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Intelligence Amplification Open Thread
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.
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Comments (339)
Noopept is the only drug i would actually consider a nootropic. it is extremely effective at increasing metal ability and it does not have known side effects. in my experience it similar to the effects adderall, however it is more subtle, not necessarily weaker, but harder to notice.
http://discovermagazine.com/2010/the-brain-2/27-metal-marvel-mended-brains-50-years-lithium/article_view?b_start:int=0&-C
It's thought that the ratio of omega-3 to omega-6 fatty acid intake is more important to cardiovascular health and inflammation than absolute omega-3 intake. Has anyone addressed whether or not this is also the case for cognitive effects / whether reducing omega-6 intake alone has a cognitive benefit? How much do we know about the mechanism behind omega-3's cognitive benefit? (Apparently inflammation alone is associated with lower intelligence, though possibly because of common causes in childhood.)
Given how important o-3 is to cell membranes (even if o-3 did not reduce inflammation) and how important cell membranes probably are to brain function, reducing -6 intake is unlikely to have a strong cognitive benefit. According the my amateurish models, the most important way keeping o-6 intake low impacts cognition for a young guy like you is by slowing the rate at which your brain will deteriorate over the decades. In other words, the inflammation reduction is caused by a reduction in prostaglandins, which are synthesized from fatty acids, where prostaglandins have no particular role that I know of in the maintenance of cell membranes -- they're paracrine hormones.
Having read some of this and being curious enough now to consider experimenting, I am catching myself worrying about social backlash.
I am a graduate student and I vaguely recall at least an episode of Boston Legal discussing nootropics; do schools often have policies hostile to their use? Where would I find this information?
EDIT: I have searched through the student code of conduct for my school as thoroughly as I could stand and found a bunch of vague references to (a) academic dishonesty and (b) loads of other policies. The impression that I get is that if someone didn't like nootropics they could make my life unpleasant but maybe I'm projecting from this.
As long as you follow the law (ie, nothing that requires a prescription you don't have), you're safe from academic consequences. The episode you're thinking of was probably about Ritalin and/or Adderall, which are illegal without a prescription but widely used anyways.
While I believe this and intend to pursue it, my sense of weirdness and nervousness remains. If, as wikipedia mentions, piracetam is totally unregulated then there just might not be anything about it but it doesn't relieve the worry in my mind that there could be something that I'm missing.
Piracetam is totally legal and unregulated in the US. (I guess in most of Europe it is prescription only.)
People take Piracetam all the time. From what I've heard, most schools will deliberately look the other way regarding even illicit brain-doping. If you're discreet you have little to worry about from your school. The authorities are less tolerant, but the Feds barely ever intercept even prescription drugs unless they're commonly sold for recreational purposes.
In any case, Piracetam is regulated as a "nutritional supplement" not a drug.
Piracetam is currently questionable. Please see http://www.imminst.org/forum/topic/43965-piracetam-not-banned%3B-but-its-going-to-be-difficult-to-sell/ and other threads.
This was mentioned in a previous thread, but the game of Go seems intuitively to be beneficial when it comes to updating your beliefs and acting on those updates. You have to continuously adopt better and better heuristics in order to outperform your opponent, and you have to actively propagate learned tactical heuristics when you encounter relevant patterns of game play in order to gain their full benefit. It seems as though this might merit further investigation.
"Deleting a certain gene in mice can make them smarter by unlocking a mysterious region of the brain considered to be relatively inflexible, scientists at Emory University School of Medicine have found."
http://www.medicaldaily.com/news/20100918/2064/gene-limits-learning-and-memory-in-mice.htm
With human genetic engineering having such a controversial status and without a Seasteading Institute presence it seems especially unlikely that we'll get to make use of all our knowledge of intelligence-related genes before FOOM or crash or whatever. :/ Maybe if we found a series of genes that regulated speed of human development such that a human could become fully mature in 3 years and die in 15? Seems unlikely...
If they learn what the genes do at a biochemical level they can make drugs to replicate the effect. That is the direction a lot of gene research goes into, from what I've heard.
Even more unlikely when we note that the process of maturing the mind requires decades of novel environmental stimulus. To pull it off within 3 years would require basically creating a new species, not just tweaking the speed of physical development in this one.
Smarter wiser minds should be able to do a lot more with a lot less environmental stimulus, especially if such stimulus was optimized for the nourishment of smarter wiser minds, no?
(By the way, I find it really improbably that such a project could ever work, but I figure it's worth at least 5 minutes of contemplation. In case anyone's doubting my sanity. :P )
Absolutely. And it is getting that sort of improvement in smarts at the same time as doing the maturation acceleration that will add most of the difficulty. Speeding up the aging itself is the easy part.
It's going to be legal somewhere in Asia, if not throughout Asia
Even so, unless such a project was started really soon with a really big budget then we just don't have enough time. Would it be possible to get such a project started in the next... say, 5 years? I don't know who has a vested interesting in human genetic engineering for intelligence or if we know enough about genetic engineering yet.
All humans, for a start?
The best-ROI techniques I've found to date are getting sufficient sleep, and trying hard. I know that these work, andthey work quite reliably.
