I may be of the minority here but I am definitely not the minority in the real world.
If you care about health why not exercise and eat healthy and never take any type of drug for any reason unless you are sick.
The person who made this site has been willing to test, meticulously document and analyse his results. He's pretty informed as to the side-effects, so no, I don't think he's "bat shit crazy", he's doing us a service.
In his most highly rated drug, modafinil, he took it on 8 different days and could tell which one it was 5/8 times.
8 days, couldn't tell the difference 3/8 times and it is his most highly recommended drug.
He definitely needs to try drug free, exercise and sleep over a month.
Many people, including myself, find exercise to be mind numbingly boring, and intellectually insulting. (Pick up a weight and put it down? That is quantitatively zero work, buddy. No thanks.) Never underestimate the motivation to find a quick fix.
I used to think the same way but decided one day that I was going to walk/jog ~10km every day and eat healthy. Now, I really enjoy walking. It gives me a chance to think about the problems I've been trying to solve during the day, what I'm going to do tomorrow, etc. And at some point I actually started enjoying the _feeling_ of doing exercise. It's hard to describe, and I know that myself from 12 months ago would believe me but I definitely wouldn't want to stop exercising.
So my recommendation is to spend your time while exercising thinking about whatever was bothering you during the day. It's quite relaxing, frankly. To be fair, my exercise routine doesn't include the gym but the same logic applies there.
> (Pick up a weight and put it down? That is quantitatively zero work, buddy. No thanks.)
While true if you're using the strict physics definition of work, its not true if you use the common meaning of the word.
And remember, if it took you 20 years of practice to become a hardened couch potato, don't expect to change overnight.
Some people enjoy repetition. Some... really don't.
For me the challenge is to keep finding new interesting sports.
I've been boxing almost every day for almost 6 years now. The more into it I get, the more there is to discover and the tougher my sparring partners get. It really doesn't feel like repetition at all.
So maybe you just haven't found a sport you liked yet. Or haven't given them enough time to reach a level of mastery where it doesn't feel so repetitive anymore.
You are literally hacking your own body. Also, since no two people have the same genetic code, determining a fitness regiment is a highly experimental process optimized for you. Since this is a highly quantifiable process, you can make the development as data-driven as you choose as there are all types of variables to measure. There was a popular HackerNews post about applying Machine Learning to a ketogenic diet. See https://github.com/arielf/weight-loss
I try to avoid lifting weights as much as possible. Instead, fitness for me includes olympic ring travelling (http://travelingrings.org/about/where-are-the-traveling-ring...), rock-climbing, free-running, and acrobatics.
The supreme irony of this thread is that the exact mindset you're describing here would probably be alleviated by the stimulants being debated as an alternative(?) to exercise.
I suspect this plays no small part in the historical use of just about every stimulant under the sun including cocaine, amphetamine and modafinil by athletes looking to get ahead. Said athletes were probably still literal leaps and bounds healthier than the average member of the population.
Of course, no drug is an alternative to exercise and good sleep, and nothing about those two things would preclude you from taking any drug I can think of. It's a false dichotomy that breeds silly arguments.
That said, the use of such things is probably not strictly healthy. However, rather than worrying about winding up on a 'faces of meth' poster[0] I would consider how much one is really benefiting from use. The stimulant drug classes are infamous for their ability to persuade people that they're receiving much greater enhancements in ability than is really the case.
"Cocaine produces, for those who sniff its powdery white crystals, an illusion of supreme well being, and a soaring overconfidence in both physical and mental ability. You think you could whip the heavyweight champion, and that you are smarter than anybody. There was also that feeling of timelessness. And there were intervals of ability to recall and review things that had happened years back with an astonishing clarity." - The Autobiography Of Malcolm X, pages 137-138
"Like their British counterparts, the American scientists evaluating amphetamine for the military consistently found that, by all but a few measures, amphetamine did not objectively improve or restore performance lost to physical exhaustion, lack of sleep, or low oxygen any better than caffeine. Users certainly felt that the drug boosted their performance, but subjective impressions seldom reflected objective performance. Even where measurable gains were occasionally produced these were largely or entirely due to increased optimism and persistence in the contrived test conditions." - On Speed: The Many Lives Of Amphetamines, Nicolas Rasmussen, pages 81-82.
You are after all paying quite a cost on multiple levels for whatever gains are alleged, so you had best be sure they're real.
[0]: It's important to keep in mind the order of magnitude(s) difference between therapeutic doses and the mega-doses used by tweakers. In the latter case you should definitely be worried about winding up on a 'faces of meth' poster.
