Is this talking about me (SL), or is there some other person of our acquaintance who’s written up an experience with piracetam? I can chime in with my experiences if so desired.
Tesseract
Karma: 1,029
This particular reference is from James & Bolstein, 1992, and Eliezer gets it from Influence, Science and Practice. It’s on chapter 2, page 26 in the fifth edition.
This comment is shockingly insightful and I would like to thank you for it.
What is the aim of philosophy? To be clear-headed rather than confused; lucid rather than obscure; rational rather than otherwise; and to be neither more, nor less, sure of things than is justifiable by argument or evidence. That is worth trying for.
Geoffrey Warnock
Education helps close the gap between what man believes to be the truth and truth itself.
Richard Scholz
One of the toughest things in any science… is to weed out the ideas that are really pleasing but unencumbered by truth.
Thomas Carew
A system for generating ungrounded but mostly true beliefs would be an oracle, as impossible as a perpetual motion machine.
(McKay & Dennett 2009)
Man’s most valuable trait is a judicious sense of what not to believe.
Euripides, Helen
Ah, I think you misunderstood me (on reflection, I wasn’t very clear) — I’m doing an experiment, not a research project in the sense of looking over the existing literature.
(For the record, I decided on conducting something along the lines of the studies mentioned in this post to look at how distraction influences retention of false information.)
Is that supposed to be the Lovecraftian variation on ‘God help us’?
To love truth for truth’s sake is the principal part of human perfection in this world, and the seed-plot of all other virtues.
Locke
If you want to live in a nicer world, you need good, unbiased science to tell you about the actual wellsprings of human behavior. You do not need a viewpoint that sounds comforting but is wrong, because that could lead you to create ineffective interventions. The question is not what sounds good to us but what actually causes humans to do the things they do.
Douglas Kenrick
The idea that destroying the environment will make the remaining species “better” by making sure that only the “fittest” survive betrays a near-total misunderstanding of evolution. Evolution is just the name we give to the fact that organisms (or, more precisely, genes) which survive and reproduce effectively in a given set of conditions become more frequent over time. If you clear-cut the forest, you’re not eliminating “weak” species and making room for the “strong” — you’re getting rid of species that were well-adapted to the forest and increasing the numbers of whatever organisms can survive in the resulting waste.
I think that if you understand how evolution works on a really intuitive level — how blind it is — it’s very difficult to believe both in human evolution and a guiding divinity. “Genes which promote their own replication become more common over time” is not a principle which admits of purpose. Vaguer understandings of evolution’s actual mechanism probably contribute to the apparent reasonableness of “theistic evolution”.
100 upvotes for a top-level post is 1000 karma, not 100 — upvotes for top-level posts are worth ten times more karma than upvotes for discussion and comments. This makes posts disproportionate sources of karma, even given the greater effort involved in writing them.
Sometimes I see a really bad series of comments by the same person and want to downvote 5 times in quick succession.
Both of these suggestions would be incredibly overbearing solutions to a relatively minor problem.
This one really annoys me. It’s one of the very few posts of Eliezer’s that I’ve ever downvoted, because it strikes me as both naive and foolish. And I think that’s because what Eliezer’s proposing here is to pretend that your map is the territory. To take your third-hand model of history (no doubt deeply flawed and horrendously incomplete) and treat it as if it were your actual experience. Not to mention that you just don’t have the knowledge he suggests envisioning (how do you know what it actually feels like to change your mind about slavery?) — or the sheer cognitive impossibility of actually making an imaginary runthrough of history.
It’s one thing to recommend having historical perspective, and another to pretend that that perspective is actually your own.
Correction: This quote is usually attributed to Andrew Lang. Not sure how I got that wrong.
Also, it occurs to me that this is essentially an application of Bayes’ Theorem. In an ordinary survey, the posterior probability (killed leopard|says yes) is 1, which is bad for the farmers, so they lie and therefore decrease the conditional probability (says yes|killed leopard), which is bad for the surveyors. Adding the die roll increases the unconditional probability of saying yes, so that the posterior probability no longer equals the conditional, and they can both get what they want.
Okay. I’m not going to post my writeup since it’s a little outdated — close to two years old now — and contains a lot of info irrelevant to this discussion, but the gist:
I tried out piracetam very actively (using it frequently, varying a lot of things, and closely noting the effects) for about two months in summer 2012, and have been using it periodically since then. I didn’t notice any long-term effects, though I don’t think I’ve actually ever tried to test the effects of a fixed long-term regimen.
What I did find was very dramatic acute effects, starting within an hour or two after taking it and lasting for a couple hours. These effects included music enhancement, visual enhancement (colors look brighter, textures look sharper), relief from anxiety/depression accompanied by a sense of clarity, and often mild euphoria.
While I haven’t done any blind tests and therefore can’t be entirely sure the effects aren’t placebo, they’re often quite strong (e.g. piracetam has helped me go from being very anxious to feeling very clear and self-possessed in situations where I wouldn’t expect that to happen otherwise) and some of them feel quite unlike any state I experience when not using piracetam.
It does seem to be difficult to get piracetam to work right, though — there seems to be idiosyncrasy in the dose people respond to, you have to figure out how much choline to take with it, tolerance builds, you might need to take a high initial dose (‘attack dose’) to get effects immediately, etc. I can see how this unreliability might seem characteristic of a placebo, but I can also see how it might cause people to falsely conclude that something was a placebo because they didn’t get effects from it easily.