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paper-machine comments on Announcing the Quantified Health Prize - Less Wrong
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Comments (140)
Sweet, gwern's modafinil fund was getting kind of low anyway.
I'm flattered (and I also see that I am becoming notorious for modafinil, I hope this doesn't cause me problems later in life!), but I'm not actually sure I want to participate. The deadline is fairly short compared to last time, and dietary minerals haven't been a previous focus of mine. When I look at the list in Wikipedia of essentials or 'other' as well, the only ones I've looked into are:
iodine
Which as far as I know, while very important to human development and especially IQ, must be administered chronically and during said development - and so is fairly useless for 'adults (20-60)'.
EDIT: in my further writeup on iodine (http://www.gwern.net/Nootropics#iodine), I was able to find 2 studies which used iodine on middle schoolers or college-age adults; in neither was any significant effect on IQ noticed.
Magnesium
Which may be useful in acute doses for adults, but this is based on some highly speculative small mouse studies on magnesium l-threonate, and so any material on it would be awfully short.
Potassium
User:Kevin claims potassium in various forms has helped him a lot. This has a surface plausibility because of potassium's role in neurons, but is as or more speculative than the magnesium.
I suppose I could package up the research on those 3 and hope for one of the smaller $500 prizes if it looks like, as last time, there will be few participants.
Would you be more inclined to participate on an extended deadline?
For what little it's worth (since I'm not a potential participant here), the deadline struck me as a short one. Participants are going to do this in their spare time, and it's a busy time of year (holiday/family obligations for many people, and end-of-academic-term obligations for students and academics).
Probably, but with diminishing returns - an additional month is worth almost as much as 2 months. More important to me is how many people would be participating and what I could dig up on any minerals.
Nice pun.
I was going to make a comment about how gwern should do this, but I see you beat me to it!