Starting a Company Can Turn You into a Psychopath

The title &quot;Starting a Company Can Turn You into a Psychopath&quot; is complete nonsense when paired with the linked article. Correlation is not causation.<p>With that being said, I&#x27;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.

I think you are mistaking psychopathy with how obsession and ambition can lead people morally astray.<p>One can&#x27;t be fixed, the other sometimes can be.

Given that sociopathy&#x2F;psychopathy is an actual pathology and has some organic basis, I&#x27;m not really sure the title is accurate. I don&#x27;t think anyone has indicated that sociopathy is developed during your adulthood.<p>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 &quot;but I need my CEO to be...&quot;. 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&#x27;t have those feelings.<p>So unite brethren against the non-human sociopaths among us!

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

It doesn&#x27;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&#x2F;10th the size of the second. It doesn&#x27;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.

Most of this sounds absolutely useless. I mean, we could spend all day coming up with statistical hypotheses like:<p>&quot;People who drink Folgers&#x27; coffee are more likely to be psychopaths&quot;<p>&quot;People who drive red cars are more likely to be psychopaths&quot;<p>&quot;People who eat out every 3rd Sunday of the month on leap years are more likely to be psychopaths&quot;<p>...and we wouldn&#x27;t be any smarter for it. Aren&#x27;t there any more useful ways to show off your analytics platform?

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

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?