the Communists were OK with the idea of being better than well and were willing to pay for research into performance enhancement (you can read about some of the related material in Stambler's A History of Life-Extensionism), and so when their researchers went looking, they found.
What's the attitude of present day China when it comes to performance enhancement? Shouldn't they also care about it?
I don't know too much about the East Asian countries other than culturally, they seem to be massively anti-drugs of any kind except tea & tobacco (with a minor exception for amphetamines because they help you work harder); every time I come across a discussion of drugs, especially psychedelics, in a Japanese or Chinese fiction or nonfiction work, I am struck by how ignorant the author obviously is and how they are peddling out of date War on Drugs & Reefer Madness hysteria.
In China, this might have something to do with the nationalist propaganda an...
So Scott Alexander's post at http://slatestarcodex.com/2016/03/01/2016-nootropics-survey-results/ shows that the most "effective" "nootropics" have still been the ones that have existed for a long time. What do these results really mean, though? Is it possible that people are just worse at noticing the subtler effects of the other drugs, or are just much worse at disciplining themselves enough to correctly use the racetams or noopept (as in, with choline)?
How much potential is there in innovation in nootropics? What is holding this innovation back, if anything? It feels like there hasn't been any real progress over the last 15 years (other than massively increased awareness), but could targeted drug discovery (along with people willing to be super-liberal with their experimentation) finally lead to some real breakthroughs?