Another which is somewhat less reliable is 'sleeping on it.' I mean quickly and intensively priming the mental pumps on a task, then doing something else, then coming back (ideally after a good night's sleep) to the task later. I often perceive the benefit of signicant effortless processing which must have taken place in the interim,
Back to trying hard. To help w/ this, I tend to psych myself differently depending on the mental barrier of the hour, e.g. (just by way of example):
raring to go -> go (duh); low energy -> compete with self / make it a game / hyperoptimize; anxiety concerning outcome -> depersonalize, take cosmological perspective, dust-mote-on-dust-mote, etc.; self-doubt -> reflect on successes and known abilities, depersonalize; lazy -> see low energy; competition for focus -> promise self rewards if focus, quick-list competing demands then flush from mind, etc.; uncertainty - 80/20 rule, do-then-adjust, countless pithy sayings
The psych-up phase may take 5 seconds (most of my techniques are so familiar I just need a quick flash on them to get most of the effect). Ideally I've planned ahead sufficiently so that 'sleeping on it' is still an option if I feel insufficiently psyched after the psych-up phase. Sometimes, just reminding myself of this fallback makes the psych-up easier.
Fairly mundane stuff, but reasonably effective and equipment-free (the bed I'll be needing anyway:-)
Also, I hear that fat people need more willpower, and depressed people should just cheer up.
Are you sure that it works because you're unconsciously working on it? Might it be that during the time off, you simply forget what you were thinking, and you take a new approach that works?
I'm considering writing a post on meditation if there is enough interest (see my comment here).
Most if not all of the comments so far are focused on individual intelligence augmentation.
I suspect there is big, juicy, low-hanging fruit in collective intelligence augmentation. We're pretty smart by ourselves but really dumb when we get together in groups, small and big.
For an interesting (if controversial) example of IA for groups, see Software For Your Head.
Morendil, Thank you for reminding me of this book! A technique I remember being described there is very attractive to me. My memory will mangle the details, but basically it is a convention by which either party in a discussion (say, party A in a discussion with party B) can call a point of order to ask the other party (in this case, B) to state A's position to A's satisfaction.
I have tried this some with mixed results, which I suspect could have been better with more preparatory groundwork. I'd love to hear of others' experiences.
That sounds like either a Protocol Check or the more useful Intention Check.
What I like about the Protocols is that most of them can be practiced unilaterally and without even sounding weird. "Okay, what is our intention here" can be a powerful question when a discussion is getting bogged down.
"What do you think I believe?" "Why do you think I believe what I believe?"
I haven't tried these out yet.
Yes Nisan, that is the gist as I recall it. One can see how such a tool might help with a whole host of dysfunctional discussion/meeting behaviors.
A skeptic might regard this as gimmicky, and point out that the discipline required to use the tool properly would, if present, have prevented the dysfunctions in the first place. To which I reply: Well, maybe. But it's cheap to try. You might even enjoy it.
I'm planning to start an organisation that experiments with a different feedback system for organisations.
It is about trying to improve organisational sanity more than intelligence though.
Improving organizational sanity? But... organizations are not found to be conscious, are they?
Hold off on proposing solutions..
Personally, I find physical pain to be somewhat helpful. When I start getting drowsy in one of my lectures, winding my hair around one of my fingers and pulling on it keeps me awake and cognitively alert. I've also found that biting my tongue is less effective at it.
I often find myself getting drowsy while driving. The most effective thing I know of to do about this is to eat sunflower seeds (in the shell). I suspect this would also work during lectures.
If you're getting drowsy in lectures wouldn't you be better off either arriving at lectures better rested, or if you already are and the presenter bores you, learning information in another way? When I went to university, lecturers would get two weeks' trial to prove that their lectures were worth attending. If they weren't, I just read the syllabus, and would study the material from a textbook or the internet during the time allocated for the lecture.
It's rather unfortunate that the majority of lectures were thus avoided, but better to use the allocated learning time optimally.
It probably would be, but that's not always possible, and something about attending lectures and riding buses seems to trigger the "go to sleep" response in my brain whenever I'm not properly rested.
I also seem to have adapted to getting six hours of sleep each night; I naturally wake up about that much time after I go to sleep. Not sure why; it might have been a response to years of sleep deprivation (yay neural plasticity), in which case it might well be worth looking at to determine if it decreases my mental capabilities, and if it can be replicated. An extra two hours each day adds up, after all.
Yep. I used to use electric shocks to keep awake during classes.
From what source?
I used to make good use of static electricity in some of my classes that had suitable carpet and chairs... but we kind of had different goals in mind than alertness. ;)
A cheap electrical muscle stimulation device.
Did that work better than OTC chemical stimulants? Did the practice create any social penalties? And are you planning on making a top-level post with your rationalist's guide to operating politically?
No social penalties. Not conspicuous. Not stimulating myself during a period of low physical activity seems obviously correct to me. No plans to.
The time granularity for the stimulation does sound like an advantage.
If the abandonment of the post is due to time constraints, and you have a general idea and a list of sources, I'd be happy to attempt fleshing it out to article size and send it back for review.
Email me. Maybe we can set up a Skype conversation on it in a few weeks.
Some people use a peg on either a finger or an ear to harness that effect.
