[HN Gopher] Smart drugs reduce quality of effort, and slow decis...
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Smart drugs reduce quality of effort, and slow decision-making
Author : wjb3
Score : 214 points
Date : 2023-11-16 09:12 UTC (13 hours ago)
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| inciampati wrote:
| Wow. Smart drugs just increase time spent working. N=40
| cmcaleer wrote:
| Anecdote regarding 'smart drugs': The most interesting thing I
| observed in starting treatment of my ADHD as an adult is that it
| I think that it stimulated my brain such that I was better able
| to recognise my tiredness. I remember taking dexamphetamine while
| I was titrating in the afternoon and pulling over an hour later
| while driving because I felt I was too tired to safely drive.
| This was after what I had considered a 'normal' amount of sleep
| in the past.
|
| When I spoke to people who took these drugs in university (almost
| all w/o ADHD) sleepiness or calmness never reported by them as a
| side effect. I avoided coffee and 'energy' drinks in the past
| because I had this effect, and didn't really understand how
| people took caffeine to keep themselves awake - I thought it was
| kind of a meme and I wouldn't understand why my coworkers would
| drink it during night shifts.
|
| I don't think dehydration adequately explains these to me, as I
| do take care to try to stay hydrated.
| jhfdbkofdchk wrote:
| yeah that's how you know you legit have ADHD, when a cup or two
| of coffee makes you calm instead of wired. I do have a
| threshold where if I drink too much coffee I can't sleep, get
| jittery etc.
| petesergeant wrote:
| That is also how you know you have a caffeine dependence,
| though
| kaashif wrote:
| Yeah, back when I drank a lot of coffee, one cup would make
| me feel calmer, while going too far and drinking like 3-4
| cups (which I did do once to see what it was like) makes me
| feel like shit, have a headache, be unable to sleep well,
| etc.
|
| After stopping, even one cup makes me jittery and I no
| longer feel like I need to drink coffee to feel awake.
|
| Caffeine dependence is terrible and widespread.
| matwood wrote:
| > Caffeine dependence is terrible and widespread.
|
| There are plenty of reasons to not want to be dependent
| on caffeine, but I wouldn't put its dependence in the
| terrible category.
| qwertox wrote:
| Agree. If I don't drink coffee for a couple of weeks, which
| I rarely do due to the extreme migraine from withdrawal
| (3-4 days), and then drink one with half a spoon of coffee,
| I'm extremely alert and focused for house. Now I'm drinking
| like at least 10 cups a day with zero benefit.
| robocat wrote:
| It is easy to quit without headaches - _slowly_ reduce
| your caffeine intake over a few weeks. Quitting cold
| turkey (abruptly stopping) will give most people nasty
| withdrawal symptoms.
|
| I regularly give up either (a) using caffeine only pills
| and breaking them to linearly decrease caffeine dose, or
| (b) measured reduction of instant coffee over time.
|
| Start at your current caffeine intake, every morning take
| one dose (might start high) and reduce slowly over say 3
| weeks. It requires significant patience and self-control,
| but it has worked for me. My main problem is ensuring I
| don't have social coffees: it is easy to fall back into
| the habit of drinking coffee if I don't follow the
| titration regime.
|
| https://hn.algolia.com/?query=robocat%20caffeine%20quit&t
| ype...
| ishjoh wrote:
| One easy thing you can do to reduce your caffeine intake
| is to drink 1/2 caff or have every X coffee be decaf. I
| switched to 1/2 caff and tapered down, that was a lot
| easier for me.
| culi wrote:
| I think this is a vast simplification. People vary. Sometimes
| drastically. Sometimes even from day to day.
|
| I have certain foods that seems to dramatically change the
| way stimulants like caffeine affect me. For whatever reason
| if I eat bananas and nut butter (maybe I have an allergy or
| food intolerance?) I find that caffeine makes me feel like I
| crash. When taken on an empty stomach I can get very "wired"
| but it also depends heavily on my sleep schedule and the time
| of day I take it.
|
| I've noticed I can get an incredibly productive boost from
| caffeine when I take it at a time that disrupts my current
| circadian rhythm. I (used to) usually drink coffee in the
| morning and it rarely felt like it helped at all. I knew if I
| was desperate I could drink it around noon and see a big
| boost but then I wouldn't be able to go sleep on time and
| would pay for it the next day
|
| Genetics, diet, microbiome, epigenetics, sleep habits, study
| habits, social health, seasonality, etc all likely play
| _some_ role in the way people metabolize caffeine.
|
| There is no published evidence that stimulants universally
| make people ADHD more tired or calm.
|
| And personally I believe given the right conditions anyone
| might get to experience the effect of caffeine actually
| making them sleepy.
| anonymouskimmer wrote:
| > Genetics, diet, microbiome, epigenetics, sleep habits,
| study habits, social health, seasonality, etc all likely
| play some role in the way people metabolize caffeine.
|
| > And personally I believe given the right conditions
| anyone might get to experience the effect of caffeine
| actually making them sleepy.
|
| There was a 6 month time in my late 20s when I was
| averaging 3.5 hours of sleep during the week while working
| two jobs and going to school. The third energy drink of the
| day seemed to signal my body to be tired.
|
| Years later with a much better life balance and fully off
| of caffeine for months at a time a single 12 ounce can of
| Coca-Cola at lunchtime was enough to keep me wired until
| late into the evening. Some time after that, while fully
| off of caffeine for about a year, 80 mg accidentally
| ingested from caffeinated protein bars disrupted my sleep
| deep into the night and took a couple of days to recover
| from.
|
| I could definitely do better with procrastination, and
| sometimes have trouble focusing, but am pretty sure I don't
| have ADD/ADHD.
| LoganDark wrote:
| It sucks that meds used to work this way for me, but now they
| just don't. They stopped working after a couple months, and
| never started working again, even after taking absolutely
| nothing for weeks. It's been almost a year since they've
| worked and I'm convinced my brain just patched a backdoor or
| something and just _wants_ me to be useless and dysfunctional
| all the time.
| cvdub wrote:
| They are probably still working, but you'll never get the
| same rush of excitement/euphoria that you felt in the first
| few months.
|
| The euphoria is a negative side effect in my opinion.
| That's what leads to abuse and addiction. Don't chase it!
|
| I'm sure you've heard all this before, but make sure you're
| getting enough sleep and exercise. Also, avoid acidic
| drinks in the morning like coffee and OJ when taking your
| medication. The acid can break down some of the medication
| before your body has a chance to absorb it.
| LoganDark wrote:
| > They are probably still working, but you'll never get
| the same rush of excitement/euphoria that you felt in the
| first few months.
|
| > The euphoria is a negative side effect in my opinion.
| That's what leads to abuse and addiction. Don't chase it!
|
| Yeah that's so not what I'm talking about.
|
| When they worked, I was able to practice art, take
| regular showers, get chores done and stay focused without
| getting bored and compulsive. It doesn't help with any of
| those anymore. I can't use it to draw, can't take regular
| showers, can't get chores done even if they're staring me
| in the face, and boy do I get extremely, painfully bored
| _all the time_. And this happens whether I am on or off
| stimulants.
|
| Again, they used to _work_. That is, actually _treat the
| ADHD_. And now they don 't.
|
| This has _nothing_ to do with euphoria.
| gtirloni wrote:
| I can relate. Various friends took them and I never bothered.
| They looked like crackheads and it scared me.
|
| I was recently diagnosed with severe ADHD by several doctors
| (something I've been treating as anxiety/depression for my
| whole life), and was prescribed lisdexamfetamine.
|
| It makes me super calm and my thoughts organized. When I'm
| tired, I feel tired. If I'm sleepy, I'm sleepy. My productivity
| isn't insane, it's just more stable and predictable now.
|
| I wish I had been diagnosed many decades ago.
| cmcaleer wrote:
| This is almost exactly my experience. I sat on my diagnosis
| for a number of years thinking it was wrong and 'this is just
| me', not really fully understanding the benefits I was giving
| up by foregoing meds.
|
| After starting I really just didn't need my anxiety meds
| anymore. Turns out being able to keep your shit together
| makes you less anxious. Who knew!
|
| Paranoia about the cardiac side effects have led me in to
| caring a lot about my overall cardiac health, which has meant
| that I've largely countered side negative effects with the
| obsession over HIIT and less medication overall. Giving up
| alcohol has been kind of sad but I'm getting to the age where
| hangovers are starting to get brutal so maybe it's for the
| best.
|
| It's also been nice to keep certain aspects of ADHD that I
| like, like my hyperfocus on certain subjects.
|
| I wish I could tell teenage me to investigate this sooner.
| gtirloni wrote:
| _> After starting I really just didn 't need my anxiety
| meds anymore_
|
| Exactly. I'm currently slowly going off antidepressants.
| paulocal wrote:
| Same story here, just with modafinil. All the signs were
| there since as far back as I was 7 years old.
|
| I've been able to control my focus so much better which seems
| to make me less tired. When I sit to get work done and
| inevitably get distracted, I can recover instead of go down a
| spiral of unproductiveness. I'm also better at prioritizing
| my focus on the things that are important, such as a must-
| have feature for launch, rather than a nice-to-have that I
| just enjoy working on more.
|
| And surprisingly, I've been getting some of the best sleep of
| my life so far on a pill designed to keep you awake. Who
| knew?
| gtirloni wrote:
| _> And surprisingly, I 've been getting some of the best
| sleep of my life so far on a pill designed to keep you
| awake. Who knew_
|
| It's my experience as well. I used to wake up really tired.
| I still get the same hours of sleep but I wake up
| feeling... normal? which is an improvement. Very
| unintuitive.
| JohnBooty wrote:
| Yeah I feel like I sleep great at night w/ modafinil.
|
| To be clear: I can't sleep well at all for about 8-12 hours
| following a dose. It has killed my ability to take a
| lunchtime nap.
|
| But as long as I don't take it after noon, I get great
| sleep at night. I fall right to sleep in minutes. Plenty of
| dreams as well, which suggests to me I'm getting in some
| good REM sleep.
| JohnBooty wrote:
| First: congrats on the progress! That sounds great!
|
| I've been thinking about moving in the opposite direction,
| actually. ADHD meds like lisdexamfetamine/adderall have been
| moderately helpful.
|
| But I am starting to think that I might do better treating
| this from an anxiety/depression angle. ADHD is so comingled
| with anxiety for me that I can't tell them apart. When I'm
| falling behind on tasks I get anxiety, which is _the literal
| worst thing for my ADHD_ , so that exacerbates the ADHD,
| which increases the anxiety.
|
| I'm curious (if you're open to sharing) if you're still
| treating the anxiety/depression side of things?
| jm4 wrote:
| I had the same experience with amphetamine. I think it's an
| ADHD thing. My doctor started me off on a low dose and I was
| falling asleep when I took it. We bumped it up and I'm working
| harder to stick to a good sleep schedule. It's mostly subsided,
| but I do still need the occasional afternoon nap.
