The way I've switched from a 'wake-at-2-pm' kind of person to a 'wake-at-6-am' kind of person is setting an alarm, popping 200mg caffeine + 200mg modafinil, then going back to bed. In 10 minutes I'll be right back up and ready to go to the gym and go about my day. I've started dialing back the modafinil since it seems unnecessary to get up anymore and I have some ethical concerns (see comment below.)
I'll also +1 the friction removal concept -- laying out my gym clothes the night before really helps me get out the door as soon as I'm up in the morning. Otherwise, I'll tend to want to go back to bed.
The wide use of drugs as performance enhancers in our industry really makes me unhappy and uncomfortable. (I guess it probably exists in other industries too?)
I can't work out how to properly put into words how or why it makes me uncomfortable. But it seems like instead of drawing lines and saying people shouldn't need to take ADHD medication to focus, or modafinil to work unnatural hours, or ambien to sleep on planes, we're just going along with it. Like the work should come first, and of course we should take drugs to allow us to meet work expectations, or to get the upper hand in intra-employee competition, etc.
That’s an odd bit of moralizing. We’ve been taking drugs to alter our mental state for thousands of years (alcohol, caffeine). I don’t know about Modanifil, but Adderall is one of the most well studied drugs out there, so much so that we give it to children for permanent daily use. A therapeutic dose is much easier on your cardiovascular system than the double shot espressos that everyone chugs down.
I have ADHD but I've never took any medication for that. Would you mind to share some of these effects? Because over the years I feel like my attention span has shrank considerably.
Modafinil has basically as safe as caffeine, isn't it? The big difference with caffeine is that many governments permit caffeine in food/drink but control modafinil, but trusting governments to have good opinions on drug safety seems a little unsubstantiated. I think modafinil is less addictive than caffeine and has fewer withdrawal problems. And it's not a drug like cocaine or alcohol that has serious long-term side effects. So I think the only serious reason to avoid it, if it doesn't cause you side effects, is a morality that says certain drugs are bad. (Which isn't even consistent - there are plenty of moralities in the world that say that caffeine and alcohol are bad too, and that at least makes sense.)
It's not unusual to feel gut-uncomfortable with technology enhancing the lives of humans beyond where nature left us, but at the end of the day, I have trouble seeing how you can say using modafinil to get your job done is bad but using eyeglasses to get your job done is good.
Do M.D.s generally recognize modafinil as less safe than caffeine and alcohol? It seems unlikely to me that the political will exists in the US to schedule either, regardless of what doctors actually think.
My claim is that no research exists that argues that modafinil is more dangerous than caffeine. (I'm not 100% sure about this claim, and it's easily debunkable. And for what it's worth I take caffeine and have never taken modafinil.)
I'm deeply uncomfortable with it too, and that's why I'm probably going to taper down to a complete stop. It's just hard to want to do that when I'm much more focused and productive when I'm on strong stimulants. All of my most effective coworkers are medicated.
This isn't sustainable. Ask older folks around you who used to use a lot of stimulants when they were younger, and you'll find the answer. Stimulant use is a lot harder on the body and the mind the older you get. Caffeine, as a light stimulant, is better, but can also be problematic.
I've encountered these work environments before and I wouldn't want to again. In my case it was a bunch of young people pushing themselves to the brink hoping to win the startup lottery as early as possible. They didn't of course. I hope your work environment isn't like this.
I quit caffeine (stomach issues) over a period of a few weeks, I replaced my morning up and moving cup with a shower as cold as I can stand, I challenge anyone to still feel sleepy after that (assuming they slept well).
Like my classmates who took adderal to get good grades, definitely. It shouldn’t be tolerated and should be tested. But then all of academia needs to change.
I used to be a big caffeine drinker. In my experience the problem with caffeine is that your body's tolerance to it seems to increase and so you need to keep increasing the dosage in order to get the same effect. It ended up being a net negative for me.
I've noticed that the best way to wake up early is simply to go to sleep early. Takes a bit of work at the beginning if you've developed some bad habits but eventually you can get used to it. Seems to be more mental than physical.
Also, caffeine should really be used only for emergencies in my opinion. Like if you've had very little sleep but you still need to be productive. Other than that I would stay away from it. Your body really does not need daily doses of caffeine to function, just like it does not need nicotine nor alcohol nor any other drug (assuming no medical need). They are just net negatives.
Drink green tea if you really feel like having some mild stimulant every day.
I'm surprised that you're commenting about the caffeine and not the modafinil!
Caffeine has lots of wonderful effects on the mind and the body. It was essential in helping me switch to an earlier routine: can't go to bed at 10pm if you're not tired because you woke up at noon; best way to be tired at 10pm is to get up at 6am; caffeine helped me get up at 6am.
Cycling your caffeine intake is a great way to still reap the benefits of caffeine without building up a tolerance.
>>I'm surprised that you're commenting about the caffeine and not the modafinil!
I know nothing about modafinil.