You mean like the sort of peg you use to hang up clothes with? I've heard of people using them for kinky bondage stuff, but not for keeping themselves awake. Don't they have the disadvantage that the longer you leave them on, the more they hurt when you take them off, thanks to cut off circulation?
At least with hair-pulling, you can keep it up indefinitely, and you can vary the pain level depending on how much you want and how much you can take. You'd also probably look a bit less weird fidgeting with your hair than you would wearing a clothespin clamped on your ear, even if you have to take up a hand to do so.
Yes, I'm referring to clothes pegs. One acquaintance of mine in particular who made use of it was quite adept at managing the sensory experience effectively to create different physical associations to subjects for various peg locations. He was also an arts major and sufficiently socially adept as to harness the 'weirdness' as a peacock effect. And when we went out at night the peg doubled as some kind of drinking game...
Other self-inflicted-pain based learning aids include elastic bands and the cat o' nine tails.
Wouldn't rubber bands be dangerous, due to the risk of losing a limb or something? Tourniquets aren't supposed to be applied unless you're in danger of bleeding to death or you've basically already lost the limb already, after all, and while a rubber band might not be as tight, it still seems dangerous. I haven't got any first hand experience with them, so I might be wrong, though.
Also, cat o' nine tails? Seriously? What are you going to do, pull your shirt off and start self-flagellating while you're in the middle of a test or a lecture or a business meeting or something? :P XD
Only in the sense that plastic bags are dangerous. If young children get the crazy idea of putting plastic bags over their heads or using elastic bands as tourniquets then they might suffocate or lose limbs. Sane people who use elastic bands as a source of self stimulus flick them against their wrist.
I thought I was safe with that one. It's a cat o' nine tails, an instrument used for brutal torture and maiming. No, you don't use that as a substitute for a bottle of mountain dew when you need help paying attention. (Yet th self flaggelation usages still fits the category 'self-inflicted-pain based learning aids'.)
I've been mulling over getting an iPhone, basically weighing two considerations.
On the one hand, it's another distraction. As Paul Graham wrote, the ability to carry the internet around is not necessarily a move someone aspiring to get more done should make.
On the other, it seems like it must have awesome potential as an intelligence amplification tool! I feel like I'm missing a step towards human-machine integration by not getting one.
Anyone have any thoughts on how to optimize the tool for intelligence amplification?
A few apps that seem to have potential:
Honestly, having the ability to access any piece of knowledge as long as I know how to find it has revolutionized my life. I would for years get hung up in my own mind when I was missing a key fact in a discussion or debate, now I find I can more eloquently present myself while essentially throwing links at the other person (rarely in real time and if in real time usually just as an exercise in my own mind). As someone with a short attention span my ability to pull hard data from my active memory has always been difficult. But now, what was a hindrance, is now an incredibly powerful asset. My conversation now lives at the edge of my consciousness almost continuously, my responses are natural and precise. I study the "zone" as an adrenaline and video game junkie, just knowing that I have the internet's knowledge comfortably in my pocket has freed my mind to exist in this state more often than ever before.
I don't have an iphone, I have a blackberry. I use it for talking and email, web browsing when needed. I also have an extensive social network and at any given time can converse through bbm/gchat/fbchat/msn with around 100 people. Where before I was forced to be stuck at home on my desktop or to lug around my laptop to connect with my peers I can now go anywhere and do anything and still be able to make those connections when I have to. I've found myself becoming a much more social creature, shedding chains while at the same time gaining real time information updates that allow me to know where to go on any given night.
I've just started keeping my phone on silent, no vibration, no nothing. I haven't had a ringtone since 2002, but even the vibrations started to get to be too much. I check my phone often, but its always on my terms. When I'm at home I have my phone facing me on my desk and the alert light fits nicely into what is essentially my HUD of monitors and input devices. Though sometimes "phone calls only" which is essentially the same as silent with the obvious difference, when I "need" to be reached.
I could never go back. Going back at this point would be like deciding just to sit in a basement and smoke weed all day, sure it might be nice, relaxing, whatever, but what good is it doing? If I got rid of my smartphone I'd be jumping off of the society train into the dinosaur graveyard.
I could go on, but I've been awake for longer than I remember and my active memory is failing me, I hope what I've written here makes enough sense and I'd be more than happy to elaborate and would even like to get into more detail as to specific benefits (politic power and sex, to name a couple more).
I've also benefited from Sleep Cycle, Meebo (IM aggregator), and Epic Win (a to-do list/incentive system that hijacks the shininess of RPG progress). I also fill otherwise useless moments with a number of very entertaining games, but whether I'm losing important introspection during these moments is another question.
This one Sleep Cycle? http://mdlabs.se/sleepcycle/
Yes. Occasionally it will wait until the last moment of the 30min window to go off, which just means that I was unfortunate enough to be in deep sleep for that entire period. Unfortunately it is not very customizable, but it is definitely worth the app's cost if you already have an iPhone.
Being the possessor of a Motorola Backflip, I find that I do not use it for time-wasting Internet browsing. It has four major advantages over my previous dumbphone:
Maybe a valuable smartphone app would be one which blocks your web browsing access unless you explicitly request a five-minute unblock -- and gives out larger intervals only after making you click through an irritatingly long series of "Are you sure you're sure?" dialogs that jump around the screen so you can't just tap on "OK" repeatedly. Not enough to cripple your phone, but enough to make you think twice about idly rechecking your email for the 18th time today.