|
| I didn't have that same experience with methylphenidate. That
| one was a much more pronounced effect. I felt pretty locked in
| and it was easy to focus. The downside was I was getting
| headaches, stomach cramps, I would sweat more and my heart was
| always racing like I had too much coffee.
|
| The amphetamine feels much different. It's more of a chilled
| out effect where all the noise seems to go away. It doesn't
| make me feel any smarter, but I do feel less distracted and I'm
| able to complete boring routine tasks. I wonder if that's why I
| sometimes get sleepy with it. It's like a relaxation spa for my
| brain.
| baryphonic wrote:
| > While on a drug, participants made a poorer, more random first
| attempt at filling a knapsack than they did after taking the
| placebo, and this had an especially negative impact on the
| subsequent performance of those who'd been above average in the
| placebo condition, explaining why they dropped below the mean.
| Overall, the results suggest that the participants' approach to
| solving the knapsack task became less systematic while they were
| on each of the three drugs, the researchers write.
|
| I can't help but think that since the knapsack problem is NP-
| complete, any attempt to fill the sack could subjectively appear
| "more random." Certainly the participants could use certain
| heuristics, but since in general there is no known way to
| systematically solve the problem, this study seems to enable some
| confirmation bias on the part of the experimenters.
| bglazer wrote:
| NP-complete just means that it's very difficult to verify that
| any solution is the best possible solution. It's very easy to
| compare any two attempts at a solution. That's what the
| researchers did, they saw that the knapsacks from the drugged
| attempts were worse than placebo
| nyssos wrote:
| > NP-complete just means that it's very difficult to verify
| that any solution is the best possible solution.
|
| It means that it's hard to _find_ the best solution, but easy
| to verify.
| Hnrobert42 wrote:
| That's an interesting observation. However, maybe that makes it
| the perfect type of problem. That is, it's a problem you can
| spend a lot more time on without better results, on average.
| mdorazio wrote:
| The authors of the paper seem to have misinterpreted why many
| cognitively healthy students take ritalin/adderall. It's not to
| make you smarter or more able to solve complex problems, it's to
| let you focus and cram on large workloads for far longer than you
| otherwise would be able to. Basically, quantity over quality.
|
| A much better test would have been to give all the study
| participants some new material requiring multiple hours of study
| to memorize & learn, then give them a test. The knapsack problem
| is fine to test some measure of "intelligence", but a bad choice
| to simulate academics.
| poultron wrote:
| Agree - as someone who took Adderall in highschool and college,
| and has started taking it again as an executive in my career, I
| always took it to be able to handle multitasking more
| efficiently with less distraction, and to motivate an action to
| be performed vs procrastinating. A test in which you HAVE to
| get a job done and you're being monitored and timed - I
| wouldn't expect a large improvement in results with 'smart
| drugs'. I think it would be much more interesting to watch
| study or work habits while under the influence of these smart
| drugs, measured in pages reviewed/written or emails sent or
| slides created or phone calls made, etc. True measures of
| productivity without knowing someone is looking over your
| shoulder.
|
| Also notice as I take my "smart drugs" my ability to focus in
| meetings is increased, and therefore allows me to better recall
| information in subsequent days... vs when not on meds I'm
| constantly distracted and my memory is much more foggy,
| especially specifics or details.
| FFP999 wrote:
| > I think it would be much more interesting to watch study or
| work habits while under the influence of these smart drugs,
| measured in pages reviewed/written or emails sent or slides
| created or phone calls made, etc. True measures of
| productivity...
|
| I think you've confused "productivity" with "bulk". Do you
| evaluate engineers by how many lines of source code they
| write in a day?
| Slava_Propanei wrote:
| Ask yourself what is actually required to succeed in
| academia
| FFP999 wrote:
| The ability to kowtow to corporate foundations to get
| funding?
| bumby wrote:
| Depends on level, no? Certainly it seems higher up (PhD
| or other research-oriented role), rote busy work may be
| necessary from time to time, but it also requires more
| creative work trying to synthesize new ideas.
| Jensson wrote:
| ADHD has too much creativity and barely any capacity for
| bulk, so trading a bit of that creativity to do the bulk
| work is worth it.
|
| Imagine if your brain refuses to do worthless uncreative
| work, that is ADHD, it is great for coming up with ideas
| but sucks for doing the work you often have to do.
| breakfastduck wrote:
| I think you're missing the point. If you struggle with ADHD
| / executive dysfunction, there is a material benefit to
| measuring by those in that kind of job. Ultimately it is
| not that you're at a normal baseline and these things just
| make you do more busy work, it's that you struggle to keep
| up with so many competing priorities and demands that you
| end up dealing with none of it. So yes, for this purpose,
| that measure is worthwhile in this case.
| poultron wrote:
| This is well said. People who dont have ADHD or a similar
| cognitive dysfunction look at smart drugs as a boost
| above average to gain high performance - because they
| havent experienced ADHD or dismiss it. Unfortunately the
| reality is that folks with ADHD typically feel very below
| average regardless of their IQ, missing out on meeting
| details, falling behind in work, procrastinating severely
| vs their peers. Adderall makes me think "so this is what
| everyone else feels like" when I take it, and I can just
| get things done at the most simple levels.
| n8cpdx wrote:
| Lots of jobs do actually involve bulk reading and writing
| with relatively low quality targets. Lawyers and assistants
| being the prime examples. Also, almost all of undergrad for
| many, many degrees.
| pookha wrote:
| I get distracted easier if my diet is awful (which it has
| been in the past)... Refined carbs, sugar, tap water
| (fluoride in tap water is
| insane:https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5285601/)
| and highly processed foods. Switch to a diet high in nitric
| oxide and run and I'm a much better problem solver. And I
| have no desire to work "for fourteen straight hours" and I'll
| find another job if I'm being asked too.
| satellite2 wrote:
| The study on fluoride level is basically garbage. It's pure
| randomness and the IQ level is probably only correlated to
| the affluence of the region.
|
| Just look at the results
|
| https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5285601/table/
| T...
|
| https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5285601/figure
| /...
| pookha wrote:
| What about these?
|
| https://ntp.niehs.nih.gov/sites/default/files/ntp/about_n
| tp/...
|
| "This review finds, with moderate confidence, that higher
| fluoride exposure (e.g., represented by populations whose
| total fluoride exposure approximates or exceeds the World
| Health Organization Guidelines for Drinking-water Quality
| of 1.5 mg/L of fluoride) is consistently associated with
| lower IQ in children."
|
| https://www.hsph.harvard.edu/news/features/fluoride-
| children...
|
| https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/25446012/
|
| You don't seriously think that drinking fluoride is OK?
| It's been studied to death and it's obvious at this point
| that long term fluoride exposure causes developmental
| neurotoxicity. Multiple countries have sponsored these
| studies and they show negative correlations to IQ and an
| increase in fluoride. They've demonstrated this in rats
| with sodium fluoride as well.
| satellite2 wrote:
| Why stop here? Just take the 10 first results in Scholar,
| you have as much low correlations as no correlation
| results. You can also easily find structural issues in
| many papers. And finally fluoride supplement from the
| family can easily tip the scale dramatically in total
| consumption which make the comparison pointless.
|
| Finally, there is probably a level at which it actually
| does become toxic. Like with many other minerals, too
| little is actually harmful, there is a right dosage and
| too much is again showing toxicity.
|
| Why do the papers against do not mention this, do not
| mention any theorical model to explain their findings, do
| not correct for socio-demographics factors when we know
| that intelligence is generally very poorly related to any
| other variables except those ones which
| disproportionately explain it?
| pookha wrote:
| "And finally fluoride supplement from the family can
| easily tip the scale dramatically in total consumption
| which make the comparison pointless."
|
| In groups of 100? What's the percentage of people that
| routinely consume toxic levels of fluoride from dental
| supplements (that study ran four months)? People don't
| generally eat toothpaste or drink mouthwash but I'm sure
| it happens. I just wouldn't assume that it would happen
| often enough to give you poison data.
|
| " Like with many other minerals, too little is actually
| harmful, there is a right dosage and too much is again
| showing toxicity."
|
| This is where I'm at on tap water...I assert that LOW-
| DOSAGE exposure over extended periods of time is bad and
| I assert that in the US there are area's that have
| incredibly high-doses of fluoride in tap water (at least
| 6 parts per million). Which is bad all around. Water is
| controlled at the jurisdiction level and there's NO
| guarantee that you're getting below the recommended dose
| of fluoride. I'm of the opinion that it's completely nuts
| to put this stuff in the drinking water and the Indian,
| Harvard, and recent NIH papers appear to back this up.
|
| "Why do the papers against do not mention this, do not
| mention any theorical model to explain their findings, do
| not correct for socio-demographics factors when we know
| that intelligence is generally very poorly related to any
| other variables except those ones which
| disproportionately explain it?"
|
| I agree with this...In the first study I could not tell
| if they controlled for socio-economic status. They
| identified villages with varying levels of fluoride and
| called it a day. The Harvard study did though. And the
| American study I linked to seemed to control for this as
| well...And they all came back with results that were
| similar...Repeated low-doses of fluoride have detrimental
| effects to development health.
|
| Form the harvard study: "We carried out a pilot study of
| 51 first-grade children in southern Sichuan, China, using
| the fluoride concentration in morning urine after an
| exposure-free night; fluoride in well-water source; and
| dental fluorosis status as indices of past fluoride
| exposure. We administered a battery of age-appropriate,
| relatively culture-independent tests that reflect
| different functional domains: the Wide Range Assessment
| of Memory and Learning (WRAML), Wechsler Intelligence
| Scale for Children-Revised (WISC-IV) digit span and block
| design; finger tapping and grooved pegboard. Confounder-
| adjusted associations between exposure indicators and
| test scores were assessed using multiple regression
| models. "
| Wojtkie wrote:
| From your first link, they literally state that the
| "moderate effect" is at concentrations exceeding what
| flourinated water supplies in the US have. Here's the
| comment.
|
| >Reviewer comment (DocB1_Monograph, page 2): It would be
| helpful if the Abstract was clear in the Discussion that
| the conclusion about effects on IQ in children was
| derived from high human exposures (higher than US
| exposures) without getting into more hazard conclusions
| or assessments.
|
| They repeatedly say that the current research is no where
| near comprehensive and results are weak.
| poultron wrote:
| Agreed - when I dont take Adderall, the closest I feel to
| it is when I do intermittent carb-free fasting paired with
| high water intake. If I eat shitty, I have what feels like
| a severe mental hangover every single day with significant
| impacts to motivation and productivity.
| Aurornis wrote:
| > and to motivate an action to be performed vs
| procrastinating
|
| I've watched several peers go down the path of trying to use
| stimulants for motivation starting in college and again later
| in my career. There's no denying that it works at first. They
| are stimulants, after all, and they stimulate people
| especially well when they first start taking them.
