

Starting a Company Can Turn You into a Psychopath - glaugh
http://blog.statwing.com/starting-a-company-can-turn-you-into-a-psychopath/

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jaytaylor
The title "Starting a Company Can Turn You into a Psychopath" is complete
nonsense when paired with the linked article. Correlation is not causation.

With that being said, I've seen founders become lots of things both good and
bad. The experience of doing something as challenging as creating a new
business is certainly the type of endeavor which will likely forever alter
your view of the reality in which we reside.

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diego
You missed the [the title of this post is tongue in cheek] part.

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jessaustin
Humor is impermissible in HN titles!!1!

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WhitneyLand
I think you are mistaking psychopathy with how obsession and ambition can lead
people morally astray.

One can't be fixed, the other sometimes can be.

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ryanobjc
Given that sociopathy/psychopathy is an actual pathology and has some organic
basis, I'm not really sure the title is accurate. I don't think anyone has
indicated that sociopathy is developed during your adulthood.

Getting real for a second, all jokes aside, sociopaths are a real and severe
threat to society. You should shun and avoid sociopaths at all costs. You
might be tempted into thinking "but I need my CEO to be...". The answer is NO.
Such a CEO will do nothing, add no value, and ultimately steal all the money
of the company, and not feel the least bit guilty or remorseful. Because
sociopaths don't have those feelings.

So unite brethren against the non-human sociopaths among us!

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wtracy
PHP programmers are psychopaths. Who is surprised? :-)

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aschwa32
It doesn't seem clear that these results are even statistically significant.
As there are no calculated errors associated with the final values (which
there should be for any study involving numbers) and the first sample is about
1/10th the size of the second. It doesn't seem like you can even draw the
conclusion that there are more psychopaths proportionally within the founder
group, let alone establish a causal relationship. TL;DR Study does not really
say anything statistically meaningful.

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glaugh
Our bad. Should have put some p-values in the text itself. All those
differences are statistically significant, typically at <0.001 levels.

All the statistical output, including confidence intervals, is available via
clicking through the links to the dataset itself, available here:
[https://www.statwing.com/open/datasets/88ed02bd6dda2f813ba98...](https://www.statwing.com/open/datasets/88ed02bd6dda2f813ba98d5e01a6f239d7a5359c#workspaces/3859)

Edit: We added a couple notes about this in the blog post, thanks for the
feedback.

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j_baker
Most of this sounds absolutely useless. I mean, we could spend all day coming
up with statistical hypotheses like:

"People who drink Folgers' coffee are more likely to be psychopaths"

"People who drive red cars are more likely to be psychopaths"

"People who eat out every 3rd Sunday of the month on leap years are more
likely to be psychopaths"

...and we wouldn't be any smarter for it. Aren't there any more useful ways to
show off your analytics platform?

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nobodysfool
Looks like the same thing can be said if you are a student...

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AznHisoka
So the question is: Did drug dealing turn Walter White into a psychopath, or
was his psychopathology lurking and accelerated when he got lung cancer?

