If you look at this story from anyone else’s perspective, right up until the last few moments this is a story about a man with untreated schizophrenia or temporal lobe seizures escalating his illness to the point of kidnapping someone and transporting them across state lines.
Almost every company in the dot com boom was convinced the headlights at the end of their story would be vindication, not the ambulance coming to take them to a psychiatric ward. Almost all of them were wrong.
My mentor who inspired me to be an entrepreneur was diagnosed with schizophrenia and is basically spending the rest of his life in hospital…
I really think there’s something in schizophrenia beyond the illness. A lot People with it normally get symptoms around 27-28 but achieve insane amounts before then (same as my mentor)
> I really think there’s something in schizophrenia beyond the illness.
I don't think there needs to be any special association. "Predisposed to schizophrenia" necessarily implies "not neurotypical", and the outcome distribution for individuals who are not neurotypical is much, much broader than neurotypical.
The pinnacle of success in society has a pronounced overrepresention of neurodivergence, in the same way that pro athletes as a group have freak physical genetics.
But I would expect that there are equally many people predisposed to schizophrenia who, rather than overachieving prior to symptom onset, end up dysfunctional and battling a variety of substance addictions.
(and also I'd expect that the relative probability of these outcomes is highly affected by the strength of support networks and socioeconomic status)
I had an episode of delusional schizophrenia in my early 20s and luckily haven't relapsed. No hallucinations, just started to think everything was secretly talking about me or to me.
My pet theory is something like, my brain's dials for "avoid risk" and "recognize patterns" are turned up too high. So I breezed through a software engineering degree without ever partying, but I spend a lot of my time sitting in my house unable to motivate myself to go outside, and I'm not very empathetic (other people's words) and not very outgoing.
It's not that schizophrenia makes you smart, but that "smart" and "schizophrenic" are both functions of some high-dimensional space, and the same underlying differences can easily cause both.
On the other side, I have an elder relative who has paranoid schizophrenia and below normal IQ. Us in the tech industry are definitely going to get survivor bias from the "Beautiful Mind" cases around us.
And of course sometimes you meet those people who are smart, beautiful, rich, and friendly, with no downsides, and all you can think is ... "You son of a bitch" :P
"Recognize patterns" on high is usually an asset in our line of work.
After reading https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Logicomix I wondered how many of {Cantor, Frege, Gödel, Hilbert, Moore, Poincaré, Russel, Turing, Whitehead, Wittgenstein} would —given a modern DX— have been said to be "on the spectrum".
Some were wrong, but plenty were simply ahead of their time, at least from the perspective of the internet "fad" becoming a ubiquitous mainstream phenomenon.
Sure, looking back some of the ideas look silly. But when you look at where were are today and the wide range of what's popular and sustainable, some of that looks silly as well.
If you look at this story from anyone else’s perspective, right up until the last few moments this is a story about a man with untreated schizophrenia or temporal lobe seizures escalating his illness to the point of kidnapping someone and transporting them across state lines.
Almost every company in the dot com boom was convinced the headlights at the end of their story would be vindication, not the ambulance coming to take them to a psychiatric ward. Almost all of them were wrong.