Rationality Drugs

It's specifically about having a more accurate model of the universe. It's not the same sort of thing as brushing your teeth, even though that's also a good thing to do.

It's a five-second skill - you have to train yourself to do it.

Those count as "undiscovered" too - undiscovered by at least me. :)

This article cited by Luke has more nuanced appreciations of drugs like Donepezil, and generally a more balanced take on the subject. For instance, they report that

Detrimental effects on cognition have also been reported: both in healthy young participants (Beglinger QJ et al., 2004) and in healthy elderly volunteers (Beglinger et al., 2005), donepezil administration (5 mg for 14 days and 10 mg for 14 days respectively) caused a slight deterioration of performance on speed, attention and short-term memory tasks.

The same article goes on to suggest that perhaps 14 days is too short a timeframe for the beneficial effects to be felt. However one can also find studies like this one (not cited by Luke) which show detrimental effects on cognition in healthy subjects over four weeks of treatment.

Neither Luke nor de Jongh et al. report on the frequent side-effects, which (Wikipedia says) include bradycardia, nausea, diarrhea, anorexia, abdominal pain, and vivid dreams.

It is highly personal.

9+ hours of sleep per night for a month will probably make me feel bad. Average of 6 hours per night may be slowly wearing myself out, but this rate seems to be sustainable indefinitely.

But then, if I do not do anything stressful, I can do with 4 hours per night for a month..

4.5hrs of sleep every 24 on everyman 3 since January and I've never felt better!

[full disclosure: the first couple of months were tough and involved much experimentation with schedules close to everyman 3.]

An emotion is irrational if it is not appropriate to the situation - for example, social anxiety is irrational if it causes one to avoid pursuing some social opportunities which have a positive expected value (for any utility function, which may or may not carry a heavier penalty for failure than a bonus for success).

I had a one-time trial and I'm planning to see my doctor for more as soon as I can.

A key symptom of depression is lack of willpower - depressives don't normally have the willpower not to sleep.

For me personally, and I suspect also for a significant number of other people, it takes willpower to go to sleep as well as to wake up early enough. In the morning, the path of least resistance for me is to sleep in, but in the evening, it is to do something fun until I'm overcome with overwhelming sleepiness, which won't happen until it's far too late to maintain a normal sleeping schedule. Therefore, if I were completely deprived of willpower, my "days" would quickly degenerate into cycles of much more than 24 hours, falling asleep as well as waking up at a much later hour each time.

Now, the incentive to wake up early enough (so as not to miss work etc.) is usually much stronger than the incentive to go to bed early enough, which is maintained only by the much milder and more distant threat of feeling sleepy and lousy next day. So a moderate crisis of willpower will have the effect of making me chronically sleep-deprived, since I'll still muster the willpower to get up for work, but not the willpower to go to bed instead of wasting time until the wee hours.

(This is exacerbated by the fact that when I'm sleep-deprived, I tend to feel lousy and wanting to doze off through the day, but then in the evening I suddenly start feeling perfectly OK and not wanting to sleep at all.)

Depressed people can have either insomnia or hypersomnia; insomnia is significantly more common. Depression-related insomnia is usually "terminal" - people wake up very early and can't get back to sleep.

Strangely enough, there have been some studies showing that depriving depressed people of sleep has a strong positive effect on their mood, but of course then they're too sleep-deprived to enjoy it.

Quite the opposite, they sleep more the than normal.

Actually, according to my nursing textbooks, depression can manifest either by sleeping more or less than usual. So five hours of sleep a night could, for some people, be a symptom of depression. And I do remember reading somewhere about first-year college or university students developing clinical depression after a few months of unaccustomed stress and lack of sleep. And for most university students, it probably takes willpower to go to bed early, since nearly everyone I know who is my age seems to be on a longer-than-24-hour natural sleep schedule. So lack of sleep could cause depression, although once you were depressed, you might find yourself wanting to sleep more (and having an even harder time keeping up with classes).

Personal anecdote: long periods of sleep deprivation can mess up your neurotransmitter levels enough to cause an episode of psychosis. This actually happened to one of my good friends. (When you're waking up at 4:30 am every day for swim practice, and staying up late for whatever reason including just wanting to have a life, sleep deprivation can very quickly get out of hand.) You probably have to be genetically predisposed, but still...it scares me.

I don't think it's everybody -- certainly there are cases of severe depression where the person sleeps 20 hours a day.

Maybe it's more that sleep deprivation can masquerade as depression. That is, if you're tired, slow, unmotivated, hopeless, lethargic, plunged in gloom, and you're sleeping four or five hours a night, your problems might be related to your sleep patterns.

If you get headaches you should probably up the choline dosage or use a more bioavailable form like CDP choline.

I felt I was quite humble in giving my opinion (or maybe just self-effacing). Still, I'm willing to logically concede the point.

I told you I was hardcore.

Potassium chloride initially, but since bought some potassium gluconate pills... research indicates you don't want to consume large amounts of chloride (just moderate amounts).

About 15 minutes after consumption, it manifests as a kind of pressure in the head or temples or eyes, a clearing up of brain fog, increased focus, and the kind of energy that is not jittery but the kind that makes you feel like exercising would be the reasonable and prudent thing to do. I have done no tests, but "feel" smarter from this in a way that seems much stronger than piracetam or any of the conventional weak nootropics.

It is not just me -- I have been introducing this around my inner social circle and I'm at 7/10 people felt immediately noticeable effects. The 3 that didn't notice much were vegetarians and less likely to have been deficient.