An iPhone? Use it to call people and maintain ongoing and stable relationships with intelligent peers. The identity grounding and mental health benefits of such interactions far outweigh anything you can get from apps.
I'm not a recluse and I already have a phone, so this isn't really an answer to my question.
Certainly true though, were I interested in comparing apps to relationships.
That was never suggested.
The communication device is merely a lead in to the two points I made that are critical to the subject of the post and have not yet been mentioned.
If IA is your goal from a smartphone, you probably want reasonably fast text input. A Motorola Droid is significantly better in that regard, since it has a physical keyboard. It's still not nearly as fast as a full-size keyboard, though. For that, I suggest getting a folding keyboard.
One bit of software I really want, and have considered writing myself, is a text editor that can be used blind with the screen locked. In some contexts, like the subway, it's easy to take out and use a folding keyboard, but only if the phone is left in a pocket. It would need some clever use of text-to-speech for navigation and typo detection, but the Android OS already provides the hard part of that.
Have you tried Swype? I've got a physical keyboard on mine, but I find that that method of input is actually even faster.
I haven't, mainly because the authors refuse to take my money for it. But if it's that good, then I suppose I ought to seek out a pirated copy.
That would be advisable. It's been a big hit with at least one other #lesswrong person, so I can now generalize from a set of two.
I've been using Swype for a while, and was very impressed with it. It did make a big improvement when I got the hang of it.
SwiftKey is also very good when you're writing a lot of text on your phone. I currently switch between the two of them, depending on what I'm going to be writing.
I haven't added much, not out of lack of interest, but because I haven't done much (rigorous) experimentation. I'm sure it's the case for many other silent lurkers. I support this open venture wholeheartedly!
Biofeedback for ADHD.
It is clear that the human body is good at adjusting and fine-tuning itself in response to immediate need. What in-built "amplification" do we have when intelligence is needed, and how could it be harnessed?
For example: The natural fight-or-flight reflex appears to provide instant alertness and focus, and I would imagine blood-flow to decision making functions is enhanced? Linked to a comment below I have found my reaction time and competance at rapid reaction computer games improves rapidly following surges in adrenaline. Is this coming from the improved focus (could this be simulated?), or increased bloodflow?
Mostly the former. Blood flow can help cognition a little (see vasodilators such as ginko biloba) but it doesn't really target rapid response.
The improve focus effect from adrenaline can definitely be simulated. Take anything from caffeine to amphetamine in large quantities.
Sympathomimetics? Ephedrine is an example that is often available OTC.
Supplementing D-vitamin (D3 in my case) seems to add more energy and efficient hours in the day for me.
Breakfast. Discuss:
Probably the biggest single thing you can do (if you aren't doing it already). It took me till my junior year of high school to realize that feeling exhausted and light-headed till lunch isn't normal.
I find that I do not want to eat until at least an hour after waking up in the morning, and if I do anyway, it doesn't settle properly in my stomach or something and I feel sort of nauseated until midafternoon.
Ever since I bore a child, I've been more-or-less unable to stomach food until 9 am. Even weak tea. (Might be psychological, for all I know.) Yet recently, I tried tea with two pieces of lozenge-like candy, and it worked.
I have the same problem but it seems to mostly apply to larger meals and certain types of food. I don't know how well this will work for others but I found that a single protein/breakfast bar usually works ok.
I can drink juice without a problem - this is usually what I do if I need to bolt out the door soon after waking and don't anticipate having a chance to eat anytime soon, so I can get some calories into me.
I've always had the same problem, which is why I went that long without eating breakfast in the first place. Eating a small amount of something liquid-ish like a fruit smoothie or oatmeal/fine cereal makes a big difference.
Hmm... I usually don't feel awake enough in the early morning to make a smoothie. I've tried oatmeal and didn't find that I reacted any differently to it than to solid breakfasts eaten too early. Perhaps I should just drink juice or something? Might that do the trick?
Depending on where you are and what your schedule is like in the morning, you could also bring along something portable (granola bar, fruit, boiled egg as jimrandomh suggests) and eat it whenever your stomach is ready for it.
I leave the house once a week, and don't need to get up at any particular time in the morning. I do eat once I want food - the question is whether I'm depriving myself of some of the value of breakfast by waiting as long as that takes.
This seems a strangely hermit-like lifestyle for a self-professed extrovert. Does this not affect your happiness?
The Internet "counts" for me as far as my dose of social interaction. Also, I have roommates.
Ok. I ask in part because it took me a while to recognize the (in retrospect quite strong and obvious) correlation between not leaving my apartment for > 24 hours and serious negative effects on my emotional state. Internet based social interaction did not alleviate the negative effects for me.
Ah, got it. Not knowing that is why I'd refrained from making that suggestion in the first place; I figured other commenters knew something I didn't. :)
My suspicion is that you're fine, unless you're doing some severely energy-intensive tasks in between getting up and feeling hungry.
