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Comment by misssocrates | Hacker News Reader

What percentage are entrepreneurs and what percentage are people with mental health problems and or drug addiction?

Funny how questions like this were completely ignored in the previous conversation where people were shitting on the homeless, but suddenly are important now that the homeless aren't the target anymore.

The cognitive dissonance here is becoming farcical quickly. Careful, people really don't like it when you point it out!

I was really hoping the grandparent was being tongue-in-cheek but, the lie-to-myself kind of hope.

I'm confused, what's your point? It's a "win" that this killing was by a certain person?

Has nothing to do with shit on the streets, etc. etc.

No, it's a win that poor people (most of whom are not violent criminals) are not being unfairly proxy-blamed for this murder any more.

I may have missed that one or didn't think of the question yet.

More than you'd think. You're more likely to be murdered by someone you know than a stranger. iirc it's something like ~55% chance of someone you know, ~25% chance of a family member, ~45% chance of a stranger (which could be anything from drug deals gone bad to serial killers).

You can delve into the data but but the format isn't the same for every year so it might be some work to normalize: https://www.fbi.gov/how-we-can-help-you/more-fbi-services-an...

Yeah, this is something that frustrates me in every discussion about crime. People take a murder rate of X per hundred people and use that to argue that you have an X% chance of being murdered walking down the street. Except that's not true, because like you point out, your odds of being murdered by a rando are way lower than the murder rate as a whole!

This is exactly why the reactionary push for police in response to the murder spike in 2020 and 2021 made no sense. The issue wasn't that people were going out and murdering more — it was that they were locked down in their homes with the people most likely to murder them. You can't fix that by adding more beat cops.

That statistic could only possibly exist for solved murders. Only ~50% of murders are solved and it's much easier to solve if the victim knows the killer. This sounds like a "looking for your keys under the street lights" scenario.

Using that same logic: since you don’t know whether victims of unsolved murders knew the killer, how could you know which is easier to solve?

The person you are replying to is making a rational argument, not an empirical one. The premise that may be understated is "cases are more likely to be solved when the victim is known to the killer, because the amount of people who know a person is far smaller and more easily investigable than the entire general public."

Oh, I understand the premise. But one premise does not a good argument make. Maybe witnesses are less likely to cooperate if they know the murderer! Maybe this type of murder tends to happen inside homes, where there’s less likely to be evidence such as surveillance footage! Maybe it is easier but only by one or two percentage points! etc etc

Umm. Lots of entrepreneurs have both mental health problems and use drugs. Especially use drugs.

Use the drugs that make you violent or so in need that they need to rob to get their next fix? Or the ones that make you think a lot and eat lots of tacos?

Nah it’s more of a “it’s easy to find a stick if you want to beat a dog” situation - drugs don’t make you do much of anything, aside from provide an excuse to do the thing you were too scared to do while sober. Drugs are the excuse, not the reason.

I’m not a violent guy, and I’ve never had a drug encourage me to act violently. Yes, even ‘those’ drugs.

I am however a lazy guy, and I’ve often had drugs encourage me to indulge my laziness.

Drugs can and do easily exacerbate pre-existing conditions. Especially mental health problems which would otherwise be controlled without intervention.

Many “crimes of passion” have had inebriation as a root cause of the lashing out.

Good to remember that alcohol is a mood-altering drug. However, its popularity is not limited to tech bros.

I think a lot and eat lots of tacos with zero illicit drug use. I’m pretty sure that makes me an overachiever

> What percentage are entrepreneurs and what percentage are people with mental health problems and or drug addiction?

Not for nothing, the mentally ill and/or drug addicts are no more likely to commit violent crime than you, i.e. the general population. It's amazing how with every suspect of violent crime, the first thing everyone wonders is about their mental health. Here's something to consider: everyone is mentally ill, and the majority of everyone is addicted to something or other. Let's stop demonizing mental illness and drug addiction, which are both medical conditions; stop looking for explanations there, and focus on one thing: the actual crime, the actual behavior, what happened, not what they where thinking and not if they were high. And fuck all else, especially the Goddamn bigotry. If you want a reason for violent crime, money's usually got everything to do with it. Use money as a lens, not personal biases. Because in my experience, the greatest individuals that have ever lived, that have contributed the most to humanity, were severely mentally ill, and the greatest artists, that contributed the most and most amazing pieces, paintings, music, film, that have survived the test of time, were drug addicts.

There's a lot of overlap in that venn diagram.

What percentage of what?

If you mean "What percentage of crimes are committed by," it's probably the second population. Probably. I'm actually pretty weak on that narrative right now.

If you mean "What percentage of the population described is committing violent crimes that should result in jail time," I'm even weaker on it. Because the homeless population is way, way larger than the tech-entrepreneur population, so by percentage of population I think it's a toss-up without hard numbers.

It doesn't take many dead executives on a yacht or strangled estranged wives to tilt the numbers when the population is small.

A reasonable question, but barely relevant to the emotional reaction to this specific tragedy, which involved a single victim and presumably a single killer and is unlikely to have much effect on the overall percentages.

> What percentage are entrepreneurs and what percentage are people with mental health problems and or drug addiction?

Never really met anyone that described themselves as an 'entrepreneur' that actually was one though. Lots of people that wanted to desperately identify as one and they'd spend all their time telling anyone who'd listen that's what they were.

In contrast, the actual entrepreneurs are too busy actually going out there and building things. I think it's a label that only makes sense when it's applied by someone else.

Meh, several my friends and I did. Each of us were very successful but we all had slightly nerdy jobs that were a bit hard to explain to muggles.

read your comment as "what percentage of entrepreneurs are people with mental health problems and or drug addiction?" which actually is a really interesting question.

If you want to get all numerical. Let's say an extremely generous 1% of SF population are tech entrepreneurs. 1 out of every 12 murders in SF this year was committed by a tech entrepreneur.

This would imply that Tech entrepreneurs were 12 times more likely to kill you than any other SF local, an astonishing 1100% higher murder likelihood than average!

Given that this is a forum frequented by a lot of SF Tech entrepreneurs, the FBI should monitor this forum or perhaps shut it down all together.

That's funny, but what if you look at the past 20 or 30 years so you have a larger sample?

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