With regards to your nootropics and evolution article, something to note is that we in fact do appear to have a system for regulating dopamine up when sleep deprived (dopamine is imitated by drugs such as amphetamines), to keep us going.
We do? As far as I've ever seen, sleep homeostatic pressure is pretty relentless, there is no off switch for it. As far as I know, modafinil's mechanism hasn't been pinned down, but modafinil's dopamine effects (while much touted in the media as indicating risk of addiction despite the abundant real world evidence against addiction being a substantial risk) don't seem to be large and some of the followup research was weak.
I'm on the phone, google sleep deprivation dopamine. A built in equivalent of fighter pilots taking amphetamines to stay awake.
edit: this should get you started . Ultimately, some important functions having to do with adjustments of synaptic strength (e.g. synaptic renormalization) seem to be done during sleep, and it makes sense that animals evolved a mechanism by which they can partially compensate for the lack of maintenance and post-pone such maintenance until next night.
With regards to the whole nootropics issue, none of the very high performing peop...
“It cannot be gotten for gold, neither shall silver be weighed for the price thereof. / It cannot be valued with the gold of Ophir, with the precious onyx, nor the sapphire. / The gold and the crystal cannot equal it: and the exchange of it shall not be for vessels of fine gold. / No mention shall be made of coral, or of pearls: for the price of wisdom is above rubies.”
Another 477 days are past, so what have I been up to? In roughly topical & chronological order, here are some major additions to
gwern.net:Statistics:
QS:
Black-markets:
Bitcoin:
Tech:
Literature/fiction
Sand, on:
compiled & expanded anthology of my poems
Misc:
Site:
I began A/B testing my site design to try to improve readability:
I began a newsletter/mailing-list; the back-issues are online: