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Culture War Roundup for the week of September 5, 2022

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If Google required every employee to take adderall, would it actually improve their productivity? Or would it just lead to the best candidates leaving google for an employer that wouldn’t force them to take adderall?

Google is an employer and has to stick to rules like "you can quit" which the US army is unconstrained by. Google also can't control the other medications its employees take .

The Google version would be closer to having a company doctor that prescribes most Software engineers with Adderall, telling them the exact dosage to take and how to use it.

In the military meanwhile they can do things like put the meds directly on your breakfast platter, and give intense physical training that basically mandates you take this stuff to survive them. Social conformity is a powerful thing, if people were encouraged to take such drugs to remain in the special forces I suspect most people who are dedicated enough to enlist in the first place would take them. If the Army doctor regulates your PED use then it is a heck of a lot less dangerous than the normal PED regimen that everyone in American Kickboxing Academy uses.

I think that's a great point, but the difference is that steroids are much more effective than adderall at their respective jobs. Steroids can essentially take people in the bottom quintile of muscle building potential and take them to the level of the top 0.1% natural athletes, and they take people in the top quintile and make them completely superhuman, they are freakishly effective. If something of this magnitude existed in the realm of productivity, it wouldn't matter that the best people left google, because the drug is doing so much of the work that those who take it become the best because of it.

Since loss of muscle mass is a major problem for the elderly, should people in their 50s take steroids to build up muscle mass?

Stanozolol can cause liver problems, also there is some evidence that it can cause heart problems, I would in general not reccomend PED's unless you have a doctor regulating your dosage, there's way too many variables that can fuck you over.

I'm not sure if that is supposed to be an argument against my position, but yes, elderly men in particular should definitely be taking TRT (I'm not a doctor, just my opinion), I think the overall quality of life calculation is completely unambiguous in favor of taking low to moderate doses of steroids.

I was asking to see if I should be taking steroids.

As a guy that did steroids, I gotta say you're overselling them. They will make you a better athlete, but they will not make a bad athlete into a good athlete. Not really.

I think adderall is more effective based on my own experiences with both.

I went from benching 260 to 230 after going off of stanozolol, and my 5k time went from 18 minutes to 20 after I was weaned off EPO. That's a pretty dramatic difference in strength/speed.