Toxoplasmosis associated with entrepreneurial initiation and performance (2020) | Hacker News Reader

Toxoplasmosis associated with entrepreneurial initiation and performance (2020)

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67 pointsmastax55 comments

I wouldn't be surprised if this is a correlation. My quality of life increased significantly after I got my cat about 2 years ago (just before COVID!). I say to anyone who ask, getting a cat was likely the best decision I ever made. Since then I became a lot more entrepreneurial and productive. I don't believe neither me nor my car has Toxoplasmosis gondii (my cat was tested for this when I brought him home).

My cat is my friend, my roommate, my infant, the most precious thing I have and an endless source of entertainment due to weird stuff cats randomly do. He's also significant amount of responsibility, since he's a living conscious thing and I really want him to have a nice and long life. All these factors have been very useful to understand what it is that I want from life and focus on getting them.

Was your car tested too?

Cats are quieter and less needy than dogs. They take care of themselves and don't bark at neighbors. How are you supposed to start a new company with a dog pawing at you?

Because with a dog you have something worth fighting for

You prefer an emotionally shallow animal? /s [1]

1 - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KJFp272w9u8

Dogs are indeed more demanding, they henceforth grow your sense of responsibility, which aligns with the required skills of entrepreneurship.

Having a dog forces you to micro-manage. This may be fine is just starting out in a business but it does not scale.

> Having a dog forces you to micro-manage.

I'm pretty sure I disagree but I'm 100% certain I don't understand the rationale leading to this statement.

For any pet, if you have to act as a manager, that's IMO terrible. Management incurs performance reviews, growth and overall, judgement and control. I think a pet/owner relationship is about nursing first, with added leadership when the breed allows (dogs, horses...)

Management: ensure litter box is cleaned daily.

Micro-management: know where last bolus is in the dog's gut and expected evacuation time.

I'd say cats are on equal footing with dogs when it comes to needy. Cats just may not exhibit it as much

Dogs literally cannot shit without human intervention

Not exclusively true, there are matts and solutions just like people have for cats.

I have a doggie door and both my dogs (Red Heeler and Border-collie/rottie mix) just waltz outside whenever they need to relieve themselves. Not sure where the necessary intervention is other than putting the door in… and it’s certainly far more sanitary than a box of urine and feces sitting inside my house.

Don't know many cat owners in tech? They lay on the keyboard, the printer, the tower exhaust fans, the passively cooled router, etc......

Tangent: I'd like to see the effects of dog adoption on pregnancies.

I have witnessed and heard about a non insignificant number of young couples hesitant to having kids (because careers, mostly) deciding to adopt a dog for varying reasons. Typically, less than 18months later, boom, baby.

I think many people use it as practice/test. I have definitely see the pre-baby puppy often, but I have also witness the pre-breakup puppy where one partner turned out to be a poor caregiver.

Cat ownership is one of the least likely ways to become infected with toxoplasmosis - far more likely is contact with undercooked meat. In fact most studies suggest it is not an important risk factor at all.

https://www.bmj.com/content/321/7254/142

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3497129/#!po=4....

This sound like the hair brained rhetoric a cat parasite host would cough up

I wonder if they'll connect the third leg of the triangle and figure out that entrepeneurship is mental illness.

Perhaps better described as a form of masochism.

Yeah, really felt like they were too zoomed in on one effect of a mindset shift. They could just as easily have said "cats lead to increase in resignations without a solid financial plan in place."

We have to earn money to make a nice life for our cats.

I don't know about yours, but mine just requires a human as a bed and mice to murder. She's a cheap date.

We should not interpret this to mean TP makes you better at entrepreneurial thinking. It means you are more likely to try to start a business without a sound rational basis.

Occasionally, a business without a sound rational basis succeeds: Pet Rocks made certain people lots of money. (Yes, really! Look it up.) But it's not the way to bet.

Infection with TP caused men to become reckless drivers, and (incidentally) less attractive to women. It affected women the opposite way: they became more risk-averse and conformant, and presumably more attractive to those men who seek that out.

In reflecting on life, I'd say a good percentage of the most enjoyable, worthwhile and meaningful things in life usually don't start with a "sound rational basis."

This is not to say that everyone should YOLO their way through life but if you always think something through to the nth degree and wait for it to make complete sense, a lot of life will pass you by.