Make it in advance and refrigerate. If it has too short a shelf life for that, experiment with recipes and/or storage conditions until you find one that lasts long enough. I had the same issue with making eggs, until I realized that they have a pretty long shelf life when boiled and it was stupid to let laziness affect my diet when I could just make two batches per week in the evenings and have a constant supply.
Boiled eggs have a shorter shelf-life than raw eggs (4-6 days tops). Raw eggs can last for weeks, if the temperature is stable.
Actually, boiled eggs have a shorter shelf-life than raw eggs. Raw eggs can last for weeks -- even a couple of months -- so long as they stay in the same cool temperature. Boiled eggs will last 4-6 days tops, in my experience. They get slimy, then rot.
I didn't mean to imply that boiling increased their shelf life; rather, boiling in advance is necessary to make them convenient enough to have for breakfast, and the shortened shelf life is still long enough for that purpose. (The 4-6 day range agrees with my experience, hence two batches per week.)
We had chickens for a while before they were all murdered by a mink. A freshly-laid egg would last 3 months in a constant temperature. A fiend of mine keeps his eggs on the counter. He lives in a country with a hot climate, and his eggs last for weeks and weeks, too. I think it's amazing : )
An egg has to be able to stay fresh while a chick is developing in it.-- about 3 weeks, and the hen will be keeping it quite warm.
It's amazing that something which isn't alive, and is full of fat and protein and water doesn't go bad in that time.
I just make a couple of fried eggs for breakfast usually. Takes less than 5 minutes and can be done in parallel with making my morning cup of tea. Advance preparation looks like overkill to me - why not just get up 3 minutes earlier?
Actually, boiled eggs have a shorter shelf-life than raw eggs. Raw eggs can last for weeks -- even a couple of months -- so long as they stay in the same cool temperature. Boiled eggs will last 4-6 days tops, in my experience. They get slimy, then rot.
I don't think there are any storage conditions that would let a smoothie the way I make them last that long. I like them with equal parts ice, frozen fruit, and fresh fruit, plus a dollop of yogurt and three good squirts of agave - all of which items are stored at a variety of temperatures. It'd freeze solid in the freezer, melt in the fridge, and lose texture in a thermos.
Well, it doesn't necessarily have to be simplified all the way down to zero preparation. What if you premixed two containers, one frozen and the other refrigerated, so that only one mixing and one blending step had to be done in the morning? For maximum simplicity, one of those containers could be a piece of the blender itself.
I'm pretty sure that a puree of ice and frozen banana (or whatever) would freeze solid in the freezer overnight, and not be amenable to blending in the morning with the other ingredients. (Also, I use a stick blender.)
You could try ultra-fine oats. I make a drink thing with them and some fruit juice, and it only takes some shaking if you can cope with that first thing. Maybe cooking makes a difference?
I've been mean to make some of my own, when I've got my own place.
Or palatinose, but that is more expensive. Unsure of US suppliers.
Those pouches make my snobby food heuristics scream.
Food is just a mixture of chemicals of one variety or another... their containers have no causal power on the nature of the chemicals.
I am aware of that (except that I suspect I dislike bottled water at least in part because of something leaching out of the plastic). However, there is a correlation between packaging and certain food types, and I've trained myself to steer away from the type that is indicated by those pouches.
Edit: I am puzzled by downvotes to this comment. Is it off topic? Are my packaging neuroses bothering someone?
Odd, I hadn't come across this type of packaging before that website.
Different social conventions? Seriously all that packaging says to me is bulk purchase of goods from website where packaging isn't really compared to others on the shelf, so no incentive for people to make it fancy to signal worth.
On the other hand, I find that if I don't eat shortly after waking up I'm unlikely to remember to eat at all for the rest of the day unless something prompts me to do so, which tends to result in further difficulties the following day when I'm ravenous and can't think straight. If I do eat within an hour or so of waking up, I'm much more likely to notice hunger-signals for the rest of the day.
Not just carbohydrates. Fat and protein.
"We report that when C57BL/6 mice are maintained on an intermittent fasting (alternate-day fasting) dietary-restriction regimen their overall food intake is not decreased and their body weight is maintained. Nevertheless, intermittent fasting resulted in beneficial effects that met or exceeded those of caloric restriction including reduced serum glucose and insulin levels and increased resistance of neurons in the brain to excitotoxic stress."
"Since May 2003 we have experimented with alternate day calorie restriction, one day consuming 20-50% of estimated daily caloric requirement and the next day ad lib eating, and have observed health benefits starting in as little as two weeks, in insulin resistance, asthma, seasonal allergies, infectious diseases of viral, bacterial and fungal origin (viral URI, recurrent bacterial tonsillitis, chronic sinusitis, periodontal disease), autoimmune disorder (rheumatoid arthritis), osteoarthritis, symptoms due to CNS inflammatory lesions (Tourette's, Meniere's) cardiac arrhythmias (PVCs, atrial fibrillation), menopause related hot flashes. We hypothesize that other many conditions would be delayed, prevented or improved, including Alzheimer's, Parkinson's, multiple sclerosis, brain injury due to thrombotic stroke atherosclerosis, NIDDM, congestive heart failure."
This post at ImmInst looks awesome: carefully chosen synergistic and effective nootropics.
