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Does creatine make you smarter?

dynomight.net

11–20 of 289 posts

Re: Does creatine make you smarter?

#11
Good discussion, but this conclusion:

> I don’t know. Maybe a little.

is not the right way to interpret the null result (insufficient evidence to reject null hypothesis that it has no effect) because the prior for supplements that people are trying to sell you is so low. In the absence of clear, strong evidence, you should assume the the whole thing is just an example of motivated reasoning. People want nootropics to be real, and other people really want to sell you readily available powders by claiming they have nootropic properties. In that environment, they were always going to trying to concoct a similar narrative about some supplement, and it just happened to be creatine. Those efforts were always going to result in a handful of "positive" studies that turn out to be non-reproducible, maybe because of p-hacking, maybe because of publication bias, maybe because of outright fraud. This is what the literature always looks like for stuff that just doesn't work. If it did work - if the effect size was large enough that you could personally detect it in your own life - then the papers would be trying to put error bars around the effect size, not trying (and failing) to barely distinguish it from a placebo.

“If your experiment needs statistics, you ought to have done a better experiment.” - Ernest Rutherford

Re: Does creatine make you smarter?

#15
post #11

Good discussion, but this conclusion: > I don’t know. Maybe a little. is not the right way to interpret the null result (insufficient evidence to reject null hypothesis that it has no effect) because the prior for supplements that people are trying to sell you is so low. In the absence of clear, strong evidence, you should assume the the whole thing is just an example of motivated reasoning. People want nootropics to…

Heavily agreed. The supplement industry has such a low level of reliability that it has really soured me on so many practices people have. And I flat out do not understand how some of the supplement stores survive.

Re: Does creatine make you smarter?

#16

I remember learning about Creatine as a weightlifting teen I never ended up doing it because you had to cycle it, and it was just one more thing to track Is it the same case in 2026? Is there a simple pill I can take?

I've never heard of cycling it. We're you a teen during the steroid arrival? Maybe people were confusing things. I've always just done 5mg a day, but now people are talking about taking mega doses of like 20-30mg a day, shrug

Creatine is dosed in grams not milligrams, otherwise your number are correct.

Re: Does creatine make you smarter?

#17
Sometimes I stay up until 1–3 a.m. because I'm working on a problem that's so interesting I can't stop until I make progress.

If I know I'm only going to get a few hours of sleep, I'll take 5–10 g of creatine, drink plenty of water, and go to bed. The next morning, I usually don't wake up with a headache.

If I skip the creatine under the same conditions, I'm much more likely to wake up with a headache after a short night's sleep.

Now it's become a habit, I automatically take creatine whenever I know my sleep duration is going to be much shorter than usual.

Re: Does creatine make you smarter?

#19

Sometimes I stay up until 1–3 a.m. because I'm working on a problem that's so interesting I can't stop until I make progress. If I know I'm only going to get a few hours of sleep, I'll take 5–10 g of creatine, drink plenty of water, and go to bed. The next morning, I usually don't wake up with a headache. If I skip the creatine under the same conditions, I'm much more likely to wake up with a headache after a short n…

Do you take monohydrate or HCL?
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