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Comment by corry | Hacker News Reader

Author is missing the forest for the trees.

Risk-takers, innovators, short-cut-seekers, I'm-smarter-than-you's, I-can-out-hustle-you's, I-need-adventure-not-safey's, drop-out-of-school-to-code's etc are all going to be more likely to experiment with mind-expanding substances than the general population.

They are also more likely to start companies, perhaps with wild ambitions.

VCs are the pattern-matching mimics of the ecosystem, so who cares what they do - they are clearly just following the trend that is set out by the founders.

How is it surprising, then, that startup hotspots have higher use of psychedelics (especially against the backdrop of a giant revival of psychedelic use)?

Isn't it exactly what one would suspect?

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Your sentiment confuses a couple of things.

1. "Openness" is the personality trait of the 5 factor model most closely associated with drug use. Openness also most closely correlates to intelligence amount the 5 factors. Those are coincidental factors not suggesting more intelligent people favor drug use disproportionately.

2. Risk taking behavior, or more precisely actions benefiting from exceptionally low neuroticism, is not a personality facet. Its a result of faster than normal gamma-globulin uptake in the amygdala. Such people do not associate a fear response to stimulus associated decision criteria and as such prioritize things differently. These people tend to have a very low incidence of drug use because they are less capable of feeling thrills and fears.

> These people tend to have a very low incidence of drug use because they are less capable of feeling thrills and fears.

So your entire reply is super interesting first off. Wouldn't this be somewhat moot as the same people would also be the type of people looking for an edge, not a thrill?

The super risk takers, the kind of people who are willing to walk into a burning house or enter a combat fire fight, at first appear incredibly reckless, possibly suicidal. Its normal to think that because their behavior dramatically differs from how normal people perceive and interact with the world.

Instead those people simply lack a certain form of emotionally regulated fear as a stress response. That difference can occur from extensive training and conditioning, but in more extreme yet casual cases its something a person is born with. Their bodies still tense up, they still produce adrenaline, and their pulse still shoots up like everybody else so they are reacting to stress with a stress response like normal people. The difference is that their inhibition due to that fear is more rapidly eliminated by a neurotransmitter. That allows two things that normal people don't realize occurs:

1) The high risk behavior is primarily a means of learning to interface with the world in a new way.

2) The resulting high risk action is often the result of a rational risk calculation in a snap moment, similar but opposite of panic.

The edge, if any, comes from proving something or eliminating a consequence other people aren't willing to attempt. The consequence though, is that even if such people are able to realize and prove this edge most people will not be willing to accept it.

"These people tend to have a very low incidence of drug use because they are less capable of feeling thrills and fears."

Are you talking about dark triad style psychopaths? This is the only personality type I've ever known to be both risk seeking and averse to drug use. Every other risk seeker I've ever known applied the same risk seeking attitude to drug use.

No. Psychopathy is very different. In some ways psychopaths fail to process inhibitions that prevent them from revealing deceptions under high stress conditions. Its not clear what difference in the brain allows that behavior in that context as it eliminates several forms of standard processing, but it is known that psychopathy is a neurological disorder directly aligned with extreme narcissism.

People with a natural ability to process naturally through high fear stimulus still feel fear. Unlike psychopaths these high risk people still exhibit all the same physical symptoms of a stress/fear response. The difference is that they lack just the emotional inhibition associated with that fear response. In normal people a fear stimulus drives us to halt, pause, and evaluate our options. This processing takes time and when it becomes crippling its called anxiety.

People capable of processing through extremely high risk are not so inhibited. Either they are powering through the risky scenarios intentionally as a means of learning something new or because they have weighed their options and found the high risk approach to support an outcome with value that exceeds that severity and and incidence of associated risk.

Here is an example. Imagine deploying as a military service member to Afghanistan at the height of that conflict knowing rockets and bombs land on bases that hurt people. This sounds high risk, because you certainly don't encounter this ever driving to work in the US. Evidence will indicate, though, at that time a person was 10x more likely to die from a traffic accident driving to work or from being shot by police in the US than they were to die from any reason while serving in Afghanistan. Most people are not capable or appreciating that. Now apply that same line of critical thinking to modifications of your daily routine. A for a high risk person this is common and boring while for everybody else its extremely challenging and quite stressful. These are not the kind of people tempted to explore drug use.

I don't see how the final sentence follows, that hyper logical low emotional response people would not be tempted to explore drug use.

If you're going to be hyper logical about it, there are some drugs that give you rewards that outweigh the risks, at least if done in judicious way.

Eg, some stimulant drugs can give you an edge in any number of endeavors with very low risk. Other types of drugs can give you an edge if you need to endure physical pain. Even plain alcohol makes you less logical and less controlled and could give you an edge in the same way poker players benefit from using a "crazy man" strategy.

If absolutely nothing else, you'd think this type of person would at least experiment. If they can mitigate risk, which is very possible, then it makes perfect risk/reward sense to find out if any drugs could be useful tools you keep in your back pocket.

"Risk-takers, innovators, short-cut-seekers, I'm-smarter-than-you's, I-can-out-hustle-you's, I-need-adventure-not-safey's, drop-out-of-school-to-code's etc are all going to be more likely to experiment with mind-expanding substances than the general population."

You forgot criminals, which those in the list above often become.

> criminals

You misspelled "Forbes 30 Under 30" https://www.bu.edu/rbfl/2023/05/17/30-under-30-pipeline-to-p...

Why not both startup founders and criminals? There're plenty examples...

Sure, it's the same general personality motif - lack of risk-aversion and perhaps lack of respect for authority.

Or are you making the more subtle point that, currently, any use of psychedelics outside of an approved study makes one "a criminal"?

> How is it surprising, then, that startup hotspots have higher use of psychedelics

Well, some people think programming is a profession dominated by 'geeks' and that 'geeks' are uptight squares who don't much like to party. Or to the extent they do party, it's conservative stuff like playing video games until 2am while drinking beer.

In college, the people putting on rager parties with open drug use, noise complaints and people jumping over a spontaneously started bonfire? All organised by people studying things like film.

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