The temptation of smart drugs

Mental prowess in pill form is always tempting. Modafinil offers heightened alertness and wakefulness even during sleep deprivation; piracetam promises enhanced cognition and intercerebral blood flow; ergoloid offers purported memory and anti-ageing enhancements. There are many more.

I’ve promoted these agents to friends and taken some of them myself. The philosophical and ethical case for cognitive enhancement is well established¹; that they work is (at least for some drugs) beyond doubt.²

But advocates of their use might want to consider the alternatives first. Those taking them rarely consider the ‘optimised base case’—a scenario in which everything else cheaply possible is done before making an intervention. It’s another way of asking: what’s the control group for this experiment? Testing a drug on people who have a severely deficient diet is all well and good, but your potential consumers might be best advised to make sure their diet is adequate (cheap) instead of taking your drug (expensive).

Compared to taking smart drugs, the optimised base case is distinctly unsexy: exercising, meditating, getting enough sleep and a good diet that avoids insulin spikes will get you most of the benefits that cognitive enhancers offer. These things are cheap, easy, free of side-effects and proven to work (unlike many cognitive enhancers). Edge cases³ excluded, it’s worth doing them first.

Gwern offers readers a warning in his article on dual n-back, a technique for enhancing working memory and possibly increasing IQ, suggesting they turn back and focus on interventions with bigger marginal returns:

To those whose time is limited: you may wish to stop reading here. If you seek to improve your life, and want the greatest bang for the buck, you are well-advised to look elsewhere.

Meditation, for example, is easier, faster, and ultra-portable. Typing training will directly improve your facility with a computer, a valuable skill for this modern world. Spaced repetition memorization techniques offer unparalleled advantages to students. … Modest changes to one’s diet and environs can fundamentally improve one’s well-being. Even basic training in reading, with the crudest tachistoscope techniques, can pay large dividends… And all of these can start paying off immediately.

Work on your optimised base case by making easier, cheaper interventions to your productivity first. Only then is it worth improving it further.

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1. Bostrom and Roache, 2009. Smart Policy: Cognitive Enhancement and the Public Interest. [http://www.nickbostrom.com/papers/smart-policy.pdf] ↩
2. Modafinil’s alertness-boosting effects are clinically proven, and the drug increases working memory. Piracetam and others purport to genuinely increase ‘cognition’, but for the most part the studies supporting this claim are small and old. ↩
3. Such as where an immediate boost is needed—if you’re sleep-deprived or jetlagged but need to make an important presentation, for example. ↩

I know I don’t know what I want

I’m trying to be more open to the idea that I don’t know what I want. It’s easy to get swept up and inherit other people’s values wholesale; pause for a moment to reflect on what you really want, or how to find that out.

To be mature you have to realize what you value most. It is extraordinary to discover that comparatively few people reach this level of maturity. They seem never to have paused to consider what has value for them. They spend great effort and sometimes make great sacrifices for values that, fundamentally, meet no real needs of their own. Perhaps they have imbibed the values of their particular profession or job, of their community or their neighbors, of their parents or family. Not to arrive at a clear understanding of one’s own values is a tragic waste. You have missed the whole point of what life is for.

—Eleanor Roosevelt

Fail more.

I saw Neil Gaiman speak recently. He was as eloquent on stage as you’d expect, and an answer to one particular audience question reminded of a New Year Wish of his:

I hope that in this year to come, you make mistakes.

Because if you are making mistakes, then you are making new things, trying new things, learning, living, pushing yourself, changing yourself, changing your world. You’re doing things you’ve never done before, and more importantly, you’re Doing Something.

So that’s my wish for you, and all of us, and my wish for myself. Make New Mistakes. Make glorious, amazing mistakes. Make mistakes nobody’s ever made before. Don’t freeze, don’t stop, don’t worry that it isn’t good enough, or it isn’t perfect, whatever it is: art, or love, or work or family or life.

Whatever it is you’re scared of doing, Do it.

Conversely, if you aren’t failing, you are seriously underestimating the extent of your skills and how far you could be stretching yourself.

Relationships are the important thing

On the Grant study, which followed hundreds of participants for most of their lives:

In an interview in the March 2008 newsletter to the Grant Study subjects, [principal investigator George] Vaillant was asked, “What have you learned from the Grant Study men?” Vaillant’s response: “That the only thing that really matters in life are your relationships to other people.”

via What two things do lifelong studies agree on when it comes to living a long, happy life? | Barking Up The Wrong Tree.