"Drug X improves performance measure Y" will in general be an incomplete description of the effects of drug X.
To be a rationalist is to be the kind of person who mentally adds "among other as yet undiscovered effects" to every single bullet point above.
Upvoted for naming what was bothering me.
Of course I imagine some drugs are rather well understood by now. But Lukeprog's post doesn't seem to touch on the safety and potential downsides of taking this stuff, which would be useful.
(Also, creepy pill-man is creepy.)
I'd like to share one day's worth of experience with modafinil.
I noticed a huge difference in alertness. I was filled with an urge to be doing something every second. I don't believe I was more intelligent (some of the work I did that day turned out to be low quality) but I was much more productive. And happy. I felt like I was just "riding the day" -- that going through life, minute by minute, running errands, checking items off my to-do list, and seeing what happened next, was boundlessly fascinating.
I suspect that, at least for me, and maybe for others, most unhappiness is really fatigue, coupled with the guilt of not having accomplished much in a state of fatigue. Simply not being tired makes me deliriously happy. I am not surprised by the study that coffee reduces depression in women, though I know to be suspicious of medical study methodology. The symptoms of clinical depression look a lot like the symptoms of chronic sleep deprivation (fatigue, inability to concentrate, clumsiness, weight gain or weight loss, dramatic and irrational emotions). It's possible that some people with symptoms of depression are actually sleep deprived (or that a typical amount of sleep for a modern-day working or student life is too little for their biological needs.) I had a year when I thought I was losing my mind; in retrospect, it may have had something to do with getting no more than five hours of sleep a night.
If you don't mind sharing, how do you plan to do this? Is it as simple as "this controlled substance makes my life better, will you prescribe it for me?" Or are you "fortunate" enough to have a condition that warrants its prescription?
I ask because I've had similar experiences with Modafinil (my nickname for it is "executive lubricant"), and it is terribly frustrating to be stuck without a banned goods store.
A key symptom of depression is lack of willpower - depressives don't normally have the willpower not to sleep.
For me personally, and I suspect also for a significant number of other people, it takes willpower to go to sleep as well as to wake up early enough. In the morning, the path of least resistance for me is to sleep in, but in the evening, it is to do something fun until I'm overcome with overwhelming sleepiness, which won't happen until it's far too late to maintain a normal sleeping schedule. Therefore, if I were completely deprived of willpower, my "days" would quickly degenerate into cycles of much more than 24 hours, falling asleep as well as waking up at a much later hour each time.
Now, the incentive to wake up early enough (so as not to miss work etc.) is usually much stronger than the incentive to go to bed early enough, which is maintained only by the much milder and more distant threat of feeling sleepy and lousy next day. So a moderate crisis of willpower will have the effect of making me chronically sleep-deprived, since I'll still muster the willpower to get up for work, but not the willpower to go to bed instead of wasting time until the wee hours.
(This is exacerbated by the fact that when I'm sleep-deprived, I tend to feel lousy and wanting to doze off through the day, but then in the evening I suddenly start feeling perfectly OK and not wanting to sleep at all.)
I've been self-experimenting with piracetam the past few months.
I usually study from a site called USMLEWorld with a selection of difficult case-based medical questions. For example, it might give a short story about a man coming into a hospital with a certain set of symptoms, and explain a little about his past medical history, and then ask multiple choice questions about what the most likely diagnosis is, or what medication would be most helpful. These are usually multi-step reasoning questions - for example, they might ask what side effect a certain patient could expect if given the ideal treatment for his disease, and before answering you need to determine what disease he has, what's the ideal treatment, and then what side effects that treatment could cause. My point is they're complicated (test multiple mental skills and not just simple recall) and realistic (similar to the problems a real doctor would encounter on the job).
I've tried comparing my performance on these questions on versus off piracetam. My usual procedure is to do twenty questions, take 2400 mg piracetam + 600 mg lecithin-derived choline, go do something fun and relaxing for an hour (about the time I've been to...
Wouldn't a comparison between control-then-piracetam days with control-then-control days tell us a bit more about how effective piracetam is, accounting for possible fatigue?
Lukeprog, I noticed in your last two posts you've used a stock photo to represent the subject of the post. I may be different from everyone else, but despite the usefulness of this design choice, I associate it with probloggers or whatever you would call them. So, personally (and this is only personal taste), I would try to use them very sparingly. I hope you don't mind my suggestion.
You aren't the target audience for the stock photo, it's a random person seeing Less Wrong for the first time. People like pictures.
Having experimented with nootropics (using gwern's site as a guide), I can report there is little exciting in the way of "being smarter" - but there is plenty of low-hanging fruit in the stimulants! Being more alert and motivated is a pretty good proxy for being smarter to boot.
