[sinenomine]

> The only downside of working with them is going home and looking in the mirror and wondering why you can't match their pace.

One could imagine a society expending not insignificant proportion of GDP on R&D towards human cognitive enhancement. Same society could allow anyone to volunteer for the corresponding enhancement programs.

If one starts to ponder why we don't live in such a society, one is led to reconsider major incentives governing our public sphere and key institutions.

I don't think in the end there is a rational excuse for obvious lack of government-led or private-funded research into nootropics, neurophysiology of exceptionally bright individuals, and non-therapeutic gene therapy. The amount of research done so far is laughable, compared to obvious transformative impact in case of a breakthrough. As a "tech worker" and as a taxpayer I have to admit that the current nexus of large-scale sociopolitical trends is aggressively coercing me to spend my individual and very limited peak of energy, competence, intelligence and willpower towards advancing mostly deadbeat goals of the attention economy.

The small (in absolute terms) fundamental physical difference between the best and merely good enough should not be an insurmountable abyss we take it for.

I don't want to be a 2x engineer for your corporate monstrosity or yet another fast-growing CRUD app. I want to be a 2x engineer putting in meaningful work towards implementing the timeline where anyone, myself included, could become a 10x or a 100x engineer by undergoing affordable and safe gene therapy.

[astrange]

I think you might have overdosed on the fancy personal optimization literature and skipped the basics. Having a bigger brain metaphorically doesn't necessarily lead to productivity so much as increased ability to delude yourself.

The basics for being productive are 1. be in good shape (sleep and exercise) 2. not having to do less important stuff (someone cooks for you) 3. not having any more important stuff to do (no side business, spouse and kids don't demand more of your time).

Similarly, the best way to get moderately wealthy isn't to make a lot of complicated investments, it's to marry someone else who works and buy a house together.

[sinenomine]

Please don't pattern match me lazily onto typical silicon valley archetypes. I know and follow basic healthy living advice, yet it is still perfectly obvious where I'm lacking regardless. There shouldn't be this abyss between tiers of people and this burning need for verbal copes should not exist either.

Platitudes are a mind killer.

[astrange]

Following it is good, but if that’s not enough the answer is still going be something else basic. It’s probably never nootropics in practice until you get past several more kinds of boring stuff.

For instance, the best society wide interventions for kids still aren’t going to be fancy chemicals, it’s going to be better air quality esp. near highways and in schools, and that’s assuming we took care of maternal nutrition.

[sinenomine]

> but if that’s not enough the answer is still going be something else basic.

Why should it be this way, is there a Law of the Universe mandating every human shortcoming being some regrettable lifestyle flaw?

> For instance, the best society wide interventions for kids

... it's better to avoid this beaten topic, this is not a hill I'm willing to die on today.

[astrange]

> Why should it be this way, is there a Law of the Universe mandating every human shortcoming being some regrettable lifestyle flaw?

Oh, I don't mean only basic things are helpful, I mean if it works it'll become "basic". Like if a nootropic really worked that well we'd call it either a vitamin or a medication. (NAC and modafinil are here, and half the other effective ones like Semax are medications in Russia.)

> ... it's better to avoid this beaten topic, this is not a hill I'm willing to die on today.

That's funny since I don't think anything I said there is common wisdom yet, it's my personal hot take.