xq

Are there any good sci-fi books where this is explored?

Marshall Brain's Manna[0]. It goes into the recursive effects of "anytime anyone accesses information, that access is publicly logged" as well.

Though in my view the story hasn't held up very well over the past 12 years, compared to great scifi with similar tropes, such as Egan's Permutation City[1] or older Stephenson. In some ways that's due to a less intense writing style; in other ways it's due to parts that have essentially come true, making them seem retrospectively like "bad scifi".

Egan's description of mind-merging in Closer[2] might also be of some interest, as it explores the conceptual overlap between intimacy and real-time mutual information access.

[0] http://marshallbrain.com/manna1.htm

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Permutation_City

[2] http://eidolon.net/?story=Closer&pagetitle=Closer&section=fi...

as you said the data often need to be taken with a grain of salt. It's actually a little surprising nothing like this has been done yet in academia given the increased interest in the topic in recent years.

Definitely. I probably should have emphasized, not the limitations of anecdotal evidence, but the danger of untestable, excessive or irrelevant speculation.

It's super easy to treat metaphor or simple models as truth when the reality is much more complex and, as such, relatively unstudied. The biggest issue with online nootropics communities is not that people share their experiences, it's that readers often take the average of experiences and generalize it into a pseudo-neuroscientific model.

Not only does this reflect terribly on the nootropics and practical transhumanist milieus, it does a disservice (as a third-order effect) to people such as yourself who just want palatable, accurate, expertly distilled information. The rampant generalization diminishes the validity of the entire field from a public perspective, which slows scientific progress in those places with the ability to generously allocate resources, which in turn delays the amount of time it takes for a significant body of literature to arise which might warrant a canonical survey or introductory paper collection.

It's a shame, and I have no clue what to do about it, or if there even is anything that can be done within the context of places like /r/nootropics or Longecity. Here's hoping that systems like Experiment.com do what they aim to.

Disclaimer: have been an /r/nootropics moderator for most of its life. Am basically inactive now, but sometimes answer modmail.

Be wary of Longecity (and /r/nootropics to a lesser, or at least different, extent). There are some Longecity users in the Brain Health forum who will seem to know what they're talking about if you haven't read through introductory neuroscience and pharmacology textbooks. The same is true in /r/nootropics, but there are a greater concentration of knowledgeable users and bad science tends to get readily downvoted. I know I have said some ridiculous things in the past on both forums, and /r/nootropics has been more willing to call me out for indulging in anecdotal evidence.

The Longecity forum also seems to have a slightly more experimental tone to it, given that Longecity as a whole is not a nootropics community but a life extension community. There's a tradition of doing "group buys" of new substances from overseas. /r/nootropics has gotten more openly experimental in the past couple years, but I don't believe anyone has tried to organize a group buy yet.

But yeah, the sibling comments have exhausted the options that exist today. As far as I'm aware there aren't any expansive surveys that span the whole of nootropics / cognitive enhancement. There are papers that compare specific classes of new substances or techniques, but no comprehensive treatment of the idea of cumulative/permanent pharmacological brain enhancement yet. For now we're stuck with two slightly quirky online forums (which both skirt the line between self-help and wannabe academia) and wading through the literature ourselves. There's also examine.com and wikipedia as starting points.

> Oh well, it was great while it lasted.

Also an eight-year user; couldn't agree more.

I've also been around since nearly the beginning (coming up on tenth cakeday) and I feel very similarly.

I expressed as much in Alexis' modtalk thread, and I was glad to see many others doing the same. Site usability issues aside, frankly I couldn't care less about the admin-moderator and moderator-user dynamic of the default subs. The large-scale reddit community lost my interest years ago in typical Eternal September fashion.

But I feel, on the whole, betrayed by the new direction of the site. Not only does it not reflect the early days of reddit that drew me in -- it doesn't even seem to reflect a natural growth-driven evolution of the platform.

I find myself losing all remaining interest in reddit and suspect I'll delete my account in the coming weeks if there aren't major changes to

(a) the horrendous attitude of the [user-facing] admins,

(b) communication channels between reddit engineers and users who try to contribute to site development,

(c) the ancient moderation tools that can't handle subreddits over 50 thousand users.

It's been a great run. Really, what an amazing decade. But, at least for me, these recent events are just the final blow. They represent a turning point in reddit and a turning point in my own life. These discussion silos of the early 2000s all feel bloated and fairly useless now.

have there been any community attempts to push code that was rejected?

Apparently yes: https://www.reddit.com/r/TheoryOfReddit/comments/3bxrxj/lets...

Another great example of how much reddit cares about their assets is reddit companion. Which at the time of writing has around 154,302 installations, is utterly broken and hasn't been updated since February 21, 2013, the most ridiculous thing? It isn't hard to fix people tried to do the work for reddit since it is open source but they simply have been ignoring those pull requests since 2013. Which is silly since those pull request effectively do fix companion, resulting in a perfectly working version.

Hey. Forgive the stunted speech, but I must practice! :)

Mi komencas lerni Esperanton ĵus antaŭ unu semajno -- tra Duolingo, ke eble vi atendas -- sed nun mi provas iri al pli realaj verkoj, plejparte tradukitaj facilaj verkoj, tiuj mi leĝis en la anglan iam en mi vivo.

Kiam mi rigardis la Esperantajn grupojn en Meetup.com por la Bay Area, mi memoras vidinta la nomon "trio" ien. Tiu estas vi, ĉu ne?