Lately I've been extraordinarily surprised at how effective potassium and potassium salt are. By which I mean that simple potassium is probably the most positively mind altering supplement I've ever tried.
Maybe also this: Single Dose of 'Magic Mushrooms' Hallucinogen May Create Lasting Personality Change
A single high dose of the hallucinogen psilocybin, the active ingredient in so-called "magic mushrooms," was enough to bring about a measurable personality change lasting at least a year in nearly 60 percent of the 51 participants in a new study, according to the Johns Hopkins researchers who conducted it.
From the abstract:
...A large body of evidence, including longitudinal analyses of personality change, suggests that core personality traits are predominantly stable after age 30. To our knowledge, no study has demonstrated changes in personality in healthy adults after an experimentally manipulated discrete event. Intriguingly, double-blind controlled studies have shown that the classic hallucinogen psilocybin occasions personally and spiritually significant mystical experiences that predict long-term changes in behaviors, attitudes and values. (...) Consistent with participant claims of hallucinogen-occasioned increases in aesthetic appreciation, imagination, and creativity, we found significant increases in Openness following a high-dose psilocybin session. In partici
My own impression on reading that yesterday was that your average LWer doesn't really need Openness; what we need is Conscientiousness!
EDIT: I've posted article based on Spent dealing with Openness: http://lesswrong.com/lw/82g/on_the_openness_personality_trait_rationality/
The statistics in the linked paper are very badly done: see Does psilocybin cause changes in personality? Maybe, but not so fast.
Creatine improves cognitive performance.
Isn't this primarily true for vegetarians? I was under the impression that most people have all the creatine their brains can make use of.
What about assuefaction? Drugs to which the brain can adjust and compensate doesn't seem to be good long-term improvement.
I decided to try some of the suggestions here. There was a piracetam powder I ordered. How on earth are you supposed to ingest that crap?!! I have such a powerful negative taste reaction, even disguising the ~2g in 3 glasses of water, or 2 glasses of milk, or in a mouthful of food (though it suggests consuming on an empty stomach)... that even if it was prescribed by a doctor to cure aging, I'd be hard-pressed to take the recommended dosage on a daily basis. What can I do to continue this experiment without having to annihilate my taste buds?
The post would be more actionable if you could give a bit more analysis on what side effects are reported for each substance.
Could you expand the "CRT" initialism? I'm not finding it in the linked text on a quick scan. Thanks!
What about improving rationality with neurofeedback? The theory is that if you can see some kind of representation of your own brain activity (EEG for example), you should be able to learn to modify it. It has been shown that people could learn to control pain by watching the activity of their pain centres (http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg18224451.400-controlling-pain-by-watching-your-brain.html). Neurofeedback is also used to treat ADHD, increase concentration, and "it has been shown that it can improve medical students' memory and make them feel calmer before exams."
There are several key reasons that rationalists may underestimate the dangers of drugs. I can also think of one good reason, other than the obvious one (which is the application of rationality techniques including calling on helpful social influence)
hypothesised risk factors
There is a big distance in the kinds of inferences that can be made from consistently health literature and popular social commentary. Rationalists may be biased to base their decision to use or continue to use drugs based on medical evidence, without incorporating evidence from commo
Well, it's not surprising that drugs can help with cognition. But we've to be very careful about two things : the effects it has on other parts of the body, and the long-term effects, both to the body and to the brain itself.
The human body is a very complex and delicate machinery, and the human brain the most delicate part of it... it's very easy to create long term problems in it by trying to push it a bit too much. Just look at the professional sport players, and how badly they are damaged after a few years of taking drugs to enhance their performances.
T...
On the other hand, you should consider what evolution can do. Evolution is not the world's best algorithm for inventing things. However, it is an excellent optimising algorithm. Balancing multiple considerations to decide the optimum amount of substance A in your body is the sort of problem that algorithm should do really well.
Essentially the only exception to this rule is when your cells are reacting to DNA/RNA that doesn't belong to you. If cold virus RNA is making your nose run, stop it by all means. But you should trust your own body on most other matt...
Or as Eliezer puts it:
Algernon's Law: Any simple major enhancement to human intelligence is a net evolutionary disadvantage.
But here's gwern writing about about loopholes in Algernon's Law.
On the other hand, you should consider what evolution can do.
It frustrates me how often this argument against using mind enhancing substances is used and, more importantly, the weight it is given. Not only is evolution optimizing for different critiera (which DuncanS mentions) it is also optimising for an entirely different environment. Further, our expectations that random chemicals will be bad for us is to a massive extent screened off when we go ahead and test them and find that they make things better!
