As it turns out, von Neumann was good at lots of things.

https://qualiacomputing.com/2018/06/21/john-von-neumann/

Von Neumann himself was perpetually interested in many fields unrelated to science. Several years ago his wife gave him a 21-volume Cambridge History set, and she is sure he memorized every name and fact in the books. “He is a major expert on all the royal family trees in Europe,” a friend said once. “He can tell you who fell in love with whom, and why, what obscure cousin this or that czar married, how many illegitimate children he had and so on.” One night during the Princeton days a world-famous expert on Byzantine history came to the Von Neumann house for a party. “Johnny and the professor got into a corner and began discussing some obscure facet,” recalls a friend who was there. “Then an argument arose over a date. Johnny insisted it was this, the professor that. So Johnny said, ‘Let’s get the book.’ They looked it up and Johnny was right. A few weeks later the professor was invited to the Von Neumann house again. He called Mrs. von Neumann and said jokingly, ‘I’ll come if Johnny promises not to discuss Byzantine history. Everybody thinks I am the world’s greatest expert in it and I want them to keep on thinking that.'”

____

According to the same article, he was not such a great driver.

Now, comparing him to another famous figure of his age, Menachem Mendel Schneerson.  Schneerson was legendary for his ability to recall obscure sections of Torah verbatim, and his insightful reasoning (I am speaking lightly here, his impact was incredible). Using the hypothetical that von Neumann and Schneerson had a similar gift (their ability with the written word as a reflection of their general ability), depending on your worldview, Schneerson's talents were not properly put to use in the service of science, or von Neumann's talents were wasted in not becoming a gaon. 

Perhaps, if von Neumann had engaged in Torah instead of science, we could have been spared nuclear weapons and maybe even AI for some time.  Sure, maybe someone else would have done what he did...but who?

Temporary implies immediately reversible and mild.  

People who are on benzos often have emotional regulation issues, serious withdrawal symptoms (sometimes after very short courses  potentially even a single dose), and cognitive issues that do not resolve quickly.

In an academic sense, this idea is 'fine', but in a very personal way, if someone asked me 'should I take a member of this class of drug for any reason other than a serious issue that is severely affecting my quality of life?', I would answer 'absolutely not, and if you have a severe issue that they might help with, try absolutely everything else first, because once you're on these, you're probably not coming off'.

What are the norms on drug/alcohol use at these events?

On a scale from 'absent from the campus and if found with legal substances you will be expelled from the event and possibly the community' to 'use of pharma or illegal drugs is likely to be common and potentially encouraged by mild peer pressure'?

In computer security, there is an ongoing debate about vulnerability disclosure, which at present seems to have settled on 'if you aren't running a bug bounty program for your software you're irresponsible, project zero gets it right, metasploit is a net good, and it's ok to make exploits for hackers ideologically aligned with you'.  

The framing of the question for decades was essentially "do you tell the person or company 

 with the vulnerable software, who may ignore you or sue you because they don't want to spend money?  Do you tell the public, where someone might adapt your report into an attack?  

Of course, there is the (generally believed to be) unethical option chosen by many "sell it to someone who will use it, and will protect your identity as the author from people who might retaliate"

There was an alternative called 'antisec': https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antisec_Movement which basically argued 'dont tell people about exploits, they're expensive to make, very few people develop the talents to smash the stack for fun and profit, and once they're out, they're easy to use to cause mayhem'.  

They did not go anywhere, and the antisec viewpoint is not present in any mainstream discussion about vulnerability ethics.

Alternatively, nations have broadly worked together to not publicly disclose technical data that would make building nuclear bombs simple.  It is an exercise for the reader to determine whether it has worked.  

So, the ideas here have been tried in different fields, with mixed results.  

Clive Wearing's story might be interesting to you: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=k_P7Y0-wgos&feature=youtu.be

O man, wait until you discover nmda antagonists and anti-cholinergics.  There are trip reports on erowid from people who took drugs with amnesia as a side effect so...happy reading I guess?

I'm going to summarize this post with "Can one of you take an online IQ test after dropping a ton of benzos and report back?  Please do this several times, for science."

Not the stupidest or most harmful 'lets get high and...' suggestion, but I can absolutely assure you that if trying this leads you into the care of a medical or law enforcement professional, they will likely say something to the effect of 'so the test told you that you were retarded right?'  In response to this, you, with bright naive eyes, should say 'HOW DID YOU KNOW?!' as earnestly as you can.  You might be able to make a run for it while they're laughing.

https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/BSo7PLHQhLWbobvet/unethical-human-behavior-incentivised-by-existence-of-agi

I wrote about this, but didn't use the s-risk term.  I'm fine with exposing future me to s-risk, please don't pulp my brain.

If you can get a salesforce cert, you can get any of the other baseline IT certs.  Being a female and being native is actually massive for hiring at companies that care about that stuff.

Apply for government IT jobs, help desk type stuff, a lot of it is hybrid or remote, if it's a hybrid position, ask to be remote for the first month (two paychecks) to manage moving.  

Six months in, open a business, ask your company to switch you to 1099, route the job through your business, work it for another year, this creates a performance history. 

Now you are a poor, native american woman owned small business, and you can apply for 8A set aside contracts as the prime.  This allows you to take 10% or so off the top when teaming with a large company that will actually staff the thing.  Grow to around 40 employees, sell for 5-10mil in 15 years.

It's not honest work, but lots of people have done this.  If you think I'm full of it, I literally worked on a contract where one of the companies on the winning team was called "Native American Woman".  

Good luck.

Unfortunately, I haven't found a solution that scales, and I don't think there is one.

I suspect that a clean environment is incompatible with most technological infrastructure.  Microplastics, oilfield brines, combustion products, industrial/agricultural/mining waste, etc all accumulate in the environment and concentrate on the way up the food chain. Even a strip mall generates a ton of pollution in the nearby water table.

I've given up on 'pure' and just try to have a clear understanding of how I'm poisoning myself.  The most depressing thing about this is that I've been to absolutely beautiful farms, with happy animals...and in my due diligence discovered that the reason it was affordable to homestead there is because the textile plant closed in the 70s, so all the jobs left...but the PFOAs stuck around.

So... I try to know what's going into my body, avoid poison where possible, and do my best to get whatever garbage is accumulating out.

That being said, I think the stuff that has done the most damage to my body are medical products.  Read those labels carefully!