if I were a billionaire with some means of getting around the FDA
Do you have to get around the FDA if you’re doing non-commercialized, non-academically-published research? Like, basically, friends making legal (because novel) chemicals for friends to take voluntarily?
IIRC Gwern’s Nootropics and “Algernon Argument” pages basically came to the same idea: bearish on most nootropics, except stimulants and moda, due to evolutionary/biological tradeoffs.
Algernon’s Law doesn’t apply if you can eliminate the tradeoff. E.g. if the tradeoff was intelligence vs. energy costs, and it’s no longer difficult to feed your intelligence-enhanced human 5000 calories a day reliably.
It would be interesting to see analyses of other tradeoffs, and use that to hypothesize other classes of nootropics. E.g. if there’s some neural operation that’s bottlenecked on some chemical that takes a long time to synthesize or requires rare materials or causes damage or something, we could supply that chemical, or figure out how to prevent that damage, or something.
Do you have to get around the FDA if you’re doing non-commercialized, non-academically-published research? Like, basically, friends making legal (because novel) chemicals for friends to take voluntarily?
IIRC Gwern’s Nootropics and “Algernon Argument” pages basically came to the same idea: bearish on most nootropics, except stimulants and moda, due to evolutionary/biological tradeoffs.
Algernon’s Law doesn’t apply if you can eliminate the tradeoff. E.g. if the tradeoff was intelligence vs. energy costs, and it’s no longer difficult to feed your intelligence-enhanced human 5000 calories a day reliably.
Exactly, hence the support of stimulants and/or modafinil, which trades off calories.
It would be interesting to see analyses of other tradeoffs, and use that to hypothesize other classes of nootropics. E.g. if there’s some neural operation that’s bottlenecked on some chemical that takes a long time to synthesize or requires rare materials or causes damage or something, we could supply that chemical, or figure out how to prevent that damage, or something.