creatine supplementation increased the average IQ of their sample of vegetarians by 12 points
Creatine didn’t improve my iq, but it did improve my scores on a digit memory test and more importantly, my mental stamina. I took it for a year, decided it wasn’t doing anything and quit. After about a week, I noticed that I was feeling tired after six or seven hours of programming instead of the eight or nine I had been doing. After taking creatine again my energy returned.
Anecdotal blah blah, but maybe you should try it? It doesn’t cost that much for a month’s supply, and you can find simple recall tests online and do one measurement before and one after.
I’m looking for answers less like “this thing made me feel better/worse” and more like “these RCTs with a reasonable methodology showed on average a long-term X-point IQ increase/Y-point HAM-D reduction in the intervention groups, and these analogous animal studies found a similar effect,” in which X and Y are numbers generally agreed to be “very large” in each context.
This also seems to be the kind of question that variance component analyses would help elucidate.
I do take a creatine supplement, despite expecting it to not to help cognition/mood/productivity that much.
Those studies could not falsify the thesis of Jim Babcock’s given that he doesn’t assume that the same nutritional intervention has the same effect on different people.
The idea of a rationalist who doesn’t understand that rationality/intelligence doesn’t imply values convergence astounds me.
I’ll be a vegan when our technology outgrows animal farms, or the personal cost to be a vegan falls below the tiny sliver of me that is vaguely dissatisfied with the status quo.
The problem is that it is intensely hypocritical to only value human life, because humans are just not that different from other animals. Maybe “irrational” is the wrong word here, because orthogonality thesis blah blah, but it’s laughably arbitrary, along the same lines as nationalism or sexism. “I happen to have been born in X group, therefore X group is superior.”
Creatine didn’t improve my iq, but it did improve my scores on a digit memory test and more importantly, my mental stamina. I took it for a year, decided it wasn’t doing anything and quit. After about a week, I noticed that I was feeling tired after six or seven hours of programming instead of the eight or nine I had been doing. After taking creatine again my energy returned.
Anecdotal blah blah, but maybe you should try it? It doesn’t cost that much for a month’s supply, and you can find simple recall tests online and do one measurement before and one after.
I’m looking for answers less like “this thing made me feel better/worse” and more like “these RCTs with a reasonable methodology showed on average a long-term X-point IQ increase/Y-point HAM-D reduction in the intervention groups, and these analogous animal studies found a similar effect,” in which X and Y are numbers generally agreed to be “very large” in each context.
This also seems to be the kind of question that variance component analyses would help elucidate.
I do take a creatine supplement, despite expecting it to not to help cognition/mood/productivity that much.
Those studies could not falsify the thesis of Jim Babcock’s given that he doesn’t assume that the same nutritional intervention has the same effect on different people.
Those studies could elucidate evidence in favor of his thesis, though, which is why I’m looking for them.
Are you a vegetarian?
No, but I don’t eat very much meat.
Not to be that guy, but the idea of someone being a rationalist but not a vegan astounds me. You do know animals are sentient, right?
The idea of a rationalist who doesn’t understand that rationality/intelligence doesn’t imply values convergence astounds me.
I’ll be a vegan when our technology outgrows animal farms, or the personal cost to be a vegan falls below the tiny sliver of me that is vaguely dissatisfied with the status quo.
The problem is that it is intensely hypocritical to only value human life, because humans are just not that different from other animals. Maybe “irrational” is the wrong word here, because orthogonality thesis blah blah, but it’s laughably arbitrary, along the same lines as nationalism or sexism. “I happen to have been born in X group, therefore X group is superior.”