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Comment by faanghacker | Hacker News Reader

I keep reading/hearing about the relationship between psychedelics and Silicon Valley, but I have yet to meet that many people in real life who work in the SV software industry and use psychedelics.

I'm a SWE who has spent over a decade at various large companies in SV.

I know one fellow SWE who has used it at Burning Man.

Several other SWEs gave me a neutral or negative reaction when I mentioned using psychedelics.

If there is a side of Silicon Valley that involves using psychedelics to enhance your work, it's either a lot smaller than the media makes it out to be, or I'm in the wrong place.

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I don't know anyone using them to enhance their work. However, I know plenty of developers in SV/San Francisco that take them recreationally. It's not something people really talk about at work.

It’s not something you talk about at work. There’s plenty of people around who are happy to chat about it at a house party or bar

Perhaps it's not something folks feel comfortable discussing--were these neutral or negative reactions from acquaintances and coworkers, or from close friends?

I obviously didn't flat out ask others if they had tried it. I either mentioned that I had tried it or played dumb and asked if they knew anything about e.g. microdosing, as if I had only heard of it.

Anecdotally...

1) Friend from college working in machine learning space who just moved back to SV from Asia, saying that the tech culture in Asia suffered from a lack of creativity. In the same conversation I brought up having used psilocybin and he freaked out, thinking it was going to damage my brain.

2) Another friend from college who's a hardware engineer. who found it strange that I didn't want to drink whiskey with him but regularly use psilocybin. He also warned me about brain damage.

3) Friend from work whom I knew socially. After he quit working, I chatted with him and suggested that if he wanted to try psychedelics now would be a good time, before he decides whether to go back to working. He seemed to be surprised, and just made a comment about Steve Jobs to cover up the awkwardness.

4) Another coworker I worked closely with and had a good opinion of me because of the work that I had done, who had gone to another company. I asked him if he knew anything about microdosing while having lunch and he said not to try that stuff because it would mess up my head.

5) The Burning Man guy was someone I'd worked with before. He told me about his recent BM psychedelic experience after I told him about having used ayahuasca recently.

Point is, my experience of sampling people I know in SV both socially and professionally hasn't yielded anything close to "yeah I have used psychedelics to help my work" even when I didn't ask them straight up if they had used it, and instead volunteered my own experience first.

I worked in large companies in South Bay, not SF-based startups. That probably had something to do with it. Still, all the press about SV and psychedelics gets tiring when it seems not to take into account the likely uneven distribution between South Bay vs SF and large companies vs startups.

At the risk of getting downvoted I just gotta say: I think you're talking to the wrong people...

Your problem is big asking people at big companies. Most people who do psychedelics wouldn't like to work for a big company. Also in my experience as a contractor inside many companies people who work for a long time at the same big company are unlikely to have tried anything except alcohol.

In terms of the Big 5 personality traits:

High openness -> open to new experiences -> try psychs. High openness -> need for creative expression -> small company.

Low openness -> closed to new experiences -> don't try psychs.

Low openness -> closed to new experiences -> stay in same big company

You don't need some personality model to get that though. Just to have met enough people.

World and people are a bit more complex than that. I am perfectly fine staying at big banking corp, and in the same time tried shrooms maybe 10x, salvia extract few times (quite similar but 10-15 minutes only), weed & hash all around the world.

Some of us get fulfillment in their lives from stuff we do outside of work (adrenaline sports, mountains, travelling in my case), and we have work just to sponsor this, and other pursuits in life. Even if its quite creative software dev work.

But overall you are maybe right, more career-oriented folks in big companies who have less open mind, like to just follow the rules from above (alcohol ok, other drugs will kill ya all) etc.

Yeah it's a model, there will be exceptions because reality is more nuanced. My problem with working for a big company despite it allowing more time for doing stuff outside of work is that I just don't connect with the people there. Because on average more people are low openness I find we don't see things the same way and don't have the same sense of humour.

> 1) Friend from college working in machine learning space who just moved back to SV from Asia, saying that the tech culture in Asia suffered from a lack of creativity. In the same conversation I brought up having used psilocybin and he freaked out, thinking it was going to damage my brain.

Doesn't that re-enforce the conditioning the CCP is capable of even within its supposedly 'creative, disrupting innovative' cohort in China? So after being immersed in that environment it ensures the thought of a substance that induces deep, critical and often very uncomfortable introspection and potentially painful moments of clarity is thought to melt your brain? I'm not at all surprised by that occurring if I'm honest.

I may talk negatively about the many ills of SV but at least its forward thinking enough that you can just go into the East Bay into Oakland and be where its completely decriminalized now. There is something to be said about it being 'accessible' enough if you're actually really motivated, all while it not being so widely shoved down your throat with perpetual ads and aggressive marketing. I'd hate to see Psilocybin analogues as plentiful in 7-11 as 'spice' was (synthetic canabinoids).

Personally, after being in the Industry and seeing how MJ played out I kind of hope it sticks to a MAPS like model where its left in the hands of researchers and medical professionals on the Establishment side, and simply de-criminalized on the Public side. That's the best of both Worlds I think and restores individual agency. But I want to make it clear: I think plant medicines are no joke and not to be taken at all lightly, this includes cannabis.

Hopefully we get a kickstart in future mycologists and explore other usecases from it while its still a DIY system. I was listening to an NPR story about a lady who decided to try and build a 8ft canoe entirely out of mycelium, just because she wanted to see if it would be sea-worthy [1]. I thought that was pretty cool in a bio-hacker kind of way.

As for your experiences, maybe expand your social circle?

> At the risk of getting downvoted I just gotta say: I think you're talking to the wrong people...

My thoughts exactly, no downvote from me. And incidentally only then did I look up at his handle and kind of just nodded to myself.

I personally think we're at the same place where MJ was in the mid to late 90s depending where you are; its out there and people do it in private but good luck getting them to admit it to you with all the blatant propaganda and misinformation if you're not included without overtly asking about it. Oddly enough, CU Boulder has a psychedelic club on campus [2]; I never went to a meeting myself, unfortunately but I heard good things from an Educational stand point.

I talked to a guy I only just met on my way to SFO from DIA about psychedlics the last time I went to NorCal, we were talking about what we were doing at work, then the weather and environment and the ever growing harshness of the wild fires in CA over the years: it just came up naturally.

1: https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/fungus-answer-climate-c...

2: https://www.psychedeliclub.com/

I’m a pretty successful Silicon Valley SWE. I enthusiastically use psychedelics, but I’m not going to mention them to my coworkers.

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