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 .
I don't know what that means. All that shows is in one small sample, dopamine levels went up after staying up. Well, that's not surprising: they were either going to go up or go down, so you might as well flip a coin to choose...
With regards to the whole nootropics issue, none of the very high performing people I know regularly takes some wonder drug (other than caffeine, and even that in moderation), nor is any wonder drug common in programming contests or other intellectual sports.
Why do you think you would know and on what basis do you claim they are not common? Most people carefully conceal any drug use, especially when it's something like modafinil or Adderall they either are obtaining illegally or have fraudulently gotten a prescription for. Modafinil usage is notorious in Silicon Valley, amphetamine use (in the form of Adderall and Vyvanse) is even more notorious in the Ivy League and higher ed in general, and surveys like the Nature survey suggest that quite a few top scientists are very quietly abusing stimulant on the side.
Alcohol use is very notorious in the higher ed in general too, so is all sorts of drug use. Hollywood is notorious for drug abuse too.
Are you referring to this survey by chance? Around 20% ever used, 10% regularly.
It's perfectly consistent with my opinion that gains are a: generally small, and b: likely occur only in a portion of the population. (a random small change to brain parameters should be expected to improve performance in about 50% of people, assuming brain parameters are not precisely at the local maximum for performance)
You can contrast that w...
“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: