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Periodic reminder: AFAIK (though I didn't look much) no one has thoroughly investigated whether there's some small set of molecules, delivered to the brain easily enough, that would have some major regulatory effects resulting in greatly increased cognitive ability. (Feel free to prove me wrong with an example of someone plausibly doing so, i.e. looking hard enough and thinking hard enough that if such a thing was feasible to find and do, then they'd probably have found it--but "surely, surely, surely someone has done so because obviously, right?" is certainly not an accepted proof. And don't call me Shirley!)
Very interesting, thanks. I've now read most of your links. Obviously I can't actually evaluate them but they seem intriguing... Especially because IIUC they at least allege positive effects working on different regions of the brain (and contributing to improvements on different sorts of tests), which suggests maybe they can stack.
I take your point that no one's really trying. Has anyone really tried to really try? For example, has someone who actually knows their stuff tried working out a plausible market plan (e.g. how to deal with regulation), and then tried to get venture capital, for intelligence enhancement? I guess there's tons of stuff sold as mind enhancing, though presumably it's mostly useless; and if these are all research chemicals from pharma companies then they'd be hard to sell... Or, has anyone tried a noncommercial (philanthropic, say) angle? Maybe I should talk to the Noo people.
4[anonymous]
Yeah unfortunately it seems to be the case that no one has really seriously tried (ie invested a lot of resources, on the scale of a large company or a government) to do R&D on significantly increasing IQ in healthy people through drugs, but I won’t get into that here.
If you’re interested in this area then I really do recommend to talk with the people at Nootopics.
Everychem is the small company that has synthesized most of the drugs I’ve listed and sells them for research (so really they are just research chemicals), but even though this is clearly a grey market, it has attracted…a lot of interest in the community. The user u/sirsadalot is the person who has written the posts I linked and is more knowledgeable than me, so I would suggest talking to him.
Yeah unfortunately it seems to be the case that no one has really seriously tried (ie invested a lot of resources, on the scale of a large company or a government) to do R&D on significantly increasing IQ in healthy people through drugs...