An observational study of programming and cannabis intoxication
arxiv.org
arxiv.org
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.
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'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.
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.
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
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?
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
I suggested individual action; you attached success criteria to it that support your weirdly strong desire to paint me as a marxist.
Now, I don’t know why you’re so adamant on it, but that’s your business I guess. I think it’s kinda weird honestly.
That's why using drugs is really stupid, they don't enhance your capabilities, they simply give you an illusion of that.
- 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).
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
So we would ask:
"Do you have any programmer's fuel?"
Also related, the phrase "fire an event" is a cannabis reference:
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?"
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Missing_stair
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.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26040778
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.
https://www.atarimagazines.com/computeii/issue3/page52.php
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.
His eyes lit up and he asked, "did we work out?"
I like that John Draper Repellent idea. You don't even have to smoke it, just the sight of the Evil Weed should do the trick.
no info on that other stuff mentioned (!)
It doesn't seem like they tested "boring" 9-5 programming, or programming net new features.
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.
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.
For some definition of "need", I suppose.
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.
Wait, how do you make cannabis enhance task focus? I'm unfamiliar
There is probably a scale of complexity to triviality of task in which it hinders or helps respectively.
Perhaps the stoning material of choice alters what you find very interesting.
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
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.
I find it is detrimental when needing to do detail arithmetic, but in high level geometric and abstract relationships it can be a huge benefit.
Occasionally you'll have some crazy idea and follow it, the kind of ideas that you don't have normally.
But in general your productivity will be very low and results poor.
Don't do any kind of drugs or alcohol if you need your brain to be sharp. It's nonsense.
This is very rare in Europe.
I said that I end up doing stuff that I usually don't, that's a different thing.
Speak for yourself
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.
Hashing it Out? Understanding Psychoactive Substance Use in Programming
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.
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.
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.