Talk:Nootropics

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introduce yourself

Hey; I'm no chemistry expert, or even a Nootropics expert, just someone with an avid interest in the subject of improving quality of life through chemical knowledge who is using their work on the wiki as an excuse to educate myself so as to better educate others. So feel free to be bold and edit this page, and the content page, and anything where you think important information should be etc. --Haley 05:09, 17 April 2010 (CEST)

Principles of Pages and Discussion

Let's come up with some ideas, here's some of mine, add yours and revise these a bit, too. Let's have an open dialogue about how to best design the page!

Civil, modest, friendly interaction

This is not a contest. The goal is not to make your favorite chemicals "win" and get the most favorable language on the page. Keep the fighting and pretentiousness to a minimum. Our goal is cooperative research.

Something that comes up quite often when having intellectual discussions is a tendency of one person to try to silence another person's right to make an argument. That is, a person will appeal to their intellectual "authority" to win an argument instead of actually addressing the conflicts and debates at hand. ("I have a phD in chemistry, and...", "Unfortunately you are another person who just cannot properly interpret studies," "You obviously don't know how a ____ works, because...")

While that all may be true, and your feelings of intellectual superiority may be entirely valid, for the purposes of this page you are kindly asked to stifle those feelings and instead show your intellect by making concrete arguments when necessary. If you are correct, it will be apparent. An argument is judged by its merits, not by the voice it came from.

Let's seek to be a positive, inclusive group of quality-centered, motivated researchers. No personal attacks on intelligence, nasty criticism, or claims to authority. Insults and heated debates waste time which could be better spent neutrally explaining/discussing something and then moving on.

Skeptical, coolheaded presentation of information, even from reputable sources.

Scientific evidence should be held to a higher standard than forum advice or trip reports: people take scientific papers seriously.

CAM (complementary and alternative medicine) Marketers have plenty of places online to advertise, this ain't it. Lots of CAM research, even the kind published in journals, is shoddy. In fact, the majority of CAM trials published in journals are ill-managed because that's not where the money is in Science. In addition, establishing that any chemical has any given effect is far more difficult and problematic than one's brain would automatically assume if one hasn't studied research methods and the potential problems of a trial. But to someone who is not used to analyzing drug trials, many of these problematic drug trials can seem relatively bulletproof in their conclusions. A paper's conclusion may suggest one thing, but what its actual contents, context, and results suggest or fail to reliably suggest may be entirely different case to a careful eye.
This is why it is our job here to not voicelessly present paper "results" devoid of any context or analysis We must pay attention to research methods and only talk about papers we have time to look over. Whether or not we have the time to apply that careful eye to each and every paper, the least we can do is not lead the reader to assume the validity of a paper's conclusion just because it happens to be published.
We must describe papers in a tone which illustrate the great amount of uncertainty we and they should have about the conclusions, given the limitations of, or our lack of attention to, the experiments' methods. Or if we and hundreds of others have have analyzed a paper and found it to have solid methods and a plausible conclusion from its data, we should say that too. We need to constantly remind readers that its hard to know just from reading over a paper whether that paper and its experiment and its results are actually saying anything meaningful about whether chemical A has effect B.
This seriousness is not because "people should only use chemicals which the medical institution approves of" That's not the case. We can write this page in a tone which makes it clear that people should use whatever drug seems best, in their careful judgment, for them to use. The reason to take a skeptical and careful attitude about the significance of any given scientific paper is because not doing so can easily make it seem like the scientific method has irrefutably and authoritatively put strong evidence behind a chemical's usefulness or uselessness for X purpose when it hasn't. Our goal isn't to let people's hopes down, the chemical may still work, our goal is to be honest to them about what medical science has or has not been able to establish about the chemical.

Not just a list of links to websites

Anyone can find lots of websites which talk in a fuzzy, vague way about Nootropics by searching google, and I'd bet only like 1/5th of them include original thought and research (rather than just being a summary of more sourced (sourced as in the citing of sources) work like the kind of pages you find on about.com), and half of the rest are just pages selling something.
I think our job here is to summarize and reference, and constantly obtain new information and refine our summaries.
We should link but our links should be to helpful, research-citing, quality pages Especially, when it comes to pages which talk more generally about the effects of a drug, it's best to go to ones where sources are cited. Some paragraphs of fuzzy, overly-generalizing, descriptive text on some page in the middle of nowhere is okay now and then, but we should strive for better.

