Thank you for this, I've been doing this since I was a child, it often ends up being taken badly and I have a lot of trouble with it. I'm still struggling decades later to rein in this habit.
I actually find it a relief to know this is a common trait in programmers and may have it's alternate side of making me better at my craft.
Something I'm surprised hasn't come up yet is the ability to flex... "something" in your brain and turn hallucinations on and off.
I grew up in a Buddhist family and was meditating since an early age. I'm not sure if this was related at all but since I was young I could look at things when I was bored and do something in my brain that would cause the patterns to move. If I then needed to concentrate I could focus and it would go away.
I did some research and found out that there is a common effect with meditators that they can meditate while on drugs in order to mitigate or in some cases even deactivate some of the effects. So if you want to experiment it might be good to learn a bit so you have an extra tool to work with your mind while you're altering it.
In those books you relax and are able to see the image through the chaos.
The same can be said for when you are on these types of drugs, or at least for me personally. When I was able to relax and let my mind go, the hallucinations and visuals would come at a greater intensity. If I needed to, I was able to snap out of it by focusing my mind on the moment and tangible reality in front of me.
When I was leading a few people on their first experience I explained this to them, that if they are unable to relax and let go, the visuals would not come as quickly or be as intense. Do not be afraid, relax and let go and if needed you can ground yourself back if you have a decent mind and didn't take an amount larger than you can handle.
I didn’t realize this was a thing! I’m generally able to do this too, especially when meditating. It started after trying psychedelics in college, which probably ‘activated’ something in my brain that said “you can make the carpet swirl”. It’s sort of like looking at a Magic Eye photo. I just tried to do it now, but having just woke up, I don’t think I can concentrate enough to do it.
How early did your parents start you on meditation?
When you grow up in a buddhist family it's more like something that's always there. My parents were heavy meditators (1 hour+/day) so I would often just hang out with them. They probably half taught me a few dozen times when I was young, it's a culture thing. Kinda like growing up a Christian household I'm sure you accumulate random knowledge about the bible, god and jesus. When I was older I went through some more official training but it was purely an interest thing, they let me pick my own path. These days I meditate but I do it in a purely secular non religious way.
I honestly don't remember exactly where, but I was reading a wiki for psychonauts once and it provided a scale for the potency of a dose (e.g. No effect, threshold, etc) and the metric they used was the observer's ability to consciously resist the effects of the drug - kind of like when you're drunk or stoned and try to "force" yourself to sober up.
I have a similar experience with HPPD...the ability to "flex" the mind to either increase or decrease the degree to which I was experiencing the visual pattern distortions. it was mostly just a matter of directing attention into the experience vs. pulling out of it. anyway, fascinating thread on HN this morning.
>Something I'm surprised hasn't come up yet is the ability to flex... "something" in your brain and turn hallucinations on and off.
>I grew up in a Buddhist family and was meditating since an early age. I'm not sure if this was related at all but since I was young I could look at things when I was bored and do something in my brain that would cause the patterns to move. If I then needed to concentrate I could focus and it would go away.
There has been some "intriguing evidence of overlap between the phenomenology and neurophysiology of meditation practice and psychedelic states."[0]
I came across this while researching meditation practices, and stumbled upon Andrew Newberg's work[1] on the neuroscience of religion.[2][3] He's spoken about an experiment where the neural correlates of nuns experienced in the "centering prayer" exhibited similarities to people who'd taken psilocybin mushrooms.[4]
I find this absolutely fascinating, yet completely expected, because the ancient literature on meditation do mention drugs in relation to meditation. For example, Patanjali's Yoga Sutras mention that "siddhis are born of practices performed in previous births, or by herbs, mantra repetition, asceticism, or by samadhi."[5]
In light of this, I've also thought about why, for example, there are the Five Precepts in Buddhism,[6] which are considered to be fundamental in the path towards attaining enlightenment. We've often understood it as a code of ethics for Buddhists, but what if it arose as a way to protect meditators from harming themselves and others in case of adverse episodes during meditation practice?
Extrapolating from the article and associated research, what you're describing as a mental "flex" may be an ability to consciously weight higher-level models over lower-level ones, and vice-versa. I'd be interested to see the fMRI results of a bunch of people who can do that "flex."
Logic doesn't matter, it's the ability to sell it. This goes for almost all major decisions which are usually decided based on emotional "gut feelings" rather than logic and statistics.
I would suggest something like:
"I've been crunching the numbers on how to increase efficiency and been pleasantly surprised at how well we're performing compared to our competition. I was thinking of trying an experiment based on this new study I've read <Link> where we leverage existing great management techniques to also allow remote work on a limited basis. If you're interested I could show you the numbers but I think with a small sample set <me and a few other good developers> we could prove that this could boost our efficiency even higher! In fact even though it's increasing our numbers we can even offer it to the team as a perk, <study> has shown that when a team gets a perk even if it boosts efficency they work even harder! We have this great new/old project <X> that would be perfect to measure the numbers with. How about I roll it out at the beginning of next month? Don't worry about the planning, I have some experience and can have a proposal on your desk by the end of the week."
Mostly good advice. Along similar lines (w/ more detail of course), see DHH's book "REMOTE" which includes advice on how to sell the idea to mgmt. As a first step I'd recommend starting even smaller though, vs framing it as a new and demonstrably better way for projectS to be done in general (ie, a big change). See if you can find a way to demonstrate the benefits on a personal/individual level, without making a big deal of it. If you can start the bigger conversation (involving teams / processes / policies) already armed with evidence of success at your current workplace, you'll gain credibility and engender confidence / assuage fears of those in management who need convincing.
