A place to discuss potentially promising methods of intelligence amplification in the broad sense of general methods, tools, diets, regimens, or substances that boost cognition (memory, creativity, focus, etc.): anything from SuperMemo to Piracetam to regular exercise to eating lots of animal fat to binaural beats, whether it works or not. Where's the highest expected value? What's easiest to make part of your daily routine? Hopefully discussion here will lead to concise top level posts describing what works for a more self-improvement-savvy Less Wrong.
Lists of potential interventions are great, but even better would be a thorough analysis of a single intervention: costs, benefits, ease, et cetera. This way the comment threads will be more structured and organized. Less Wrong is pretty confused about IA, so even if you're not an expert, a quick analysis or link to a metastudy about e.g. exercise could be very helpful.
Added: Adam Atlas is now hosting an IA wiki: BetterBrains! Bookmark it, add to it, make it awesome.
Being able to synthesize vitamin C would have been a huge evolutionary advantage, given how many people died of scurvy throughout history, but evolution never managed it. Other chemicals have the same problem: evolution is severely limited in how many things it can try, which sorts of chemicals it can try, and how large the selection effect has to be for it to take off.
As others have said, vitamin C synthesis is something most mammals could do. Apes lost it because there's not much use for the ability when your diet contains so much fruit. Adaptations with no use get dropped by evolution pretty quickly deterministic way. Once it's gone, it's hard to get it back.
Evolution has no problem with small selection effects - even tiny ones work quite nicely once a mutation gets past the early small numbers stage (which admittedly makes mutations less likely to stick.)
Evolution in humans would historically have been quite slow bec... (read more)