|
| The problem is that the motivation from stimulants is
| famously prone to tolerance and rebound effects. It's also
| very prone to habit-forming associations. I've noticed
| several people try to use prescription stimulants in an "as
| needed" fashion when they need to get a lot of work done
| quickly and they don't really want to do it. It doesn't take
| long before it's obvious to their friends and coworkers when
| they're having an off day or an on day, even though they
| might deny any rebound effect. It gets scary when they do
| this so long that they forget how to self-motivate without
| taking stimulants because they've built such a strong mental
| association between "I have a lot of work to do" being a
| trigger for "I should take another pill today" or even "I'll
| save this work until tomorrow when I can take a pill". It
| gets even scarier when tolerance sets in (to the
| motivating/stimulating effect, not so much the intended
| attention-enhancing effect) and they're now flirting with
| escalating doses, double doses, combinations with
| 'nootropics' to boost effects or 'reduce tolerance' and other
| slippery slopes.
|
| The short-term productivity boost shouldn't be denied, but I
| think it's also short-sighted to hold these drugs up as a
| free lunch productivity boost. Let's be honest: A little
| experimenting here and there isn't going to show tolerance,
| extensive rebound, psychological associations, or other
| effects, but that's also what gets people in trouble when
| they start to think it's a free lunch. There's a reason the
| traditional ADHD treatment approach involves taking the same
| dose every day rather than encouraging the patient to build
| psychological associations between taking the drug to alter
| their mood state.
|
| The strange part about this conversation is that if I wrote
| all of the above text about drinking 2 energy drinks at the
| start of a work day, few people would argue with it. The
| tolerance, rebound, and dependence effects of caffeine seem
| to be well known in pop culture. For some reason people with
| a little exposure to prescription stimulants seem to think
| that the normal rules don't apply to them, at least at first.
|
| A lot of people who have minimal or sporadic experience with
| stimulants seem to think they're no-strings-attached
| productivity boosts, but there's no free lunch. The brain
| will adapt over time.
| WalterBright wrote:
| I would get a short term productivity boost with caffeine,
| and then a remarkably unproductive time when it wore off. I
| deduced that the "up" part of the curve was cancelled out
| by the "down" part.
|
| So I switched to decaf. I'll still enjoy regular coffee now
| and then as a special treat.
| saiya-jin wrote:
| Very good summary of long term situation, I hope OP and
| similar folks would realize the drawbacks. Indeed, concept
| of 'free lunch' simply doesn't exist in reality, especially
| when it comes to drugs. Our bodies and minds constantly
| adapt and what caused a certain reaction before will
| gradually cause less of it the more its used. Some folks
| fare better, some worse, some have very low threshold for
| addictions.
|
| A very US-centric view I think, i never knew a single
| person in my University who took these 'enhancing' drugs,
| we just got wasted from alcohol and smoked weed. And I went
| through rather stressful University where 2/3 of people who
| started were thrown out of school in first 2 years in one
| or the other filtering hardcore courses with slightly
| psychotic professors (still not getting why by far the
| hardest course from 5 years for studying freakin' Software
| engineering had to be 'Theoretical electrotechnics' with
| some hardcore math way beyond our actual math courses, of
| course never used any of that, not even on rest of
| studies).
|
| Anyway, any substance you abuse will eventually kick back
| quite hard, if it didn't yet give it some time (or take a
| bit harder look in the mirror next time). Same for bad
| habits.
| nikkwong wrote:
| I could see someone making the exact same arguments that
| you're making about caffeine: you need to increase the dose
| over time, it's habit forming, people are not the same when
| they're not on it, etc; but many would argue that they
| drink coffee successfully for entire lifespans and are
| better off for it. You're demonstrating a 'spiraling out of
| control' reaction that happens when people habituate to
| stimulants but--well, I'm not sure how many cases this
| actually occurs in.
|
| Stimulants may be used by individuals with true
| deficiencies in an effort to get to baseline. Many people
| who start using stimulants in their 20's and 30's report
| being able to express healthy, practical behaviors that
| they couldn't summon themselves to express before: cleaning
| the house, making it to meetings on time, paying attention
| in conversations. The caution that you're expressing is
| warranted with any substance, but I'm sensing a bit of
| fearmongering which I think could possibly stop individuals
| from trying a substance through which they could possibly
| receive benefit.
| nicoburns wrote:
| Yes, which makes sense because we rarely reward people for
| making high quality decisions. And this is _especially_ the
| case within academic contexts.
| The_Colonel wrote:
| Yeah, exactly. I take modafinil, and it doesn't make me smarter
| in the sense of "fluid" intelligence, it just gives me the
| ability to last longer on mental tasks.
|
| I used to be completely mentally exhausted after a single
| meeting, modafinil fixes that for me. It makes me smarter in
| the sense of "crystallized" intelligence as a consequence of
| accumulating more knowledge, experience, mental models etc.
|
| There's also the problem of getting used to the drug. When I
| first started taking it, there were various side effects
| (including perceived worsened short term memory), which
| subsided with time.
| thelittleone wrote:
| I used to get great results from modafinil. But it slowed to
| the point of having no effect at all. Was concerned I was
| getting fake ones. So went to India where its made, bought
| from source and same thing. This was years after I had
| stopped already. But I'm grateful for the focus it gave me
| for 3 or 4 years.
| lynx23 wrote:
| Long term tolerance... When I found Ibometin as a remedy
| for occasional headaches, I could only take half a pill and
| had to actually ly down because it felt rather strong.
| These days, I can eat two and dont even notice the ffects.
| And no, I dont take it regularily, more like every 2 or 3
| months.
| anonymouskimmer wrote:
| I wonder if for some of these drugs it may not be a
| tolerance effect, but perhaps the drugs are just doing
| what they are going to do (a long-term physiological
| change) and after that point no longer have an effect.
| Like growth hormones after bone plates have fused.
| corndoge wrote:
| I had exactly the same experience over the same time
| period. Even waited a year and tried it again, same thing.
| Also started getting nasty side effects (dyspnea). Wasn't
| aware of any other drug that acts this way so i'm glad you
| made this comment because i've always wondered if it was
| the drug quality changing over time or if it was my
| reaction to the same drug.
| itchyouch wrote:
| As someone with a real Rx for ADHD/Narcolepsy, I noticed
| the same thing after several years.
|
| After being on it for ~5 years it lost its magic and
| efficacy, so I ended up introducing lifestyle changes in
| the form of a 5-color-a-day smoothie, exercise & sleep.
| Lifestyle changes were helpful, but not quite enough.
|
| When I recently started back up, I noticed that Provigil
| was a bit too stimulating for me. And I've found a good
| balance in doing a 1/4 to 1/2 a pill. About 50-100mg dose +
| caffiene (coffee/tea/energy drink) instead of the typical
| 200mg.
|
| And that's been quite a nice boost.
|
| Adderall on the other hand is a massive dump of dopamine
| and focus, so the focus is there, but it's easy to become a
| stimulated zombie.
| xkcd-sucks wrote:
| Someone, um, very close to me, who has an d-amphetamine
| RX, in grad school that found modafinil to be excellent
| in staving off psychosis caused by staying awake for
| several days in a row. However they also found developing
| better working habits and leaving academia to much more
| significantly improve quality of life.
| Aurornis wrote:
| Modafinil is a DAT inhibitor. Taking it will reduce the
| amount of amphetamine getting into neurons, effectively
| reducing or blocking the effects of the amphetamine
| because it can't access the parts of your brain that it
| uses to operate.
|
| Your 'friend' was probably into overdose territory and
| the Modafinil antagonized the d-amphetamine while also
| inducing a wakefulness effect.
|
| I really hope your friend realizes how bad this was.
| AuryGlenz wrote:
| I had a similar experience. I was taking it for idiopathic
| hypersomnia. At first it was a miracle drug, and then after
| only a few months it made me feel like absolute shit. Just
| - my whole body feeling bad, in a bad mood, etc. Hard to
| describe.
|
| I've asked my doctor for a prescription so that I could use
| it to go on stimulant breaks, but since I already have a
| prescription for Vyvanse and Adderall he was concerned I'd
| get drug audited. The last time I tried to find a good
| online Indian source it seems it's very hard to find
| anything legit.
| Aurornis wrote:
| You may already know this, but Pitolisant is a new non-
| stimulant medication that could be helpful.
|
| People either love it or find that it does nothing for
| them, so don't get your hopes up too high. However, for
| patients who respond it seems to be a great improvement.
| Be warned that it can take a long time for the positive
| effects to appear. Unlike stimulants that work well on
| the first day and decline over the subsequent
| months/years, it seems to do very little or have
| uncomfortable side effects on the first few days and then
| reveal the positives after a month.
|
| And FYI, there's a weird copayment reimbursement program
| from the manufacturer that makes it affordable for many.
| Dumb game to have to play, but it's there.
| Aurornis wrote:
| I remember someone showed me the subreddits for Modafinil
| and other stimulants (before they were banned, I believe).
| It felt like every 3rd post was from someone complaining
| that their Modafinil "didn't work any more" and they didn't
| realize that tolerance was going to set in.
|
| They thought they had discovered a free source of
| motivation in a pill.
|
| Of course, most people's initial assumption was that they
| received fake pills. Not a bad assumption after ordering
| online with crypto from an overseas website, but most of
| the stories went the same way: It didn't matter the source,
| it just wasn't "working" for them any more.
|
| I'm always surprised that people understand how tolerance
| works for energy drinks, coffee, and other caffeine
| sources. But then they get exposed to prescription drugs
| and assume it's going to feel like that forever.
|
| The second part of this problem is the misunderstanding
| about dosing. The prescription pill doses are set for
| continuous dosing of patients who need to take it every
| single day.
|
| A Narcolepsy patient taking 400mg of Modafinil every day
| forever is going to get into a steady-state tolerance that,
| ideally, brings their function back to a normal adult. A
| non-Narcoleptic person who takes 200mg or 400mg of
| Modafinil without having a baseline tolerance is going to
| be zipping around with extra stimulation. However,
| tolerance will set in eventually as well, leaving them with
| some stimulation, but nothing like those early doses when
| they had no tolerance. Again, this is a well known effect
| for other drugs like opioids or caffeine or benzos, but for
| some reason people forget the laws of tolerance apply to
| prescription stimulants too.
| The_Colonel wrote:
| > It felt like every 3rd post was from someone
| complaining that their Modafinil "didn't work any more"
| and they didn't realize that tolerance was going to set
| in.
|
| I believe it's at least partially caused by incorrect
| expectations. When people start taking modafinil, the
| effects are quite strong and stimulant-like, sometimes
| even with mild euphoria. But then these effects disappear
| and people are like - what's happening, I can't feel it
| anymore? Tolerance or fake pills?
