Absolutely, it shouldn’t be disqualifying in almost anyway. (But it is disqualifying as a “strong HIA method”, unless it’s not actually weaksauce.) I think one interesting question is stackability, i.e. can you take piracetam and use TES and use fNIRS and get the benefits of each separately. Another interesting question is whether these genuinely increase intelligence, which is to say, do they increase g, or instead do they do something else, e.g. a increase more specific cognitive ability. In principle you could get medium-strength HIA this way. I’m skeptical but not confident that you can’t. There should DEFINITELY be at least a couple people working on this full time in a serious & systematic way, and I don’t know if there currently are any!
It seems to me that widespread cheap interventions that give +1-2SD would be amazing and open the way for more.
I guess this seems right, due to the social interest and proving out that it can be done? I think that getting to “widespread” is a bit hard because it’s hard to tell whether your thing is helping unless the effect is big. Caffeine is quite widespread because it has a big, fast, obvious effect on cognitive abilities (but not increasing g), and doesn’t seem to make many people go “woah we could increase a bunch more different cognitive capabilities much more”.
My second bet, by the same criteria, would probably be non-invasive BCI.
Yeah seems interesting! Though others have expressed worry about developing mind-reading tech.
Absolutely, it shouldn’t be disqualifying in almost anyway. (But it is disqualifying as a “strong HIA method”, unless it’s not actually weaksauce.) I think one interesting question is stackability, i.e. can you take piracetam and use TES and use fNIRS and get the benefits of each separately. Another interesting question is whether these genuinely increase intelligence, which is to say, do they increase g, or instead do they do something else, e.g. a increase more specific cognitive ability. In principle you could get medium-strength HIA this way. I’m skeptical but not confident that you can’t. There should DEFINITELY be at least a couple people working on this full time in a serious & systematic way, and I don’t know if there currently are any!
I guess this seems right, due to the social interest and proving out that it can be done? I think that getting to “widespread” is a bit hard because it’s hard to tell whether your thing is helping unless the effect is big. Caffeine is quite widespread because it has a big, fast, obvious effect on cognitive abilities (but not increasing g), and doesn’t seem to make many people go “woah we could increase a bunch more different cognitive capabilities much more”.
Yeah seems interesting! Though others have expressed worry about developing mind-reading tech.
My take on mindreading tech was that it would be probably a good thing. Though that particular startup maybe didn’t seem too promising.