I have personally been harmed by antibiotics (Cipro) and suffered an astonishing array of symptoms.
That sucks, yeah. So, I totally buy something like “in many cases, there’s some medical intervention (such as fixing something about the microbiome) that would increase that person’s effective cognitive capacity by quite a lot”. As really simple, broad example, getting 7 hrs sleep / night vs 4 hrs should be a very big boost for almost everyone.
The question I’m asking is “how can we get lots of super brilliant geniuses (of whatever flavor—artistic, philosophical, scientific, mathematical, political, empathetic, etc etc)”? Microbiomes might be important to get reasonably correct, in that if you get them wrong then they have a really bad effect, but I highly doubt you can take a normal person and make them a super brilliant person by tweaking their microbiome (at least in any reasonably normal / feasible way).
That sucks, yeah. So, I totally buy something like “in many cases, there’s some medical intervention (such as fixing something about the microbiome) that would increase that person’s effective cognitive capacity by quite a lot”. As really simple, broad example, getting 7 hrs sleep / night vs 4 hrs should be a very big boost for almost everyone.
The question I’m asking is “how can we get lots of super brilliant geniuses (of whatever flavor—artistic, philosophical, scientific, mathematical, political, empathetic, etc etc)”? Microbiomes might be important to get reasonably correct, in that if you get them wrong then they have a really bad effect, but I highly doubt you can take a normal person and make them a super brilliant person by tweaking their microbiome (at least in any reasonably normal / feasible way).