Imagine reading about the following result buried in a prestigious journal: > We administered [Drug X] to 10,000 patients 80+ years of age selected to be a statistical representation of the populace. None had exhibited any prior medical history to suggest unusual conditions, outside of the normal range of issues...
In response to the question > "Does anyone happen to know of reliable ways for increasing one's supply of executive function, by the way? I seem to run out of it very quickly in general." > > (Kaj_Solata) I posted that my military experience seems effectively designed to increase executive...
Subject: Warfare, History Of and Major Topics In
Recommendation: Makers of Modern Strategy from Machiavelli to the Nuclear Age, by Peter Paret, Gordon Craig, and Felix Gilbert.
I recommend this book specifically over 'The Art of War' by Sun Tzu or 'On War' by Clausewitz, which seem to come up as the 'war' books that people have read prior to (poorly) using war as a metaphor. The Art of War is unfortunately vague- most of the recommendations could be used for any course of action, which is sort of a common problem with translations from chinese due to the heavy context requirements of the language. Clausewitz is actually one of the articles in Makers... (read more)
Interesting addition of the government perspective. I think that my contributions to that perspective have very little potential for value-added, as that perspective seems to be prevalent in academia and the private and public sectors. I am taking the individual perspective for this discussion.
I would also be interested in a Metamed opinion on this topic, as you are correct, it seems like the magnified version of what I'm suggesting. I'm basically asking 'should you hire metamed to prescribe you off-label nootropics based on existing studies?'
Taboo reliable. Sure. I hold the opinion that psychiatrists cannot predict that a given drug will improve a patient's long-term diagnosis, and that psychiatrists/psychologists cannot agree on what condition a patient is manifesting. I agree that we have no tools to know when or how they're unique. I'm taking the perspective that the (admittedly very biased individual) should consider trying available options with low entry costs and demonstrably unimportant side effects, to see if they are unique snowflakes like those few in the study. The costs seem low and the potential upside high when considering psychological augmentation via off-prescription nootropics.
Good point on the endocrine condition. Very similar situation to what i'm trying to express. Probably a better example than mine.
I'm trying to figure out if bias in the case of the consumer who doesn't have access to prescription medication is enough, if you have a perspective of 'try the otc thing to see if you get the same positive outlier result, if not, discontinue.'
Thanks for that last link, it was an interesting update on the effectiveness of psychiatry. I was weighting my knowledge of the prevalence of rotten corpses in psychology into my estimate of the effectiveness of psychiatric methods, which now seems to be conflating two very different things. Although it does still seem that the set of psychiatrists who are capable of ignoring the prevalent rotten corpses in psychology when prescribing drugs is still small enough to tip the field toward doing your own analyses. I guess i don't have a good set of heuristics for comparing the effects of personal bias v the effects of a psychiatrist trained in psychology and prone... (read more)
That is one basic question to ask. The fact that it was not developed to combat a mechanism of senescence does not mean that it fails to inadverdently combat a mechanism of senescence. I agree that more study of the individual is in order. However, personally I'd probably still try the stuff in the interim- I wouldn't want to lose years waiting on papers to be published, and i feel that the chance is worth it.
The previous sentence is really the point of the prompt- what level of evidence do you need to strike out on your own, against the frequentist stats saying it doesn't happen for most people? What amount of upside?
Imagine reading about the following result buried in a prestigious journal:
... (read 536 more words →)We administered [Drug X] to 10,000 patients 80+ years of age selected to be a statistical representation of the populace. None had exhibited any prior medical history to suggest unusual conditions, outside of the normal range of issues collected over a lifetime. 1/3 of the patients were selected as a control group, and the others were entered into a longitudinal study of [Drug X] in which they were given varying doses over a 30 year timespan. [Please read charitably and flesh this out to be a good, well run longitudinal study by your personal standards. The important thing is the number of patients involved.]
Of the patients
Hahaha, exact same thing here. The US Air Force makes a big thing out of attention to detail- a single errant fold in a bedsheet or T-shirt results in the entire 50 person unit's crap being thrown everywhere and all of you have to do it again.
In contrast, we went to the shooting range once and had to hit the target a single time out of 40 shots to pass. In fairness, if the AF is using rifles everything is pear-shaped anyway.
the nepotist bureaucratic nightmare that was the Roman Empire
One of my goals with this thread is to figure out how to avoid such nepotist bureaucratic nightmares, which have historically dominated the long-term outlook of empires from China to Rome to, increasingly, the US.
Mmm. There are qualifications. First, your orders are enforced by other people- and limited by their ability to understand and adapt your orders. As time goes on and your orders are outdated, they will not be updated until someone of equal or greater rank devotes both attention and personnel to updating them, and it is rare for this to happen until something definitively proves they are outdated (an incident of some sort).
So, yes, a wide impact. But not a wide impact at your top quality level, a wide impact at the level that manages to percolate through your chain of subordinates and a persistent impact (for better or worse) until an incident causes a policy update.
American Air Force is the same.
In response to the question
"Does anyone happen to know of reliable ways for increasing one's supply of executive function, by the way? I seem to run out of it very quickly in general."
(Kaj_Solata)
I posted that my military experience seems effectively designed to increase executive function. Some examples of this from myself and metastable are
Uniforms- not having to think about your wardrobe, ever, saves a lot of time, mental effort, and money. Steve Jobs and President Obama are known for also using uniforms specifically for this purpose.
PT- Daily, routinized exercise. Done in a way that very few people are deciding what comes next.
-Maximum use of daylight hours
Med Group and Force Support-Minimized high-risk projects outside... (read more)
The scholarly literature sometimes features article-type reviews of 'popular' science books.
I will look on ebscohost (google scholar may work as well)
for just the title of the book,
refine my search for publication dates in the first couple years after the original book was published (although I just saw an article-review on Seeing Like a State from 2010, 12 years after the original's publication)
And then there are often reviews from noteworthies in the same field as the work, particularly if the author has published in academia prior to the popular work.
I've found them largely useless for any research, however, due to their brevity and their largely not-serious approach. The review is simply not treated like a scholarly response, it's more of a 'five stars, would recommend' thing usually speaking, and even criticisms in the pieces feel off the cuff and not well considered.