The article begins with "It’s a lengthy read, but don’t let the wall of text dissuade you." That's scary right there. Anyone who is scared off by this short, popular fluff piece needs a lot of help in reading (or is not a native speaker of English). To learn to read a piece like this thoughtfully and critically mostly takes practice in reading, not the latest "smart drug." I've been hearing people tout smart drugs for as long as I have been involved in online discussions (since 1992), and I have never seen any evidence of regular users of smart drugs doing anything smart.
Let's learn from how an indisputably smart person (LISP hacker and genuine NASA rocket scientist Peter Norvig, now Google's director of research) approaches claims of a new wonder drug. He writes of "Warning Signs in Experimental Design and Interpretation"
in a free online article that is also a wall of text, but which any Hacker News reader could read and apply to become more smart in day-by-day life. We can learn together by comparing the popular article kindly submitted here to the checklist of warning signs provided by Peter Norvig.
Warning Sign D1: Lack of a Randomized Controlled Trial
The article about "smart drugs" submitted here doesn't cite any scientific literature from any country and makes no reference to results from randomized, controlled trials. As another participant here has already pointed out in a smart comment,
the author of the article's main text is in the business of selling smart drugs. He is not a neutral, objective source of information on the subject. He doesn't seem willing to share his evidence base for his claims, perhaps because he has none.
Warning Sign D2: Lack of Double-Blind Studies
The author refers to people taking various drugs while being aware of what they are taking, which skews their recollection of their performance and very likely results in invalid recollections. Most SCIENTIFIC studies of mental performance interventions are careful to be "double blind" and to have neither the subject nor the experimenter aware of which subject received the studied intervention and which received a sham intervention. And such studies have careful tests of mental performance (working memory, IQ, or the like). The article here is mere advertising puffery by comparison.
Warning Sign D3: Too Few Subjects
The author advertising smart drugs doesn't describe any careful studies, so of course he doesn't mention the number of subjects in any studies. Most so-called studies of smart drugs have been far too small to have any statistical power.
Warning Sign D4: The Wrong Subjects
People voluntarily self-administering smart drugs are VERY likely not a representative sample of the general population. If some people self-report that they became smarter after using the drugs (do their friends and relatives agree?), that by no means shows that most people will be better off if they take the drugs. Random assignment to the treatment condition from among a representative sample is necessary to show that the drugs have any general or consistent benefit.
Warning Sign D5: The Wrong Questions
Most of the supposed tests of smart drugs appear to use mere user self-reports rather than standardized measures of mental performance that show up in the scientific literature on psychology. Simply put, no high-quality treatise on human intelligence
has ever reported that smart drugs are good for anything.
Warning Sign D6: The Wrong Statistics
Again, most statements about smart drugs found online have no statistics at all. In any event, what studies there have been about smart drugs that use the language of statistical analysis have mostly been very amateurish in their statistical approach.
Warning Sign D7: Lack of a Specific Hypothesis, or Overzealous Data Mining
Before the user begins taking a smart drug, is the expected effect "creativity," or "memory" or cognition, or what? The article, by its incoherence in grouping drugs by their supposed effects, shows that most of the time people who have sunk money into smart drugs are expected to imagine their own benefits, and will, to avoid embarrassment at being snookered.
Warning Sign D8: Lack of a Theory
The human brain is a very complicated biological system, with many feedback loops, and so far there is no mainstream theory of neurophysiology (a topic with MANY investigators all over the world) that suggests simple chemical interventions to produce long-term improvement in any aspect of mental performance.
Warning Sign D9: Lack of controls
It's not clear in the smart drug promotional literature even what should be controlled if there were a controlled trial of smart drugs. The smart drug promoters are not making enough effort to contrast taking smart drugs with other interventions (say, learning to read more challenging reading material by practice) that likely have better impact on long-term mental performance.
Warning Sign I1: Lacking Repeatability and Reproducibility
The author basically acknowledges that many smart drugs have results that are not reproducible reliably.
Warning Sign I2: Ignoring Publication Bias
Because smart drug trials are not announced in advance in publicly readable databases, every person selling smart drugs gets to announce unverifiable anecdotes while hiding in the file drawer all the cases in which smart drugs failed.