For my part, I've been self-employed (full-time consulting), 98% remote, for about 3 years. Before that, in almost 20 years of traditional software-related jobs, about half my working days were remote. I was fortunate in being able to insist on a high degree of autonomy wrt how/where/when I got my work done, for most of my positions. Not always possible, but you'll never get the freedom if you don't look for the oppty and make the case for it.
Interestingly enough if a large amount of people replied to fishing emails they would become unprofitable as most of those people would not be tricked into sending them money. If anyone felt like a charity project a chatbot that contacted spam senders could put a lot of these scam operations out of business...
Holy crap that could be a public charity. You donate $10 to help keep a service running that honeypots the scammers. Like an automated / machine-learning version of kitboga, the guy on twitch who scams people and thousands of people watch him do it.
Do you have any idea how hard it can be to get a job in any decent circus? Most of them require decades of training and education and pay less than most manual labour jobs. Honestly working as a software developer (which I do) required far less investment of time and money then circus. (Where I am now a Partner Acrobatics trainer)
Clearly accepted Cirque du Soleil performers are scarcer than Google developers. This can also be applied to top performers in classical music as well.
The thing that shocked me is it isn't just the best. Even the worst usually have massive amounts of time and effort invested and the pay is normally awful. It's the hobby effect, similar to art and music, however the top performers make vastly less. Cirque du Soleil performers who are some of the best in the world still mostly make < 100k/year.
Uh, maybe in some places in Canada? I grew up in Nova Scotia and seeing a doctor with an appointment was possible within a week, emergency was always possible right away. (Had 34 stitches by the time I was 17 due to growing up on a farm so I had a lot of experience.)
Here in Austria it's even easier, I can go directly to my family doctor at any time and wait ~hour with no appointment necessary. Xrays, or other things are usually possible same day and even elective surgery that improves quality of life is free and is plannable within a couple months with the recovery time as paid leave from work.
It is being worked on in many european cities. Berlin for instance has a public housing buyback plan in place and many European cities are looking at or have already placed rules in place making foreign ownership or running of massive rental companies more expensive or difficult. Generally commodification of essential needs such as housing and food does need some regulation in order to prevent victimization of the poorest citizens.
I started thinking about possible other reason's this could occur and checked into the data about the Norwegian study. The data was all from mandatory conscription so it couldn't be tainted could it?
Guess again.
At the same time that IQ started dropping Norway changed their conscription policy...
"In practice recruits are not forced to serve, instead only those who are motivated are selected.[14] In earlier times, up until at least the early 2000s, all men aged 19–44 were subject to mandatory service, with good reasons required to avoid becoming drafted."
Hmmmm so IQ in the tested cohort started dropping when it was only tested in people who chose to take part in Military service rather than all 17-18 year old males?
That seems like it could have another explanation...
EDIT:
So it seems I missed some info ->
I went back and looked at the data in the study to see whether it used the preliminary research or only for successfully recruited candidates and discovered this:
"Cohorts born before 1962 were subject to a different scoring norm, and cohorts born later than 1991 faced a radically different conscription process with less than 50% invited for in-person testing after completing a web-administered survey. As a result, representative data are not available for later birth cohorts. Data for immigrants are excluded as information on full family size and exact birth order is of lesser quality, while selection into scoring is markedly different as immigrants typically do not face mandatory conscription testing but need to self-select into conscription."
So it seems the preliminary examination does not include enough information or the conscription in general has changed to radically for that information to be reliable.
After more investigation it seems that basically they're saying that from 1980 - 1993 IQ rose, then fell again from 1993-2007 reaching roughly the same levels as previously.
All data after that is tainted as too much has changed in the data source (conscription).
However one very important point about this is that all data is pre-smartphone.
They read it well enough to generate a testable hypothesis about the underlying data. He or she should be commended, not criticized.
Even with the resulting edit there appears to be, at least to me, a clear need for additional investigation utilizing non-Norwegian conscription data before the original research question can be validated.
True enough, however through my mistakes we have established that all self righteous theorizing should take into account that the data is pre-smartphone ;)
> While 63,841 men and women were called in for the examination of persons liable for military service in 2012 (mandatory for men), 9265 were conscripted
Good catch... I wasn't reading thoroughly enough...
I went back and looked at the data in the study to see whether it used the preliminary research or only for successfully recruited candidates and discovered this:
"Cohorts born before 1962 were subject to a different scoring norm,
and cohorts born later than 1991 faced a radically different conscription
process with less than 50% invited for in-person testing after completing a
web-administered survey. As a result, representative data are not available
for later birth cohorts. Data for immigrants are excluded as information on
full family size and exact birth order is of lesser quality, while selection into
scoring is markedly different as immigrants typically do not face mandatory
conscription testing but need to self-select into conscription."
So it seems the preliminary examination does not include enough information or the conscription in general has changed to radically for that information to be reliable.
That's a confusing Wikipedia article. It also says:
> Since 1985, women have been able to enlist for voluntary service as regular recruits.[citation needed] On 14 June 2013, the Norwegian Parliament voted to extend conscription to women.[15] In 2015 conscription was extended to women making Norway the first NATO member and first European country to make national service compulsory for both men and women.[16] There is a right of conscientious objection.[citation needed]
So at least since 2015, all men and women called in were apparently tested.
Figure 1 A shows a the trends in cohort IQ for the study, and it only goes roughly from the early 1960s to the early 1990s, which is the whole of the comparable period, and it does rise and fall within that period. I just don't know what you're on about.
I actually find it a relief to know this is a common trait in programmers and may have it's alternate side of making me better at my craft.