|
| I fell into this trap originally as well and was
| comparing production batches etc. But the actual reason
| is that with a pro-longed use, Modafinil doesn't "feel"
| like anything. There's no altered state of mind, there
| isn't even a mild kick you get from a coffee. Modafinil
| isn't a stimulant which would kind of push you to do
| things. It doesn't "give" you anything, it only "takes
| away" the fatigue, and this is far more difficult to
| notice. On a relaxing day off, it doesn't feel any
| different if I take modafinil or not.
| FireBeyond wrote:
| > I'm always surprised that people understand how
| tolerance works for energy drinks, coffee, and other
| caffeine sources. But then they get exposed to
| prescription drugs and assume it's going to feel like
| that forever.
|
| In fairness, tolerance management and mitigation is a
| component of prescription drug design and composition,
| unlike the others. It of course can't overcome
| pharmacology, but there are mechanisms with varying
| efficacies.
| trashface wrote:
| Had a similar effect with bupropion, which is an
| antidepressant not a stimulant, but known for its
| activating effects, unlike the SSRIs which make some people
| (including me) super sleepy. Unfortunately I wasted the
| period where bupropion was giving me energy by pumping it
| into a dead end job, which eventually went away. I should
| have 100% used it to find a new job.
| michaelt wrote:
| _> it 's to let you focus and cram on large workloads for far
| longer than you otherwise would be able to_
|
| Isn't the point of doing that _to get better results_?
|
| I mean, imagine if without drugs I can do a hard slog through
| the books for 6 hours before giving up; and with drugs I can
| spend 12 hours anxiously bouncing between tasks and _feeling_
| very busy; but I actually learn more by doing the former than
| the latter - nobody taking study drugs is hoping to spend twice
| as long for worse results.
| criddell wrote:
| Think of it this way.
|
| Say unaided, you can get to 85% proficiency in 6 hours and
| that's about all you can sustain.
|
| With smart drugs, you only get to 75% proficiency in 6 hours
| but can keep going and will hit 95% in 9 hours.
|
| Think of it like a pick up truck with two gas tanks. It is
| less efficient than a small car but because of the larger
| tank it has more range.
| The_Colonel wrote:
| > I mean, imagine if without drugs I can do a hard slog
| through the books for 6 hours before giving up;
|
| Many people using this kind of drugs normally lasted maybe 1
| hour or so before giving up (without the drugs). And it often
| took a long ramp-up to even get to that 1 hour of focus.
|
| > and with drugs I can spend 12 hours anxiously bouncing
| between tasks and feeling very busy
|
| I guess this is maybe the case when your body isn't yet
| accustomed to the drug. I don't have any such issue after I
| got used to the drug (in my case modafinil).
| shortrounddev2 wrote:
| I would replace the word "learn" with memorize here. You
| aren't rewarded in school for learning, you are rewarded for
| information regurgitation. The point of taking Ritalin is to
| improve this capacity. Learning is secondary to passing in
| school
| TrackerFF wrote:
| Anecdotally: I never met failing or bottom-barrel students
| taking ADHD meds to boost their performance.
|
| Obviously, I can't know if students from the bottom
| percentile also engaged in that, but all the students I knew
| that took drugs to perform better, were motivated students
| that wanted to maximize their grades. And they studied things
| that required lots of reading and memorization (law,
| medicine, and similar).
|
| My take was that the kids that used those drugs, were the
| ones that wanted an extra push on the last 10% - to put it
| that way.
| tiahura wrote:
| Read the paper, or at least the abstract before you criticize
| researchers for misunderstanding. They were testing performance
| on the knapsack problem.
| HDThoreaun wrote:
| No one is taking these drugs to improve their performance on
| the knapsack problem. They're taking them so they can work
| for 15 hours straight without being distracted. It doesn't
| make any sense to say they don't work when the test is
| completely irrelevant.
| thruway516 wrote:
| They didn't say it doesn't work. They said it seems to make
| you dumber, at least on certain tasks - not the same thing
| as 'it doesn't work for studying or distraction'. Their
| findings are pretty interesting and relevant, at least for
| correcting a mis-perception that not a few people have
| about those drugs and what they're supposed to do (many
| people call them 'smart' drugs).
| sheepscreek wrote:
| "Smart drugs" is a poor choice of words to describe them. They
| are really "executive function support drugs".
|
| Even on them, a person will need to consciously make healthy
| choices. These drugs do not magically help you think smart.
| That still has to come from you.
|
| If anything, I feel ever so slightly "dumber" on them. They
| dull my creative thinking and in return, I gain a bit of
| motivation. It does nothing to my willpower. So I still need to
| want xyz thing bad, but it makes the act of doing that more
| fulfilling. Even if it's a waste of my time but something I
| _must_ do. The experience is more fulfilling. I reckon it's the
| extra dopamine at play.
|
| Regardless, xyz is still my decision and I can very much pick
| an unhealthy thing. Drugs don't aid your prioritization skills.
| They don't improve your communication. Those are skills that
| have to be learned. Maybe not, if you won an organized parent
| lottery. Then at least you will know what good looks like, and
| can learn to emulate that.
| cvdub wrote:
| Super accurate description!
|
| I never considered motivation and willpower to be separate,
| but I think your breakdown makes a lot of sense.
| somestag wrote:
| Agree. Amusingly, the authors found evidence that the drugs
| work: students spent more time focusing on even the easy
| version of the task. The impulse to "be done" with something
| and stop focusing on it is one of the things stimulants
| counteract.
|
| I'm also not a big fan on emphasizing the "cognitively
| healthy" part of the equation. My understanding is that
| stimulants do exactly the same thing in a person whether
| they're "cognitively healthy" or not; they're not the sort of
| drugs that target a deficiency or clear up some specific
| problem. The only difference is that some people have more of
| a need in this area than others.
|
| This reminds me of an old article I read about how
| psychedelics don't actually "increase connectivity in the
| brain" like users thought, as though that had anything to do
| with why people use psychedelics.
| garciasn wrote:
| > This reminds me of an old article I read about how
| psychedelics don't actually "increase connectivity in the
| brain" like users thought, as though that had anything to
| do with why people use psychedelics.
|
| That's why some folks say they take psychedelics; they want
| to justify their drug use for 'fun' as something more
| beneficial. I wish people were more honest with themselves
| and others.
| ethanbond wrote:
| "The drug increases connectivity in the brain" is a
| completely orthogonal claim to "the drug does something
| beneficial for me."
|
| In fact a lot of people who have taken (and really
| cherish) psychedelics would _not_ describe them as fun,
| and sometimes they 're very actively un-
| fun/terrifying/unenjoyable, and yet can _still_ be
| beneficial.
|
| What exactly is going on at the level of "brain
| connectivity" is pretty much unrelated to all of that^
| somestag wrote:
| Some people take psychedelics for the _feeling_ of
| connectivity, and there is some talk out there about
| psychedelics being healthy for the brain and "helping
| the brain form new connections" (all of that is based on
| very limited evidence and a lot of woo), but even that
| isn't what the article was about.
|
| The article just scanned people's brains while they were
| on drugs and saw that the electrical activity was more
| erratic and scattered than normal, not more active and
| connected, and concluded that people were using
| psychedelics based on a myth.
| renewiltord wrote:
| Legality in the US depends on suffering being alleviated.
| Honesty won't get you legality. I'm pro legalization so
| I'll lie about the benefits if necessary. You'll then
| have to pay the costs necessary to detect lies.
| jimz wrote:
| Wait, what? US as in the United States? That's simply not
| true. Even if we disregard that "legality in the US" is
| at best a moving target considering that federalism
| creates jurisdictional differences as a feature and
| therefore there are few things that are entirely outlawed
| in the US across the board everywhere, but considering
| that the most efficacious painkillers are also the most
| controlled, while deliriants that, prior to processing,
| extraction of active ingredients, and pairing with other
| psychoactive substances at minute doses, have little
| health benefits but great potential to create harm
| (thinking of belladonna and datura as a start), are legal
| to grow and aren't even subject to scheduling.
| Criminalization's link to health is effectively ret-
| conned and a poor ret-con at that. What turned Laudanum
| from something acceptable to give to babies to something
| of a moral hazard far worse than a health hazard was the
| same rationale that turned a nation of with no provision
| for immigration controls for the first hundred years of
| its existence into one where entire ethnicities,
| nationalities, and places of origin served as the basis
| for exclusion and continues to do so under the thinnest
| of guises: moral panics based in racism and perpetuated
| by those empowered and enriched via the propagation of
| such policies.
|
| Lying about efficacy will do nothing but only bolster
| what was never a legitimate rationale to begin with. This
| is a country that failed to learn lessons from
| prohibition, that managed to kept the Mann Act on the
| books even though the legislative intent - that of the
| fear over 'miscegenation' was hardly a secret, a country
| where congress never bothered to even get rid of the
| chapter in the US Code that contained the Chinese
| Exclusion Act and therefore leaving the ugly legacy plain
| to see for all. Why lie about your cause when the truth
| that undergirds the reality is far uglier and far more
| disconcerting to begin with? And of course, for once,
| Oscar Wilde was wrong and the truth may not be pure but
| certainly simple: prohibitionist policies began in racism
| and are sustained by moral panics while protected by the
| state agencies that now benefit financially from its
| existence. All this has a paper trail, both online and in
| print, in the federal register, in the US Code, in
| congressional records and archives. If that's not enough
| to justify resistance, your real reasoning will still be
| more persuasive than having to make up something to
| justify a position against a line of thinking that has
| goalposts with wheels built in from the start.
| renewiltord wrote:
| Dude, there is no way I'm going to get shrooms legalized
| by saying I want it for fun. It's too hard to get support
| for. It's much easier to place this fig leaf in front:
| look at these suffering people with mental illness;
| here's some evidence that it heals them; look at this
| grandma who has less pain; look at this grandpa who
| doesn't have seizures.
|
| Marijuana legalization used the same strategy: medical
| first, then complete. The technique works. The other
| technique of "Oh yeah, I want it for fun so you should
| let me do it" has been tried for eons and got nowhere.
| You can come up with all the theory, but one technique
| worked and the other didn't, so I'm not interested in the
| theory.
|
| Fake science it's going to be. The people who hate it
| don't have the ability to tell that it's fake.
| somestag wrote:
| I don't agree with them, but I don't agree with you
| either. Spreading fake science and medicine is
| fundamentally harmful to society, and doing it just
| because you want to trip legally is not a good enough
| excuse. This is like a textbook example of the ends not
| justifying the means, and it's from the same playbook
| that big pharma uses.
| somestag wrote:
| I don't agree with the parent that it's okay to lie about
| the health effects of a drug just because you want it
| legalized, but I feel like you missed the forest for the
| trees here.
|
| When a drug is stigmatized in the United States, it is
| essentially impossible to get it legalized without
| showing there is a medical use for it. That's just how it
| is. If your goal is to get a drug legalized, it does not
| matter whether that's how it _should_ be, or whether this
| is all rooted in systemic discrimination, or whether
| pharmaceutical companies push stuff that 's just as bad
| under their veil of legitimacy. Citizens who are anti-
| drug are under the impression _right now_ that ~100% of
| illicit drugs are extremely dangerous and a major threat
| to their community, and they are not going to sit around
| and listen to a history lesson philosophizing about how
| all their fears are a propagandized illusion.