Let's list experience reports

Problems with experience reports (besides the obvious)

  1. For some nootropics (Piracetam, Hydergine, etc) there are so MANY experiences out there on forums, hundreds upon hundreds, with everyone giving such variable results or using them as part of different cocktails to balance out choline depletion, serotonin agonism, etc., that it seems crazy to even look at any selection, small or large of these experience reports as a reliable source for a generalizable effect. What's more, using experience reports for these chemicals encourages a culture of "I don't need your stinking evidence!" when with drugs that popular, there are trials available which are good to look at first.
  2. There are literally thousands upon thousands of noot users on the internet, all of whom have their own cocktail which they believe to be ideal, whether for themselves or others. It is kind of silly to make a catalog of these because any drug out there there is probably someone who has tried it and liked it.
  3. Because of a variety of potential biases, it is unreasonable to simply accumulate the number of posts we can fid online of people who said a specific drug "works" for them and tally it up here as a figure. Those numbers could easily reflect popularity rather than one drug's usefulness compared to another. (even if we did it as a percentage of experience reports, people tend to speak more about Noots which have worked for them, leaving us with the same bias) Those numbers could not even be used to judge whether a drug is in itself useful, as because measuring the placebo effect for n=1 is impossible (you don't have to do with that with hallucinogens, for example) and because people tend to be more inspired to talk about a drug if it did work for them. So there might be 500 or 20,000 people who have tried piracetam and personally felt no benefit.

But...

There are still some basic sensations which are not so tied to the placebo effect of taking smart drugs (nausea, dizziness, exhaustion, etc), and it is good to at least have a space to talk about these... it would be good to have some space to link to experience reports.
Experience reports are especially good at finding potentially bad combination.
Browsing forums where people give experience reports are good places for getting pointers to different, more scientific-based information about the drugs.
Because there are so MANY experience reports out there, though, I think an index or table of some sort would be best for this.

Where to source experience reports from

This is usually straightforward.

Useful experience reports

  • BL forum users are not likely to be web dealers, because most of them have spent quite a lot of time on here.
  • Erowid trip reports: surely a few of these are from dealers, but Erowid has some pretty good editors to screen out junk, and a good community of legitimate content writers,
  • A blogpost on a regular, long-term unpopular blog by someone who doesn't seem to be running an online store.
  • A post on any forum by a regular, long-term poster who doesn't seem to be running an online store.

Things to be wary of including

  • A post on any forum by a user who has a few posts and most of them have to do with the awesomeness of drug X.
  • An out of nowhere youtube video, webpage, etc., which seems genuine enough.
  • A blog post on a popular blog or review site. Prominent bloggers often get free stuff in the mail, or get offers of money which face it, you would be happy to get money from running a blog too.
  • they mention which site they got it from.

Big red flag

  • ANY post on a unregulated forum or board that is specifically dedicated to academics or smart drugs and seems like a welcoming honeypot to a Nootropic seller looking to move their inventory.
  • comments on blogs, comments on youtube
  • Published on a commercial drug website
  • overwhelmingly positive blog comment which encourages users to buy some today, etc.

Research methodology

An example of a "good" paper

Here is a story which illuminates the importance of understanding Research Methodology when analyzing an experiment

A paper published in an obscure journal may say "well, it seems certain fraudinol increases mental capacity by 100%: the ten people in our trial took the test, took fraudinol for ten days, and ten days later their scores increased by an average of 100%!" and this might seem very cool. A well-meaning CAM enthusiast like you or I might think: oh, this paper was very hard to find, but I'm glad I found it. It lends hard evidence to what I've suspected all along: Fraudinol works.

But as an amateur research methodologist (which is what we all are when reading this stuff) several alarms should have already gone off in your head: Why was there no control group? Ten people is a rather small sample size, how can he be sure it reflects the general population? Were the tests on the same material? Different material? How different? What uncontrolled-for variables might have also affected the outcome, if not entirely at least to some degree? Do the results actually support the conclusion the author is making (Score on a test != mental capacity)?

Even more important than any of these are basic questions of reliability. Who is this guy and how do we know he's not lying about the results? Does he have a higher profit interest in being honest about Fraudinol's uselessness (ie. a professional researcher) or lying about its effectiveness (ie. he sells Fraudinol and Fraudinol services for a living)? What journal is he publishing it in? Are there reasons to believe the journal has or has not applied a high level of scrutiny to the paper and its conclusion, or to the research group or their honesty, while editing and publishing the paper?

While none of these things necessarily negate the possibility of the results being true, these concerns about experiment design or publication are good reasons to doubt a paper's usefulness to us as to understanding how useful the chemical is for purpose X. It is important for us to learn about research methodology and experiment design, so by reading the details of a published paper, we can tell what conclusions can really be drawn from its results.

Places to learn about Research Methodology

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