“If an important decision is to be made, they [the Persians] discuss the question when they are drunk, and the following day the master of the house where the discussion was held submits their decision for reconsideration when they are sober. If they still approve it, it is adopted; if not, it is abandoned. Conversely, any decision they make when they are sober, is reconsidered afterwards when they are drunk.”
― Herodotus
Maybe not exactly what the excerpt was getting at, but here's a variant: Instead of individuals using alcohol for this purpose, some fortune 500 companies use it too. At corporate "Team Building" offsite workshops, open bars are available to the sequestered employee groups. Those without the self control to abstain or exercise moderation are quickly identified as non-management material.<p>The excerpt also reminded me of an H. Ross Perot story that I cannot seem to find anywhere online. Someone had approached him for VC and had a sound business plan. The person had had issues with alcohol in the past, and had sworn off it. Perot had learned this (probably from a PI), and at the moment they were going to sign a business deal, Perot insisted on closing the deal with a drink. The other party explained that he did not drink, but Perot was absolutely insistent and would not close the deal without a drink. So the guy left without a deal. The next day, Perot called him and closed the deal. Perot had been testing the resolve and reliability of the guy. The venture was a success and became a Fortune 100 company.
Not the main point of the article, but I found this quote interesting.<p>"...police officers could significantly improve their ability to detect false statements if suspects were asked to give their alibis in reverse order."<p>This is similar to a technique we use in user research – not to catch someone in a lie, but to help them remember what actually happened. If you ask someone "what is your morning routine like", they tend to forget a lot of details and gloss over things that were difficult / tedious. If you ask them to recount backwards from "how did you arrive here today", they will give you a clearer picture. Not sure it works in all cases, but I use it on myself when I really want to remember a sequence of events.
I don't really buy this. True colors do tend to show when someone is being careless in general, especially when they're drinking. But someone who really wants to give you a false impression of themselves or their motives will probably manage to stay on point while drinking with you.<p>To summarize, beware of false negatives. Alcohol in given quantities doesn't have the same effects on everyone, and if you're drinking with them, you may miss the red flags you set out looking for in the first place.
A HN submission of cached contents of an article, that was cached by a HN indexing system because it was previously posted in the past.<p>This shows that HNdex is doing its job in helping people discover posts that they hadn’t seen.<p>It must also be some sort of milestone in the history of HN perhaps, as <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/from?site=hndex.org" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/from?site=hndex.org</a> currently shows that this is the first post to HN from HNdex aside from the Show HN about HNdex itself.<p>A couple of things that this makes me wonder is:<p>- Will the cached article itself eventually also be cached and show up when you make the following search on HNdex for example? <a href="https://hndex.org/?q=alcohol+social+trustworthiness" rel="nofollow">https://hndex.org/?q=alcohol+social+trustworthiness</a> I’m thinking that the author of HNdex probably already thought of excluding HNdex pages from HNdex itself.<p>- Is this a new era of HN, where more third-party sites pop up in order to explore and interact with HN in novel ways? I am aware of a few other third-party sites that offer some sort of interaction with HN. But the others that I can think of immediately have been alternate front ends that mostly didn’t do anything radically different. HNdex on the other hand is really something different.<p>- Since the caches work with things like Google+, and since it has cached articles that have since gone 404’d, it must mean that HNdex is the result of a personal project that has been ongoing for quite a while. Or they extracted the data from other archive sources. Either way, I wonder if any of the other people on HN also have HN-related projects that they either made for their own use and didn’t (yet) set up a public version of, or are working on currently.
I've heard it expressed in Japan that coworkers who were unwilling to drink in the obligatory after-work bar visit were untrustworthy. They were taking advantage of their coworkers. The drunk coworkers would share unguarded thoughts while the sober one wouldn't. All taking and never giving was unscrupulous.<p>Years ago, it was almost a requirement to participate. One rationale was that being drunk excused someone who spoke their mind. As speaking your mind to your boss was not allowed in sober company, but sometimes critically important to the success of a company, you had to at least pretend to be drunk and go along with everybody else's pretense. That's oversimplifying it, but you get the idea.