|
| Even if you got them to listen, they would just say "Why
| risk it?" The only way to start changing minds is to
| point out there are upsides to drug legalization beyond
| just "freedom is good." That's why all of the arguments
| for legalization focus on health/therapeautic benefits,
| either directly from the drugs themselves or in the
| ability to treat those who need help with addiction.
| Levitz wrote:
| I've had fun with psychedelics, I also honestly consider
| they have improved my life.
|
| Yes the trip can be lots of fun, but really, "fun" is
| widely available once you cross the line and take drugs.
| MDMA is fun. Amphetamines can be fun. There is no
| scarcity of "fun" here and I have no issue admitting I've
| taken those to the possible detriment of my health and
| for fun.
|
| The difference is that if I had to skip the "trip" part
| of psychedelics and retain the rest, I'd still do it.
| samtho wrote:
| Let's say for the sake of argument (because it's not
| true) that the _only_ possible benefit of psychedelics is
| "fun". Assuming sensible doses do not cause harm, what is
| the problem with it only being fun?
| jimz wrote:
| Or hell, even if it's not "fun" (since what is fun is
| ultimately subjective as well), as long as it is not
| harming anyone else, what is really the problem?
|
| I did a lot of psychedelics, I don't know if fun was ever
| the word I'd use to describe most of it, but I don't
| regret any of it. It opened up a lot of the back of my
| brain in a way I never could conceive and really allowed
| me to think and analyze things in ways that I wouldn't
| have access to without. That in itself is well worth the
| experience, in my subjective reckoning. When I no longer
| felt that psychedelics were able to provide me with what
| it once did, I stopped. That was that. That surely is
| enough, right?
| jdietrich wrote:
| _> This reminds me of an old article I read about how
| psychedelics don't actually "increase connectivity in the
| brain" like users thought, as though that had anything to
| do with why people use psychedelics._
|
| I don't recall seeing anyone make that argument, but I do
| tend to avoid woo and pop sci. What is reasonably clear is
| that psychedelics increase neuroplasticity even in vitro,
| which is hypothesised as being one of the plausible
| mechanisms of action for psychedelics as a treatment for
| mental disorder - they potentially create a window of
| opportunity for habitual patterns of maladaptive cognition
| and behaviour to be unlearned.
|
| Some people are very attached to the idea that the
| qualitative experience of the "trip" is integral to the
| therapeutic effects of psychedelics, but that is by no
| means a universal belief; many groups are working on non-
| psychedelic drugs that exploit this mechanism.
|
| I think it's entirely reasonable to be wary of people
| justifying their recreational drug use with outsized claims
| of therapeutic benefits, but in the case of psychedelics
| there is definitely something of clinical interest
| happening. I'm quite circumspect about the clinical use of
| psychedelics, but I think it's highly likely that we are
| going to see a generation of novel and useful psychiatric
| drugs emerge based on what we have learned from
| psychedelics research.
|
| https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6082376/
| ericmcer wrote:
| I find they make me "smarter" at coding because of how
| important the ability to hold multiple contexts in your head
| is. Being able to focus unwaveringly while drilling through a
| bunch of nested function calls does make you a better
| programmer.
|
| At some point during debugging you might throw your hands up
| and wonder who created this tangled web of complexity but
| adderall delays that moment for awhile.
| projectazorian wrote:
| > At some point during debugging you might throw your hands
| up and wonder who created this tangled web of complexity
|
| There's a nonzero chance that it was your predecessor on a
| 2am Adderall binge ;)
| raducu wrote:
| > If anything, I feel ever so slightly "dumber" on them. They
| dull my creative thinking and in return, I gain a bit of
| motivation. It does nothing to my willpower. So I still need
| to want xyz thing bad, but it makes the act of doing that
| more fulfilling. Even if it's a waste of my time
|
| I also feel "dumber" while on ritalin, but at the end of the
| day the job gets done. Also a lot of frustrating stuff, the
| kind of stuff that would easily derail me, just becomes easy
| to overcome.
|
| Progress is just happens, but you can also be motivated to do
| dumb/useless work, for stimulants dosage is key.
| ImaCake wrote:
| Similar for me, I take the smallest possible dose of
| vyvanse that works to balance off the positives and
| negatives. Honestly, its a similar trade-off with Coffee or
| sugary foods.
| throw1234651234 wrote:
| Reading all this, it feels like these basically do the same
| thing as drinking an energy drink, minus the 20point blood
| pressure spike and tooth destruction. I am theoretically very
| much against all of this except in absolutely extreme cases.
|
| https://www.reynoldsclinic.com/why-french-kids-dont-have-
| adh....
| anonymouskimmer wrote:
| Change the person for the social environment, or change the
| social environment for the person. Very odd that in the US
| "land of the free" we chose to former.
|
| > Numbers in America show that at least 9% of the children
| that are school-age are diagnosed with the disorder
|
| That percentage seriously makes me think that we might be
| overdiagnosing based on personality type instead of just
| diagnosing based on underlying disorders. Either that or US
| schools are very different than French schools.
| cvdub wrote:
| The article you linked is ridiculous...
|
| > There's also the differences in how children are brought up
| in America and in France. For example, French parents have
| set strict limits from the time they are born. The children
| are raised with limits such as not being allowed to snack
| whenever they want. They have four strict meal times and they
| know those are the times they are allowed to eat, not before.
| While they love their children just as much as others do,
| they do believe in forced strict limitations to help the
| children grow up in guidelines and feel safe and secure.
|
| Really?
| throw1234651234 wrote:
| In terms of whether these things actually make a difference
| in how likely a child is to seem "ADHD" - yes, really.
| Controlling inhibitions and not being on a constant insulin
| spike ride from snacking helps stay focused.
|
| I have also had a number of friends with "ADHD" for whom
| the solution was "cut sugar, sleep enough, go into a room
| with no electronics (or a user account with nothing else
| installed), do some cardio".
|
| I am not denying the existence of ADHD, but as a society,
| we look for shortcuts to problems that have real solutions
| and are therefore more likely to just pop a pill. See the
| sister comment, it addresses this too.
|
| And furthermore - yes, cutting screen time in children
| dramatically increases their ability to focus later in
| life.
| hotnfresh wrote:
| What's your objection? I can't tell if you believe
| (possibly with evidence/experience!) that French parents
| don't do this, or that the approach is (for some reason)
| misguided.
| cvdub wrote:
| Sorry, I should have explained more.
|
| I think it's ridiculous to make a blanket statement about
| how kids are raised in America vs France with zero
| evidence to back it up. There are plenty of strict
| parents in the US, and I'm sure there are plenty of lax
| parents in France. Plus, as the article states:
|
| > The American psychiatrists believe that ADHD is a
| disorder based on biological issues.
|
| So the way a kid is raised has nothing to do with whether
| or not they have ADHD.
|
| According to the article, the real reason "Why French
| Kids Don't Have ADHD" is because the doctors avoid that
| diagnosis:
|
| > Basically the French community has decided to focus
| more on fixing the underlying causes of the problem
| behavior instead of giving it a wide range diagnosis.
|
| Looking for underlying causes and fixing problem behavior
| sounds great, I just feel like the article is confuses
| having ADHD and being diagnosed with ADHD.
|
| Despite my problems with the article, I actually do think
| that ADHD in children is over diagnosed in the US. And
| even if the disorder itself isn't over diagnosed, I think
| ADHD medication are over prescribed to children. Those
| medications have can have negative side effects, like
| reducing appetite and therefore growth, but that's not
| even my main problem with it. As other posters have
| described really well, ADHD medication can reduce
| creativity and problem solving skills. If a kid is
| medicated too young they might obey the rules a little
| too much and develop into a less creative, interesting,
| and dynamic person as a result.
| bitwize wrote:
| "All so-called ADHD kids need is a little good old-
| fashioned discipline."
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38278555
| mmatants wrote:
| Yeah this kind of stuff makes my blood boil. One can
| shame and belt their kid into compliance, and it might
| even get them (barely, only if they're lucky) all the way
| through university but holy shit the lifelong damage of
| self loathing and burnout and broken relationships it
| creates is im-fucking-measurable.
|
| Taking a neurological imbalance and turning it into a
| morality thing is abuse. Even if unintentional. This is
| real. Parents look for simple answers like "give em the
| strap" but how is that less reductive than "give em the
| pill"?
| throw1234651234 wrote:
| Or, you know, set a good example. No one said anything
| about beating anyone, that's all you.
| bitwize wrote:
| I brought up "the strap" in the comment I linked to. The
| sort of person who thinks ADHD is just a lack of
| discipline also tends to be nostalgic for a time when
| corporal punishment, including the use of straps and even
| paddles, was considered routine and even admirable.
| "Spare the rod and spoil the child" and that.
| insanitybit wrote:
| The problem with these tests is that the students participating
| are likely already very motivated. School is something we do
| for the first ~20 years of our life, it's hard to replicate how
| fucking boring and unmotivating it is in a lab.
| hn8305823 wrote:
| Makes sense since the entire point of school is to give you
| enough executive function to perform well in society. Learning
| can happen too, but school is obviously not optimized for that.
| mtlmtlmtlmtl wrote:
| It's my feeling that stimulant use in healthy people is rarely
| functional at all. I've seen a fair amount of friends try this,
| and generally very little is gained. Often they end up focused
| on something completely different than they intended. E.g they
| wanted to start some music before studying, then they ended up
| spending 5 hours making The Perfect Playlist. Stimulants make
| you very distractable that way. It can be very hard to control
| what you end up focusing on.
|
| In addition, when able to focus, the quality of work still
| suffers from several factors such as sleep deprivation and the
| fact that you forgot to eat or even drink for the last several
| hours.
|
| I've never seen code written in one of these stimulant fueled
| all-nighters that didn't create more work than it took to
| write.
|
| The only exception I've found is for doing housework and other
| mindless, repetitive tasks.
| HDThoreaun wrote:
| Right, no one calls these "smart drugs". They're called study
| drugs, because they help you focus for long periods of time.
| bigtunacan wrote:
| That's maybe a location thing. I've never heard them referred
| to as "study drugs", but often heard then referred to as
| "smart drugs".
| mattmaroon wrote:
| And to stay awake longer.
| Der_Einzige wrote:
| Fun fact about the knapsack problem - it's what you're solving
| in a lot of video games when you do inventory management.
| setgree wrote:
| You're right about the average user's mentality, but there's
| value in publishing this kind of research for anyone who didn't
| get the memo, e.g. Caroline Ellison, who once wrote: "Nothing
| like regular amphetamine use to make you appreciate how dumb a
| lot of normal, non-medicated human experience is" [0]. The
| implicit contrast to 'dumb' here is smart.