Suggestions for statistical software (ideally freeware) for self-experimentation data analysis? Or data tracking? Ideally something that takes very little knowledge of stats and isn't programmer-oriented. I suppose I should ask people at Quantified Self.
Report back, if you do?
This list looks promising.
Not only are we reinventing the wheel here we are doing so as a community relatively poorly equipped to do so.
The guys at the Immortality Institute forums are reasonably like minded to lesswrong participants but many of them are obsessed with the kind of subject we discuss here and have done excessive amounts of investigation into both studies and typical experiences of self-experimenters.
We would in most cases be best off just reading through the best of the threads there and following their findings.
Which are the best threads? Fora do not seem optimal for synthesizing an answer. My impression is that they know a lot more than wikipedia. Why haven't they filled it out? Would they be interested in ata's wiki?
It would certainly be useful if the information was collected in wiki format. As you say, forums are far from optimal for collecting a concise synthesis of information! It would be a service to the universe if ata's wiki was filled out comprehensively.
At the top of the Nootropics forum is a sticky which indexes the best threads by subject. It looks like exactly what you're looking for.
This one in particular looks like a great getting-started guide.
Which classes could I reasonably sit in on at U.C. Berkeley that would give me the most leverage for IA research? I was thinking neuroscience-type classes, but perhaps pharmacology or nutrition classes would be equally or more useful? I have no idea how universities work.
Hi, neighbor! (Are there many LWers around here?)
Well, there's about five in my house =)
Plus John Maxwell, Lucas Sloan, and probably some folks I'm forgetting.
Yes indeed! I'm not actually your neighbor yet: the SIAI Visiting Fellows house is trying to move to Berkeley. Hopefully they'll get that figured out soon. I personally fly into town early October. LW folk Kevin, MBlume, and Emil all live in a house in Berkeley. If SIAI moves to Berkeley then to that list will be added quite a few others. There are probably other LWers in Berkeley that I don't know about yet. With some luck Berkeley will become the Singularitarian/Neorationalist nexus.
Is neorationalist the term we are adopting for the kind of Rationality espoused on LW, to distinguish from Cartesian Rationalism?
Yvain has used x-rationality for extreme rationality.
I sort of wish it were, but I think only one or two people use it. The problem is that it's not really anything like old-style rationalism and so calling it neorationalism is misleading. 'Bayesianism' is normally taken to be the philosophy, 'rationalist' the adherent. Unfortunately, rationality is more than just Bayesianism, so that too is inaccurate. The whole lack of an -ism thing is kind of a downer. 'Evidentialism' or something might work as a description of our epistemology but it fails to connect to the 'winning' part of rationality. Bayesian decision theory-ism is what we're trying to achieve, I think, but we need something more aesthetic. Suggestions?
The lack of an -ism thing is a strength. -isms are bad thinking.
-isms are bad to identify with, but make philosophies easier to talk about. People here already call themselves aspiring rationalists; they're already identifying with a group. But they're generally smart enough to keep that from crippling their ability to think. Having an -ism would allow 'our movement' to have a Wikipedia page and the like, for instance. It's just a mechanism of nomenclature.
If people here really do call themselves aspiring rationalists, especially elsewhere, that's bad. I really need to finish my post on this.
I heuristically associate people who "reject all labels" or "refuse to be pigeonholed" with a) High Broderism, b) conceited windbaggism, c) lack of intent to communicate clearly and efficiently. I also think "aspiring rationalist" is a perfectly reasonable thing for someone to call herself.
But I do hope you write your post and make your argument - perhaps you don't mean to say anything like the things I am imagining.
They do so rather context sensitively from what I've seen. It seems a not unreasonable name to call one who is aspiring to be more rational. I think that perhaps you're taking it more seriously than most? Two cult koans comes to mind.
I once suggested "optimizer".
But really, I think "rationalist" works just fine. The connection with "rationality" is immediate; as for (Cartesian) "rationalism", that's a historical term applied by academics in the specific context of an obsolete debate between (mostly) dead people that has been utterly superseded by modern concepts such as those discussed here. Does anyone visit LW and seriously come away with the impression that we're "anti-empiricist"? I didn't think so.
Does this count?
Rationalist works fine, but I'm still kinda meh on "rationalism". I guess it's okay...
Berkeley? Center of the next great rationalist movement? That's going to take some luck.
That's okay too. I'm interested in interesting social people with good communication skills. I confess I don't give a damn if they call themselves rationalists or roosters.
I can't say I'm surprised--I can imagine that a certain segment of Berkeley culture intersects neatly with LW's premise.
My interest in the area has led me to go and start a full phamacology degree. Give me a few years and I'll tell you which subjects were the most interesting. ;)
If what you want is information, you're probably better off not bothering with the classrooms and sticking to the library. If you need personal contact (whether for status/networking reasons or for more effectively locating the information you want), the important thing is to become acquainted with the right people, and going to their classes is only one way to do that.
SSRIs have neuroprotective properties among other things, some good (insomnia treatment, depression treatment, premature ejaculation treatment), and some bad (big list of typical drug side effects like nausea).
I'm unsure how much alcohol I should drink.
I'm perfectly happy abstaining. And I know that my memory and computer programming abilities are temporarily impaired by even one drink.
