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Comment by socalgal2 | Hacker News Reader

According to the book "Drunk", the reason you drink with people is it's more likely their true self comes out and you can more easily find out if they are trustworthy and worth doing business with. Not saying that therefore you should drink, nor do I know if it can actually be backed up.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Drunk_(book)

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Lol I would love to see how he argues that alcohol increases creativity. This is one of those things that sound plausible but very debatable if true or not.

There is the mysterious Ballmer peak after all.

I think it's more likely that it reduces your tendency to discard ideas that on the surface seem bad. Some of those seemingly bad ideas will turn out to be good, so if you take them seriously you'll look more creative, even though you didn't actually come up with any additional ideas.

I have Claude for this now

Go home Claude, you're drunk.

Uninvited

Yes even that framing is a bit extreme. It increases your risk tolerance. So you're more open to new creative ideas, they don't even have to be that crazy, merely not the status quo.

Guess we'll have to ask Jackson Pollock. Wait, he died in an accident while drunk driving.

In my own case it does (or at least the first one does) because it reduces inhibition from creative impostor syndrome.

It also helped occasionally in severe OCD crises when no other strategy would break a cycle of compulsion: literally a single shot of alcohol will.

And it can help if I am stuck in self-defeating ADHD loops.

None of these things are advisable or worth the health damage even small amounts of alcohol could be causing. The only thing that is worth say a dozen units per year is reducing social anxiety. There are people I only know because I had a rare drink.

Weed massively increases creativity in everybody I asked, sure as hell does for me. Its not very controllable, ideas comes semi-randomly and works with topic processed previously, but damn so many results are actually good and stand test of time (I mean decades, like apartment interior design).

Alcohol? Social lubricant for sure, but creativity is contained only in the mind of a drunken fool who thinks better of his ideas than he should. That I never experienced, nor have witnessed and I certainly didn't avoid such situations.

While I don't agree or disagree, we had a rule with my grad school colleagues and prof that we couldn't have certain discussions if four people had a pint in hand and the fifth was there drinking water, taking notes lol.

I suspect that alcohol was a technology invented to protect the society from psychopaths. The psychopaths do not have instinctive empathy, but they can pretend. Alcohol ruins their ability to keep control, so when they get drunk, they will say or do something crazy that you will remember the next day.

It would make sense that when psychopaths get the power, they will eliminate the detectors.

> the reason you drink with people is it's more likely their true self comes out and you can more easily find out if they are trustworthy and worth doing business with.

This doesn't work when you're a person being encouraged to drink in an asymmetric power dynamic and it turns out the people you're drinking with are monsters. You end up in a tragic story like what happened in the Dartmouth Predator Professor Gang and perhaps the recent Cornell case as well.

>and perhaps the recent Cornell case as well.

That was fake news, didn't happen.

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