11–20 of 141 posts
Earlier quoted context omitted.
In the context of formal tournaments, people would likely be more accepting if there were separate competition classes.
That would be a huge step in the right direction. I actually think we should do the same thing for athletic competitions.
Why is it surprising that nootropics exist? Half the good people in tech are on them. And there's nothing fucking wrong with that. "My body, my choice", as the slogan goes.
Other than amphetamines and caffiene, what would these 'half of tech'be on?
I feel fantastically focused without the jittery edge that accompanies caffeine alone.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Other than amphetamines and caffiene, what would these 'half of tech'be on?
Been a few years but I ran into a coder that bragged to me about working 14 hours straight - regularly - on Adderall. This was during an interview, yeah I passed on that job for some reason.
Folks who took the drugs took longer to play their moves. They lost more games on time, but ignoring those games, their play was better and they consequently won more games.
But imagine an alternate study where players were given the instructions to take more time on their moves. In this study, they would have lost more games on time, but when they didn't lose on time, their play would have been stronger and they consequently would have won more games.
In such an alternate study, I wouldn't say their brains got better. They just made a different choice to play at a different point on their efficient time-quality frontier.
I wonder - how much did these drugs push the frontier outward, rather than just trading off to move along it?
Nonetheless, it's interesting that this study tried to answer why/how these nootropics work (maybe they make you more reflective) and also understand in what circumstances such drugs won't help (in situations where you're under time pressure).
The study was done with rapid games, against computers, where they discarded human losses on time. Not very confident in those results. But hopefully the researcher gets the chance to try and reproduce and use classical time controls, and human vs. human opponents.
This stinks of p-value hunting.
I can only imagine the study went like this. They did all these tests and then found that there were no statistically significant improvements after using these drugs. So they said to themselves, how can we tweak the parameters so as to get something publishable? Sure, let's eliminate an entire class of games where our control group does better than the test subjects.
Problem is, the most likely explanation for this is that people on these drugs spend more time thinking, and longer think time naturally is correlated with better results. But that's not how chess is played, else we'd all spend five hours on each move. Chess is about bounded rationality. As a result it looks to me that that they biased the results as to naturally achieve a desired effect.
Why is it surprising that nootropics exist? Half the good people in tech are on them. And there's nothing fucking wrong with that. "My body, my choice", as the slogan goes.
Other than amphetamines and caffiene, what would these 'half of tech'be on?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Modafinil and nicotine. Cocaine too, I imagine, although that's more a sales guy thing.
nicotine through pill, not smoking a cigarette?
Why is it surprising that nootropics exist? Half the good people in tech are on them. And there's nothing fucking wrong with that. "My body, my choice", as the slogan goes.
Other than amphetamines and caffiene, what would these 'half of tech'be on?