Warning Sign I3: Ignoring Other Sources of Bias
The smart drug promoters make no effort to subject smart drug claims to the statistical tests that in recent years have revealed many incorrect claims in published scientific literature on other subjects. Because the smart drug claim is an extraordinary claim, smart drug promoters should produce extraordinary evidence to back up the claim.
I'll skip Norvig's next warning sign, as the following one
Warning Sign I5: Taking p too Seriously
is more relevant for the claims here. There is NO indication that smart drugs have any real-world significance (in other words, that people actually live smarter lives after taking them) as contrasted with claimed (but unreported here) instances of the drugs having "statistically significant" effects.
The last few checklist items on Norvig's checklist
are also worth looking at in connection with claims about smart drugs.
To sum up, I am willing to do a mental test (memory, or IQ, as the smart drug promoter chooses) duel with anyone who claims that smart drugs have helped him become smarter. I don't believe it, because I don't think there is sufficient evidence to back up that extraordinary claim. If anyone wants to set up the duel, we should each choose "seconds" to negotiate the terms of the mental test duel. I would, of course, insist on a series of STANDARDIZED mental tests administered by a psychologist with a lot of clinical experience. I don't expect any user of smart drugs to win such a duel.
AFTER EDIT: Responding to the first two replies received, there are standard methods in statistics for estimating adequate sample sizes based on expected effect size of the intervention. There isn't any one best sample size that fits all experimental studies, but a careful experimenter will calculate what sample size is large enough to maximize likelihood of meaningful results (statistical power) while minimizing the expense of gathering lots of subjects for the experiment. My proposal for a duel is, of course, a sample size of 1 plus the number of smart drug users who come forth to take the duel, and has other problems as a data-gathering measure, but I offer the duel to illustrate that I think that anyone can improve in smarts, for any real-world purpose, in a lot of ways that are better than taking poorly understood drugs pushed by smart drug hucksters.
You spent the entire comment condemning the lack of experimentation protocol, yet your final challenge is the most trivial of all.
What conclusion could you draw from your proposed duel? If someone can't beat you in a standardized IQ test after ingesting 20mg of amphetamine? Or a cup of coffee? Or 5g of a racetam? Seems to me your conclusion would be "I perform better than you even when you're mentally stimulated". Okay, you're smart and awesome.
I'd wager that most people taking nootropics are looking for personal results in our ubiquitous struggle to ward off lethargy while spurring motivation and concentration, not to win some mental duel with their peers.
Yes, GP's closing paragraphs were absolutely baffling to me:
>To sum up, I am willing to do a mental test (memory, or IQ, as the smart drug promoter chooses) duel with anyone who claims that smart drugs have helped him become smarter.
Wait, what? He spent 1000 words explaining to us all of the ways in which research around nootropics is lacking and then closes by proposing a ridiculous test fraught with a glaringly obvious confounding factor (the test subject's baseline intelligences). Baffling.
Yeah, the reason I take Adderall is best summed up by the difference in my college GPA that occurred after being prescribed Adderall midway through. (Not to mention all the depression-like symptoms that came from underachieving constantly and knowing it and wanting to change that on my own but failing over and over.) And in the years since then I've gone a few months at a time without it to try to see if, now that I've got more interesting jobs, I still need it to focus. Sadly, it seems like I do.
But there are tricks to it. It has something of a threshold for me: after a certain level, higher dosages don't seem to help any more (other than the first day or two right after the switch), as my body builds some tolerance. The just make the side effects worse. And the side effects are unpleasant at best, even at the relatively low dosage my doctor and I have gotten myself down to. I would absolutely not take it regularly if I felt like I could get stuff done at a sufficient level without it. Some people need their coffee, I need something a bit stronger. Sucks, but I'm stuck with it for now.
If you are in any type of relationship or looking to start one I would advise you to make it clear to your S/O when you are taking Adderall. From my experience, I'd imagine they can tell. When I met my current G/F she was basically addicted to a very heavy dose of Adderall. She would get moody and incredibly snippy when she started taking her daily dosage. I described it as "lasering". She couldn't do anything except whatever was in front of her for the next $x hours. She stopped adderall cold turkey and has been just as productive and a more personable for the last 5 months. YMMV but if you care about the people in your life, make sure they are also aware of what could be driving you.