>>Caffeine has lots of wonderful effects on the mind and the body
It allows you to be productive even after not enough sleep. Unfortunately you can only keep this up for so long. In my case I now only use caffeine when I really need it. I'll gulp down three or four cups of coffee if I need to do all nighters. And because I have virtually no tolerance to it anymore the caffeine will work like a charm and I will not feel tired at all.
> Cycling your caffeine intake is a great way to still reap the benefits of caffeine without building up a tolerance.
I've tried this. Doesn't work for me. Seems like my body built a tolerance to caffeine, and no amount of break from it (even a month) will reset that tolerance.
For people like me who often find "go to sleep early" impossible, try to get in an hour or so of solid exercise at least every couple of days--running, biking, lifting, or whatever--something that will fully exhaust you physically. And if possible, do it outside in the sun. This is the best way I've found to regulate sleeping patterns, and it also counteracts caffeine if I've had too much. I haven't found anything else that works as well.
I too find caffeine delicious, but then I realized that I have to have coffee every morning, the same amount, and can't have more coffee during the rest of the day, and am not even awake enough to enjoy the coffee I do have in the morning.
So I've been cutting down and drinking lower-strength of coffee, and more recently tea and lower-strength tea (which is also delicious). There are other delicious things I can eat and drink the rest of the day that don't have drugs in them.
I find it strange how many people have this puritanical mindset that just because something is pleasurable or can induce some degree of physical dependency this automatically equates to something with negative health consequences or something that they should feel guilty about imbibing.
Coffee is one of the, or the best, source of antioxidants in the standard American diet. Barring pre-existing Cardiac health issues there is no harm to daily use as long as you don't exceed maximum recommended caffeine doses, which was around six shots of espresso or equivalent.
Furthermore "In some publications, caffeine and trigonelline are considered to be antioxidants also." There is much more medical evidence that coffee is uniquely beneficial than otherwise.
"Green tea. usually contains around 25 milligrams of caffeine per 8-ounce serving. It's about half of the amount of caffeine found in a typical cup of black tea and one-quarter of the amount found in a typical cup of coffee."
Depending on the brand, it's equivalent to a half of cup of coffee. Although green tea contains l-theanine which helps offset the jitters from caffeine. Personally I try to limit caffeine to the most bare minimum as I personally find that it causes a reduction in my emotional spectrum.
> setting an alarm, popping 200mg caffeine + 200mg modafinil
Wow, pumping yourself full of drugs just so you can be a better cog in a machine?
Thanks, but honestly that's a non-starter. I'm not sure how we got to this point, but please reconsider - some employers might actually look at this and think that's an acceptable thing to suggest to an employee.
Looks interesting. Not sure "refund if we don't find you savings" is all that consumer friendly -- "we charge x% of your savings with a max cost of $product_cost" might be an alternative that makes this useful. Although ultimately if the customer goes with the standard deduction they'll still feel like they overpaid. What percentage of your target demo takes the standard deduction because it makes sense for them financially?
I use both regularly, and the only differences that I've noticed are related to Google web properties (particularly gmail and youtube), where Firefox has to rely on inefficient polyfills for chrome-specific features (I think, based on some googling one time, take this with a grain of salt.) What troublesome websites does Chrome work better on in your experience?
In what sense is this AI? You can of course call any computer technology AI in that it is "artificial" and "intelligent" but this looks a lot like a domain specific language for describing web apps and not anything that has to do with any sort of inference.
There is a partial answer to this in another thread, but here is a response to your specific point:
It depends what you mean by inference. In statistical machine learning and deep learning, inference means predicting things using large amounts of data. Philosophers call that inductive inference.
But there is also deductive inference. Given some general knowledge (e.g., "All men are mortal") and some facts ("Socrates is a man"), you infer other facts ("Socrates is Mortal"). There is a huge amount of work in AI that has developed algorithms that do very complex and powerful versions of this kind of inference. You can use those to infer from a brief description of what you want a computer to do what the sequence of actions the computer can take to achieve that goal. You can use these kinds of methods to generate software behavior without explicitly programming the behavior in advance.
That's a link to a widely-used AI textbook. The methods that most people today associate with AI (i.e., the learning-based inference methods), are only a fraction of the overall content.
Feynman knew this and claims to be the only person to have watched the Trinity test with naked eyes, rather than through welding goggles:
> In Surely You’re Joking, Mr. Feynman, American physicist Richard Feynman speculates that he may have been the only person who watched the Trinity Test relatively directly, using a windshield to exclude ultraviolet light. Everyone else, he claims, was looking through something akin to welding goggles.
Lasers didn't exist yet to force us to study retinal exposure to bright non-UV light and the flash from the bomb didn't last that long, nor were the first few bombs that bright, so he may have been fine... but obviously if you stare at the sun through three inches of glass you're still going to burn your retinas.
He says "I figured the only thing that could really hurt your eyes (bright light can never hurt your eyes) is ultraviolet light. I got behind a truck windshield, because the ultraviolet can’t go through glass, so that would be safe, and so I could see the damn thing."
