poke53281

6 ms·

1.
by poke53281 9y ago
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 im
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by poke53281 9y ago
(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 al
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by poke53281 12y ago
Nailed it! ;-)
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by poke53281 12y ago
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
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by poke53281 12y ago
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
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by poke53281 12y ago
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 qu
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by poke53281 12y ago
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 glad
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by poke53281 12y ago
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 i
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by poke53281 12y ago
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. S
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by poke53281 12y ago
Good grief, yes, thanks for catching that! It's late in my timezone... [editing my post now...]
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by poke53281 12y ago
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 form
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by poke53281 12y ago
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 metapro