"Son, never trust a man who doesn’t drink because he’s probably a self-righteous sort, a man who thinks he knows right from wrong all the time. Some of them are good men, but in the name of goodness, they cause most of the suffering in the world. They’re the judges, the meddlers. And, son, never trust a man who drinks but refuses to get drunk. They’re usually afraid of something deep down inside, either that they’re a coward or a fool or mean and violent. You can’t trust a man who’s afraid of himself. But sometimes, son, you can trust a man who occasionally kneels before a toilet. The chances are that he is learning something about humility and his natural human foolishness, about how to survive himself. It’s damned hard for a man to take himself too seriously when he’s heaving his guts into a dirty toilet bowl.”<p>JAMES CRUMLEY
The tech industry is rife with drinking culture and alcoholism in general. I do not drink, and I frequently feel isolated as a result, both at business and social gatherings. 30+ year old colleagues will demand a reason for why I don't drink, as if I'm the one engaging in exclusionary behavior :(
What this article doesn't tell you is that this is only historical practice among people making deals with their own money--entrepreneurs--or higher-up executives or partners in a law firm etc.<p>As someone who works for a living for someone else, you are doing yourself no favors by getting drunk around your peers or bosses. As an employee you are trading your labor for money. You aren't necessarily going to be putting anything at stake personally, so whether or not there exists trust between you and your peers matters very little (regardless of MBAisms or management platitudes about teams). As an employee, getting drunk around your peers or being around drunk peers can only lead to negative consequences. The facade people put up is good. You don't want to know what's behind that; you didn't pick these people, you're not marrying these people, you're working with them on a temporary basis then moving on. Also, employees shouldn't talk about politics or religion at work for the same reason.
Personally I have a very simple rule. I don't drink alcohol, and I don't need to have a reason for it. I tend not to give any single reason if anyone asks me about it; just any excuse on top of my head. Most of the time it suffices. The times it doesn't, I give up and let them think whatever they deem fit.<p>I have no issues against alcohol and people who drink. If people want to judge me on my teetotalism, it's up to them, but their judgement is not going to have any effect on my choice. I made mine and I'm going to stick to it.<p>I've found that Stoicism helps a lot in dealing with this. The choice to drink is in your hands. Other people's thoughts are theirs, and different people will think differently. You can only control whether you drink or not, so leave the judgement (if any) to others and don't think too much about it.
Drinking is as old as time, but what I feel is more modern is this silly gamification of "getting real." There is a problem if you have to drink to get real. Get real when you're sober. Have long, winding conversations about anything and everything when you have your faculties together. Tell it like it is because that's what you do, but soften the blow using your brain not beer.
>Not only is getting drunk pleasant<p>As someone with asian genes I have this thing called the asian flush [1]. As far as I understand it my body breaks down alcohol too fast resulting in all the waste products flooding my body.<p>Basically, I'm allergic to alcohol.<p>Alcohol makes me feel like shit, my heart starts beating in my chest, my head goes red, I get huge headaches. I always thought: why do people like this so much? Then I found out I'm allergic to alcohol.<p>It kind of sucks because so much socialising in today's world is based on alcohol. It took me 25 years but I've finally managed to accept the fact that I literally just can not drink alcohol. It took me 25 years to be brave enough to stand up to the social pressure of drinking. Geez.<p>[1] <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alcohol_flush_reaction" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alcohol_flush_reaction</a>
A lot of changes in behavior while drinking are, at low doses, social / cultural remission rather than via universal effect of the drug in question.<p>The simpler answer is that people build relationships through shared interests and experiences. Getting brutally intoxicated is just a pretty boring one that some people reach for.
I don’t drink, and I’ve often read and worried about this culture of coworkers and peers who won’t trust you, and leave you out of social functions because of your choice.<p>I’ve never encountered it though, and people seem to accept at face value that I don’t drink, and I’ve never felt left out. Even if the activity was a bar, I’ve always been invited along.<p>Maybe I’m just lucky, or the companies I’ve worked at have a different sort of people at them, but I’m grateful for it.
Alcohol as a way for alcohol companies to get rich at the expense of young people's health and sometimes lives.<p>I actually think there is kind of a conspiracy around alcohol. Because the effect of alcohol is to reduce your cognitive function, and that often causes normal people to become drunk since they have an impaired decision making ability about stopping. Drunk people sometimes make mistakes that interfere with their lives.<p>But if you become drunk and make mistakes multiple times, which I assert is actually a completely normal consequence of regular drinking for everyone, then people will literally say that it was not the alcohol that caused the problem, but that you have defective genetics (are an alcoholic) if you decide to stop drinking.<p>So I think they idea of alcoholism as a genetic disease is actually a really effective propaganda by the alcohol industry. No one can really safely consume significant amounts of alcohol regularly without making mistakes. Some people are more susceptible, but that doesn't mean that they are genetically flawed or that other people can't easily run into problems also.
