*in drug-naive participants taking high clinical doses.
Study participants were high.
Slanted reporting by the Economist, not even linking to the paper.
Study drugs make people worse at problem solving, not better
21–30 of 83 posts
Re: Study drugs make people worse at problem solving, not better
#22I think this is something well-known among high-achievers at school, but I knew some people at school who would just spend 36 hours straight doing all their assignments and still get bad marks. It was always this way for me: work for a few hours, take a break, (maybe a walk, chat with friends/roommates), make some (healthy) food, then get back to it. Staying up never helps, because you have to sleep anyway, and getti…
What you describe is what I imagined university to be like but found that people were quite lazy and amazed that I studied during the course and not all in the last 24h. Kind of made me leave academic life too early in a way I feel.
Re: Study drugs make people worse at problem solving, not better
#23Is there a link to the study? Seems weird to question the efficacy of drugs for things they're not FDA approved for. They're not nootropics.
Re: Study drugs make people worse at problem solving, not better
#24I think this is something well-known among high-achievers at school, but I knew some people at school who would just spend 36 hours straight doing all their assignments and still get bad marks. It was always this way for me: work for a few hours, take a break, (maybe a walk, chat with friends/roommates), make some (healthy) food, then get back to it. Staying up never helps, because you have to sleep anyway, and getti…
I've always been a sort of lazy high achiever and very puzzled about this.
I was always a near-top (but not top) student in schools, got a PhD and am now working in a high paying job in a bank. Besides one or two years during my university years, I've always been extremely lazy. On the other hand, in all of these institutions there have been many people who have been very serious hard workers and perhaps even at the time been ahead of me in whatever metrics the institution happened to use to measure success. However, over time I've noticed that these sort of things sort of even out. People who worked very hard in the high school or during my PhD are not more successful than me anymore.
I don't know if it's just that life is so random that the effect of hard work gets washed out by random life choices or what. It's also plausible that working hard just puts you in a very non-creative mindset and creativity is what gets most of the work done in a complex environment in the end.
For many people, hard work often seems to be an end to itself and it matters less to those people where the work is directed at. As a result, people end up working crazy hours doing stuff that could be done in one tenth of a time by using a bit of creativity or just waiting the problem to somehow become irrelevant.
Re: Study drugs make people worse at problem solving, not better
#25I want to preface this by saying that I am not a supporter of study drugs, except for caffeine. I don't find these studies to be convincing. You give people a pill, they don't know what it is. These people don't know what to expect, they've never taken study drugs before. They're solving some random logic puzzle they've never seen before. "Participants had to work out which items to put into a bag." Compare to how th…
It seems like a fairly reasonable study to me. I don't see how the study participants' possible lack of familiarity with the drugs diminishes the value of the data. From the article: "Star performers during the placebo session fell to the bottom of the pack when they had taken the drugs." That directly refutes your assertion they were doing a novel task for the first time.
What dose?
Re: Study drugs make people worse at problem solving, not better
#26I want to preface this by saying that I am not a supporter of study drugs, except for caffeine. I don't find these studies to be convincing. You give people a pill, they don't know what it is. These people don't know what to expect, they've never taken study drugs before. They're solving some random logic puzzle they've never seen before. "Participants had to work out which items to put into a bag." Compare to how th…
It seems like a fairly reasonable study to me. I don't see how the study participants' possible lack of familiarity with the drugs diminishes the value of the data. From the article: "Star performers during the placebo session fell to the bottom of the pack when they had taken the drugs." That directly refutes your assertion they were doing a novel task for the first time.
Note that in addition to possibly having not experienced the drug before, they were given fairly high doses. Most therapeutic doses will start out with a small dose.
Re: Study drugs make people worse at problem solving, not better
#27I'd bet a 1000-piece mono-color puzzle that close to 50% of currently written software is done on those drugs.
The only drug I have seen people use at work is diluted favoured ethanol and coffee of course.
Re: Study drugs make people worse at problem solving, not better
#28Is the lesson here is that problem solving typically requires more willpower than intellect?
Re: Study drugs make people worse at problem solving, not better
#29I think this is something well-known among high-achievers at school, but I knew some people at school who would just spend 36 hours straight doing all their assignments and still get bad marks. It was always this way for me: work for a few hours, take a break, (maybe a walk, chat with friends/roommates), make some (healthy) food, then get back to it. Staying up never helps, because you have to sleep anyway, and getti…
I've always been a sort of lazy high achiever and very puzzled about this. I was always a near-top (but not top) student in schools, got a PhD and am now working in a high paying job in a bank. Besides one or two years during my university years, I've always been extremely lazy. On the other hand, in all of these institutions there have been many people who have been very serious hard workers and perhaps even at the…
You might just have higher IQ or whatever. Some people work hard because they can get 60% instead of 50%
and get more money than they would have got had they not worked hard. Your test score and profile is irrelevant to them.
Re: Study drugs make people worse at problem solving, not better
#30Earlier quoted context omitted.
It seems like a fairly reasonable study to me. I don't see how the study participants' possible lack of familiarity with the drugs diminishes the value of the data. From the article: "Star performers during the placebo session fell to the bottom of the pack when they had taken the drugs." That directly refutes your assertion they were doing a novel task for the first time.
Note that in addition to possibly having not experienced the drug before, they were given fairly high doses. Most therapeutic doses will start out with a small dose.
I'm not really arguing for or against drawing any particular conclusions from this paper. I just think it's an interesting study that gives further insight into a subject that could probably benefit from many more studies like it.