Old man 1: Life is one trouble after another. I’d be better off dead, better yet, I wish I was never born
Old man 2: True, true, but who has such luck ?.. maybe one in a thousand.
My blog: https://cerebralab.com
I’m also building an open source generic ML library: https://github.com/mindsdb/mindsdb & https://github.com/mindsdb/lightwood …. which I guess might be of interest to some people here
Increasing blood flow to the large masseter muscles seems to have a broadly stimulating effect on blood flow to the head in general. You can buy unflavored gum for cheap, or xylitol gum which has a positive side effect on decreasing cavity formation.
Never thought about this one, quite interesting 🙃
So, if we are trying to prove something like:
Plane A flies faster than plane B
We do indeed need to make sure plane A and plane B are the same in all instances, I’d say that engineering not science, but in the last 50 years little science has happened so people seem to confuse the two.
If we are trying to prove something like:
Planes can fly
Then the specific plane design is less important.
My point here is something like “I did a thing, and people seem to have higher IQs upon retesting than control, and I’m controlling for things like motivation, memorization, exercise and diet” therefore, given that we don’t expect anything (maybe sans stimulants?) to increase IQ, or at least anything besides going from slob to active lifestyle wise, this finding is interesting.
If you already believe that this sort of increase is possible and easy then without me comparing it with other such experiments and outlining my method precisely in a way that a 3rd party can replicate—the claim would be useless.
But that’s not what I’m saying, I’m saying “Nobody has ever tried to take a cohort of adults at +1 to +3 STDs of IQ and have it improve”, I did (well, people did it and I collected the data) and it seems possible, therefore something interesting is happening. Given that most people here would say this thing is not possible, this should be an update that it’s possible.
I don’t want to update on the precise step-by-step method by which it’s possible, much like, if I had a crappy plane design and saw it fly, I wouldn’t want people to replicate my crappy plane design, I’d want people to try and design better planes, after updating on the fact that building planes is, in principle, possible.
This goes doubly so if by publishing the exact plane design the FAA would sue me.
pinged you in DMs :) Happy to share, I don’t need a liability waver just making sure people understand this is not medical advice, I am not a doctor+ not being assholes
That all sounds to me like increasing IQ ?
Like, if shape rotation is an underlying component of many valuable cognitive processes (e.g. math) and you get better at it in a generic way (not learning for the test)… that’s getting smarter
memory tests are included within the FSIQ evaluation
That’s learning effects (: The tests are the same because psychometry is BS and IQ tests aren’t designed to be retaken (even though people, for some reason, make claims about IQ increases/decreases)
actually—dmed you my signal, ping there
Can you send me your email and phone number?
If you can get a motivated group together I might be able to fund you replicating it as long as you’re ok being scrappy because I don’t have that much money to throw at this
I agree, that’s why I did that :)
Within the article you can find examples of that:
-> Control before vs control after p values are provided (not looking good, p value within group alone is insufficient, can capture learning, hence why I do a between group % change test)
-> Control before vs after for verbal IQ (significant—learning effect / motivation / shorter time between tests ?)
-> Intervention before vs after for verbal IQ (no significant—backs up hypothesis that this works for fluid IQ only, and the control effect is learning + the advantages on time & motivation)
No idea, I would re-do the tests on myself but I was semi-present for the replication so I’d rather wait more time.
All 3 of us might try to re-do the tests in a month and I can get 4-5 controls to re-do them too. Then I’d have numbers 1 month in.
This is also an important question for me.
With whom ?
Edit: I’ll offer you a 50 USD even money bet that your method won’t replicate when tested by a 3rd party with more subjects and a proper control group.
I doubt that will ever happen?
Like sure, I’ll take that bet, but it will never be satisfied either which way.
The problem with dyi tests is that they have no external validation—during my initial experiment I actually had a 5 min test I did 2x a day (generated so it was new problems each time) -- but the results from that don’t really make sense to anyone but myself, hence why I’ve chosen to forgo doing it.
In terms of saturating the learning effect, that’s a better approach, but getting people to put their time into doing that makes it even harder.
How is it contradicting ?
I’m saying “I don’t think people that have a short enough attention span and level of interest to not even want to DM me will do a 4hr/day thing for 2 weeks”
But maybe some of them would be interested in DYI-ing it, because that’s a different mindset.
So for those people I’d rather they DYI a thing.
You should try this and see, if noopept yield that much at doses where there’s no CV side effects that’d be a great and novel finding
I would say this is not enough data to close the market, I’d need some 3rd party self-experimenters to replicate it.
I mean games as in “playing catch while blindfolded” physical group activities
As for calling meditation and journaling training, that just seems like motivated reasoning, under that definition anything is training.
If anything journaling would lead to better verbal results, and, well, read my analysis
one reported being significantly better with conversation afterwards, the other being able to focus much better
The reason I’m not mentioning a step-by-step guideline is as follows:
Giving people a step by step guide, if someone claims to follow it they could sue me (as an individual) - I don’t want that. I will share it with people who seem to be good actors and actually interested—e.g. I shared it with the Lighthaven team, if they want to share it with people, I can’t stop them—but the liability is on them. I obviously shared what I did with all the people that self-experimented as “intervention”, if they want to plug other people in, fine by me.
My interest here is getting more information and aggregating it (which is public, I’m just measuring before/after for now) -- I’d like for people to reach out to me, for us to sync on data gathering, and for me to be updated on how they are doing whatever they are doing so I know if the before/after data is reliable.
It would take like 5 pages with if/else structures to get a perfect outline.
You need some dedication and common sense to do this, in that regard, it’s easy enough to look at my hypothesis and run a quick literature review then reach a conclusion about what you should do—and I’d actually like a “1000 ships” approach here where more people try to replicate in their own way—maybe my way of putting it all together is wrong, I’m starting from out of distribution data and using theory + heuristics that I’m not an expert at to translate it into something relevant for normal people.
If what you’re asking for is not “give me a step-by-step guide as to what to do”—then I’d ask what is unclear from what I already wrote, like, the general model I have should be enough if your intention isn’t to perfectly replicate this but just to extract “quick fix” style solutions for yourself (but those solution won’t work)
My worry here is that I say something like “One of the things you can do is to experiment with racetams and through careful monitoring and mood-observation figure out which one to take, at what dose, through what method, so that it doesn’t affect your BP or HR and feels good.
And then someone goes ahead, overdoses on a bottle of X labeled “not for human consumption”, and blames me. Or that someone does it badly (e.g. decoupled from the other interventions, without doing the careful experimenting required to figure out the correct substance/dosage/am) and then says “well, I did exactly what you said and it didn’t work”—Ignoring the fact that what I said involved 20 other things.
People tend to want easy solutions that they can apply in their sleep… and I actually want to build one, but I am like 2 years away in the best of cases, until then I’d rather recruit dedicated people to help me figure stuff out, as opposed to give advice about which I am uncertain, which people will follow poorly, and which makes me liable for spelling out those solutions
All of these issues are resolved by having controls and by the variance within control.
Using different tests, given that the results don’t correlate very well, would be a mistake.