"They're really trying to raise the intellectual level this year" sounds like music to my ears.

Target audiences are different. More competent people prefer absorbing more dense presentation that leaves out obvious steps and communicates more sophisticated ideas faster, while newcomers need all steps spelled out for a simple enough version of the ideas. Video lectures are usually targeted as people new to the field, or generally less technically sophisticated, such as average university students. By looking for video lectures, you apply a heavy selection bias for this kind of target audience, and so you should expect the presentation to be more transparent. Written material, on the other hand, may target different groups of people. By searching for a random paper or book on the subject, you are more likely to encounter more difficult material. On the other hand, if the topic is popular enough, you should be able to find easy introductory written material as well, you'd just need to filter the material by less obvious cues than it being a video lecture course. One heuristic is to look for lecture notes.

Correct. Actually more like an 11.1% annual return, but yes. This is 2% above the expected long-term rate of return for stocks of about 9%.

I should add, though, that when I invested, I could have invested anywhere between £0 and £10,000. I chose £500 because I was young and frightened of the "risks" of the market.

Had I invested all £10k, I would now be the proud owner of about £18,000.

"If P, then Q. P. Therefore, Not-Q." is just as basic and elemental an error as "If P, then Q. Q. Therefore, P." is.

I'm not sure I'd grant that. The second can be sneaky, in that you can encounter countless arguments of that form with true premises and a true conclusion. In the first example, on the other hand, true premises guarantee that the conclusion is false.

I'm not sure if there's a word for the latter category, but there probably should be. "The conjunction of the premises is inconsistent with the conclusion" is not nearly as awesome as, say, "Antivalid"

I like the staples - they all have their role to play in pushing the brain where you want it to go. Caffeine enhances concentration - my understanding is that continual small does (e.g. drink tea all day) are better than one big hit.

Alcohol mitigates biases against socially acceptable ideas by reducing inhibition. Think spirited debate over a pint, not all night bender. I find I am more receptive to odd ideas after a couple of beers.

THC (the main active agent in marijuana) is good for flashes of inspiration. I find my software designs when baked are brilliantly out of the box (the code itself usually needs a cleanup the next day). A downside is that it can affect short term memory, which reduces your ability to perform mental accounting. Best for working on large sheets of paper or whiteboards, during the planning/design phase of a project. The brain seems to adapt to it - smoke every day and you just think you're more inspired...

What would be mechanism of action of sugar for a healthy individual? Blood glucose levels are kept in a pretty narrow band, so eating sugar generates insulin spike, and unless you just exercised and have depleted muscle glycogen storage it gets converted straight into fat. Insulin spikes also cause sleepiness.

Modafinil works extremely badly on me - it masks lack of sleep well enough, but it makes my mental performance extremely low, and makes me very irritable and unfriendly. Basically I get all side effects of sleep deprivation except I'm not aware of needing some sleep.

I have mixed experience with caffeine and amphetamine-like drugs. They seem to be useful for tiredness and focus enhancements to a degree.

Well, yes, on Pg. 31 of 'The Ancestor's Tale',

• Back to the Russian fox experiment, whcih demonstrates the speed with which domestication can happen, and the likelihood that a train of incidental effects would fllow in the wake of selection for tameness. It is entirely probable that cattle, pigs, horses, sheep, goats, chickens, gees,e ducks and camels followed a course which was just as fast, and just as rich in unexpected side-effects. It also seems plausible that we ourselves evolved down a parallel road of domestication after the Agricultural Revolution, towards our own version of tameness and associated by-product traits. In some cases, the story of our own domestication is clearly written in our genes. The classic example, meticulously documented by WIlliam Durham in his book Coevolution, is lactose tolerance... [continued later on the page and then to 32]
• ...My generalization concerne dthe human species as a whole and, by implication, the wild Homo Sapiens fromn which we are all descended. It is as if I had said, 'Wolves are big, fierce carnivores that hunt in packs and bay at the moon', knowing full well that Pekineses and Yorkshire terriers belie it. The difference is that we have a seperate word, dog, for domestic wolf, but not for domestic human... [continued pg 33]...
• Is lactose tolerance just the tip of the iceberg? Are our genomes riddled with evidences of domestication, affecting not just our biochemistry but our minds? Like Belyaev's domesticated foxes, and like the domesticated wolves that we call dogs, have we become tamer, more lovable, with the human equivalents of floppy ears, soppy faces and wagging tails? I leave you with that thought, and move hastily on. -Dawkins, 'The Ancestor's Tale'

For what its worth....

People normally read only their own horoscope in the newspaper. If they forced themselves to read the other 11 they'd be far less impressed with the accuracy of their own.

-- Richard Dawkins, "Unweaving the Rainbow"

I think it's simply false that human reproduction now selects for the 'tamest' humans, whatever that means. Now, as always, human reproduction selects for those who are most able to reproduce.

It does not make sense to say that human reproduction does not select for the 'tamest' humans because it really selects for those most able to reproduce. Those are different levels of abstraction. The question is: are the 'tamest' humans the ones most able to reproduce, and therefore selected for by evolution?

I feel as though if you are hoping to preserve the specific biological scope of humanity you have some significant roadblocks on the way. Our species was generated in millions of years of shifting genes with selection factors blatant to subtle, and more recently we've stripped as many selection factors out as we can. (For good reason, natural selection is a harsh mistress...)

Malaria etc still is a selecting factor as has been documented but they're greatly reduced. In Dawkin's 'The Ancestor's Tale', he tells the story of the Russian Silver Fox breeding experiment in which wild foxes were selected for tame characteristics, resulting in foxes that behaved like border collies.

He hypothesizes that if humans were subject to a similar non-natural sexual selection, picking for the 'tamest' humans (adult male chimpanzees will kill each other and definitely don't work well with groups, while adolescent chimps can work together in large groups no problem -- this is another suggestion w/ the skeleton and other claims for the whole idea of species right after the human-chimpanzee concestor being pushed toward neoteny in order to work in larger groups.)

The border-collie-foxes ended up having floppy ears, liked being pet, yipped and enjoyed playing with humans. If Dawkins is correct, we're a bunch of domesticated humans in a similar fashion. When you throw a wrench into natural selection like that, things start to go out of whack instantly like the constant birth problems Pugs have, bloat in Bassett hounds to back problems in daschunds. It's difficult to predict -- a part of the naturally selected whole that had one purpose, modified to another, can have all kinds of unexpected repercussions. Anything that can 'loves' to do double or triple duty in the body.

So unless you snapshot the human genome the way it is and keep people from randomly reproducing as they like to do, you don't get to maintain a 'pristine' human condition.

Is it preferable to slowly wreck and junk up your genome and species via a more or less unguided (at least in the center of the curve) process, or attempt to steer it in a humane way without eugenics by genetic engineering even though the consequences could be drastic?

The bottom line is that our species will change no matter what we do. I don't know for sure, but I would prefer thought going into it over neglect and leaving the whole thing up to chaos.