Have you looked at gwern's nootropic page? I've seen articles from it posted on HN on occasion. He seems to be doing a pretty solid job of testing the potential effects of various nootropics on himself.
His efforts to double-blind himself and using Dual N-Back for testing effectiveness indicate he takes this topic seriously, and is trying to be very scientific about it. (I say "trying to" because I'm absolutely clueless in this area; it looks to me like he's being pretty rigorous, but I'm not knowledgeable enough to make that claim confidently.)
In particular I liked reading about his experiments with Adderall (which I am using currently), modafinil, and especially the choline/racetam combinations.
Part of the problem may be the pitching of certain drugs as "smart drugs" when instead they are "effectiveness drugs". Adderall doesn't make me any smarter; it corrects a chemical imbalance in my brain, and in doing so makes me more effective.
(Well, honestly, it doesn't "correct" anything; it's like putting your thumb over the end of a garden hose and spraying water at a guy who's thirsty. Solves the problem, just not without a lot of mess. And with dopamine instead of water.)
I just have to comment that in his page, I disagree on using dual n back as a measure of mental ability. As the mind repeats a task over and over it learns what to expect.
I personally view n-back as any other repetitive task, only it is mostly in the mind; the more you whittle, the better you will be at whittling.
If you look at the wikipedia page [1] you will see that there have been papers both for and against n-back improving cognitive ability.
The way I propose to test effectiveness would be to have a bunch of subjects all try to learn a difficult task that is unfamiliar to them. Those with the placebo supposedly would not be able to learn it as quickly or understand it as well. The large sample size would account for statistical inaccuracies and differences among people's abilities.
I personally took nootropics this last winter for three months. My theory is that people who claim improvement are looking for improvement, and notice more just how good they are at tasks... I took piracetam, choline, aniracetam, and oxiracetam (and a tiny sample of pramiracetam, the supposed best, for free), and noticed nothing the entire time. Originally I thought I noticed improvement, but only realized I was looking for improvement in every task I did, which made me notice everything I did. After this realization I didn't notice anything at all, for the rest of my supplies. I learned more than just their ineffectiveness during this self experiment...
EDIT:
I will revise my statement to add that I do not think that *racetams are completely ineffective. I do believe that they are relatively useless on healthy individuals without any disorders, though. Most of the studies in the wikipedia page are on people with disorders, and I do remember reading before that their benefits on people without problems is disputed.
> I just have to comment that in his page, I disagree on using dual n back as a measure of mental ability. As the mind repeats a task over and over it learns what to expect.
So?
> I personally view n-back as any other repetitive task, only it is mostly in the mind; the more you whittle, the better you will be at whittling.
Progress in n-back is very slow. I'm up to 2400 rounds and still am only at 30-50% on D5B; a difference of 10% is perfectly noticeable.
> If you look at the wikipedia page [1] you will see that there have been papers both for and against n-back improving cognitive ability.
The Wikipedia page is completely useless compared to my FAQ, but yes. That's not relevant to whether it is a useful way to measure variations in mental ability.
True, n-backs don't necessarily represent cognitive improvements, but they are a method to identify changes in some kinds of mental processes.
For instance, if you do Dual 3-Back for 3 weeks with an identical supplement regimen, you can graph the progressive improvement over time. That'll give you a semi-baseline, and if all you change (in your life) is a supplement from that point, you can attribute the alterations in your typical N-Back to something supplement related.
I know, placebo effect, etc. It's not causation, just correlation. Just because correlation gets pimped out on the street corner by people with agendas doesn't mean we should ignore him. We should just be careful when we utilize his services.
> I have never seen any evidence of regular users of smart drugs doing anything smart.
Paul Erdős famously claimed that amphetamines helped him in mathematics:
> After 1971 he also took amphetamines, despite the concern of his friends, one of whom (Ron Graham) bet him $500 that he could not stop taking the drug for a month.[34] Erdős won the bet, but complained that during his abstinence mathematics had been set back by a month: "Before, when I looked at a piece of blank paper my mind was filled with ideas. Now all I see is a blank piece of paper." After he won the bet, he promptly resumed his amphetamine use. - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paul_Erd%C5%91s
Erdos took amphetamines daily after his mother died in 1971, and claimed to sleep for about 4 hours a day while on amphetamines. He did not recommend them to anyone else, and he objected to the use of amphetamines being included in his biography because he didn't want to cause any kids to start taking drugs.
