Drugs are prescribed based on a cost-benefit analysis. In general, the medical establishment is pretty conservative (there's little benefit to the doctor if your problem gets solved, but if they hurt you they're liable to get sued). In the usual case for amphetamines, the cost is the risk of side effects and the benefit is helping someone manage their ADHD. For you, the cost is the same but it sounds like the benefit is much bigger. So even by the standards of the risk-averse medical establishment, this sounds like a risk you should take.

You're an entrepreneur. A successful entrepreneur thinks and acts for themselves. This could be a good opportunity to practice being less scrupulous. Paul Graham on what makes founders successful:

Naughtiness

Though the most successful founders are usually good people, they tend to have a piratical gleam in their eye. They're not Goody Two-Shoes type good. Morally, they care about getting the big questions right, but not about observing proprieties. That's why I'd use the word naughty rather than evil. They delight in breaking rules, but not rules that matter. This quality may be redundant though; it may be implied by imagination.

Sam Altman of Loopt is one of the most successful alumni, so we asked him what question we could put on the Y Combinator application that would help us discover more people like him. He said to ask about a time when they'd hacked something to their advantage—hacked in the sense of beating the system, not breaking into computers. It has become one of the questions we pay most attention to when judging applications.

I'd recommend avoiding Adderall as a first option. I've heard stories of people whose focus got worse over time as tolerance to the drug's effects developed.

Modafinil, on the other hand, is a focus wonder drug. It's widely used in the nootropics community and bad experiences are quite rare. (/r/nootropics admin: "I just want to remind everyone that this is a subreddit for discussing all nootropics, not just beating modafinil to death.")

The legal risks involved with Modafinil seem pretty low. Check out Gwern's discussion.

My conclusion is that buying some Modafinil and trying it once could be really valuable, if only for comfort zone expansion and value of information. I have very little doubt that this is the right choice for you. Check out Gwern's discussion of suppliers. (Lying to your doctor is another option if you really want to practice being naughty.)

To me, it still feels Wrong to not feel bad when bad things are happening. Especially when bad things are happening to the people you know and interact with.

I suspect that the reason why it feels Wrong is because I would assume that if someone you know was in a really bad situation, and they saw you not feeling bad about it, they would assume that you don't care about them. I was assuming that "feeling bad when bad things happen to someone" is part of the definition of what it means to care about someone. And I'm naturally reluctant to choose to not care.

oops, I just realized... if the rule is "only have emotions about situations that were within my immediate control", and you know that the other person will feel upset if they don't see you feeling bad about their situation, then that counts as something that's within your immediate control... though something about this seems like it doesn't quite fit... it feels like I'm interpreting the rule to mean something other than what was intended...

Also, I'll admit that I have almost no idea how many people believe "if you aren't sad about my bad situation then that means you don't care about me", and how many people don't believe this. I'm still not sure if I believe this, but I think I'm leaning towards "no".

but if you happen to have the "gift" of "sadness asymbolia", then you can go ahead and show sadness about other people's bad situations, and not experience the negative affect of this sadness. And of course it also has all those other benefits that Will mentioned.

"fear asymbolia" also seems like it would be extremely helpful.

Something also feels Wrong about enjoying sadness. If you happen to enjoy sadness, then you need to be really careful not to deliberately cause harmful things to happen to yourself or others, just for the sake of experiencing the sadness.

and yet somehow "nonjudgemental acceptance" doesn't feel wrong... these mindfulness techniques seem like an entirely good idea.

I would like to request a recommendation for a text that provides a comprehensive introduction to Lisp, preferably one with high readability.

There's lots of ways to keep track of expenses. I'd long been doing that in an excel spreadsheet.

Once you have them, you need to look at them in a cost-sensitive way. I don't see how writing down numbers accomplishes that.

I don't dare to cook anything that involves handling raw meat

This thread just confirms the benefits of being a vegetarian.

This article is supposed to be a life changer when it comes to shaving. I haven't tried all of the suggestions, but the ones I have tried have improved my shaving experience.

Bongo, you didn't understand my objection: In the classical Newcomb, Omega explains the rules to you when he appears, and there's one uncertain element (the contents of the opaque box). You determine the strategy, which by Omega's predictive power has already been entangled with the uncertain contents of the box.

In the transparent Newcomb, you either don't know the rules (so you can't precommit to anything, and you can't commit to any strategy in which Omega2 wouldn't require the opposite strategy) or you know the rules in advance and therefore you can determine the strategy, which by Omega's predictive power has already been entangled with the uncertain element of whether he'll appear to you, and with how much money in the boxes.

In the problem that's posed on this thread however, there's no uncertainty whatsoever. You exist and that's certain. The entanglement has been already resolved in favor of your existence. You don't need to satisfy your mom's expectations of you in order to keep on existing. You don't need to become a musician if your dad expected you to be a musician, You don't need to be a scientist if your mom expected you to be a scientist. In ANY universe where you get to decide a strategy, YOU EXIST. Or you wouldn't be deciding anything.

People hopefully do understand that instead of "Omega and Prometheus speak of their predictions" we can quite easily have "Your mom and dad tell you of their pre-birth expectations for you"

If anyone here honestly thinks that by failing their parents' expectations they'll stop existing, then they're literally insane. It's exactly the same as with them foiling Prometheus' expectations.

I've used the trolley problem a lot, at first to show off my knowledge of moral philosophy, but later, when I realized anyone who knows any philosophy has already heard it, to shock friends that think they have a perfect and internally consistent moral system worked out. But I add a twist, which I stole from an episode of Radiolab (which got it from the last episode of MASH), that I think makes it a lot more effective; say you're the mother of a baby in a village in Vietnam, and you're hiding with the rest of the village from the Viet Cong. Your baby starts to cry, and you know if it does they'll find you and kill the whole village. But, you could smother the baby (your baby!) and save everyone else. The size of the village can be adjusted up or down to hammer in the point. Crucially, I lie at first and say this is an actual historical event that really happened.

I usually save this one for people who smugly answer both trolly questions with "they're the same, of course I'd kill one to save 5 in each case", but it's also remarkably effective at dispelling objections of implausibility and rejection of the experiment. I'm not sure why this works so well, but I think our bias toward narratives we can place ourselves in helps. Almost everyone at this point says they think they should kill the baby, but they just don't think they could, to which I respond "Doesn't the world make more sense when you realize you value thousands of complex things in a fuzzy and inconsistent manner?". Unfortunately, I have yet to make friends with any true psychopaths. I'd be interested to hear their responses.

Nihilism may not be incompatible with happiness but after reading this post I still believe that I experience legitimate existential angst. It occurs at unpredictable moments, but more often exciting ones: during coitus, staring at a beautiful sunrise, listening to the climax of a beautiful piece of music; but also during mundane tasks like brushing my teeth. I experience an overwhelming sense of angst and meaninglessness. The feeling of arbitrariness, embodied as raw emotion, overwhelms all other sensation. Usually I am able to quickly recover, at least operationally.

I don't think I'm depressed and I've gotten better since the visceral discovery of nihilism back in high-school, but I suspect this will never go away.

I posit that these sequences and indeed any deliberation of abstract nature is super-stimulus. It was probably fairly stimulating for some ancestral man to connect the pain of having a rock fall on him to throwing a rock at a gazelle. But reading through hundreds of pages of information describing "the way" seem unlikely to improve my genetic fitness.