Now that I'm not deficient, it is of course not noticeable as mind altering, but still serves to be energizing, particularly for sustained mental energy as the night goes on.

I'm sure I was deficient but most people are deficient if they don't eat fruits and vegetables as a voluminous staple of their diet.

Now if we only had a drug that increases conscientiousness.

I did click through to your page; I decided not to quote it directly, which was a mistake. My impression is that of LWers, vegetarians are the most common group (though perhaps there are lots of sleep-deprived people).

Overall, I was disappointed with taking a qualified statement ("creatine deficiency causes intelligence problems; make sure you have enough") and turning it into an unqualified statement ("creatine improves cognitive performance").

you should have wondered why there was such a price difference and not then been surprised at the taste

I would have expected any price difference to have something to do with the cost of making pills. If that's not the case... is there a competitive market in powder but not a competitive market in pills, or do all the sellers agree on this same method of price discrimination, or what?

Grapefruit juice worked great! I also tested and found V8 to work pretty well. The powder floated on the top and I barely noticed it, even using just half a glass.

You are correct. I basically wiki'd it, glanced at some of the LW material, browsed amazon and saw largely positive reviews for the product. Maybe those people all have capsule-makers.

I'll report back with my experiences with citrus and/or parachuting later. Thanks for the tips!

'parachute' (make pills using toilet paper)

Can't you just chew on a cracker, spit that out, and make a 'pill' out of that? Though I suppose some people might find that more unappetizing than eating paper.

[edit: never mind, grandparent discussed eating it with food and said it was suggested against.]

Thanks! Think it might still be best to expand the initialism in the text, but now I know what you mean.

I am of the impression that the reason for the health problems of professional athletes is the degree to which they push their bodies (which, perhaps, might not be possible/feasible without drugs and supplements) rather than a direct effect from the drugs themselves.

Your impression approximately matches my research.

Because pills and capsules are things which have substantial effects on the human body in ways which bypass common natural pathways. Variations in diet (to an extent) and lifestyle changes (of certain kinds) were common in the ancestral environment, which means that they have been reliably and exhaustively tested on the human race over the course of our entire history as a species.

There are some artificial things which have been well-tested. Alcohol, for example, has effects which are well-known; enough people make use of it that there have been substantial incentives to research it exhaustively, at least to the point where we feel fairly comfortable imbibing it in moderation without fear of catastrophic side effects. The same goes for a lot of other substances, some of which are natural (I would assume that natural psychoactive substances were more likely to be discovered before societies grew very picky about what they put in their bodies, i.e. before the introduction of many regulatory bodies).

The issues with the remaining substances is that we don't have enough knowledge about (some of) them to justify what could be existential risk. There have been enough drug recalls over the years that it has become apparent that a successful clinical trial, possibly funded by the same company which has an incentive to bring the drug to market quickly, is not sufficient evidence to dismiss the possibility. As a result, it is not irrational to take extra care - acquiring extra information and erring on the side of the status quo (which happens to include one self, currently still alive and well).

Consuming chemicals that have been tested is certainly an improvement on consuming chemicals that haven't been.

Consuming chemicals to make your brain work better seems to me to be a rather similar activity to overclocking a computer. Let's add more voltage. Let's pour liquid nitrogen into it. Perhaps it will go faster ! Perhaps it will, but will it still be working in 5 years time?

First of all, note just how crude these efforts are compared to the technological research undertaken by the companies that actually make microchips. The same is true of the brain - it can make dopamine and deliver at synapses - exact points of contact throughout the brain. Yet you see people discussing just adding more dopamine everywhere, and thinking that this is in some sense improving on nature in a clever way.

I have to mention a point against myself - which is that I do take general anaesthetics, which, while not an intelligence enhancer, is definitely an intelligence modifier for specific circumstances. However, turning brain function off is arguably simpler than trying to make it better.

It is possible, definitely, to improve human intelligence by combining it with a computer. So it's not the case that I'm against the idea that it's impossible to improve on the natural intelligence we all have - it obviously is.

What I'm pointing out is that all of these drug ideas are bound to be something that evolution has at some point tried out, and thrown away. And they are really unsophisticated ideas compared with those the brain has actually adopted.

Even the situation dependent argument isn't as strong as you might think - for example your brain has a lot of adaptations to cover the "unpleasant and potentially traumatic things" situation, for example - and these adaptations generally disagree with your view that you shouldn't remember them. It's probably the case that intelligence tests are a novel environment, however....

Same here. As a childfree human, maximizing the number of copies of my DNA is right up there with paperclip maximization on my list of priorities. :-)

One other categories of exceptions: We aren't in the EEA anymore. In particular, we have much looser constraints on available calories than in the EEA, and that changes the optimal settings even for reproductive success.

I have heard of genetic disorders, and know that they occur, and why they are found in the gene pool. And in such cases, it's entirely appropriate to take medication for them. I take your point that perhaps I could have mentioned this class of DNA earlier, and that it is appropriate to take medication for that class of diseases, as it doesn't improve your quality of life to leave it as it is.

I didn't think we were discussing genetic diseases particularly. I am convinced of your argument that if you have a genetic disorder that affects your intelligence, you should take medication for it. I don't see why this is relevant to the more general case of people who don't have a particular genetic issue. Evolution is a good balancing algorithm - but it works by trimming the outliers. If you are unlucky enough to be one of the outliers, there's likely something that needs correction. But generally, I don't see the relevance.

As for your second point - well, we did. Cancer is very rare in the natural environment. It's only in our much safer modern environment that we live long enough for it to become a problem again.