Ever met someone who has burned out? It's not pretty. Did you know that work-related-stress is amongst the largest threats to (particularly men's) health? Have you seen workaholism, stress-induced alcoholism, general-burnt-out-ness ruin relationships? What makes you think nootropics won't cause these problems as well? After all, ex nihilo nihil fit.
Ever think about how much gas you burn getting to work, how much plastic trash you create at lunch or coffee, how much coal it takes to keep the lights and the AC on for you to do what you do? Ever think about how many people died of weird lung diseases to produce that coal? Again, nothing comes from nothing.
Unless your work really is curing cancer, de-acidifying the oceans, or colonizing Mars, it's likely that your work is actually a negative sum game. You're worse off for it, and so is everyone else.
and none of what you mentioned could be magically achieved by one person popping a pill to gain some short term effect, and probably lose something in longer run. feel free to experiment on yourself, just please don't force anyhow this pitiful activity on others.
I believe massive changes in life can be done just by permanently altering diet, but best, fastest and most durable results are in combination of diet and exercise. proper workout stimulates metabolism, makes people more happy and the feeling of strength and endurance coming from your own body is just priceless. oh and it prolongs life too on top of adding massive quality to it.
did I laid out a massive change in somebody's life? yes. so what? great rewards come after great hardships, naturally. but many people will keep throwing money at their problems, refusing to change, instead of pouring sweat for free and keep wondering why it doesn't work.
When diets work, they require pushing the body to the point of starvation and keeping it there, which is just not sustainable. The body goes into starvation mode and tells the brain to do everything it can to sustain food. No amount of willpower can overcome that.
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/05/08/health/08fat.html?pagewant...
> fat people who lost large amounts of weight might look like someone who was never fat, but they were very different. In fact, by every metabolic measurement, they seemed like people who were starving.
>The Rockefeller subjects also had a psychiatric syndrome, called semi-starvation neurosis, which had been noticed before in people of normal weight who had been starved. They dreamed of food, they fantasized about food or about breaking their diet. They were anxious and depressed; some had thoughts of suicide. They secreted food in their rooms. And they binged.
>Eventually, more than 50 people lived at the hospital and lost weight, and every one had physical and psychological signs of starvation. There were a very few who did not get fat again, but they made staying thin their life’s work, becoming Weight Watchers lecturers, for example, and, always, counting calories and maintaining themselves in a permanent state of starvation.
Moloch specifically refers to zero-sum games. Intelligence enhancement is not that; if everyone in the world gained 10 IQ points we would almost certainly be far better off.
To what ends?
Curing cancer and Alzheimer's, getting self-driving cars on the road by 2025 instead of 2030, colonizing Mars, figuring out how to fix our diets without requiring infinite willpower, etc, etc.