poke53281

I agree with you re: the "Nature is Good" dogma. In spirit, it was meant to convey respect for the cycle of life, diversity of the biosphere, etc. Gets seriously problematic if extended to, I dunno, the Polio virus and asteroid impacts. In any case, that particular dogma dates to the the 1960s, when nuance wasn't exactly the flavor of the decade. And arguing about stuff is good, too!

And yep, Wilson was the real deal. His work had also been a huge influence on me at the time that I met him. I still evangelize Quantum Psychology to anyone who I think can handle it.

(Ex-CAW member here; have been out of it for more than a decade. Posting anonymously for professional reasons, but I used to be personally well-acquainted with both the founders of Church of All Worlds and Robert Anton Wilson.)

Church of all world still nominally exists, and has been through several incarnations during the 60s. Although its foundational premise was indeed deeply silly, it was self-consciously so: an act of intentional myth-making. It encouraged its members to explore other spiritual paths as well as to create their own; and there were many CAW members who were committed Buddhists, Jews, atheists, etc.; a large majority counted themselves as Discordians. The only principles held as official dogmas were things like "Nature is Good", and "Be Excellent to Each Other" (because why the fuck shouldn't Bill & Ted be part of your mythos?). So it was all in rather good fun.

This is not to say that the organization didn't have its problems. Chiefly, it was frequently subject to nasty internal politicking -- personality-driven power-plays of the sort that are unfortunately quite common in idealistically non-hierarchical organizations. But when measured against typical metrics for cults, eg[1], it fails on every single count.

Anyhow, just a gentle reminder that not every new religious movement is a cult (in the conventional modern pejorative sense of the word).

[edit: fixed link.]

1: http://www.icsahome.com/articles/characteristics

Nailed it! ;-)

Primarily it instilled that love of math, where previously there had been anxiety and ennui. This was sufficient to get me actually complete the work -- and do some extra work for fun -- which was more than enough to get through the math in my university coursework. I didn't get into more advanced maths in university, and for the fields that I've ended up in (and here I need to omit some otherwise too-revealing biographical details), I'm undoubtedly sub-par at mathematics. When it comes to calculation, I'm still definitely slower and more mistake-prone than my colleagues. I attribute this to avoiding mathematics for my first two decades; if math is a language, then I learned it at an age when having a thick accent is unavoidable. I make up for these deficiencies by being much more stubborn than my colleagues -- just hammering away at problems until they're done -- and also having an excellent intuitive grasp of certain domains, which I can then implement via coding rather than formulae. (I learned to code when I was very young, so that's something which I'm much more natively fluent at). After I've solved a problem via intuition and code, I usually try to prove (or at least investigate) it with proper math, to reassure myself that the solution is efficient and correct. That's far slower and more painstaking, but I eventually get there (and nine times out of ten, my intuition was correct). That's probably the wrong way to do things, but it works. I wouldn't be able to have a job where the math necessarily came first, however!

Oh yes, I'm aware of that stuff. If somebody reasonably competent wanted to resolve my real name from this dummy account, I have no doubt that they'd be able to do it. My concern, however, is not that malign people reading Hacker News will try to discover who poke53281 really is (surely I'm not that interesting); rather, it's that I don't want clients Googling for my real name to easily turn up accounts of my drug-taking exploits. It is probably still possible to start with my real name and find this account, but that would be a vastly harder task -- a much smaller needle in a much larger haystack -- and again I can't actually imagine anybody being sufficiently motivated to do so.

I personally haven't had any adverse effects aside from a sore jaw and a mild ~36-hour serotonin depression following a trip. In the company I took it -- fellow "psychonauts" who always made a serious effort to control the quality of the environment, the quality of the drug, and the quality of their own mental state -- I've never seen anybody else have serious adverse affects, either. We all benefitted from it to varying degrees.

That said, I don't want to dismiss the potential for adverse effects! LSD is a serious tool. It basically gives you the ability to bypass and/or rewrite elements of your brain's BIOS, which is just as powerful and potentially dangerous as it sounds. I can appreciate the possibility for harm if your environment, mental state, or chemistry go awry. It is dangerous to take LSD in a potentially hostile environment where you don't have adequate support, or if you are prone to certain types of anxiety or confusion. There are plenty of people who should probably never take it; personally, I don't recommend it to anyone who isn't already fairly comfortable with observing and controlling their own mind through introspection and/or meditation.

