The Psychopharmacology of the FTX Crash

https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/the-psychopharmacology-of-the-ftx

by feross • 4 years ago

34 34 4 years ago

astralcodexten.substack.com

rendall2• 4 years ago

It's an astonishing article. It seems to reveal a hidden world that I have no knowledge of.

I don't know how to absorb that many of my colleagues and even supervisors are taking speed. Like, what percentage?

Honest question: are you all on Adderall?

nick__m• 4 years ago

yeah

Tenoke5• 4 years ago

1. The difference between speed and Adderall taking is larger than it seems at first glance. 2. Scott is exaggerating the prevalence of its usage a bit.

feet5• 4 years ago

What, exactly, is the difference? If the term "speed" simply refers to amphetamine, the only difference could be ROA and the fact that your usual "street speed" is racemic.

rejectfinite2• 4 years ago

No. Caffeine pills + theanine and multi vitamin, yes! Legal and nice.

Caffeine still REALLY works for me, I cannot take it in the evenings unless I want to stay up.

Theanine helps with focus and is also calming, it's what's in green tea.

Multivitamin with all vitamins and magnesium etc. Magnesium esp helps with cramps.

morelisp• 4 years ago

When I left SV in 2010 I estimate 5% of my professional/social circle was on some variety of non-approved stimulant use. From the people I know still there it’s upwards of 20% in many companies now, especially in the sketchier startups (eg crypto).

When I started working again in Germany ca 2015 I would say usage was negligible. Today it is… around 5%. I’m pretty worried I’m watching history repeat itself.

dorkwood• 4 years ago

I drink a lot of soda.

ChainOfFools• 4 years ago

check out the documentary "bigger, faster, stronger."

this goes way beyond adderall.

and though a sample size of 1, my own circle largely consists of research academics in the social sciences, of whom at least half have openly acknowledged their use of adderall, concerta and the like for (or more fairly, sometime over) the past 10, 20 years or longer, most starting in grad school. i suspect the real number is close to 75% but not everyone is candid about it.

ParanoidShroom• 4 years ago

Not anymore, spent two years using amphetamines daily, different stims like adrafinil, modafinil etc. Turns out it just makes you work a bit faster, make mistakes faster, get tunnel vision, miss clues, makes me an asshole towards other people.

Working in fang, Adderall speed bunnies are not that popular. The best engineers are prioritizing their clear thoughts. Taking speed is really not helping.

There is no free lunch, biggest features for optimal performance are still: sleep, exercise, good food, social contact.

It sure is fun tho, but it makes it easier to lie to yourself. Too bad it's too much fun for me to use recreationally.

nonameiguess• 4 years ago

Does it matter if the people taking Adderall actually have ADHD or just take it for fun? My wife takes it and neither her cognitive function nor risk appetite seem greater than normal because of it. It just means she can walk in a straight line for more than 10 feet without wandering off at the first shiny object she sees. I tried a single pill once and felt like I was about to have a heart attack within an hour. Didn't seem to have quite the same effect. As far as I can tell for people who actually have ADHD, the biggest negative side effect is the dependence. Without it now, she'll sleep 20 hours a day.

rendall2• 4 years ago

The article has that extended, unexcerptable part about how tech and finance people are on it in particular because our jobs are unusually hard to focus on for hours per day. The people who can do it both unmedicated and uninterrupted are rare.

There have been periods, sometimes extended times, when I have had a hard time focusing on my job. Other extended periods of time when I literally want to do nothing else.

Over the years, these extremes in variation have largely gone away on its own and I like to have a nice work-life balance.

But I'm doing nothing close to ambitiously creating a cryptocurrency exchange nor making scads with Jane Street, either, and now I must confess to FOMO.

secretsatan• 4 years ago

Being a bit older, coke used to be extremely popular in some firms I worked at

misiti3780• 4 years ago

Never taken it, never plan on taking it (even though everyone around me seems to be on it).