|
| [0]
| https://twitter.com/carolinecapital/status/13790363463003054...
| thruway516 wrote:
| Someone should also do a study to see if using 'smart' drugs
| over time lowers the criminal inhibitions of chronic abusers.
| SBF, Caroline Ellison and that whole gang, that Razzlekhan
| lady. It's funny how they all seemed smart but were
| ultimately just building a house of cards. I wonder if that
| is also an effect of long-term use.
| oooyay wrote:
| > It's not to make you smarter or more able to solve complex
| problems, it's to let you focus and cram on large workloads for
| far longer than you otherwise would be able to. Basically,
| quantity over quality.
|
| imo, that's kind of a dangerous assertion. I'm an adult in his
| thirties. I take Adderall because I have a genuine loss in
| executive function at times. A small dose of Adderall (read:
| less than 2mg) puts me back on track where I can deeply focus,
| understand, and interpret things. There's certainly people I've
| seen abuse the drug, but I don't think it's safe to say that
| the results of Adderall are quantity over quality and frankly
| the abuse of the drug often doesn't occur in a vacuum. It
| happens in people that aren't very substance aware in the first
| place.
| thruway516 wrote:
| They did not misinterprete anything. They said it reduced the
| 'quality' of effort and increased the time to find a correct
| solution. It is you who misread the title as "Ritalin does not
| work for students".
| instagraham wrote:
| Wow. Worth noting that there doesn't seem to have been much
| research or coverage of modafinil since the 2016 boom in "it's
| safe and makes you smart!" media hype.
|
| By far the easiest to obtain and abuse, though it's as yet
| unclear what abusing it looks like
| The_Colonel wrote:
| Abuse typically means taking higher than prescribed doses which
| then "unlocks" some kind of euphoria - e.g. Adderall,
| benzodiazepines etc.
|
| Modafinil can't really be abused in this way, it doesn't get
| you high and increasing the dose is usually counter-productive.
|
| Another element of abuse is addiction and Modafinil has no
| physical addiction and IMHO minimal to non-existent
| psychological addiction.
| Inviz wrote:
| Would you mind sharing where's your antagonism towards
| modafinil coming from? Is it your personal experience or is it
| everybody's enthusiasm rubs you the wrong way?
| gtroja wrote:
| I take adhd drugs to resist the urge to do something else that
| the voices of my head tell me to. Maybe I think less, but I think
| enough to get the task done
| TrackerFF wrote:
| I have ADHD (inattentive), and wasn't diagnosed until I was in my
| mid 20s - I somehow managed to graduate from university. I
| attribute the countless all-nighters for that. I never tried ADHD
| meds before I was officially diagnosed, but I good chunk of my
| classmates would regularly use meds in the days / weeks leading
| to exams, so that they could cram for 12 hours.
|
| From experience, the different drugs available can feel wildly
| different on me - so I'm going to assume that would also be valid
| for the non-ADHD users?
|
| But, anyway, looking back - the playing field def seemed uneven.
| How on earth are unmedicated neurodivergent going to compete
| against "enhanced" healthy people - it's like playing football
| with crutches, while your opponent is not only healthy, but also
| using steroids.
|
| EDIT: And, yes, I'm sure some % of the students that perform
| better when using meds may have some underlying/undiagnosed
| condition.
| culi wrote:
| I think you have a very simplified view of how ADHD and
| stimulants work. There's no actual research to back up the oft-
| repeated claim that stimulants affect people with an ADHD
| diagnosis differently from those without one. Actually the one
| bit of research I found suggests the exact opposite--that
| stimulants negatively impact the productivity and concentration
| of people without ADHD
|
| https://www.healthline.com/health-news/if-you-dont-have-adhd...
| TrackerFF wrote:
| So the implication is that there must be millions of students
| out there that are experiencing placebo effects from taking
| stimulants? Because there is practically an endless supply of
| feedback out there, from "normal" students, that report their
| ability to study/focus/cram going up, when using ADHD meds.
| anonymoushn wrote:
| If they negatively impact productivity and concentration for
| people without ADHD, and they affect people with and without
| ADHD diagnoses the same way, do they negatively impact
| productivity and concentration for people with ADHD?
| culi wrote:
| People seem to be focused on the study I cited rather than
| what my comment was saying overall. It's just one study with
| a sample size of 40.
|
| My point in including it was to show how variable (and
| generally lacking) research results are about the effects
| people feel from these substances.
| jugg1es wrote:
| I'd like to see if they still get these results if they use
| people who are acclimated to these drugs before-hand. The first
| time taking any drug always hits the hardest and it's possible
| these people were just too high.
| photochemsyn wrote:
| They missed an opportunity to compare microdosing psychedelics
| like LSD with the amphetamine class stimulants. Many users report
| that psychedelics do have interesting cognitive effects related
| to enhanced creativity and making long-range connections between
| disparate subjects, though I'm not sure it would help with
| knapsack optimization.
|
| As others note, the ADHD-type drugs just let you work longer
| without needing sleep, although the bill must eventually be paid
| with interest, which is why people who take a lot of stimulants
| tend to go through boom-bust cycles over time. Such drugs also
| have a kind of jangly nervous side effect which inhibits the
| creation of complex mental architectures of the kind that
| mathematicians rely on, so I'm not surprised by the study's
| results. They're more suited to rote learning (unfortunately
| common in today's academia) and repetitive tasks (factory work
| etc.).
| cmcaleer wrote:
| > why people who take a lot of stimulants tend to go through
| boom-bust cycles over time
|
| SBF (and all those in Alameda+FTX who got scripts from their
| in-house psych) in particular having the biggest boom-bust
| cycle in stimulant history. Though that doesn't count world
| leaders alleged to have stimulant use history.
| mtizim wrote:
| > single dose trial
|
| Humans make better decisions when in a state they've been pretty
| much their entire lives than in an altered one, more news at 11.
|
| The study seems useless - it's like giving the participants their
| own, long used car, asking them to set a time, and then comparing
| that to the time they would set in the same car, but with a
| slightly different clutch. I'd very gladly read a similar
| comparison for long term regular users.
| jfrbfbreudh wrote:
| I take ADHD meds and find that it definitely dulls my thinking
| and creative problem solving, but it at least gives me the
| motivation to actually write code vs. do nothing.
|
| Ideally, I'd have unmedicated days where I just sit and think
| through problems, and then medicated days where I'd work on the
| actual implementation. Unfortunately, I just spend all of my time
| on HN and youtube on my unmedicated days.
| r3d0c wrote:
| the opposite for me, makes it easier for me to solve problem
| because i can cohesively hold multiple thoughts in my head for
| long enough for me to see the patterns to be able to understand
| them, along with the emotional regulation an increase in
| executive functioning ability that meds help with (which is
| what adhd really is, not just problems with motivation or bad
| at concentrating)
|
| but i also work out 5-6 days a week and that + meds have been a
| huge boon than just meds because it keeps the depression down
| too, which is what you might be afflicted with because on my
| rare off days i still can do some work & be motivated
| unshavedyak wrote:
| > Unfortunately, I just spend all of my time on HN and youtube
| on my unmedicated days.
|
| I often wonder about this with me. I've got various hallmarks
| of ADHD (especially after my SO was diagnosed), but generally
| i'm productive.
|
| In this specific case, i can't figure out if it's something
| like ADHD that drives this behavior _or_ just normal human
| avoidance of work i dislike.
|
| Ie i of course don't have this problem when it's an interesting
| problem. I also tend not to have this problem after i get
| started, since most larger domains have interesting subdomains.
| Difficulty (read: vagueness, scope issues, etc) definitely lead
| to more of this for me though.
|
| Human brains are weird.
| ActorNightly wrote:
| ADHD isn't so much as you are all over the place, its more
| along the lines of erradic attention. Hyperfocusing on a
| problem (especially one that is interesting) and being super
| productive is a common symptom.
|
| Stimulants basically help regulate the dopamine levels so you
| can context switch easier and spread your attention to more
| things.
| JohnBooty wrote:
| Yeah. I describe it like this:
|
| Imagine a top of the line TV. Fantastic image quality. The
| only catch is... you can't choose what content it's
| playing.
|
| That's ADHD. At least for some people. Like me.
| ActorNightly wrote:
| Im the same way. Days are not enough. You basically need to
| have like an umedicated week to gain your creativity back. I
| also (2xmicro)dose shrooms (i.e enough where I feel a very very
| slight trip but can still function).
| raducu wrote:
| > I just spend all of my time on HN and youtube on my
| unmedicated days.
|
| The first times I tried stimulants, after 2-3 hours of euphoric
| productivity, the effects would wear off but the residual
| stimulation would be enough to make me continue working and I
| would always think "hey, I can do this no problem without the
| stimulants, I just need to push over the hump", but never
| seemed to work.
|
| A few years in, and yes, I can do without stimulants on easy
| tasks, but not really on complex stuff.
|
| I also can drive wile not on stimulants and not be a complete
| nervous mess afterwards, which is a big permanent gain for me.
|
| Also the "OMG, OMG, I'm so screwed by this messup at work,
| they're going to find me, things are going to crash because of
| it" changed to "it's going to be ok, things always work out in
| the end"
| willtemperley wrote:
| It's not unusual for students to crush and snort ritalin before
| exams in the UK.
|
| We have an interesting system - final year exams are essentially
| a one-shot thing in the UK. If you are lucky enough to able to
| retake a final exam, your mark is capped at 40% - a third class
| mark. An upper second class degree is required for PhD entry.
|
| Little wonder people will do _anything_ to pass those exams.
| anonymouskimmer wrote:
| What's the justification for capping scores on retakes? I can't
| believe that any empirical data supports it.
| TrackerFF wrote:
| My guess would be that it gives students the unfair advantage
| of more study time?
|
| Where I studied (Norway), university students would regularly
| fail on purpose on the first exam, so that they could get
| two-ish months more time to read on the subject, as the re-
| take/postponed exam would be around August/September, or
| January/February - depending on semester.
|
| It was/is called "strategic re-take", and unsurprisingly,
| you'd always see a bunch or A grades on the re-take.
|
| Same thing happens in the high-school level. People that want
| to study wildly popular majors, like medicine, will spend
| YEARS re-taking HS classes/exams to polish their grades.
| Those studies are so competitive that you could get almost
| straight A's, but still not be good enough.
| willtemperley wrote:
| Good question. I suppose it's to penalise those who can't
| work under pressure to a very tight schedule and reward those
| who are prepared to risk brain-damage with performance
| enhancing drugs for the sake of recognition.
| etothepii wrote:
| This is university specific.
| onemoresoop wrote:
| IS there an advantage to snorting it? Does it not damage the
| nasal passages?
| ryukoposting wrote:
| Shocker, your brain function is impaired while on a drug you've
| never taken before and you weren't prescribed.
|
| In my experience, it doesn't matter if you have multiple
| psychological evaluations and 10+ years of success with a
| consistent dosage of an ADHD medication. Most doctors just won't
| write the prescription because of this sort of bunk.
