you can get on the street today is likely not of the same chemical composition as the common LSD of 1985. It will still give you a psychedelic experience, but the type of trip and risk profile may be different.

For a non-pharmacological trip, I highly recommend “Psychedelic Information Theory”: http://psychedelic-information-theory.com/pdf/PIT-Print-Web.... [PDF]

LSD has a way of giving one a new perspective. However, it can also make one very suggestive and can amplify any emotion, good or bad. Set and setting is key, and even if the experience feels "bad", there's often some sort of benefit one can derive from that trip, if you approach it with mindfulness.

Psychedelics are not a magic band-aid to fix all your problems. But they can nonetheless change your life for the better, if you approach them right.

I recommend that you study psychedelics intensely before making the decision. LSD may not even be the psychedelic for you. There are also psilocybin mushrooms, as well as N,N-Dimethyltryptamine.

I am curious if you really meant suggestive, or suggestible?

Yes, suggestible. My bad :)

Not a myth. Plenty of information available about it online and in books. Look up Timothy Leary who was a pioneer of LSD use.

Or, better, read Be Here Now. I recommend it every chance I get: never have had a friend who's disliked it. It has a few anecdotes on Leary, and it's probably influenced Atkinson far more than Leary has (Jobs recommended it a bunch, and, in his own (paraphrased) words, there once was a time where every college student in America had read Be Here Now).

If you’re looking to find out more first, Michael Pollan’s recent book, “How to change your mind” goes in depth on psychedelics.

Honestly, meditation is another path to similar kinds of insights — it just requires more patience. But it’s also free, and legal.

Give this a read if you’re interested

https://erowid.org/chemicals/lsd/lsd.shtml

Especially:

https://erowid.org/chemicals/lsd/lsd_health1.shtml

"Reactions that are prolonged (days to months) and/or require hospitalization are often referred to as "LSD psychosis," and include a heterogenous population and group of symptoms."

"In spite of the impressive degree of prior problems noted in many of these patients, there are occasional reports of severe and prolonged reactions occuring in basically well adjusted individuals."

Also, one famous example of "bad trips" (maybe with "prior problems"):

https://www.smh.com.au/entertainment/music/thats-one-hell-of...

It’s all true but though it’s easy to experience, it’s impossible to fully describe because it transcends rationality.

In a way many Apple designs seem to be results of LSD “mind-expanding experiences” - look really awesome first, but not so much when you get sober.

Can’t think of current examples except maybe the Touch Bar and Magic Mouse.

Soldered ram.

I also dislike the giant trackpad on current MBP's - I keep brushing it with my hands/arms/body/everything and it's causing all sorts of problems.

I feel like the Touch Bar was done after the designers were water boarded or something.

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