But there's fairly persuasive evidence that several drinks daily causes old people to live longer. With the notable exception of social isolation (people tend to drink more when they're socializing), just about everything I can imagine was controlled for.
I wonder how many of the non-drinkers are super-tasters. If so, this could make dietary differences (like avoiding dark green veggies) which would affect longevity.
On the other hand, this is a long inferential chain, and just to generalize from one example, I don't like the taste of alcohol or other bitter flavors (grapefruit, coffee unless considerably buffered), but enjoy most dark green veggies.
Fascinating idea for another confound they didn't control against. How common is what you call a super-taster, though? If it's infrequent enough, it can't possibly explain the entirety of the huge effect in the study.
wikipedia-- the article puts the prevalence at about 25% for people of European decent, but they're defining supertasters as people who experience tastes more intensely, and it does correlate with disliking alcohol and bitter flavors.
On the other hand, using the expansive definition of supertaster, for all I know there are people who experience bitter intensely, enjoy it, and make fine distinctions between different bitter flavors.
I suspect, although I haven't tested the hypothesis, that I am a supertaster. Dark green veggies are delicious cooked. I love the smell but hate the taste of coffee. I don't like grapefruit by itself, although I've consumed sweetened grapefruit juice that was okay. And the single most repulsive taste experience I have ever had involved a rum-soaked tiramisu crust. I haven't tasted any alcohol since - I'll use wine to cook once in a while, but I make sure that the alcohol all boils off. I can't get myself to bring anything that smells like alcohol to my lips.
I tried eating some raw Swiss chard-- it was tolerable, and the texture of the stalks is like celery but better, but I definitely prefer the taste cooked. Someone with less tolerance for bitter would probably have hated it.
Another thing that should be taken into account -- though, as far as I know, it's not discussed explicitly by any serious research into the subject -- is that with many people who drink, being a total abstainer can be a great obstacle to building trust .
From what I've observed, drinkers are apt to be prejudiced against abstainers in social situations, treating them as prissy and judgmental types in front of whom one should be extremely cautious before divulging any potentially compromising opinions and information. I myself usually have this attitude when I first meet people in parties and similar places, and I think it is on the whole a useful heuristic, though I will quickly override it as soon as I get more information about the person. (There are several people who are abstainers and nevertheless enjoy the highest level of trust from me.) I obviously have no systematic data, but it does seem like lots of people employ the same heuristic, though many would never admit it explicitly.
Excellent point: I know I tend to feel the same way about vegans (I eat dairy+meat) initially.
'Drinks' is really ambiguous. Wine drinkers average something like 18 points better than beer drinkers on IQ tests, indicating that there are very large confounding variables at play.
True. You really have to believe it's alcohol that's making a difference to just talk about "drinks". I do believe they would have noticed if it were only red-wine drinkers who benefited (via reservatol, say), though. I imagine their data included the kind of drinks imbibed.
The 18 IQ points of wine > beer is clearly mostly snobbery/signaling :)
They didn't control for social isolation? I wouldn't take that lightly at all. I would be astonished if sociable people didn't live longer.
I didn't read the full text of the original study, but someone pointed out that "social-behavior factors" didn't include the amount of time spent hanging out with friends/colleagues/family and drinking.
The reason I take this study as any evidence at all is that it's not the first such study to indicate that drinking increases lifespan, and because they did control for quite a few things.
The link didn't work for me but assuming it refers to this study, controlling for socio-behavioural factors (which includes measures of social support) significantly reduces but does not eliminate the effect.
Could that just be because the controls used are imperfect measures of what we should be controlling for?
It could. The balance of evidence makes it seem unlikely that moderate alcohol consumption has negative health consequences and quite plausible that it has some health benefits (particularly if red wine is consumed) however.
That's right. The link no longer points directly to the text.
A shockingly high percentage of undergraduates illegally use ADHD drugs. A group of researchers questioned 1,811 undergraduates at a large public U.S. college and found that 34% admitted illegally using ADHA stimulants.
The researchers conducted detailed interviews with 175 of the users. None of these users "sought out information from health professionals, medical or pharmaceutical reference guides, or even Internet sites before taking their first dose."
From the paper "Illicit use of prescription ADHD medications on a college campus: a multimethodological approach" by DeSantis AD, Webb EM, Noar SM, published in the Journal of American College Health. Not available online.
It is online. google scholar is awesome. pdf doc
The magic combination of things that work for me:
Regular exercise, i like running at least 5 days a week, tabata/endurance depending on the mood/energy levels.
Piracetam
Very strong coffee in the morning
Clear goals of what i want to accomplish
No sleep debt, and sufficient sleep everyday.
Last one is the hardest, but the weeks that manage to get enough sleep, i get things done like an animal.
Are you worried about caffeine addiction at all? My understanding is that once your body gets used to it, the coffee is really only bringing you up to what would otherwise be your baseline.
My experience is that when used in combination with sufficient sleep, i.e., much more sleep than most Americans get, small doses of caffeine (e.g. 1 espresso/day) can be a permanently useful stimulant. The 'cost' of the alertness gets taken out of your bone density and immune system rather than via chemical habituation.
Exercise, especially tabata seems to mitigate some of these problems. I get sick quite often, but i recover very fast and my bones seem to be stronger. Of course it's just my subjective observation.