See here for the details of the trip: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8247965

The critical thing is to understand that the opposite of fear, hate, and indifference is love. If you truly love something, you'll gladly do whatever it takes to become good at it. So I needed to rewire my brain to be madly in love with mathematics; once that was accomplished, the rest was easy.

Counterfactuals are always difficult, but in this case I am sure that the answer is somewhere between "no" and "after years of hard work". Certainly it wouldn't have happened overnight -- whereas with psychedelics it very literally did happen overnight. Even if the psychedelics were simply a shortcut, there was a lot of benefit in taking them: within a year of my trip I'd completed 15 credits worth of maths courses, and the rest of my education and career benefited accordingly. I'd been trying for years to overcome those anxiety issues organically and was still only a fraction of the way there, so the non-psychedelic path would not have yielded results in time to benefit me in university.

Well, I'd always had a love of fractals, without ever truly comprehending how the underlying maths worked. Same goes for cosmology -- utterly fascinated by the outputs, but didn't really understand the actual mechanisms thereof. So during the trip, I used fractal and cosmology images and videos as an emotional "anchor" -- grounding the trip in material I already loved and was comfortable with / fascinated by. I then surrounded those materials with more mathematically technical videos, images, and texts about fractals & cosmology -- the things I traditionally would have shied away from as too mathematical for me to understand; and finally, surrounding that material, I spread out the quite trivial mathematics I was struggling with at the time -- textbooks, homework assignments, etc. The intention was to create a continuum ranging from the mundane to the transcendent, with the hope that when the boundaries dissolved between them, I would understand that they're all really one and the same, and that my enthusiasm for the transcendent could be extended into every corner of mathematics.

This more or less worked as planned, although during the peak of the trip -- I had taken quite a lot of LSD -- my vision got too wobbly to actually make sense of words and numbers, so I put on a video of "Baraka" instead, which seemed comprehensible at the time and somehow in alignment with the whole "transcendent" angle of the trip. As I came down, I moved back to reading chapters of James Gleick's Chaos and finally to doing math homework which had previously irritated the piss out of me -- but now I loved it. That attitudinal switch was instant and permanent.

At the same time as this was a very positive experience for me, it also gave me the a level of respect for LSD such that I don't approve of it being used as an uncontrolled "party" drug. The changes I made to my brain were intentional and beneficial, but I can easily see how somebody who wasn't controlling their environment and intentions could end up bricking their brains on a bad trip. That kind of power is something that should be used with care.

Good grief, yes, thanks for catching that! It's late in my timezone... [editing my post now...]

Yes, this is a dummy account; my regular account here has 4497 karma, but is linked to my real name. The conservatism of some of my clients -- and the fairly public role I sometimes must play -- is such that I'd rather not have my former illegal exploits broadcast quite yet. Hopefully you can understand!

In answer to your question: yes, I very much believe that it can be applied to programming and computer science -- and in fact already has been. Much of the early development of those disciplines was directly influenced by psychedelics.[1] I personally haven't tried to apply psychedelics to programming/CS in the same explicit way as I did for math, but I've found that the general visualisation skills developed over about a decade of fairly steady experimentation -- tripping about 3-4 times per year -- have been invaluable in solving constraints problems, visualising codeflow, etc. But one could argue, in that case, that I might have developed the same skills without psychedelics, since it was a slow development over many years. Whereas in the case of the "mathematics trip", the cognitive change literally happened overnight.

1: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/What_the_Dormouse_Said

Myself, I used LSD to learn calculus -- or rather, to overcome a lifelong crippling phobia/anxiety of mathematics, which allowed me to rapidly learn calculus. When I was 21, I encountered John Lilly's theories of cognitive metaprogramming with psychedelics, and I designed a trip to convince myself -- at a really primal level -- of the fundamental beauty, power, and accessibility of math. 12 hours after dosing, my fear of mathematics was gone forever, and I spent the rest of the summer acing a series of intensive calculus courses. 17 years later, I've co-founded three successful and highly maths-intensive companies. I am certain that I could not have done this without the drugs.

I do hope that some day the world will wake up and realise how much of a wrong turn it took in banning psychedelic research; it has the potential to be a power for good unlike anything else.