A place to discuss potentially promising methods of intelligence amplification in the broad sense of general methods, tools, diets, regimens, or substances that boost cognition (memory, creativity, focus, etc.): anything from SuperMemo to Piracetam to regular exercise to eating lots of animal fat to binaural beats, whether it works or not. Where's the highest expected value? What's easiest to make part of your daily routine? Hopefully discussion here will lead to concise top level posts describing what works for a more self-improvement-savvy Less Wrong.
Lists of potential interventions are great, but even better would be a thorough analysis of a single intervention: costs, benefits, ease, et cetera. This way the comment threads will be more structured and organized. Less Wrong is pretty confused about IA, so even if you're not an expert, a quick analysis or link to a metastudy about e.g. exercise could be very helpful.
Added: Adam Atlas is now hosting an IA wiki: BetterBrains! Bookmark it, add to it, make it awesome.
Does the same reasoning apply to cancer treatment and antibiotics?
"If God wanted us to fly he would have given us wings!"
All else being equal we can expect our evolutionary heritage to be reasonably well optimised. But all else isn't equal. I don't have the same goals that the selection for my allelles in the ancestral environment implicitly optimised for. Evolution couldn't optimise for my specific needs at specific times which is one of the reasons we evolved general intelligence to handle that sort of thing.
Interventions, chemical or otherwise that we would consider using are not selected by random. They are created (often) by intelligent design and then selected for via a process of cultural evolution and empirical study.
Does the same reasoning apply to cancer treatment and antibiotics?
No, it doesn't. Cancer and antibiotics are about creating new chemicals to combat an organism that's evolving against you. I'm talking about evolution that merely changes the quantities of chemicals your body already knows how to make.
Your brain uses chemical signallers - this requires producing a chemical which fits into a receptor somewhere. You're suggesting either making more of these chemicals, or something that can perhaps jam a receptor. Or something that looks like one of these chemi... (read more)