Erdos was also apparently more prolific after starting amphetamines, perhaps because he started sleeping significantly less.[1]
With respect to medication, I find your list not much more convincing than personal testimonials which are themselves not at all informative. Trying to figure out the body by doing a bunch of double blind tests is like trying to figure out a car by listening to how different actions change its sound. You may get some way but you won't have anything much better than a list rules for calculating epicycles.
It is true that the prevalence of 12 person tests which barely correct for confounders, misunderstood p-values and outright making up results to get more positive outcomes is a very bad state affairs for medicine. Explaining in part why results are constantly contradicting each other. But even if it weren't so - without understanding a particular drug's sensitivity to genetics and the particular individuals respective haplotype, large numbers and good methodology will simply not not be good enough.
Not until sensing technology becomes more prevalent will it be possible to say anything about the effects of drugs with confidence. We already for example know that time of day, food content and acidity of stomach, how the drug is taken, consistency, metabolism and genetics can affect toxicity and or efficacy. You cannot have any kind of conversation on drugs without knowing what pathways it interacts with, how it saturates, how and if any haplotypes respond differently, where and how it is metabolized, state of vitals when taken and so on.
But there is good news. The effects of genetics on drugs is one of the easiest success stories one can point to for genomics. Sensors are getting better so that one day we can not just share testimonials but sequences, recorded metabolites, change in vitals, oxygenation, hormones etc. to finally be able to form proper correlations. It is true that tests can very much also include this type of data but at that point I don't think the lab experiments would even be necessary. A person could simply randomly place sugar capsules, do the battery of tests and then measure for absorption themselves.
It is for this reason I believe that personalized crowdsourced testimonials backed with hard real data will someday outpace the current lab based/phase 4 method of testing effectiveness.
>Warning Sign D3: Too Few Subjects
>The author advertising smart drugs doesn't describe any careful studies, so of course he doesn't mention the number of subjects in any studies. Most so-called studies of smart drugs have been far too small to have any statistical power.
Neither yourself, nor Peter Norvig suggested an appropriate number of subjects for tests like these. So I'm curious, what would be an appropriate number of subjects?
You test some statistical hypothesis, and you end with some probability that the hypethesis is true. Increasing the number of people increases the number of samples. Loosely speaking, increasing the number of samples will reduce the variance on the variable you are measuring. When the variance is reduced, the confidence in the result is increased.
Say you are measuring IQ before and after taking omega 3. Say your hypthesis is "omega 3 immedieately increases IQ". Assume this is true, even if it probably isn't. After testing this on 20 people you might be able to say "the hypthesis appears to be true, but there is a 46% percent chance these results are due to chance". However after testing 1000 people, you might be able to say "the hypthesis appears to be true, and there is a 0.5% percent chance these results are due to chance". Then you are 99.5% confident in your result. Standards for confidence varies from field to field, but typically 99% confidence or more is called a significant result. Given some assumptions, you can also calculate the number of samples needed to generate a result with confidence >X% with probability Y. According to Daniel Kahneman in Thinking Fast and Slow, most researchers don't take the time to do this, and are consistently surprised when their experiments turn out to not give significant results.
This post, like so many others, states the p-value concept backwards. Statistics give you the chance of a false positive observation among a universe of negative realities, not the chance of a false reality in a universe of positive observations.
> So I'm curious, what would be an appropriate number of subjects?
This depends on the experiment. Some of the things to account for are the number of variables, the confidence you are looking for and the amount of interdependence. Consult a statistician, particularly one expert in experimental trials, for an evaluation.
Rule of thumb, the larger the effect size, the fewer the number of participants. The larger the random variation across people the greater the number of participants.
There is a lot of evidence supporting the use of Nootropics and other related supplements. Unfortunately, due to many of the issues brought up in the article, such as the inability to patent any of these substances, there is not a lot of direct research studying improving cognitive ability from a normal state. That being said, there is plenty of research on these substances, but most of the research is related to studying Alzheimer's and other Neurodegenerative diseases. They look at improving people who are already in decline, not improving people who are at a baseline or normal state and attempting to increase brain power. The users of Nootropics have to extrapolate their results based on those studies.
