It becomes pretty obvious when a person views HN as just a SEO fountain. Occasional self-posting is fine. This is extreme. Especially when you consider he seems to be involved in both componentowl and dextronet. That's blatant continuous self-promotion.
I don't care so much about self-posting (I do it all the time), but it was a little bit of a shill (and I'm guilty of that too, so I can't be too critical). I think the overall article was amusing and made sense... I see no problem with it (other that the plug at the end which wasn't a big deal IMHO).
Yeah, you're not kidding. I took shrooms, A (LSD), E, smoked some marijuana (not much), tried cat a few times and generally partied it up for maybe a decade. At some point I found out that my mother had suffered from schizophrenia, which would explain why I got my money's worth out of marijuana, shrooms and A. I had a pretty hard time working out what was real.
Bad trips were something else. We're talking about seeing everything bad about myself and humanity, which considering the basically selfish nature of a human is quite something. Very black-and-white, good-and-evil thinking, alternating between extremes. Synthesizing sounds, colors, physical things around me. When I read about people going nuts or harming themselves, I'm not surprised. Very black-and-white thinking can lead to some alarming thoughts.
I'd find that if I spent a few hours spiralling on that I could lose the ego totally and emerge with a very objective sense of the world. A world in balance, things as they should be, personal and friends' faults accepted, insights into myself and others. I definitely made some amazing self-discoveries, but at significant risk.