What we know from later laser research is that unless you have a comprehensive visual field test, it's often hard to identify that part of your retina has been scorched. Your brain just filters it out as a blind-spot and you don't realize what you're failing to see.
There's every chance that Feynman totally burned a section of his retina and never realized it, and there's every chance that he was fine because the exposure at his distance wasn't that bad, but at the end of the day he was more reckless than insightful in this situation.
Maybe he should have closed one eye, but the first atomic bomb only explodes once. Your body won't last forever no matter how well you care for it (as Feynman well knew, having just watched his wife Arline die slowly of incurable tuberculosis); seeing the first atomic-bomb test with your own eyes seems eminently worth the risk of blindness, or even sacrificing an eye.
I really can't agree. I would not exchange my eyesight for the whole world, literally. Therefore the qudos of having looked at a novel explosion in no way compensates for any risk to my eyes.
Downvoted not because I’m afraid of my own mortality, but because pointing out the obvious fact that nobody can see after they die is neither insightful nor useful. Go tell that to someone who has become blind and let me know how much consolation that provides them.
Even if I knew was going to die tomorrow, I will not exchange my remaining eyesight for qudos. I would prefer to spend my last day looking at my family, the trees, the running water, the flowers. It seems totally uncontroversial to me, I'm really surprised to find someone who disagrees.
Sorry, no, I just meant that the maximum human lifespan recorded so far is 12.2 decades, and the vast majority of people reading this will die in even less, 2–5 decades, regardless of what happens with climate change. Given that, it's silly to treat your body as if you could make it last forever.
Yep, he basically says that he knew the only thing that would damage his eyes would be UV-B, so he just went for it. Long time since I read the book but that's what I remember.
I don't get this type of thinking. Unless he thought it would be worse to wear the googles what is to be gained by doing something like wearing goggles (in that situation) just in case you were wrong? Why not reduce the chance of harm as much as you can?
I think this also has to be considered in the context of an ongoing cataclysmic war encompassing the world where whole cities were being destroyed and of course they were developing a weapon to destroy them faster. Today, WWII is that long ago thing that lasted for a few years and then it was over. Soon the veterans and the Holocaust survivors will all be dead. To anyone then, a lot of things probably didn't seem as important. A lot of people reacted to the atomic bomb once it was public as the impending end of the world, too. So the scientists who knew about it first probably had their attitudes affected.
The window didn't block a lot of other high power radiation, and he died from cancer 35 years later, though the connection is not scientifically certain.
Practicing regularly to increase self-knowledge, thinking spiritually, reflecting on your relation to the world – do you not consider that a religion? Organized Christianity is just one flavor.
> Practicing regularly to increase self-knowledge, thinking spiritually, reflecting on your relation to the world – do you not consider that a religion?
Religion has been the guiding force for this kind of internal reflection and family/community thought. As religion has declined in many west societies, we haven’t replaced them effectively.
We may not need more religion, but it sure seems like we need something. Building our society so heavily on economic expediency can’t be healthy long term.
I'm in favor of more prolific philosophy circles. There is probably a group in your area that gets together regularly to discuss the works of different philosophers, join in and study up on some Kierkegaard and I think you'll find it gives you a lot of the same pay off.
I’m familiar with those kinds of meetings and family members that attend. I’m fortunate in that I work in a field that is very much service oriented (from a humanism point of view) that offers a lot of fulfillment and the opportunity to consider & and demonstrate my personal values.
My comments - I guess - are more generally focused. I feel similarly about male identify. We’ve walked back many aspects of traditional masculinity (often for good reason and for positive social benefits) but haven’t - as a society - replaces them with alternatives. I think it leaves many young men without a positive vision for “what it means to be a man”. These are opportunities, but I don’t know how we can work through them without a distinct shared cultural vision for what we all want to be. Individualism has its downsides too.
Maybe I jumped the gun there and got a bit sidelined by semantics. In my mind, theism is a necessary but not sufficient condition for religion. Ritual, on the other hand, intersects with religion and irreligion (again, in my mind). I saw another comment speaking about 'atheistic religion' which to me is an oxymoron. I now think the word religion is overloaded.
Didn't mean any offence to anyone - I have an issue with the idea of palliative doublethink, not religion, theistic or otherwise.
The website you link to doesn't explain anything with evidence either. All I see are assertions. For example
> In addition, all but very few sites (those both tiny and very new) will need to do everything in their power to prevent anything from ever going online that may be an unauthorised copy of a work that a rightsholder has registered with the platform. They will have no choice but to deploy upload filters, which are by their nature both expensive and error-prone.
Why will they have no choice but to deploy upload filters? Why are new/tiny sites exempt?
I'll also +1 the friction removal concept -- laying out my gym clothes the night before really helps me get out the door as soon as I'm up in the morning. Otherwise, I'll tend to want to go back to bed.