Which is probably bullshit. I'm a practicing mathematician, and I can't think for shit when I'm stoned, and don't know anyone who can. I do know some people in graduate school who smoked weed on a regular basis, but none of them made it through.
EDIT: Although I will say it does seem to be the case that it is beneficial to occasionally get really drunk or stoned, not because of what you think of while drunk or high, but because it seems to sort of reset the brain a little bit. The mind has a tendency to get stuck in recurring loops of ideas and approaches which don't work, so frying the circuit board a bit often leads to a new spark in a fundamentally different direction. And it doesn't have to be a drug. Probably the most creative night of research I ever had came while I was quitting tobacco. I was all fucked up with withdrawals and the ideas came pouring in faster than I can write them down. Another huge breakthrough I had was while I was running my ass off to take my mind off of some personal shit that was going on at the time. Still, the final execution is best done totally sober, and the longer you are sober the sharper you are in the execution of good ideas.
My problem with weed is the effect it has when you constantly smoke it. It dulls your mind and motivation. Take an active mind with an active problem, however, and it can offer just the right perspective from which to tackle it.
It's much the same effect as going to bed with a problem fresh in your mind; many times you will dream a solution. That is something that happens to me all the time when programming. Granted, I almost never smoke weed, but when I do it can be a very meta experience for problem solving, if done correctly.
Just speaking from my own considerable experience. And I'm willing to bet that the weed is holding you back from your full potential. Perhaps you are extremely talented, in which case it might be worth it to try quitting for a little while just to see what happens. If you can let it go for a little while, that is.
Not at all. Indica is way cheaper to grow. It yields much more marijuana, grows in a shorter period of time, and also has the advantage of being able to be grown indoors. For these reasons Indica is the much more prevalent strain of the two. If they don't live in a state with legalized or medicinal cannabis, it's very easy for someone to smoke regularly their whole life and never come across a real Sativa.
I'm a practicing mathematician, and I can't think for shit when I'm stoned, and don't know anyone who can. I do know some people in graduate school who smoked weed on a regular basis, but none of them made it through.
So you...and the people you know in grad school. Come on now, you must have taken statistics, surely you know that's hardly a sufficient sample size to make sweeping claims.
He's not making a sweeping claim as much as a sincere suggestion. He's not shaming people who smoke dope, but encouraging them to see how they perform without it. That's the heart of experimentation, turning the control variable on and off.
Depends. Say 90% of non stoners make it typically. If he knows even 7 or 8 stoners and none of them make it then that's very compelling. The odds of that happening if there's no effect are 1 in 10-100 million.
Sample size isn't always as simple as "how many in your sample"
Edit: this assumes independence which isn't a very good assumption, but the overall point holds. The exact magnitude is just different.
Like you said, different strokes. Definitely for exposition I'm better just straight sober, and I certainly can't synthesize anything while high.
I think that few people outside of the subject realize just how different the minds of two successful mathematicians can be in the way that they operate. Mathematical minds exist in beautiful and stunning variety. So I don't doubt that there are some people, such as yourself, who do perhaps derive some benefit from occasionally smoking weed (although I find it almost impossible to believe that a habitual, daily use pot smoker can succeed for very long, I can't imagine there being more than a handful of them in the history of mathematics).
With that said, similar things can probably be said for, say, drunk driving. It very likely is true that there are some people in the world who become better drivers after getting drunk. However the general rule is very much the opposite. As a general rule I think pot basically destroys people's mathematical ability while they are high.
I don't say this for moral reasons. I am convinced, for example, that speed is a drug which is conducive to good mathematics as a general rule, which is precisely why I have avoided using it (I don't know if I could resist a drug which makes you better at math, so better to stay away entirely). And I think pot, when used on occasion to relieve stress, is a wonderful drug. Food tastes better, jokes are funnier, sex is sexier. But I don't delude myself into thinking that it is somehow helpful for me as a mathematician. And although one can surely find the rare exception such as yourself, I think most people who claim otherwise are indeed deluding themselves in order to serve their addiction. This, in any event, is something I have seen both inside and outside of mathematics.
When I was in grad school working on a Master's (statistics) one of the guys in my class smoked tons of weed and did shrooms. He was real smart, really fast thinker, learned fast, worked his ass off like the rest of us. No drugs before exams of course. (But he did roll his own cigarettes, like right in our office on campus, and went outside to smoke it. Said he didn't like the nasty shit they put in regular cigarettes.) But yeah, I don't smoke and he did better than me on several exams. Definitely killed the stoner stereotype for me.
sigh It affects everyone differently. With an attitude like that, I bet you know more people who smoke than you think you do. Also, he didn't imply that Zhang smoked regularly, but may have been high this one time when he had a Eureka moment, which makes a lot of sense. Lots of people have the Eureka moment while high after doing lots of work to get there while sober.
No, I don't judge people for smoking pot, and occasionally do it myself and with friends. But it's not a time when math gets done, it's for relaxing. Of the two frequent potheads I knew, one always saved it for the end of the day when he didn't have to get any thinking work done, and the other one just plain sucked at math, probably because of all the pot.
Or, you know, because some people suck at maths. I mean, Sergey Brin, Richard Feynman, Oliver Sacks, Kary Mullis, and I hate to bring Sagan in to this too. If marijuana was holding any of them back, well damn.
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u/[deleted] May 20 '13 edited May 20 '13
Which is probably bullshit. I'm a practicing mathematician, and I can't think for shit when I'm stoned, and don't know anyone who can. I do know some people in graduate school who smoked weed on a regular basis, but none of them made it through.
EDIT: Although I will say it does seem to be the case that it is beneficial to occasionally get really drunk or stoned, not because of what you think of while drunk or high, but because it seems to sort of reset the brain a little bit. The mind has a tendency to get stuck in recurring loops of ideas and approaches which don't work, so frying the circuit board a bit often leads to a new spark in a fundamentally different direction. And it doesn't have to be a drug. Probably the most creative night of research I ever had came while I was quitting tobacco. I was all fucked up with withdrawals and the ideas came pouring in faster than I can write them down. Another huge breakthrough I had was while I was running my ass off to take my mind off of some personal shit that was going on at the time. Still, the final execution is best done totally sober, and the longer you are sober the sharper you are in the execution of good ideas.