Boring is definitely not the way I would describe the way I exercise.
1) There's no reason exercise by nature has to be boring or free of intellect. Physics greatly applies to freestyle snowboarding, for instance, and the adrenaline is top-shelf. Not to mention the scenery and vitamin D! Gymnastic and weightlifting activities in general encourage a practical understanding of leverage, torque, moment arms, etc.
2) Even without choosing exciting sports and applying your scientific knowledge to them, why not walk on a treadmill while you work, or sit on a recumbent bike as you watch that 3rd convolutional neural net video? It's an easy way to up your circulation while taking in knowledge and alleviates boredom.
As far as I can tell, typical snowboarding gear consists of a thick jacket, long trousers (or somesuch), with goggles and a snow hat. To produce Vitamin D the light has to actually come in contact with the skin.
- sport climbing - you wouldn't believe how cool and stimulating the sport is, switch indoor/boulder when weather is bad. cool people in community too
- mix of backcountry skiing in winter and hiking anytime else will give you huge amounts of nature that is very relaxing on the mind (easy rule - the more mind works daily, the more body workout it needs to relax, and vice versa)
As tech workers, I think I would even beyond sitting in a chair all day being physically insulting, to say that it's perhaps one of the greatest (and really a non-trivial one) occupational hazards we face.
and exercise can be anything physical that makes you sweat, why the need to take only weightlifting into account?
this statement is both technically wrong, and stupid because of your inane try-hard elitism. with google you can calculate down to several sig figs how many joules of work was done by picking up a weight, and putting it down.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Work_(physics)
maybe you meant 'qualitatively'? even then, still wrong. moving heavy shit around is work, even if it ends up in the same spot.
So if the person puts the weight on the floor where they picked it up from they will have done zero work on it. Your attempt at pedantry was misdirected -- I would've said that because of the change in density of the Earth's crust that technically the force of gravity does change and thus is not an entirely conservative force.
Also, I wasn't getting pedantic. I was quoting the definition of work, which I believe that GGP misunderstood.
You're confusing work and energy. Energy is expended, but work is not. Work relates to the change in potential energy of a system -- which will not change in a conservative system (assuming you return to the original point). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Work_(physics)
however, you will never, ever, achieve a zero work vector in a weight room, whether you're off by a micron or a mile. give it a shot, tell me how it goes.
you're arguing for an impossible result using textbook definitions, pretty much what i would call 'useless pedantry'.
You have to at least be impressed with the level of rigor he did manage for a person working alone to test hundreds of chemicals.
This guy produced and personally tested over 150 different psychedelic compounds, and published his notes on synthesis, dosage and effects.
He links to a site all over the place with mountains of data http://examine.com/
Also, http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/
(And many others)
Seriously, there is a lot of research into many of these supplements. It's not like Gwern is our only source of information. I have nothing against the information he is giving, but it's far from the only source.
If you compare his rigor to that of a fully funded NIH experiment, yes it will be found lacking. But if you compare it to all of the personal the experimentation that any of us do on a regular basis i.e. trying out a low protein diet, a paleolithic diet, TDD, sleeping more, not being on the computer before bed etc... Then it is the height of rigor.
Not to mention foods that people take to make themselves "feel better" (ie. modify mood), like chocolate or ice cream (or chocolate ice cream! mmmmmm).
Hang on now...most people find consuming caffeine and alcohol batshit crazy? Do you live in Utah or something?
Last I checked, caffeine in moderate doses has a mixed bag of positive and negative effects that's not clearly net negative.
There's controversy around whether moderate alcohol consumption (think 1 drink/day) has a positive effect. (Some studies say it does, but it's argued it's a statistical anomaly because people who don't drink at all are weird, e.g. former alcoholics, people with medical conditions that forbids them any alcohol, etc.)
"Conservatively, a bottle of melatonin pills will cost about 6 USD for 150 pills". This is the part I find interesting. I live in NZ, and melatonin isn't readily available - unlike most drugs here it's not government subsidized. It costs $20 for 10 pills, and you have to visit a doctor.
Crazy accessibility and cost difference.
ARAS = Ascending Reticular Activating System https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reticular_activating_system
Then ctr+f melatonin and shortly lower there is some good information about how melatonin is not that great. Highly recommend the general article - incredible amount of information.
I disagree. I think huge numbers of people take nootropics frequently if not daily (caffeine and prescribed mood-altering drugs) and I'd bet that you'd consider these completely normal and non-crazy. But that belief is based in normativity, not logic. All of these substances have negative side effects, and the industry around prescription drugs is very much at odds with the actual research around prescription drugs. In fact, the only substances on the list which I think probably don't have negative side effects are ones that most people probably don't take (Fish Oil and Vitamin D3).
