Of course this is not the same, statistically, but one thing I have done in the past is to find the most ridiculously expensive property in an area, look up the tax records online, and then google the owners. It takes a bit of work, but the picture that emerges is quite interesting.
For example, I live in the Seattle area, and I know where the mega-wealthy enclaves are here. Who owns the biggest mansions? Microsoft executives, members of the Nordstrom family, members of the construction family who built the Space Needle, people connected with Daniel's Broiler, some guy who invented a new kind of eyeglasses, a congressman's ex-wife, a woman who grew and sold her IT consulting firm, a guy who built a successful condo listing website, doctors, the founder of an investment firm, a commercial real estate developer... In short, it was mainly key players in big local businesses, entrepreneurs, and a small handful of physicians.
I imagine if one did this for NYC, the picture would look predictably different.
I relate very strongly to everything you say here. I've been diagnosed, hospitalized, and medicated on 3 separate occasions for major depression. In every case, I believed then and still believe that it was avoidable, and mostly situationally caused, regardless of the fact that it does eventually manifest as a severely disrupted and debilitating brain-state that could be characterized as a medium-term illness.
I am frequently exasperated by the discussions on HN. I think that the now-popular model of depression as an illness is better than the old-fashioned model of depression as The Blues, but I also think the newer model is still ignorant and harmful in new and different ways. EDIT: The view of depression as a medical condition may be a handy lens for allowing hospitals to deal with emergencies effectively, but for the suffering individual, it is woefully incomplete and even downright misguided. After dealing with it in my own life for 15 years, I've become convinced that Depression is a biopsychosocial [1][2] constellation of interacting phenomena involving bi-directional feedback between one's mind and one's life. And everyone experiences this feedback loop, even if it does not lead everyone into depression.
I've found it far, far more productive in my own life to analyse and try to improve the underlying causes, as opposed to medicating and _identifying_ with what I view as a temporary disorder, more similar to the flu than to a chronic disease. (Clarification: I support the use of medication to help with the "bottom of the trough" stage - that is, the temporary, crippling, chemical brain disorder phase. I am extremely suspicious of indefinite reliance on it, but I cannot rule out the possibility that some individual cases are so severe that long-term medication is the rational choice.)
I would add to your list that in this community, our ambitions are extremely high relative to most normal people. With very high ambition comes the likelihood of strong disappointment. I also find that being smarter than most people is a deep rabbit hole that makes a lot of social, professional, and authority-related interactions very weird. I think it's sad that it's so taboo here to talk about that issue in particular.
I wish more people would focus more on the nitty-gritty practical causes, like you do in your third paragraph. Despite my encounters with depression, I have spent the vast majority of my life being happy, active, social, fulfilled, unmedicated, and in every meaningful sense not depressed at all. I attribute this to a mix of choices about how I life my life, along with a fair amount of good luck. After all, we cannot control everything in life. There are gatekeepers. I've gotten jobs that led to incredible opportunities, relationships, and friendships. What if me or the interviewer had had an off day? What if they'd chosen someone else to interview me that I didn't hit it off with? A doctor can't address things like that - things that have huge impact. (A therapist can, sort of. I am a fan of CBT.)
Microsoft has some wildly successful products, like Windows, Office, XBOX, SharePoint, SQL Server, etc. That's great. But they also employ well upwards of 100,000 people (including 'contingent' staff). It does not take that many people to ship those products. Not even close.
So they productively employ some fraction of those people (I'd guess, conservatively, less than half), and they pseudo-productively distract the rest with poorly managed fool's errands. And don't think it's a case of "you don't know until you try" - in most cases, everybody knows. General Managers will seize on any misguided idea with enough plausible deniability in order to build their fiefdoms.
It's like a bizarre kind of welfare system for the upper middle class. A few people do amazing work and ship great products. For the majority, the most significant thing they accomplished was passing the hiring gauntlet. But they all get to live in big houses and drive BMWs.
An institution can work on the whole, but still be grossly inefficient.
"see things that aren't real" is a very poor characterization of the psychedelic experience. One attempt at describing a small part of its many aspects: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2498783
I think this is the sort of thing one is meant to consider and reflect upon, not the sort of thing one subjects to Standard Internet Argument Protocol.
Pot, LSD, and mushrooms, for starters. Except for expansive and distorted definitions of the word "addictive", and except for that one friend everyone seems to have who couldn't handle their acid.
What do the views of the majority have to do with my moral compass? Drugs in particular are a case where the benefits tend to be personal and individual. I don't expect most people to get it, especially given how many people are conservative, religious, or just believe whatever they have been brought up to believe. When I'm deciding what is right and wrong, the law is generally the last thing on my mind.
edit: As for "what's with the rash of...", I think there is a significant subset of hackers that are very interested in the workings of their brains, since we have typically been dependent on and defined by what our brains are capable of since childhood. In turn, there is a very powerful affinity between many of those who are fascinated with the brain, and psychedelic drugs.
People smoke cigarettes primarily because they are profoundly addictive, both chemically and psychologically. That confounds ordinary risk/reward analysis, and so I think it is a red herring here.
Also, the "Hope you..." phrasing makes your comment come off as a bit sneering/condescending, just FYI.
I'm very positive on LSD in general, but even to me, "a year of regular LSD use", or any kind of "regular" use sounds extreme and dangerous. I guess I take it for granted that something so intense should be approached with a great deal of respect and caution. I do find it odd that people naturally "get" this for things like driving a car, hang-gliding, back-country skiing, skateboarding, parkour.... but often shut down mentally when the subject is illegal drugs.