I can relate to this to a certain extent.<p>Not sure if its cause or effect, but the people who I have had the latest nights with I probably do trust the most.<p>Whether thats 100% alcohol related is debatable, but alcohol does help get social nights started.
Where I work lots of people have bottles of liquor on their desks, even some sprint retros or meetings are done with a bottle on the table. There are endless happy hours & days of the week where we get served alcohol on premise. Team outings cannot happen without alcohol being involved.<p>Take two sets of people: those who drink & those who do not - guess which set gets promoted/large raises/etc.
The most convincing reason I have seen for drinking is the one given by Aldous Huxley in The Devils of Loudun: to escape our "sweaty selves". In short to achieve a small escape from the constant experience of being ourselves.<p>A somewhat similar take though more strategic it is said the ancient Persians either debated drunk and decided sober or debated sober and decided drunk.
if you want to improve trust and communication in the workplace, encourage positive & healthy social relationships among employees, so they are comfortable enough to speak their mind.<p>drugging people into an uninhibited state so they speak their intoxicated thoughts is not a long term solution.
It is an interesting theory; but I don't think it holds up very well on close inspection.<p>For one thing, human 'trust' is mostly about raw familiarity. If trust were linked to actual trustworthiness, politics would be completely different and "any publicity is good publicity" wouldn't be a proverb. Motivated untrustworthy people generally have great success getting people to trust them, drinking involved or otherwise.<p>In addition, trust even being an assessable characteristic is debatable, people's reliability is very dependent on context and circumstance. Nobody is trustworthy in a divorce court, for example.<p>"causes people to get along more freely and easily" makes a lot of sense, but the utility drunken parties for assessing trustworthiness seems weak.
It’s interesting because I have a hard time trusting people who don’t drink. And I often will not get along with someone until I at least get a drink with them. It’s not great as I know some people who categorically do not drink.
For folks who act a lot differently while inebriated, the accepted belief (way back when) was that alcohol changed their personality. I figured out that the alcohol released the suppression on those personality traits. In my case, it made me quiet (for once).<p>History: Drinker from 8-24. Quit because I started feeling sick from it. That's my history w/ intoxicants in general.<p>Sidebar: I don't care if someone's buzzed. It's just a state, like being tired or caffeinated. However, it seems common for drinkers to have a moment of embarrassment around non-drinkers but I kind of wish they didn't.
I never got drunk because I cannot stand the taste of alcohol. I can drink at most half a glass of wine or beer. (Similarly, I can also not stand the taste of some artificial sweeteners. I am probably not a supertaster, because I do like grapefruit very much. I also have a problem with many 'synthetic' smells and cannot stand smoke.)<p>I never realized that this had an effect on my social life, by not joining in with getting drunk with others (especially in my younger years). In my current social circles, excessive consumption of alcohol is not the norm.
I only skimmed the article but the paranoid tone reminded me of some idea I had regarding alcohol:<p><pre><code> As an adult the constraints of social life are really heavy and indeed we have to fake / lie / hide constantly. drinking alcohol is not spying technique, it's a lubricant to restore your intuition and natural self without care
Also, even without the social burden, existential crisis lead to paralysis often, alcohol or other drug can make you feel creative and random again, a bit like a child.</code></pre>
Yeah, let's just ignore the 1.2 billion Muslims in the world that don't drink and assume they're untrustworthy. What a sophomoric article! الله اكبر
I knew a guy in the military who often stated: "Never trust a man you cannot have a drink with"<p>I had always felt conflicted because alcoholism was a common thing there and often people were sorting these things out.<p>This article was precisely his point. It has always stuck with me. Some of the most counter-intuitive advice from the least expected minds which has changed my views much later in life.
This isn't something new. Psychologies has concluded it's easier people friends with those who they 'commit crimes' (doing something evil) together. Consuming alcohol is just one of those, only it's way too popular.
when people ask me at a bar why I don't drink, i have given this answer "I dont need to drink to say or do dumb things"<p>we laugh about it, and then we move on to other topics...
The usual thing in Russia for doing business. Easy to spot an idiot when he is drunk.
Someone who is not drinking is perceived as someone who has an issue to hide.
alcohol increase aggressiveness and self indulgence, not directly truthfulness, and it's sad to see frat boy culture getting glorified on shaky psychological myths.
If you missed the link, this was discussed in 2014.<p>I thought this deleted comment was interesting from that discussion -<p>Why not drinking is a sign of conservatism -<p><a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7798391" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7798391</a>