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atucker comments on Limitless, a Nootropics-Centered Movie - Less Wrong Discussion
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Judging from the trailer, the drug doesn't seem to have any side effects (except for maybe dependence).
Any good nootropic must produce dependence, because if you stop taking them, you become godshatter.
To rephrase that without the sci-fi jargon - if you start out crippled and a drug fixes it, but you go back to the way you were when you stop taking it, then you're dependent on that drug. Similarly, if you start out average and a drug makes you awesome, but you aren't willing to be merely average when you could be awesome instead, then again, that's dependency. People speak of "dependency" as though it's intrinsically bad, but it isn't; what's bad is when something (a) leaves you worse off than you started if you stop taking it (that is, it has withdrawal symptoms), and (b) there is a reason why you'll eventually have to stop taking it (such as a tolerance that builds up until it's providing no benefits other than avoiding withdrawal symptoms.) In many cases, one or both of these does not apply, so dependency is not a bad thing even if it happens.
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It was mentioned in an Eliezer post, and in the thread there was this comment:
but I'm not seeing the connection here...?
Your unaugmented brain wouldn't be able to process the memories and concepts formed while under the influence of the drug. So you would end up with a head full of incomprehensible data stuffed there by a superintelligent former-you.
Not that it helps alleviate your confusion, but I'll note that he's borrowing the term from Vernor Vinge in Fire Upon The Deep, where the "any sufficiently advanced intelligence is indistinguishable from a god" principle is applied liberally.
TheOtherDave is right. Eliezer borrowed the word but not the entire concept.
What I meant was, "you'll become more stupid/slow-thinking/... but have memories of when you were much smarter, and that is intolerable."
This pretty much describes the first month after my stroke. It's no fun at all... but it isn't intolerable. People are pretty good at recalibrating.
That said, as has been said by others, the other piece of it is perhaps more problematic: your head will be stuffed with memories that you can no longer fully process. This is OK, as long as the corrupted versions of those memories that you end up creating in the course of trying to process them aren't dangerous.
By way of analogy, consider system A with a max string length of N chars trying to read a database file written by a system B with a max of 2n chars. It might be OK (the strings we care about happen to be <=N). It might be a relatively isolated failure (a few strings get truncated and some data gets lost). It might be catastrophic (the strings aren't terminated and overflow into adjacent registers and system A crashes).