I offer some of the highlights of my personal experience with LSD, anonymously, due to the very unfortunate stigma. I'm very positive on its ability to unlock potential, trigger insights, expand perspective, and facilitate learning, even in spite of having experienced a few bad trips. Although the experience is deeply personal, I'll try to offer the most concrete accounts I can.
First, of all the hundreds of little insights, interesting trains of thought, and connections made between previously unrelated ideas, there is one revelation in particular that floats to the top of my mind. It's this: LSD confronts you, in an extremely visceral way, with the fact that the entire universe that you perceive and interact with, the whole world and everybody in it, is entirely in your own mind at all times. Sure, it's perfectly reasonable to believe that it's all derived from an objective, external world - but you've never interacted directly with that one, and in fact you can't.
Now, you might say that you already "know" this, philosophically. You can even do the smug, Internet know-it-all thing and say this is completely pedestrian, name-drop Descartes and a bunch of other philosophers, and hit me with a zinger about how this is about as deep as "The Matrix". But I'm not claiming that LSD leads you to the philosophical idea; I'm saying that it slaps you right in the face with it, viscerally. It doesn't tell you, so that you have to think about it in the abstract; it shows you, literally with your own eyes. It's the difference between knowing what the Grand Canyon looks like from pictures, and standing on the edge of it.
It is very common for people to describe the onset of their first trip in terms of waking up, for the first time, ever. I'd describe it this way, too. It feels like waking up for the first time, and realizing that you'd been dreaming your whole life. Of course, this is really just an analogy, and it's more than just a feeling. It's a sudden shift in your actual perceptual processes, which are largely chemical, and have now been altered. But by the mere fact of them being altered, you realize that the default way of perceiving is just that - just a default. It isn't more "true" or more "real" - it's a default, it's massively culturally constructed, and it's characterized by a certain amount of non-questioning of assumptions. What's a color? What's a country? What's a "week"? What's a leader? What is solid? Which way is up? What's a job? Your brain starts trying to decompose every concept into basic principles, and you realize that for a lot of things in the human world, there are none. Just made-up, widespread beliefs that cause lots of people to act as-if, and in so doing, make them "real". Again, there is a difference between merely realizing this philosophically, and being transported outside of the web of culturally-reinforced beliefs and observing it from the outside.
So there's a lot of shedding of constructed concepts. What's left when all that chaff blows away? Whatever it is, it a) seems a lot more real, and b) is obscured in normal consciousness. I'm not suggesting that it would be desirable to permanently lose the ability to think on the level of appointments, check-writing, stop-lights, prospectuses, and the rest of the "mundane". I am definitely suggesting that what is left of experience after all that is obliterated from consciousness is worth seeing. There are parallels here with Buddhism and enlightenment traditions. It's also extremely common for people to offer meditation as a substitute. It's perfectly fine if you don't want to do illegal drugs - hardly anyone will fault you. But don't fool yourself that you're getting the same effect. I've practiced meditation too, and while it does alter consciousness, there are many meaningfully different altered states - they are in no way equivalent or substitutable. (Think about it - if you can simulate an LSD trip by meditating, do you simulate a K trip by meditating differently? Can you meditate yourself to a heroin high by a different technique? LSD isn't just another interchangeable "enlightened" state - they're all specific in their sets of effects. I have no doubt that I too have missed out on plenty of profound experiences by not taking, doing, seeing, or achieving any number of things. It's a big world.)
Sadly, this is turning into a wall of text, and I could still go on for the rest of the day. So, I'm going to force myself to wrap up with just a few more short highlights:
* I learned OpenGL while tripping. The subjective experience was of the information slipping into my brain effortlessly. Normally, I have to read sentences and paragraphs multiple times for them to "sink in". That time, I just skimmed, and understood. The next day, sober, I wrote a couple of neat height-field/terrain programs in OpenGL. Of course we've all learned dozens of even more complicated topics without any drugs, so this anecdote is meaningless, right? All I'm talking about is what it felt like to learn it. It felt effortless by comparison to the way I normally learn. Placebo? Selective memory? Your other favorite bias? Might be interesting to know definitively - but I still had a really good time that night.
* I once won a game of Mastermind on the first turn, without making any other guesses. This seriously freaked out the other people at the table. I wasn't tripping at the time, but I was in a distinctly "trippy" mentality - so much so that I was having a mini-flashback by the end of the turn. What I had done was to realize that the room was a closed system, containing the information about the winning pattern, and that as part of that system, I might have access to the information via other channels. Basically, I just paid very close attention to the other person's body language as I fingered different colored pegs, and allowed him to inadvertently "tell" me the correct colors and order.
* I once did a drawing of a woman from the neck up, while tripping. When I started drawing her hair, I got lost. I was drawing hair for what seemed like hours. I was hiding dozens of other, nested, drawings inside the texture of the hair. It still looked more or less like hair, but if you really looked at it, it was teeming with a whole bunch of unrelated drawings. Sure, I could do the same thing now, but it had never before occurred to me to try that. There is something about tripping that is inherently amenable to that kind of recursive, fractal thinking.
In short, don't knock subjective experiences. The enjoyment of music is a subjective experience, is it not?
MC,SuperGreenX - Panzer Dragoon Orta 'More Than a Weapon'