I've seen several studies related to use of Piracetam in children with Down Syndrome as well, leading to a statistically significant IQ improvement.
Problem is that I don't believe intelligence always works this way, e.g., if having less of Y causes lower than average IQ, it doesn't imply that having more of Y will raise IQ in subjects with average/above-average IQ.
Note, however, that an IQ below 75 falls in the bottom 5% of cognitive ability. I highly doubt that it's possible to infer impact of these drugs on individuals in the upper 5% of cognitive ability (exactly the folks that are the most interest in boosting their intelligence to stay competitive -- software engineers, medical/graduate students, etc...) from these studies.
Quick clarification: I am not claiming that Piracetam can't have any effects in healthy, mildly-to-moderately gifted individuals, it's just that I am not certain you can extrapolate from studies of Piracetam use with impaired individuals.
Finally there could be other benefits to Piracetam use (reduced anxiety, better memory, better focus, etc..) even if there's no "boost" to performance IQ.
I just don't (yet?) see conclusive evidence of this.
> I've been hearing people tout smart drugs for as long as I have been involved in online discussions (since 1992), and I have never seen any evidence of regular users of smart drugs doing anything smart.
That people doing smart things aren't busy talking about smart drugs (if true) does not imply that some smart drugs aren't helpful.
I've heard plenty about caffeine and modafinil use from people who do good work. I use caffeine and I do good work.
Well, to an extent it has: there's archeological evidence that human intelligence has risen from ~40,000 AD to ~10,000 (see "Before The Dawn"). It's just that additional intelligence (beyond what we have now) doesn't seem to confer any further evolutionary advantage.
It could be as simple as an energy tradeoff. Our brains already consume a significant fraction of our daily calories, having them work harder might not improve our reproduction results sufficiently to balance the increased risk of starvation.
> To sum up, I am willing to do a mental test (memory, or IQ, as the smart drug promoter chooses) duel with anyone who claims that smart drugs have helped him become smarter.
Nooptroics work, otherwise they'd not have FDA [insert whatever system you're under] approval. A quick glance at the crap fluff piece above shows that many of them are simple supplements [i.e. distilled stuff from a normal diet], but some are <b>real pharmaceutical drugs</b>.
Obviously, we immediately cull anything that is available from a normal diet, and ask the questions of the others. As such, your <b>entire</b> argument is ignorant, as it fails to ask the simple question: <i>in what cases do these drugs work</i>?
They're designed for a purpose.
They must be efficacious for that purpose.
They <i>might</i> have other beneficial side effects.
They <i>might</i> have negative side effects.
Your comment is ignorant as hell, and it's depressing that you're the top comment.
Hint: drugs such as modafinil, caffeine, nicotine are part of daily life <b>because they have a demonstrable effect</b>.
This is a white-wash, and a pathetic piece of propaganda. Major pharma companies, and entire caffeine / nicotine based economies of industrialised <> developing world countries and the multi-billion $ profits involved state you're full of shit.
/HN, what a crock.
HINT: Military forces have been STUFFING a whole slew of drugs into their people since they were discovered. Where do you think heroin came from? Where do you think amphetamines came from? Where do you think most of the research (hello LSD) was focused towards in the last 40 years? Where do you think the newest batch of stuff came from?
Here's a "duel" for you: find a serving member of combat (esp. Airforce) and then ask them if they can fly <i>without</i> taking their pills. They. Are. Not. Allowed. To.
Enhancing drugs work ~ go investigate the fucking Tour-de-France, you idiot. And if you need data on the mental realm, then nicotine & caffeine have <b>full documented papers on their effects</b>. This isn't even the prescription / FDA / illegal stuff out there.
You really are a shill.
Gaaahh... Muppets.
p.s. "On Muppets". Why the hell doesn't standard HTML tags work around here? Retro-chique? Kinda... odd for this type of forum.
You state that Nootropics work, or else they wouldn't be available/approved. However drugs that would generally be considered psychoactive aren't approved as nootropics, they are approved as part of the food and beverage industry/anti depressant/anti-narcolepsy/anti-ADD aids (Modafinil, Adderall, nicotine, caffeine).
