208 karma · joined April 1, 2019
1. Dark Pools, by Scott Patterson, and 2. Flash Boys, by Michael Lewis.
I'm nearly 28, and the past ~4 months have felt like I have been suffering from acute brain fog. And not even regarding challenging topics; most of the decline feels concentrated in parsing relatively simple logical statements and arguments. I used to be able to do this without any difficulty, and now, suddenly, it feels like it requires conscious effort. I too feel like I used to be decent at math and computer science. It's gotten so bad that I'm wondering if this is an actual medical condition (perhaps there is lead in my water? perhaps I have long COVID?).
As far as testing intellect (2), apparently it's not so far out of the ordinary to request a clinical psychologist to administer an IQ test. Additionally it's easy to get tests from Mensa or other organizations. I've been considering doing this for a while myself, but have delayed due to anxiety over the result. IQ tests are evaluated against individuals of the same age, so it won't tell you how you compare against people of other ages (including your younger self), but you can probably compare against earlier aptitude tests you have taken to see if there is a decline. I get the whole IQ discussion gets toxic really fast, so I'll just say I'm not endorsing any of the rhetoric or ideas that co-occur when people start talking about it.
For (3) I think the research on this is rather grim. I don't have time to come up with a good survey, but I'm sure the "rationalists" among us will happily chime in. I think the consensus is that it is possible to increase abilities in a narrow domain and only for a short amount of time.
I have to admit that this has been a very hard thing to come to terms with. I've already felt my work performance suffer, and I'm not sure if there is anything I can do about it. I've been exercising regularly for years now, and recently got my sleep habits in check, but to no avail.
Does this have something to do with Will Hurd's past in the CIA? Feels like an interesting choice to have on the board of the premiere AI research lab.
I think in the future what will happen is someone will build a language with CSP style concurrency that deals with the "update-in-flight" and "persistence" problems. Essentially extending the notion of a programming language runtime from "once, here, on this computer, right now", to something much broader.