> If you care about health why not exercise and eat healthy and never take any type of drug for any reason unless you are sick.
What's a drug? What's sick?
Arguably, refined sugar is a drug, or the dopamine that you get from surfing news sources like HN. And things like caffeine, which are entirely normative, aren't even arguable: they're just obviously drugs.
Arguably, being inflicted with a need to work 40 hours a week on tasks that don't fulfill our emotional or social needs is a horrible chronic illness. It certainly has affected my life more negatively than my chronic allergies (which I live with, untreated).
Choosing to take a nootropic should be about the tradeoffs, and health definitely is not the only factor.
But it is the biggest factor; without your health, you have nothing. When I'm weighing alternatives and tradeoffs, I tend to think in a sort of "three laws" mode:
1) If it's good for my long-term health, do it.
2) If it increases my athletic performance and doesn't conflict with 1), do it.
3) If it makes me look or feel better and doesn't conflict with 1) or 2), do it.
That's simply not true. That may be your priority, but it's not everyone's, and the assertion that "you have nothing" is ridiculous.
If I could live to the age of 50, make a major positive change in the world in that time, and then die, I'd make that trade. Of course, you don't get a guarantee that solid, everything is probabilistic. But there are definitely cases where you can trade health for some other value, and many of us are willing to make that trade.
> 1) If it's good for my long-term health, do it.
> 2) If it increases my athletic performance and doesn't conflict with 1), do it.
> 3) If it makes me look or feel better and doesn't conflict with 1) or 2), do it.
This is laughably simplistic. For example, according to this, money never comes into your considerations. Cool story, bro.
Plenty of people take e.g. extra calcium (or even just make sure they eat/drink plenty of high-calcium food/drink) to help their bones remain strong. Is taking extra chlorine (or again just eating high-chlorine foods) to help your brain remain clever really so different?
I can't even tell if you're serious. Trying to improve on nature is the foundation of science.
This is an interesting statement. I would say, trying to improve on nature is one particular notion that was instrumental in the history of science. Specifically, we can trace this back to alchemical beliefs in the notion of perfecting the human soul/body/etc. via aqua regia and so on, which were about achieving an "art" which would exceed the limits of what we are given by Nature.
Much of what is "science", however, does not come from this school of thought. The quiet life of a naturalist, delighting in the observation of an ant colony or the nesting habits of a bird species, seems to have little to do with trying to improve on nature and is much more of a piece with simply enjoying being close to it.
How about coffee, vitamin d, calcium and tyrosine?
All of them have proven benefits, nothing fringe: http://www.informationisbeautiful.net/visualizations/snake-o...
That combined with exercise, sleep and eating well is pretty much my "stack."
Personally I would rather not risk the possibility of destroying my brain with something unproven. However, for things with proven benefits and little chance of side-effects, well, why not?
So, while I would prefer to avoid self-experimentation personally, I am glad others are working to establish what works, what is safe, etc.
You can get vitamin d by going outside every once in a while.
so I ask again, what is "normal" food? where do you get your ideas of normal from?
While it certainly is possible to "get vitamin D" by going outside, that doesn't mean it's enough.
The leading theory as to the advantage of having white skin is that it assists in providing more vitamin D in latitudes without as much direct sunlight. This means the amount you get by "going outside once in a while" is not sufficient (otherwise we wouldn't need the advantage of getting as much as possible)
Likewise, drinking coffee removes calcium and vitamin d from your body, so it is wise to replace them, especially if you drink a lot of coffee.
Also, while I might not "need" to supplement them because I am getting "enough" that doesn't mean I won't benefit by taking more. Indeed, we're talking about Nootropics here, not just staying alive.
Maybe we do. But if you really care about health, why stop there?
It is scientism at its worst.
why is that important to you? what counts as "sick"? what about mental health? what about spiritual health?
Eat a healthy balanced diet, get intense physical exercise for at least 30 minutes every day, and sleep an adequate amount. It's really not too difficult. It does require discipline, but discipline is only difficult if you make it difficult.
I've never really understood the whole concept of brain enhancement drugs. What are they really doing for you? Is it at all possible they are effective only due to the placebo effect? What are the long term risks of using so many different substances?
You've seen what gwern has written. He makes clear the monetary trade off. He also explains how some of the drugs are well studied, and most probably safe.
These people aren't crazy. You just don't understand...
Quick, let's ban everything except alcohol & cigerettes! They only kill a combined ~7.5 million people per year. Nice and sane.