Their use as nootropics is secondary to their licensed use and their current popularity is, I believe, mostly to the technological sophistication of society, with a quest for constant improvement and productivity metrics.
>|They're designed for a purpose. They must be efficacious for that purpose.
Why? That is fallacious. They aren't designed for the purpose they are touted for, and as you correctly point out later, the article that these comments all relate to primarily refer to supplements rather than drugs per se .
>| Where do you think heroin came from?
What are you talking about? The military had nothing to do with Heroin.
Now, I use caffeine, nicotine and modafinil regularly. But that does not legitimise all drugs/supplements that have had the label 'nootropic' added to them by passionate advocates for human mental advancement and improvement, and the comment that is currently the first post in this thread I believe correctly points out what is required in order to establish evidence around the efficacy of these drugs.
We should not be too rapid in our praise of miracle cures and treatments, history shows that most of them are a load of shit.
> Hint: drugs such as modafinil, caffeine, nicotine are part of daily life <b>because they have a demonstrable effect</b>.
The original story talks about racetams as opposed to stimulants. I don't think the fact that stimulants... stimulate is controversial: it's just side effects of stimulants are also well known. Of course, some stimulants are more socially accepted than others: no one calls me a junky and an addict, even though I run to the coffee machine every morning lest I experience (non-trivial) withdrawal syndroms (headache, excessive sleepiness).
Racetams appeal as they (seem to) have no known side effects -- which is that part that sounds too good to be true. As far as I understand the mechanism is such: poor absorption of choline (either due to lack of choline in diet or issues with choline receptors) creates cognitive impairment; racetams and choline "fix" this impairment. That isn't controversial.
However, what I don't know (and what tokenadult doesn't know) is what affect racetams and choline have on healthy individuals. In other words, is the money spent on months' supply of choline and *racetam simply better spent on French press, a good grinder, dark roasted beans, and a gym membership?
I don't know and I'm curious to see some studies. Note: I am not saying that folks shouldn't experiment with racetams, it's just they can't know a-priori it will have the advertised effect. OTOH if you are not short on money, there's nothing wrong with experimentation: the Placebo effect alone could be worth it. It's just you have to draw the line between "someone on the Internet reported did X and experienced Y" and "X implies Y is a scientific valid conclusion".
Of course the worst scam is energy drinks: a cup of coffee costs less and tastes better than five hour energy -- and I am at a loss at how a five hour energy could do something that coffee can not.
Racetams have proven effects on healthy adults. [Do you want to know more?]. There's a scaled effect which is notable, but most adults over 30 will benefit from them (i.e. the 'smarter / less damaged your systems are' the less benefit you get).
Do you really not have access to common papers? This might be a question of me assuming common access to information where there is none.
Or, think of it this way ~ unless you're living in a pristine environment (which most of you aren't), then they'll help you. Most humans are swimming in a whole sea of chemicals [airborne, ingested] and bacterial processes that you're not aware of. Heck, every human being's weight is 1Kg (ish) of non-human DNA and complex ecosystems.
Yep, that's right: you're a huge ecosystem of your own, revel in it. So take off 1kg off the scale, that's other beasties at play.
Ye Gods, most of you are firing off megadeath levels of antibacterials, chromosome damaging chemicals, metal-based-nasties and so forth just by getting ready in the morning.[1] Your brain chemistry is a whole lot more complex ~ and although we're getting there on understanding it, we've a while to go.
But, the Racetams have so far proven <b>entirely</b> benign, and helpful. They should be given to everyone by deafult, if we're in the realms of fluoridating water supplies.
[1] No, I like science. I love science. We all love it. Still doesn't change the fact that processes like decaffeinated coffee production had stupidly large amounts of cancer producing drugs in them until recently. Or DDT.
Unfortunately I am not in a university, so I no longer have access to JSTOR and the like. I did dig around PubMed/Google and what I've been able to find were studies of impaired individuals. Citations would be useful -- for studies on healthy (or like you said, "naturally" unhealthy -- due to age, environment, lifestyle, etc...) adults.