I trained myself to concentrate the old fashioned way, practice.

tsol• 4 years ago

Cold showers are my adderall

MengerSponge2• 4 years ago

One little detail: Desoxyn, one of the stimulants used for treatment of ADHD, is methamphetamine. https://www.mayoclinic.org/drugs-supplements/methamphetamine...

I imagine/guess/hope it's less common, but who knows!

Tenoke5• 4 years ago

I imagine/guess/hope it's less common, but who knows!

Why? Because you can't shake off the meth=bad association?

Desoxyn is roughly as good as Adderall with similar side effect profile and mostly prescribed when Adderall doesn't work as well anyway.

sidewndr462• 4 years ago

Isn't adderall just a mixture of amphetamines? Is it surprising that they are similarly effective?

MengerSponge2• 4 years ago

The context here of crypto bros getting jacked to the tits on nootropics and doing their best to remake civilization is key.

I don't want to pathologize people who are actually accessing beneficial treatments. I knew kids who needed and benefitted greatly from Adderall, and I knew kids who popped one now and then for a weekend or work session. The latter is the problem.

Abuse of amphetamines is bad. I imagine/guess that abuse of meth is worse, which is why I hope it's less common.

LordDragonfang• 4 years ago

The author of the OP has actually written about Desoxyn before: https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/know-your-amphetamines

(The conclusion is that it's possibly a more effective treatment at clinical doses while still being pretty safe, and the main difference is that recreational users (a)smoke it and (b)take a lot of it)

rejectfinite2• 4 years ago

Archive just in case: http://archive.today/P46xb

sn0w_crash• 4 years ago

I spent many years on adderall.

It is speed.

And it creates the illusion that you are doing good work.

Anyone who argues in favor of adderall is in the denial stage of their own dependency. I used to do this.

This is unfortunate because we have many immensely talented people on speed convincing themselves they need it and trying to explain to others that it’s not actually speed.

crtified• 4 years ago

Several years back, before they founded FTX, the group Alameda became well known among certain crypto circles. Specifically, the most dangerous waters: the at-that-time-very-few crypto exchanges who provided high leverage services to the general public.

The group would openly declare, sometimes in the form of exchange-run "leader boards", the way they were making a great deal of money very quickly by successfully leverage trading.

My point is that Alameda has long had an underground (if not outright) reputation as one of the biggest players in crypto's highest risk zones. While pharmacology undoubtedly plays a role, in some ways the pattern we see in the downfall here is also as old as the tale of Icarus.

vgatherps2• 4 years ago

Trading on high leverage is fairly common for market making firms since you're generally delta neutral and are already in the business of moving capital around to satisfy margin requirements.

The worst risks come when you starting taking large delta risk (i.e. being long/short) on leverage, so when the market moves against you, you're just out some huge amount.

Alameda admitted publicly they'd starting 'making lots of money' from taking large long positions in ~2020 I think. This has great returns in a bull market when everything is going up, and wrecks you when everything goes down like crypto did...

sidewndr462• 4 years ago

Making money during one of the longest bull markets in history isn't particularly notable. When everything is going up, you have to go out of your way to find efficient mechanisms to lose money.

QuadmasterXLII• 4 years ago

I suspect that many people are on way, way too high doses of adderall- even with doctors supervision. At the dose at which I found the best effects (about half of the standard minimum dose given my bodyweight), I couldn't tell in a given day whether I was given the drug or a placebo (we tried this experiment), but at the end of the month I would notice that my backlog of important but boring tasks was emptier (taxes done / homework projects turned in on time / living spaces clean etc). On a longer timescale, semester on semester off, the effect was about 1.5 GPA points

klysm• 4 years ago

I have a similar experience with my current dosage. I don’t really notice it unless I’m spending most of my time in a meta-cognitive state and self-analyzing my behavior. I find being self-aware of my executive function to be quite tiring, which means I don’t really notice. As you say though, the effect size is significant.

I think one of the risks is the initial euphoric effect is what people associate with it “working”, but that’s really just a side effect.

The Psychopharmacology of the FTX Crash

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