jlewes

While recreational drug enthusiasts are often boring (especially cannabis enthusiasts), your post is misleading -- it overlooks the fact that psychedelics such as LSD and psilocybin cause an extraordinary change in cognition when compared to the rather mundane effects of alcohol, cannabis, coke etc.

At the end of the day, the state of one's cognition is rather important to one's perception of life. It is extremely memorable to alter your cognition in such a dramatic way, and to experience the temporary loss of the personality that you are accustomed to waking up with, and it's fair enough that people should want to talk about it. And it seems very likely that understanding the effects of those drugs on the brain will be helpful in understanding the construction of consciousness by the brain. For what it's worth, the stuff about death definitely chimed with me; I've been sure I wasn't coming back.

So yes, some druggy people are definitely pretentious, and the crap about "evolved people" would make anyone cringe, but those observations do absolutely nothing to diminish the significance of psychedelics as substances providing a unique and extremely dramatic perturbation of our perception of reality which will presumably be scientifically important.

> I never understood the obsession with coding speed....

I can't touch type. Dunno about coding but it would make my IM communications with colleagues a hell of a lot more efficient!

[100% hunt-and-peck typist here]

I thought this was great! I really like it.

I think the asdf fdsa and jkl lkj ... lessons should mix the order up. I actually failed to learn jkl with the lessons provided (!) and had to switch to emacs and give myself a hand-created lesson with them mixed up.

Can we have a P for previous shortcut in addition to skip?

I got used to the enter-to-start thing eventually but I messed it up several times initially, accidentally skipping lessons.

I also did this several times initially.

Do therapists / psychiatrists / psychologists really help? Genuinely interested. I would never consider (have never considered) seeing a therapist / psychiatrist, even if/when depressed. I imagine them to be people with soft science degrees who believe in a wishy-washy mixture of psychobabble and pseudo-science. Surely an intelligent person can see what their questions are getting at and influence the therapist's inferences accordingly, in the same way as you can when taking those silly multiple choice psychological assessments? What would a highly educated person with training in rigorous disciplines get out of talking to a therapist? Not being aggressive; genuinely interested. (I'm mid-30s, male, didn't grow up in a culture where you have your own therapist like they do on Manhattan TV shows (do real people do that?)).