Well, do a simple bit of logic there (sorry; the study I had in mind is locked). From the age of 20 > 30, there's a quantifiable degradation of DNA replication, or as we call it "ageing". We can all agree that ageing seems to impair certain functions, and if these types of drugs improve "impaired" individuals, then... ?
As stated: the greater the impairment, the greater the effect. Now, you might not want to spend $x on a mere 5% improvement, but we do it all the time in reality ~ tinfoil hats off, but why do we fluoridate water supplies or make sure children have nutritious meals? [in the old model of society that seems to have fallen away].
Note: I advise strongly against over-dosing or using the stronger types without some knowledge of what's going on in your brain. Although, most people fuck around with their brain chemistry happily enough on pleasure receptors anyhow, so it's better than even the legal abuses you can get up to [pain killers, alcohol, nicotine-purely-to-lungs].
Bottom line: it ain't going to kill you like other stuff, and there's no evidence it can actually damage you either [barring affective behaviours which will subside as the drug is removed[1]]. Try it, be sensible, and then whatever.
The entire theatre of this thread, set by the idiot who made the 1st post is ridiculous. Learn some science, maybe?
[1]You might get some slight mania etc depending on your base chemistry, but it's not going to be permanent.
It's fine if the paper is behind a paywall: can you at least give a citation (from a peer-reviewed journal) and an abstract?
Additionally, please see tokenadult's posts: tokenadult is anything _but_ an idiot and has contributed much valuable insight to this community (often times with concrete citations). It's important to learn to disagree respectfully.
Reading the forum rules here, I'm at a loss why a user has gone through my posts on this thread and flagged each one, without a reason.. especially since the first rude post was the one that deserved nuking, not my responses, and <i>didn't</i> get one. Nuke the rude abrasive one, not the ones offering more, unless you've a reason?
The thread I responded to is still lacking in quality, esp. references ~ but I learnt down-thread s/he's a known poster, so I guess the rules don't apply.
Charming. ZZzzz.
[Edit: I'm having trouble finding the paper on this, for reference below, it's from a Welsh University ~ it might have been removed and/or hijacked for use for something else]
Tone is important on Hacker News and you can get downvoted for that alone. Your tone throughout this conversation was dismissive and exaggerated, and HN generally rewards people who are clear and staid in their writing. If you offered evidence for your positions and argued clearly and convincingly for them, and without defensiveness, insult and exaggeration you could probably get many people to agree with you.
People who have been on the site a long time (note: not me) can downvote you, which is what happened to your posts, rather than them being flagged. If you are flagged it just goes to the admins and they delete it if it's counterproductive. Also, you don't seem to know how to use the formatting here, and you don't care enough to figure it out and fix your old posts, which some could take to be as disrespectful to a new community.
Let's learn from how an indisputably smart person (LISP hacker and genuine NASA rocket scientist Peter Norvig, now Google's director of research) approaches claims of a new wonder drug. He writes of "Warning Signs in Experimental Design and Interpretation"
http://norvig.com/experiment-design.html
in a free online article that is also a wall of text, but which any Hacker News reader could read and apply to become more smart in day-by-day life. We can learn together by comparing the popular article kindly submitted here to the checklist of warning signs provided by Peter Norvig.
Warning Sign D1: Lack of a Randomized Controlled Trial
The article about "smart drugs" submitted here doesn't cite any scientific literature from any country and makes no reference to results from randomized, controlled trials. As another participant here has already pointed out in a smart comment,
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4516111
the author of the article's main text is in the business of selling smart drugs. He is not a neutral, objective source of information on the subject. He doesn't seem willing to share his evidence base for his claims, perhaps because he has none.
Warning Sign D2: Lack of Double-Blind Studies
The author refers to people taking various drugs while being aware of what they are taking, which skews their recollection of their performance and very likely results in invalid recollections. Most SCIENTIFIC studies of mental performance interventions are careful to be "double blind" and to have neither the subject nor the experimenter aware of which subject received the studied intervention and which received a sham intervention. And such studies have careful tests of mental performance (working memory, IQ, or the like). The article here is mere advertising puffery by comparison.
Warning Sign D3: Too Few Subjects
The author advertising smart drugs doesn't describe any careful studies, so of course he doesn't mention the number of subjects in any studies. Most so-called studies of smart drugs have been far too small to have any statistical power.
