Are smart drugs driving Silicon Valley? | Hacker News Reader

Are smart drugs driving Silicon Valley?

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25 pointsantimora24 comments

Snake Oil salesmen never go away. I'm curious how he knows he is upgraded? Did he set a baseline of tasks before he started supplements? Or is he just "feeling" smarter?

Not sure about the baseline but the article gives a clue: "he claims to have increased his IQ by 20 points".

That would require reading the article before quickly dismissing it, an all too common trend these days on HN.

Exactly..

There are plenty of nootropics that are not well-proven to work and under-tested for safety. However, there are a few nootropics that are very well researched and safe.

I personally take Vitamin D3 and EPA/DHA, both of which are very well understood and not only have proven cognitive benefits, but have proven health benefits as well. EPA/DHA in particular I wouldn't give up: it has such a drastic positive effect on my concentration, and doesn't seem to require increased dosage to remain effective. Vitamin D3 I take mostly for mood in the dark winter months.

If I want to try EPA/DHA out, what should I know? Are there products out there that claim to be those but aren't, or are knockoffs?

I take this:

http://www.amazon.com/Nordic-Naturals-Omega-3-Formula-180-Co...

It essentially has little to no bad after taste (most fish oil omega supplements do).

You can find other products with higher dosage levels of EPA/DHA. Nordic Naturals seems to make a solid product.

Non-sense.. A lot of these "smart pills" are more than likely placebos that are not well studied. I take a prescription amphetamine and even that has it limits, and begins to stop working in time. A lot of people notice this, and they up their dosage and become dependent on these kind of pills to do any kind of work at all. Not a bus I would hop on without doing some research first.

I've found piracetam to work as described, but that the benefits just don't match up to the price/costs.

agree..and then there is the fact that the human body cannot properly digest vitamins. Most of the time the vitmins are excreted intact

That's not very accurate.

For example, I don't get nearly enough sun throughout the year. My vitamin D levels fell to a 5, which can be extremely dangerous long-term.

I started taking D3 supplements and three or four months later I raised my vitamin D levels to a healthy range.

If your body is starved for a particular vitamin, and you take that vitamin as a supplement, the body will be far more likely to extract value from said supplement. Vitamin D for example is among the most common deficiencies, and is very easy to correct via supplements. The reason most vitamins don't make a difference is because most people are not especially deficient in a lot of things.

Victims? Did you mean vitamins?

Nope. Definitely victims.

Deleted comment

I'm pretty sure stupid people want to be smarter too, but that's not really my point.

Smart people wanting to be smarter feels intuitive, but then again, if you're that smart you should be able to figure out that you can't known everything anyway. Given that, you can try to optimise processes or your body directly, but that doesn't really help you much in the long term.

I like to think if "being smart" the same way I think of perfection. They're both processes rather than states. So, what you think being smart means today might change tomorrow, independent of whether you've reached that state today or not. I'd try to optimise the things I do in life towards this notion of change and uncertainty.

Then there is the part where we all die in the end. This should be fairly obvious, so let's just say being happy every once in a while doesn't hurt either. On top of that sits the whole irrationality thing (snake oil). When I read things like many smart drugs are natural, I can't help but think that if you don't know that your body has a hard time telling synthetic molecules apart from natural ones you probably shouldn't be touching any of this stuff anyway.

You're taking 5kIU of Vitamin D a day??

To put that in perspective, you synthesize quite a bit more:

"10,000 to 20,000 IU of vitamin D are produced in 30 minutes of whole-body exposure, in the skin of most vertebrate animals, including humans." as per http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vitamin_D#Synthesis_in_the_skin

No doubt there, but your body can regulate its intake of Vitamin D when its produced by the skin. It can't regulate how much you ingest, so you risk taking too much and stressing your liver and kidneys.

The unintended side-effects of taking that many supplements... mind boggling. And, IMO, stupid.

> "Harder Faster Stronger. It's not just a Kanye West Song"

Except that's not the name of the Kanye West song playing in the video. But it is the name of a Daft Punk song.

That's not even the name of the Daft Punk song. It's 'Harder Better Faster Stronger'.

Or Kanye even.

haha! Thanks. edited it

Obama is from Kenye, right?

// really?

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