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Comment by systemvoltage | Hacker News Reader

Somewhat of a hot take but I think about this every now and then - simply put, Marijuana is a drug that makes people lazy. It tanks personal productivity. So we extrapolate where large swaths of populations in various states where Marijuana is legalized, wouldn’t that have a huge negative impact on the GDP? Literally neutering people’s productivity. It’s not just careers but I’ve seen addicted people (including myself) that have had serious negative impact on life and fulfilling responsibilities.

Where am I going wrong with this?

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There ought to be a name for this paradox. Maybe this is out of left field but I've called it the "stimpack & herion" problem.

If I was playing a game, and I was the general of an army, and I could tell my marines to "use stimpack", which would make them move faster and be more focused, or "use herion", which would make them move slower and be less focused. A general would never order "use herion", and plenty would order "use stimpack" daily.

But the human race is not an army, and you are not a general, or a king. You're looking at the world as an engineer looks at a problem with a set of objects. This is super common on this site - we're programmers, we love re-ordering complex systems.

Not only are people far, far, far more complex than inanimate objects, but it might turn out that issuing any orders, or banning any activity has a catastrophically different and more negative effect than you can possibly calculate. Who knows how much of our culture wouldn't exist if people weren't free to drown in their sorrows, or if people spent their lives resenting you for limiting them.

I'm not an absolutist, we should ban plenty of substances, but be very careful when considering society as a system to be optimized.

Interesting analogy. Yeah, I tend to combine narrow observations and extrapolate them to see what happens on a societal scale. Speaking of Generals, I can imagine China/Russia drumming up pro-Marijuana narrative in US to cripple it from within. When 20% of the population is addicted to Marijuana with memory loss and obesity (munchies! hello), it is a good strategy. I mean, isn't that the reason China is banning video games - so teenagers don't waste time and contribute to the vision China has?

I am being a little frivolous but this is literally the kind of stuff I think about.

In some ways you're not wrong, but this was the mentality of East Germany as well. Why waste time with Jazz and jeans? Much more efficient to be reading didactics or working in a factory.

Maybe China is the best anyone has ever been at social engineering and maybe this time they'll get it just right. I'm not so sure.

> Why waste time with Jazz and jeans? Much more efficient to be reading didactics or working in a factory.

Considering the level of social infrastructure in the former DDR exceeded that in the BRD at the time of reunification, they might have had a point there. More public hospitals, more research facilities, better public transportation, more affordable housing. Sure, none of it had the flashy elements of Western capitalism, but it mostly worked.

Note that I'm not endorsing the Stasi or the many other things the DDR did to keep its population oppressed. But real life is full of grey areas.

Oh absolutely and I hope my tone captured that it’s not clear if the bets work out. Sometimes yes, sometimes no. Vienna spending all its economic output on art and science sure didn’t help against a country who spent its entire output on tanks.

The Soviet space program comes to mind as well - the state can do plenty!

Call me crazy but you may be onto something. I don't think it's necessarily foreign actors that would take advantage of it though, moreso multinational corporations who need a sated and pliable workforce who don't think too much about their poor living conditions, lack of societal progress, lack of upward mobility, etc.

I do find it interesting that as cigarettes have waned in popularity and weed has gotten more popular, we're finding that people are less creative and innovative than ever before and there seems to be a persistent monoculture throughout the West that's extraordinarily drab. Might it have something to do with nicotine's cognitive-enhancing ability versus cannabis diminishing cognitive function? Probably not, and there's likely no way to do a cohort study on this subject, but it's an interesting question to pose regardless.

Or might this mono-culture simply be a side effect of the internet? Much like how the Roman empire led to a linguistic "mono-culture", and how railways (and later airplanes) increased global homogeneity, it seems more likely to me that as humans are more and more in contact with their far away cousins, they all start to blend more.

Well, in Russia it's the other way around - repeated pushes to legalize mj in Russia are seen as a way for USA to cripple Russian youngsters , making them disinterested in pursuing casual life goals - education, career and family. Go figure

How do they bring into this narrative various drug-using super-functional people like Steve Jobs?

From my recollection of his biography, Jobs quit weed after his teenage years. He did do a bunch of acid whilst in college, but LSD doesn't really have any detrimental cognitive effects.

Right, because human existence is entirely to "improve GDP". People have lives beyond making money for their bosses, you know?

"There's more to life than increasing its speed"

> Marijuana is a drug that makes people lazy

Some of my acquaintances have the paradoxical effect - they become less lazy.

Maybe similar to how amphetamines are used to treat ADHD - which seems perverse.

If people were less career obsessed, it would vastly reduce the amount of evil in the world tbh. Most large scale evil is done by career obsessed freaks.

I heard a talk show host once speculate that one reason weed has been illegal for so long is it would make the various motivational sticks and carrots the ruling class uses with white collar workers less effective in aggregate.

That’s crazy man. I’m very career focused and I want to improve the world. I work extremely hard, all day and everyday. I’m evil?

Here is some context, I commented elsewhere on my work ethic: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29895639

>Most large scale evil is done by career obsessed freaks.

He didn't say that most career-obsessed freaks are doing large scale evil.

It depends on what the incentives are for a career obsessed person. Someone that puts their career above basically everything else will short term optimize at the expense of e.g. public wellbeing to get in the good graces of powerful people. Profits are made off of vile decisions. That's capitalism.

> Marijuana is a drug that makes people lazy

Not necesssarily true. On the right Sativa strain it makes me incredibly productive.

California had liberal medical Marijuana for decades and now legalized it and is economically fine.

CALPERS would like a word...

labor is a requirement for survival. it is demand-induced, not supply-driven. Most can't choose to get high instead of go into work. high people still get the jobs done.

most people aren't incapable of realizing their full potential because of their personal mindspace, but because they are confined to a specific economic survival role.

didn't they ban psychedelics like LSD for a similar reason people just became way more loving and peaceful so less and less would sing up for the military?

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