Warning Sign D4: The Wrong Subjects
People voluntarily self-administering smart drugs are VERY likely not a representative sample of the general population. If some people self-report that they became smarter after using the drugs (do their friends and relatives agree?), that by no means shows that most people will be better off if they take the drugs. Random assignment to the treatment condition from among a representative sample is necessary to show that the drugs have any general or consistent benefit.
Warning Sign D5: The Wrong Questions
Most of the supposed tests of smart drugs appear to use mere user self-reports rather than standardized measures of mental performance that show up in the scientific literature on psychology. Simply put, no high-quality treatise on human intelligence
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:WeijiBaikeBianji/Intellige...
has ever reported that smart drugs are good for anything.
Warning Sign D6: The Wrong Statistics
Again, most statements about smart drugs found online have no statistics at all. In any event, what studies there have been about smart drugs that use the language of statistical analysis have mostly been very amateurish in their statistical approach.
Warning Sign D7: Lack of a Specific Hypothesis, or Overzealous Data Mining
Before the user begins taking a smart drug, is the expected effect "creativity," or "memory" or cognition, or what? The article, by its incoherence in grouping drugs by their supposed effects, shows that most of the time people who have sunk money into smart drugs are expected to imagine their own benefits, and will, to avoid embarrassment at being snookered.
Warning Sign D8: Lack of a Theory
The human brain is a very complicated biological system, with many feedback loops, and so far there is no mainstream theory of neurophysiology (a topic with MANY investigators all over the world) that suggests simple chemical interventions to produce long-term improvement in any aspect of mental performance.
Warning Sign D9: Lack of controls
It's not clear in the smart drug promotional literature even what should be controlled if there were a controlled trial of smart drugs. The smart drug promoters are not making enough effort to contrast taking smart drugs with other interventions (say, learning to read more challenging reading material by practice) that likely have better impact on long-term mental performance.
Warning Sign I1: Lacking Repeatability and Reproducibility
The author basically acknowledges that many smart drugs have results that are not reproducible reliably.
Warning Sign I2: Ignoring Publication Bias
Because smart drug trials are not announced in advance in publicly readable databases, every person selling smart drugs gets to announce unverifiable anecdotes while hiding in the file drawer all the cases in which smart drugs failed.
Warning Sign I3: Ignoring Other Sources of Bias
The smart drug promoters make no effort to subject smart drug claims to the statistical tests that in recent years have revealed many incorrect claims in published scientific literature on other subjects. Because the smart drug claim is an extraordinary claim, smart drug promoters should produce extraordinary evidence to back up the claim.
I'll skip Norvig's next warning sign, as the following one
Warning Sign I5: Taking p too Seriously
is more relevant for the claims here. There is NO indication that smart drugs have any real-world significance (in other words, that people actually live smarter lives after taking them) as contrasted with claimed (but unreported here) instances of the drugs having "statistically significant" effects.
The last few checklist items on Norvig's checklist
http://norvig.com/experiment-design.html
are also worth looking at in connection with claims about smart drugs.
To sum up, I am willing to do a mental test (memory, or IQ, as the smart drug promoter chooses) duel with anyone who claims that smart drugs have helped him become smarter. I don't believe it, because I don't think there is sufficient evidence to back up that extraordinary claim. If anyone wants to set up the duel, we should each choose "seconds" to negotiate the terms of the mental test duel. I would, of course, insist on a series of STANDARDIZED mental tests administered by a psychologist with a lot of clinical experience. I don't expect any user of smart drugs to win such a duel.
AFTER EDIT: Responding to the first two replies received, there are standard methods in statistics for estimating adequate sample sizes based on expected effect size of the intervention. There isn't any one best sample size that fits all experimental studies, but a careful experimenter will calculate what sample size is large enough to maximize likelihood of meaningful results (statistical power) while minimizing the expense of gathering lots of subjects for the experiment. My proposal for a duel is, of course, a sample size of 1 plus the number of smart drug users who come forth to take the duel, and has other problems as a data-gathering measure, but I offer the duel to illustrate that I think that anyone can improve in smarts, for any real-world purpose, in a lot of ways that are better than taking poorly understood drugs pushed by smart drug hucksters.