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“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 m

“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 3y ago
Super accurate description! I never considered motivation and willpower to be separate, but I think your breakdown makes a lot of sense.
somestag 3y ago
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 3y ago
  > 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 3y ago
    "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 3y ago
    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 3y ago
    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 3y ago
      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.
- jdietrich 3y ago
  >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/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6082376/
- milesvp 3y ago
  >My understanding is that stimulants do exactly the same thing in a person whether they're "cognitively healthy" I don’t know a lot about stimulants in general, but I know for caffeine in particular this is not true. As an anecdote, I have a friend that caffeine puts to sleep, she just can’t take it. I’ve come to find out (partly from knowing her) that part of why the FDA doesn’t regulate caffeine, is that it has a very wide range of varying effects on different people.
  - somestag 3y ago
    Well, everyone is different biologically and every drug affects everyone differently, I didn't mean that there's no biodiversity between people. What I meant was that these stimulants don't function differently based on whether you're "cognitively healthy." Methylphenidate doesn't do something different in a person with ADHD versus one without, because it doesn't interact with any mechanisms of the illness, and whether or not you have ADHD you're experiencing similar effects on the drug. Contrast with, say, SSRIs, which might have some effect in a healthy person but you're looking at a different range of effects compared to someone taking it for depression/anxiety/OCD/whatever.
ericmcer 3y ago
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 3y ago
  > 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 3y ago
> 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 3y ago
  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.

cvdub 3y ago

Super accurate description! I never considered motivation and willpower to be separate, but I think your breakdown makes a lot of sense.

somestag 3y ago

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 3y ago
> 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 3y ago
  "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 3y ago
  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 3y ago
  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 3y ago
    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.
jdietrich 3y ago
>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/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6082376/
milesvp 3y ago
>My understanding is that stimulants do exactly the same thing in a person whether they're "cognitively healthy" I don’t know a lot about stimulants in general, but I know for caffeine in particular this is not true. As an anecdote, I have a friend that caffeine puts to sleep, she just can’t take it. I’ve come to find out (partly from knowing her) that part of why the FDA doesn’t regulate caffeine, is that it has a very wide range of varying effects on different people.
- somestag 3y ago
  Well, everyone is different biologically and every drug affects everyone differently, I didn't mean that there's no biodiversity between people. What I meant was that these stimulants don't function differently based on whether you're "cognitively healthy." Methylphenidate doesn't do something different in a person with ADHD versus one without, because it doesn't interact with any mechanisms of the illness, and whether or not you have ADHD you're experiencing similar effects on the drug. Contrast with, say, SSRIs, which might have some effect in a healthy person but you're looking at a different range of effects compared to someone taking it for depression/anxiety/OCD/whatever.

ericmcer 3y ago

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 3y ago
> 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 3y ago

> 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 3y ago
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.