Things you do with no sound rational basis are generally better when they don't bankrupt you. There are lots of such alternatives.

Men with TP take risks that do not offer any commensurate reward. E.g., reckless driving. They are dangerous to be around.

Past related threads:

Risky business: linking Toxoplasma infection and entrepreneurship behavior - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18762544 - Dec 2018 (30 comments)

Toxoplasma gondii may help promote the entrepreneurial spirit? - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17615209 - July 2018 (4 comments)

I think a study of bipolar individuals would yield similar results. I still wouldn't like to be bipolar or have toxoplasmosis.

fun thought: i wonder if famed "entrepreneur" martin shkreli had a toxoplasmosis infection... he famously bought the patents for the drug that treated the infection (mostly required for immunocompromised folks) and raised the prices by some huge factor. if he was, then maybe his "entrepreneurial performance" was in service to the bug he was infected with!

yes, this is a joke! (or is it?! brb. off to start a company that moderates online discussions...)

That would be the 4-D-est of parasitic behaviors on record, and I think you're onto something

Considering that it is believed infected mice tend to go towards cats instead of away.

Toxo seems to be pretty darn clever

I can already see it. 20 somethings injecting themselves with toxoplasmosis to hack their entrepreneurial abilities.

No need for an injection, they can just rub their faces with a cat.

i am allergic so i think i'll pass

This is like a storyline from GTA 5. Absolutely hilarious haha

Potentially interesting how this relates to tropes. So often the evil villain is seen with a cat in their lap. Could this common stereotype have been driven by bacterial infections all along?

It is more that cat people are weird, generally ;-)

BTW and more seriously I'm fairly sure Toxoplasma Gondi is not bacterial.

Cats do not do what you want, an owner is a passive partner to the cat. You have to make the cat like you, so it voluntarily comes for pets. Running a business is similar - no one automatically likes you or wants what you are selling, you must give the customer pets and treats to encourage them to reward you back. In this way cat owners have a vision of life more attuned to entrepreneurship.

Maybe the elites aren't lizard people, but cat-people (khajit?). So subservience to cats has an adaptive function in the business world?

May we all walk on warm sands.

Does this mean we will see a startup offering injections of Toxoplasmosis? I've seen worse TikTok challenges.

> I've seen worse TikTok challenges.

Ha! That's a very low bar.

In New York's Natural History museum I found a small exhibit devoted to the effect of Toxoplasmosis on humans. The studies reported identified being untidy and poor driving skills can be caused by TG presence in the body. You could retrofit this evidence to this paper's claim it would seem.

'Being a good entrepreneur' and 'being untidy' might not be mutually exclusive effects of toxoplasmosis.

https://www.one37pm.com/grind/entrepreneurs/perks-of-being-m...

Just for curiosity, Albert Einstein was also messy. Not sure about if he had toxoplasmosis or not, but he had two cats.

https://www.entrepreneur.com/article/369141 https://www.bluecross.org.uk/story/pets-have-shaped-hearts-a...

About poor driving skills: it could be hard to concentrate on the traffic and surroundings, if people's mind is somewhere else.

Going full pop-neurophysiologist here: perhaps if being messy is a result of being distracted by ideas which are a requirement of being an entrepreneur. It all hangs together, for me!

This smells like one of the cases proving that unverified research can be published as scientific claim

This is super interesting to me, and I wonder how long before someone intentionally gives themselves TP before founding a company. Considering the threads I saw on HN about homebrewing covid vaccines, I can't imagine it'll be long.

It's not that easy to get it unless you enjoy playing in a litterbox. Meats can also transmit but that seems to be a very low likelihood

It's really bad news for pregnant women and immune defective people

Meanwhile there's the people taking ivermectin killing their entrepreneurial spirit.

I wonder how many comparisons they made before they found this hit?

hint keyword: multiple testing problem.

what if this is a way of thinning out the herd. jk

I'm about to pet a lot of cats.

OP you been listening to the Meateater podcast?

This is fascinating:

> Mind-controlling parasite makes hyena cubs more reckless around lions

https://www.nationalgeographic.com/animals/article/mind-cont...

the study for those that prefer primary sources:

> Toxoplasma gondii infections are associated with costly boldness toward felids in a wild host

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-021-24092-x

No, though the person I got this from probably does.

No room for more podcasts until I finish Revolutions, so probably 2025.

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