| anonymouskimmer wrote:
| I think this research is pointing out that using ADHD-like
| medication as "smart drugs" for school work in people without
| ADD/ADHD is problematic. I don't know exactly how they are used
| by those without a medical need, but I thought it was as
| temporary fixes, not taken habitually.
|
| The article specifically says:
|
| > More work will be needed to establish exactly why these drugs
| have these effects in those _without a medical need for them_ ,
| as well as to explore the potential impacts of other so-called
| smart drugs.
| jonahrd wrote:
| That is the point of the study, but in my non-scientific
| opinion it seems like a very poorly crafted study.
|
| Nobody is going to have issues with attention/motivation
| during the one, short task they were assigned at some study.
| It's a very novel, motivating environment.
|
| And then of course if you're feeling the effects of a new
| drug, you'll be "off" a bit.
|
| This doesn't really prove anything about kids who take it for
| a few nights during exam week to study.
| ryukoposting wrote:
| > I think this research is pointing out that using ADHD-like
| medication as "smart drugs" for school work in people without
| ADD/ADHD is problematic.
|
| Yes, but the conclusions drawn by this study and others are
| frequently wielded against people who _do_ have ADHD. The
| very term "smart drugs" comes from this mindset - the belief
| that these drugs don't paper over an ailment, rather they
| make the user "smarter."
| Hnrobert42 wrote:
| This study makes me think my dose may be too high. When my
| Adderall hits in the morning, EVERYTHING seems like a good idea.
| Then, I end up spending two hours writing the perfect email.
| mp05 wrote:
| This is me to a tee when I was frankly abusing Adderall as a
| young adult. My judgment of how best to use my time goes
| straight down the toilet when I'm jacked on amphetamines. The
| physical side effects are not very desirable either.
| cvdub wrote:
| Adderall reduces your task activation threshold, the amount of
| effort required to start something.
|
| It's definitely possible to reduce this threshold too far! If
| you do you'll end up jumping into the first project you come
| across and tackling it with gusto, whether or not it's high
| value. Having too much caffeine with Adderall makes this effect
| much worse for me.
|
| A little bit of laziness is good! You need to be able to power
| through the tedious stuff you have to do in life, but you never
| want to stop thinking, "this is tedious and boring, do I really
| have to do this? Is there a better way?"
|
| It's easy to lose the forest for the trees.
| tomohawk wrote:
| I decided long ago to not take substances such as these, or even
| caffeine. I also abstain from tobacco, alcohol, and the like.
|
| This forced me to develop skills and discipline over the years to
| achieve self control, and this has more than paid off. I find I
| can work a 12 hour day, and then go in the next day and do the
| same. It doesn't seem like a huge deal to me - especially when I
| consider family members who are/were farmers where this is quite
| a normal work day and used to be quite normal for everyone until
| about WWII.
|
| Am I an outlier? I don't know, but I know others who have taken
| the same path with similar results.
|
| I've worked with many people who cannot function without
| caffeine, let alone other substances. They will often claim how
| it enhances their abilities, but it doesn't come across that way
| in my observations. They seem to be dependent on a substance for
| normal, or even sub-normal performance.
| dboreham wrote:
| 12 hours farming is not really the same as 12 hours figuring
| out k8s.
| tanjtanjtanj wrote:
| The average farmer works less hours than the average office
| worker. This isn't even due to modern automation, it seems they
| have generally always worked <40 hours even during harvests.
| People began to work longer hours during industrialization and
| even then I can't find any time when working 12 hours a day was
| the norm.
| matznerd wrote:
| This study is about the amphetamine stimulants methylphenidate,
| dextroamphetamine, and the eugeroic (wakefulness agent)
| modafinil, and not about nootropics. Though the term smart drug
| can be inclusive of all of them...
|
| Real smart drugs = nootropics = piracetam and piracetam-like
| molecules. Stimulants generally decrease performance, increase
| false positives, and lead to worse performance as this study
| showed (especially in a first time user).
|
| Most nootropics take about 14 days to hit their stride and the
| effect isn't discernible immediately (though can be detected in
| an EEG)...
|
| See study: "Increase in the power of human memory in normal man
| through the use of drugs"
|
| "Nootropyl (Piracetam) a drug reported to facilitate learning in
| animals was tested for its effect on man by administering it to
| normal volunteers. The subjects were given 3x4 capsules at 400 mg
| per day, in a double blind study. Each subject learned series of
| words presented as stimuli upon a memory drum. No effects were
| observed after 7 days but after 14 days verbal learning had
| significantly increased."
|
| https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/826948/
|
| Study: "Single-dose piracetam effects on global complexity
| measures of human spontaneous multichannel EEG"
|
| "The results indicate that a single dose of piracetam dose-
| dependently affects the spontaneous EEG in normal volunteers,
| showing effects at the lowest treatment level. The decreased EEG
| complexity is interpreted as increased cooperativity of brain
| functional processes."
|
| https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/10555876/
|
| Study: "Single doses of piracetam affect 42-channel event-related
| potential microstate maps in a cognitive paradigm"
|
| "U-shaped dose-dependent effects were found; they were strongest
| after 4.8 g piracetam. Since these particular ERP segments are
| recognized to be strongly correlated to cognitive functions, the
| present findings suggest that single medium doses of piracetam
| selectively activate differently located or oriented neurons
| during cognitive steps of information processing."
|
| https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/8272204/
| scythe wrote:
| The authors are rather unfair to modafinil, also, lumping it in
| with the other two even though the negative "effects" of
| modafinil were not statistically significant (except in the
| rather dubious case of the rank testing of "productivity
| deviations") and the mean deviation was very small. Also, the
| "value attained" is not available for modafinil specifically;
| for this criterion -- which is the most believable, as it
| measures what participants _actually tried to achieve_ -- the
| drugs are all counted together, while on other measures they
| are listed separately. This is particularly disconcerting since
| the total value attained makes its way into the abstract and
| the press release yet gets shorted on the analysis.
| cvdub wrote:
| Is piracetam still the goto for the nootropics community? I
| thought people were moving away from that for some reason, but
| I can't remember why or where I heard that.
| Solortho wrote:
| About nootropics, I really enjoy noopept, it allows me to
| perform long and focused session of work without any side
| effect.
| narrator wrote:
| Meanwhile, in Russia they're making all kinds of smart drugs that
| work way better than the ones in the study:
| https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/08/16/an-iron-curtain-has-de...
|
| Piracetam was also developed in Romania in the 60s. I don't like
| communism or anything, but the complete ignorance of the U.S
| medical system about drugs developed outside the United States
| that are now out of patent is just a tragedy. Luckily, in the 80s
| and 90s AIDS patients lobbied to let foreign drugs be imported
| because many of them worked better than the domestically
| developed AIDS drugs.
|
| What's weird is illegal drugs are vastly more popular and studied
| in the U.S, with the recent hallucinogen microdosing trend, than
| drugs that have been used safely for decades overseas.
| Eumenes wrote:
| Kinda strange how they forgot to include the big stimulants, like
| Adderall and Vyvanse, in the study. My guess its impossible to
| incorporate a placebo with amphetamines. College kids are taking
| those, not Ritalin or Concerta, lol.
| averageRoyalty wrote:
| This is an Australian study, so they used Australian brands. We
| don't have those.
|
| Two of the three tested drugs were amphetamines though, very
| similar to those you listed[0].
|
| 0. https://bocarecoverycenter.com/treatment/understanding-
| add-a...
| FFP999 wrote:
| I spent a good deal of my 20s in an informal study on the
| cognitive effects of long-term self-prescribed amphetamine use.
| (Translation: I used to hang out with a whole lot of tweakers.)
| This article squares with my experience: amphetamines make your
| brain faster, not better.
| karmakaze wrote:
| > All of the drugs also increased the number of times the
| participants moved items in and out of the knapsack. "Thus, if
| one measures motivation in terms of time spent or number of items
| moved, drugs clearly enhanced motivation," the team writes.
| However, on average, the drugs did not increase 'effort quality'
| or productivity, measured as the average gain in knapsack value
| per move. Productivity was lower in all three drug conditions,
| compared with placebo.
|
| This "measured as the average gain in knapsack value per move" is
| an unusually chosen metric. Why would it not simply be the
| best/total score in the allotted time. This preemptively punishes
| sustained effort which is one of the increased behaviors. I'd
| like to see this done again with a different problem, a different
| metric, or simply their raw data.
|
| Now that I think about it, all of these types of reports should
| include the raw data or GTFO. This one seems to provide some on
| the referenced https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/sciadv.add4165
|
| > MATLAB code that generates the statistics and figures, along
| with underlying data, can be found in the notebook "figures.mlx"
| and "SOM.mlx" of the GitHub repository bmmlab/PECO
| (https://zenodo.org/badge/latestdoi/592775835).
| anonymouskimmer wrote:
| Why are you leaving out the rest of the performance criteria
| that the article mentions are done more poorly while on any of
| the drugs?
| Jeff_Brown wrote:
| Two observations:
|
| (1) When studying, the extra time spent could outweigh the
| reduced quality of thought.
|
| (2) Not a new point but it's strange how you can take a drug and
| think it has one effect when it has another.
| michael1999 wrote:
| How does a placebo for amphetamines work? I'd know the difference
| in 30 minutes.
| insanitybit wrote:
| Good question. Adding a third control group that took caffeine
| would have been interesting, since it's so well studied and
| mimics some of the side effects of amphetamines.
| GuB-42 wrote:
| You can definitely get high with a placebo. I have seen people
| in festivals getting high just by touching people, the
| "explanation" being that the people were sweating the drugs and
| by touching enough of them, you get enough for yourself to get
| high. This is as convincing to me as homeopathy, so definitely
| placebo, and it happened to people who took these drugs before
| and are familiar with their effects.
|
| And here, they are not giving you a big dose of MDMA so you can
| dance until sunrise, they are giving you a moderate dose of
| amphetamines to (tentatively) boost your ability to solve a
| maths problem.
|
| Unless you have already trained yourself, don't overestimate
| your ability to discriminate, the placebo effect is really
| strong here.
| insanitybit wrote:
| > The results showed that on average, the drugs didn't affect the
| chance of a participant finding the solution to a knapsack
| problem. Contrary to perhaps many students' expectations,
| however, participants tended to perform worse after taking one of
| the drugs, packing a lower total value of items.
|
| I have to assume that everyone who has taken these drugs could
| have predicted this, yeah? No one gets this drug and thinks "I
| will literally be more intelligent", they get them so that they
| can grind out 12 hours of work without being distracted by
| anything. 12 hours of work at 90% efficiency is way better than
| ~2 hours of work at 100% efficiency.
|
| > Not only that, but they spent substantially more time working
| on their solution while on the smart drugs than they did after
| taking the placebo. In fact, participants spent almost as much
| time on the easiest presentations of the knapsack task while on
| methylphenidate (Ritalin) as they did on the hardest instances of
| the task after taking the placebo, without any corresponding
| improvement in performance.