Yet another situation in which evolution should not be expected to give superior results to what we can come up with with science is when we know what we are going to be doing at a specific time. What is best as a general baseline is not going to be the best state when studying for a test. Which is in turn going to be less good when doing unpleasant and potentially traumatic things that you don't want to remember.
There can be harmul side-effects and that topic is not covered by the article; on the other hand, pure evolutionary argument can be doubted because of changed environment.
If I stimulate my brain, it is natural to assume my brain requires more energy now. So I probably need more glucose. In evolutionary relevant context, that would make me more likely to starve - after all, I would need more highly valued energy and thinking clearly wouldn't make a killed bull magically appear before me.
This is still true for the most of the Earth's population. It is not true for many of LessWrong readers, though. There are some primarily-mental jobs now (in some places of the world - the places where LessWrong readers come from). Keeping more things in you mind means being a better programmer, teacher, scientific researcher. Being better at your profession often helps you to evade starvation. And getting needed amount of calories - if you already know where to get all these vitamins and microelements - is trivial in these parts of the world.
So, this modification was not a benefit earlier, and it was quite costly; both factors are significantly reduced in some parts of modern world.
Of course, increased mental capability can lead to some personality traits that make it harder to reproduce; but that is again a question of side-effects and not a self-evident thing. If you consider it harmful, you can try to spend effort on fighting these side-effects - some people report significant success..
Can drugs improve your rationality?
I’m not sure, but it seems likely.
Remember the cognitive science of rationality. Often, irrationality is a result of ‘mindware gaps’ or ‘contaminated mindware’ — missing pieces of knowledge like probability theory, or wrong ideas like supernaturalism. Alas, we cannot yet put probability theory in a pill and feed it to people, nor can a pill deprogram someone from supernaturalism.
Another cause of irrationality is ‘cognitive miserliness’. We default to automatic, unconscious, inaccurate processes whenever possible. Even if we manage to override those processes with slow deliberation, we usually perform the easiest deliberation possible — deliberation with a ‘focal bias’ like confirmation bias.
What will increase the likelihood of cognitive override and decrease the effect of focal biases? First, high cognitive capabilities (IQ, working memory, etc.) make a brain able to do the computationally difficult processing required for cognitive override and avoidance of focal bias. Second, a disposition for cognitive reflectiveness make it more likely that someone will choose to use those cognitive capabilities to override automatic reasoning processes and reason with less bias.1
Thus, if drugs can increase cognitive capability or increase cognitive reflectiveness, then such drugs may be capable of increasing one’s rationality.
First: Can drugs increase cognitive capability?
Yes. Many drugs have been shown to increase cognitive capability. Here are a few of them:2
Second: Can drugs increase cognitive reflectiveness?
I’m not sure. I’m not yet aware of any drugs that have been shown to increase one’s cognitive reflectiveness.
So, can drugs improve your rationality? I haven’t seen any experimental studies test whether particular drugs improve performance on standard tests of rationality like the CRT. However, our understanding of how human irrationality works suggests that improvements in cognitive capability and cognitive reflectiveness (via drugs or other means) should increase one’s capacity to think and act rationally. That said, current drugs probably can’t improve rationality as much as demonstrated debiasing practices can.
Should we use drugs for cognitive enhancement? Scholars debate whether such modifications to human functioning are ethical or wise,14 but I think the simplicity of the transhumanist position is pretty compelling:
Notes
1 For a review, see Stanovich (2010), ch. 2.
2 For a broader overview, see de Jongh et al. (2008); Normann & Berger (2008); Sandberg (2011).
3 Muller et al. (2004); Turner et al. (2004); Gill et al. (2006); Caldwell et al. (2000); Finke et al. (2010); Repnatis et al. (2010).
4 Fox et al. (1988).
5 Foster et al. (1999); Sunram-Lea et al. (2002).
6 Rae et al. (2003); McMorris et al. (2006); Watanabe et al. (2002).
7 Gron et al. (2005).
8 D-amphetamine: Mattay et al. (2000); Mattay et al. (2003); Barch & Carter (2005). Bromocriptine: Kimberg et al. (1997); Kimberg et al. (2001); Mehta et al. (2001); Roesch-Ely et al. (2005); Gibbs & D’Esposito (2005a). Pergolide: Muller et al. (1998); Kimberg & D’Esposito (2003).
9 Kimberg et al. (1997); Mehta et al. (2001); Mattay et al. (2000); Mattay et al. (2003); Gibbs & D’Esposito (2005a, 2005b).
10 Muller et al. (2005); de Jongh et al. (2008).
11 de Jongh et al. (2008).
12 Teter et al. (2006).
13 Dimond & Brouwers (1976); Mondadori (1996).
14 Savulescu & Bostrom (2009).
15 I think I first heard Louie Helm put it this way.
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