A microdose is not a low dose, it's a dose where you don't notice you are tripping but your perception and concentration is enhanced

I'm a SV entrepreneur who is pretty well-connected with the community here (only mentioning this for the sake of credibility).

Maybe it's because I missed Burning Man this year, but I haven't heard of anybody doing this outside of articles on garbage news outlets like TechCrunch that say people are.

Marijuana or Adderall, sure (Meadow and Eaze are doing well here); maybe even the /r/nootropics stack, but not hallucinogenic substances.

I know people who have experimented with shrooms, but they don't consider them a "drug of choice," let alone a productivity enhancer by any means. In fact, one of my acquaintances ended up going off the deep end when he started taking LSD. It was a really sad story.

Absolutely, taking LSD can end poorly. There is plenty of evidence for it. Some people view their experiences during a trip as more important than their daily lives, and down that way lives nothing good.

In fact, the morning after my first trip on LSD I thought "I should not do that more than, at absolute most, once a month." It did turn out to take me about a full month before I could take what I had experienced in stride, without any lasting delusion about the nature of the real world.

But I will tell you with certainty (while the article maybe over blown) there are many people, myself included, who work in SV and take great comfort in sub-threshold psychedelics. Without it, I worry too much and am a perfectionist to my detriment. With it, I can contribute without fear of judgment.

I'm pretty sure I'd just fall down a YouTube hole and never recover.

That's what psilocybin would do, maybe not lsd. Shrooms will send you to the woods though for sure

I'd probably take too much, turn inside out and get stuck to the ceiling.