Your experience with tabata: subjective or did you find some research?
I'll still take a pass. :)
What is your experience? Have you tried stopping caffeine? Do you have objective measure of alertness?
Yes, on most days I have no caffeine. I frequently go 2-3 weeks without taking any caffeine at all except for, say, a fun-sized dark chocolate bar. I do not drink soda, take caffeniated pills, drink office coffee, or have access to other popular surrepetitious sources of caffeine, so it is unlikely that I am in denial about my caffeine consumption.
I do not have an objective measure of alertness, but I have been successfully confused by what appeared to be aytpical levels of alertness after misestimating the amount of caffeine in, e.g., a Grande Starbucks Frappucino (~120 mg vs. my estimate of 50 mg), gone back and checked the actual caffeine level, and found that it predicted my past alertness better than my estimated caffeine level. This happened twice with two different types of caffeniated beverages, both at times when I was habitually using caffeine at roughly the same dosages per day as the beverages in question.
This is a sufficient answer to my comment as well.
People have told me that human growth hormone supplements and sprays just don't work and that the only way to take it is via injection, with potential for dangerous side effects et cetera, making it infeasible for IA. Do others have additional input?
Mindfulness Meditation.
Wake up early.
The article you linked doesn't actually mention any intelligence benefits.
As far as I know, there are none. I mention it because I find I tend to be fresher and more motivated in the morning, so if I wanted to take up a new habit such as practicing dual n-back, I would schedule it in the morning. I'm really just throwing out ideas for the wiki.
As far as DNB goes, evening is better than morning: http://www.gwern.net/N-back%20FAQ#sleep
(My rule of thumb is that if something has to do with memory, you're best off doing it ceteris paribus before sleep.)
Thank you, I stand corrected.
God helmet. More info here where it's sold for $650. Kooky or credible or both?
Also, anyone know where to buy transcranial magnetic stimulation devices? Closest I found was this without an easily findable price tag. If not, do any engineers know if they'd be difficult to build?
I found a place that does TMS sessions in Berkeley that treat depression. Website here. I'll do more research to figure out if it'd be useful for things other than depression. This looks potentially promising, but I haven't found the original study yet (using Google Scholar).
Shouldn't be too tough to build. I'd sure want to make sure I know what field strengths to go for before I start inducing eddy currents in my brain though.
See this podcast for a description of one neuroscientist's experience with the God Helmet.
Clearly credible that the God helmet produces hallucinations, possibly really cool ones.
I recommend O'Reilly's Mind Performance Hacks and the accompanying Mentat Wiki. I was particularly interested in the exoself which is really just a combination of the Hipster PDA and a Motivaider.
Also, touchtyping is the closest thing to a Direct Neural Interface you can get today. If you don't know how to do it, learn!
Definitely if you program, and quite possibly if you don't, using a 'real' editor like vim, or emacs, is almost as much of an increase in productivity over something like textpad as touch-typing is over hunt-and-peck.
That sentence was awkward...
Using vim fluently : Textpad :: touch-typing : hunt-and-peck.
Also related to direct experience: use TeXmacs instead of LaTeX (even if it's auctex).
It's extremely frustrating returning to a 'normal' editor and trying to find the shortcut key for 'regex substitution'. ;)
Well, in Notepad, the keyboard shortcut for Find/Replace is Ctrl-H...
I'm referring to my favourite feature of vim: regex substitution. Commands like :%s:(\w+)(.*\s+)(\w+)$:\3\2\1:
Yeah, old-fashioned find/replace just isn't as versatile as regular expressions. :(
Obligatory XKCD link.
I've never been able to get over the initial learning curve of emacs or vi.... every once in awhile I try for a few days, but find myself not advancing up the curve fast enough to get real work done and end up ditching it for a conventional editor. Do you have any tips for how to quickly bring yourself up to speed on one of the editors, i.e. get far enough up the learning curve to be more productive with it than with a traditional editor, in a short period of time?
Others have given good advice; in particular, the idea of using a cheat sheet. People have made nice ones, but it's easy to make your own. It should show how to do the things you're already doing in your current editor. Other than that, the "trick" is just to commit yourself to using your chosen new editor all the time (except for emergencies).
If you don't already touch-type, learn that first. You should have a diagram of the keyboard (or at least the hard-to-remember parts). When you forget where a key is, look at the diagram not the keyboard.
If you choose Vim, feel free to PM me if you can't figure out how to do something in it.
I use emacs as my editor of choice, though I've never really become a super-expert in it, and I recommend it warmly.
What I advise is to make a list of basic keyboard commands and look it up whenever you're doing something; in my experience, you should memorize them effectively very soon. What I would initially include into the list are basic file commands (opening, saving, navigation, revert-buffer), copy/paste, find/search/replace, and etags commands (if you're programming). If you want, you can post your list, and I can tell you what I think should be added to it. (I still occasionally find out about some amazingly useful feature I hadn't known.)
Also, the default setup for emacs can be ugly and inconvenient, so the first step should be to customize your .emacs configuration file. You can find lots of good examples if you just google for them, and modify one as you like. By the way, if you can, install emacs 23, which supports magnificent anti-aliased fonts.