|
| As expected! One of the "traps" you have to be aware of when
| taking these medications is to be sure to not overfocus on things
| that don't matter.
|
| > The results have clear implications: healthy people who take
| these drugs hoping for cognitive gains may work harder and longer
| at a problem, but without any benefit.
|
| No way lol that is a ridiculous conclusion to draw. Without any
| benefit? Seriously? The benefits are _massive_.
| Clubber wrote:
| This phenomenon reminds me of athletes taking steroids to improve
| their performance, or slave dock workers being given cocaine to
| improve their output. The problem with both is it requires other
| people to also take those drugs to be competitive.
| dragonwriter wrote:
| I'm going to disagree with you that _the_ problem, or even the
| main problem among a wide array of problems, with _slave dock
| workers_ being given cocaine to improve output is "it requires
| other people to also take those drugs to be competitive".
| Clubber wrote:
| If you read my comment with a little more discern rather than
| jumping to virtue signal, you'll see "the problem," I was
| referring to is taking performance enhancing drugs. There is
| no need for you to remind everyone that slavery was bad
| unless you just can't help yourself.
|
| >The problem with both is it requires other people to also
| take those drugs to be competitive.
| dragonwriter wrote:
| Hey, I'm not the one who chose the analogy or the "with
| both"; if you would read what you wrote with more discern
| _ment_ before posting it, maybe we would have avoided this
| whole discussion.
| Clubber wrote:
| >The problem with both [examples of taking performance
| enhancing drugs, _implied_ ] is it requires other people
| to also take those drugs to be competitive.
|
| Writers..
| ulizzle wrote:
| I don't think amphetamines do that on their own, but rather over
| time the fatigue builds up and the drugs can't mask it anymore.
|
| The issue with smart drugs is that high tolerance leads to
| psychosis much easier than you'd think.
| sarasasa28 wrote:
| why are americans so addicted to adderall
| jobs_throwaway wrote:
| we love money, and adderall helps you focus on shit you don't
| care about in order to make money
| gehwartzen wrote:
| Having been on Adderall I agree with most here that it increases
| my executive function but doesn't really make me smarter.
|
| I have a long history of experimenting with both legal and
| illicit drugs and the only one I found to actually significantly
| increase my cognitive ability to solve complex problems is low
| dose Ketamine. Low dose lsd/shrooms as well but to a much lesser
| degree.
| Extropy_ wrote:
| I've found that small amounts of psilocybin mushrooms appear to
| calm me and allow me to "get in the zone" a lot better, as well
| as radically increase my creativity. I also found that low-dose
| MDMA, taken after eating, dramatically increased my focus and
| productivity while somewhat dulling my creativity. I've never
| tried LSD or Ketamine though.
| ActorNightly wrote:
| Generally, there is no drug that can make you smarter.
| Psychedelics can help you explore different perspective, but
| thats just being equivalent to a Monte Carlo approach to
| problem solving.
|
| That being said, if you are ADHD, stimulants can essentially
| make you more efficient, which will make you appear smarter.
| languagehacker wrote:
| A few important things to consider:
|
| Lumping all of the medications in question into a single study is
| disingenuous, and seems biased towards concluding their
| ineffectiveness.
|
| All three of the drugs in question have different mechanisms of
| action, which means that they will have a different effect on
| people with different brain chemistry. My read here is that if
| everyone takes all three and a placebo, performance may be
| enhanced in one case, but the remaining three cases can make the
| study come across as conclusive that on the whole, this course of
| treatment is ineffective.
|
| Not a lot of detail on the placebo and why it performs so much
| better, but I'm curious about the "nocebo" effect and subjects'
| prior exposure to the non-placebo dosage. In other words, is the
| feeling of being on a new "smart" drug too distracting to
| successfully take the test in question for the first time?
|
| The sample size is incredibly small at only 40 people, and skewed
| in terms of population. These were self-selecting individuals who
| responded to campus advertisements. This has been the modern
| critique of psychological experimentation in academia for
| decades, and I find it a little disparaging that we still have to
| suffer through it. I wish the HRB would ban things like campus
| advertisements as a means of recruiting test subjects -- we all
| really ought to know better by now.
|
| While the sequencing of studies on each individual helps to avoid
| some amount of sequence-based confounding variables, and the
| spacing of seven days between studies allows for a pretty decent
| return to homeostasis, the number of study participants is still
| too low to be conclusive. I'd need to see this study get repeated
| numerous times, at a larger scale, over individuals with a more
| consistent neurological history to be considered conclusive.
|
| I don't entirely buy the efficacy of working on individuals
| without any history of psychotropic medication or illicit drug
| use -- remember that this will rule out participants who have
| taken things like fluoxetine -- ruling out nearly 20% of adults
| in many countries -- or slightly skirted Australia's drug laws.
| These are people answering an ad on a college campus, likely for
| compensation. I don't think it's likely that all the subjects
| truthfully self-reported.
|
| If anything I'd expect the neurological variability of a fully
| unscreened or undiagnosed population to make it really truly hard
| to measure these drugs effectiveness. Given the mechanisms of
| action, I'd expect that the likely 20% of subjects with
| undiagnosed depression and additional likely 5% of individuals
| with undiagnosed ADHD would really throw a wrench in any
| conclusive numbers.
|
| I'm not trying to say that smart drugs are the answer to
| performing better at work. In fact, I'd expect a good night of
| sleep to make a bigger bump in these kinds of test scores. But I
| found the BPS is really jumping to conclusions based on what
| looks to me like very flimsy evidence.
|
| Testing on people is hard, but publishing summaries of articles
| that don't entirely stand on their own and drawing authoritative
| conclusions is incredibly easy.
| Inviz wrote:
| Modafinil is a great tool to have in one's toolbelt.
|
| There're days and situations when having uninterrupted focus for
| 10-14 hours does make a big impact. Condensing certain workloads
| into one day can save a lot of time in a longer run. For example
| going through huge refactoring with a lot of moving parts can be
| very draining to work through if you need to load in the context
| every day. Striking the iron while it's hot can help a great
| deal.
| Volrath89 wrote:
| True. I remember I used this back in the day when I was a pro
| online poker player. I would like to try again in Software,
| maybe to kickstart an indie project ... food for thought.
|
| How often do you use it and have you found any side effects?
| (or long term effects for that matter)
| Inviz wrote:
| I use about 100mg (average amount) 2-4 days a week for the
| last 1.5 years, going through a very challenging project. I
| had a small stretch of time when my skin started drying up on
| the forehead and was peeling off in minor quantities, so i
| took a break for a month and it fixed it.
|
| Some of the days I may not take it and not notice it, there's
| definitely no cravings. But during a break I felt slightly
| hazy when getting off it. I do notice an increase in typical
| stimulator tell-tale symptoms (like some jaw clenching), but
| i do have that from coffee as well (which i drink too). There
| can be days when i'm too wired up to fall asleep fast, so i
| may drop a 5-htp pill.
|
| The upside is that there's a lot of times when I manage to
| really concentrate on some activities. Doing 8 hours shifts
| is trivial. People note that I am pretty responsive at the
| end of the working days. Quite often I manage to do some
| personal hobby work after a full working day too.
|
| Modafinil doesn't have the ecstatic effects of Adderall and
| its friends, so working a lot can make me feel overly
| emotionally invested into some things that are not important
| in a grand picture. The stress can add up if not managed
| well. So I do not recommend working a lot for working's sake,
| there has to be a cause to pull heroic stunts like this. My
| excuse is to save up the money to enable myself to do other
| activites not related to programming later.
| bartwr wrote:
| How's your sleep and emotional state when using it like
| this? With an elimination half-life of 15h, 2-4 days a week
| it won't leave your body. I personally hated it for this
| reason - poor sleep, tossing and turning even with a sleep
| aid -> feeling emotionally unstable and even less
| productive the following day. Plus unable to recover from
| any moderate sports activity.
| cosmojg wrote:
| Everything's a trade-off. Most people who take stimulants
| regularly would be far less likely to even make an effort or make
| a decision without them. It seems obvious that the quality of an
| effort or decision will decrease in proportion when you take away
| all of the additional indecisive overthinking an individual would
| normally be doing instead of, y'know, actually doing the thing.
| Again, that's the trade-off, and I think most people are behaving
| rationally when they accept that deal. Until clinical psychology
| cracks how to simply teach the skills of "not overthinking,"
| "staying singularly focused," and "maintaining a bias towards
| action," it would seem that we're stuck with stimulants for the
| foreseeable future.
| ActorNightly wrote:
| Mandatory reading about Adderall
|
| https://slatestarcodex.com/2017/12/28/adderall-risks-much-mo...
| epgui wrote:
| All other things being equal, I think slower thinking or
| decision-making is probably a very good thing.
|
| I mean it depends on what the goal and situation is, but I
| strongly believe that _in general_ , fast thinking prioritizes
| heuristics over analysis and comes at an enormous (often
| unrecognized) cost.
| nurettin wrote:
| So if you suspect that you took a "smart drug" and it is a
| placebo, you get smarter. Got it.
| beefman wrote:
| I've long wished for more studies like this. So it's good to see.
|
| This one does miss some important variables:
|
| 1. Dose-dependent effects
|
| 2. Naive vs experienced users of a drug
|
| 3. Novel vs familiar task
|
| Though the authors spend a lot of time showing these stimulants
| reduce work efficiency, their central finding seems to be: "There
| was no significant effect of drug on performance"
|
| https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/sciadv.add4165
| zeroCalories wrote:
| My personal experience as someone diagnosed with ADHD is that
| they definitely make me more effective. My attention gets grabbed
| and redirected in inefficient ways, and being on the meds allows
| me to keep my focus fully on a task. But when I'm working on
| something I find exciting or fun, like a production failure, or a
| video game, I don't think my meds help me. Sometimes I wonder if
| my ADHD is even real.
| fredgrott wrote:
| Seems suspicious as these are narco class drugs and the study
| gave them to those who did not have the condition for the
| medicine. Did they give the study participants ample warning that
| they could be addicted after one dose?
|
| Ah ah! ADHD'ers including me have double the amount of DATs and
| NATs you guys and gals do not! Its why I will not get addicted
| taking Ritalin, Adderall, etc and yet you in fact will!
| tflinton wrote:
| I've been taking Adderall for a very long time. Prior to it I had
| a very difficult time motivating myself and simply being able to
| block out a thousand other thoughts and stimulus. I developed
| techniques to cope prior to taking it but once I started it was
| like night and day. It doesn't at all make me smarter but allows
| me to decide what I want to do rather than some sub-cognitive
| part of me. Should people take it to make them smarter? In my
| experience it helps focus, not intelligence.
| sneak wrote:
| When I hear "smart drugs" in a headline, I don't think of
| amphetamines.
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