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wedrifid comments on (Virtual) Employment Open Thread - Less Wrong
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My observation is general. 'Money for survival' is close to the minimum ambition that will require (emotionally) hard work, and learning and doing things you seriously suck at that will make you feel stupid. Maximising the chance of existential win is far, far greater. This is why observations such as those are useful in as much as they are identifying a problem that may need to be worked around.
This is one of the most prevalent forms of self sabotage in existence.
Right, so I attack that problem, because I must. I've picked up skills before, it's not a general problem for me. I'm good at a lot of things. I brag about it way more than I should. I just don't like learning things these days unless the payoff seems good enough. 'Learning to code' doesn't seem all that worth it when there are lots of other more direct things I could be doing, like studying the neurobiology and chemistry behind the mechanisms of nootropics.
And then, of course you can collaborate with me. I've got programming skills, know enough stats to get by and am now studying pharmacology and more statistics. Since I'm typically drawn to the technical side of things and also probably better at making money than neurochemistry I'll quite probably end up just making enough money to employ folks to research the interesting stuff. At least that is my plan.
To me, it sounds like web programming fits the bill of the type of skill that you say you want. The only question is whether it will be worth the effort to get through the learning curve (though you can basically get started doing stuff very fast), and dealing the frustration of problems that take time to solve.
I really have no idea how well the benefits and costs will match up to other things you can spend your time on, but it does seem that web programming skills could be an asset for your effort in the domains of nootropics and existential risk reduction. Here are a few random ideas that web programming could help you implement:
Every cause wants to be a cult... and also have a sweet website.
This is true. I actually have a lot of fun programming (when it's going well), and especially when I get to throw in graphics design stuff. (I really like nautiluses, so I wrote this script in Processing that made a photoshopped and edited nautilus lazily follow my mouse pointer around... it was sooooooo cute. Ahem.) I think I'll pick it up, but do so during the 'fun' hours of my day.
Kid, hate to break it to ya, but have you looked at all the studies about nootropics?
There are "veerrrryy few" done in normal healthy adults. Their actual effects, are very contradictory, and not that great. Sure, there are a few glowing reports about it....but there are also a great deal of "this is bunk"
Even those studies done in rats and the elderly have few solid and stable results. They are often different for each study.
As a good rule, anything that works is either illegal or prescription, or there is a movement to make it illegal(like salvia) Why? Because, stuff that works, the word gets around quickly. Quickly enough, that worried parents and politicians with ambition find out about it too.
A statistically-significant number of people I know have had significant effects from piracetam. The vast majority of this group were very familiar with other mind-altering substances and could therefore probably be trusted to distinguish actual effects from pure placebo.
I don't think that's a good argument against itsunder9000: I've seen plenty of supposedly sophisticated people who you would expect to be able to distinguish from placebo advocate things which did not do jack for me in my own blinded or randomized experiments.
For example, the people who praise LSD microdosing have generally taken more psychedelics than I've even heard of; and what happened when I did a blind randomized self-experiment? No effects (1 trend toward benefit, 1 trend towards harm). Seth Roberts had been self-experimenting for decades longer than I have, and believed that treadmill usage benefited his spaced repetition performance; what happened when I did a randomized self-experiment while skeptical? Statistically-significant harm to my spaced repetition performance, the opposite of what this sophisticate's introspection told him. Seth Roberts thought vitamin D at night hurt his going to sleep and taken in the morning, improved his awakening the next morning; what happened when I did a blind randomized self-experiment? I found that he was right about the first thing, and wrong about the second (no benefit). And so on.
I didn't believe that much in the placebo effect before I started blind self-experiments. But I sure as heck do now.
(That said, I don't necessarily agree with itsunder9000. Big clinical medical trials are in unhealthy old adults, yes, but the psychology trials are usually done with that white lab rat of psychology - college students. And there are a few nootropics with enough studies to have some confidence in the claims.)
It's definitely not a knockdown argument, it's true. It's mostly a large pile of circumstantial evidence that makes me slow to doubt it's effectiveness.
Piracetam has a reputation for being subtle. That doesn't mean it's not working (aspirin's effects are subtle too), but it does mean that in the absence of at least semi-rigorous experiments, it's hard to distinguish from placebo even for people who're skeptical and experienced with psychoactives.
Gwern's experience suggests a small effect.
One friend of mine (neuropsych major, experienced with a wide variety of psychoactives) got similar but slightly stronger results with what I think was over a slightly longer period than gwern; I think he posted his results only on Facebook, though, so I'm not comfortable sharing a link to his writeup.
And anecdotally, a wide sample of people at the college found other placebos not giving the same benefit; every finals week a large table of food and mostly-placebos is available via a student group, and enough people swore by piracetam over the others that when it disappeared in a particular year (it's sale got somehow regulated), its absence was missed.
Is this talking about me (SL), or is there some other person of our acquaintance who's written up an experience with piracetam? I can chime in with my experiences if so desired.
Indeed, it is you! Please provide first-hand details. (I'm pretty sure no one else of our mutual acquaintance has written up anything.)
Okay. I'm not going to post my writeup since it's a little outdated — close to two years old now — and contains a lot of info irrelevant to this discussion, but the gist:
I tried out piracetam very actively (using it frequently, varying a lot of things, and closely noting the effects) for about two months in summer 2012, and have been using it periodically since then. I didn't notice any long-term effects, though I don't think I've actually ever tried to test the effects of a fixed long-term regimen.
What I did find was very dramatic acute effects, starting within an hour or two after taking it and lasting for a couple hours. These effects included music enhancement, visual enhancement (colors look brighter, textures look sharper), relief from anxiety/depression accompanied by a sense of clarity, and often mild euphoria.
While I haven't done any blind tests and therefore can't be entirely sure the effects aren't placebo, they're often quite strong (e.g. piracetam has helped me go from being very anxious to feeling very clear and self-possessed in situations where I wouldn't expect that to happen otherwise) and some of them feel quite unlike any state I experience when not using piracetam.
It does seem to be difficult to get piracetam to work right, though — there seems to be idiosyncrasy in the dose people respond to, you have to figure out how much choline to take with it, tolerance builds, you might need to take a high initial dose ('attack dose') to get effects immediately, etc. I can see how this unreliability might seem characteristic of a placebo, but I can also see how it might cause people to falsely conclude that something was a placebo because they didn't get effects from it easily.