Yvain

Here's a discussion of this in the New York Times - https://www.nytimes.com/2004/11/30/health/bacteria-enlisted-...

"Dr. Hillman has been working on this therapy for 25 years and first applied to the F.D.A. for permission to begin a clinical trial in 1998. The agency, the company said, has demanded change upon change to make sure the modified bacteria would not run amok, cause undesirable changes in the mouth, or revert to a cavity-producing form. To win approval, Oragenics has agreed that the 15 volunteers in the first trial will not even have teeth -- they will have dentures."

This differs from the version I heard from Aaron in that Aaron said 100 people and NYT says 15 people, but NYT says the FDA demanded "change after change", so the 100 might be either an earlier or a later version of this.

Hopefully this changes your opinion of whether or not this is a scam, and of how much you understand about the FDA approval process.

I looked into this and it isn't true - countries which switch to opt-out don't get significantly more than we do. I agree this is surprising. The best explanation I was able to find was that, of the few people who get in accidents/comas where their organs are useful, most have already opted it, and there's a lot of negotiation with the family around exactly what that means such that an opt-in/opt-out box doesn't make a big deal. See eg https://www.hopkinsmedicine.org/news/media/releases/presumed... .

I'm the author of the article. This was added by Substack without my knowledge (it doesn't show up to me since I'm already subscribed) and I think I've disabled it now. Please check to confirm that it is disabled.

If you look at the link in the piece, you'll notice it isn't an affiliate link. If it were an affiliate link, it would have a linkcode section, or more likely just use the amzn.to link shortener that Amazon automatically applies to all its affiliate links unless you stop it.

(source: I am the OP, I do have an Amazon affiliate link, and I chose not to use it in the article to avoid concerns like this one)

"If that's the case though, I wonder why my friends and family back in the states keep complaining to me about the empty shelves, Amazon Prime delays, etc. Shouldn't fixing the symptoms of today's strained supply chain have been an easy task compared to climate change? "

If we still have empty shelves in a year, I'll admit you're right about this!

I think it's telling that the main thing you can complain about is a pretty temporary disequilibrium that's only been true for a month or two and isn't really seriously threatening most people's quality of life.

I'm the author. Guilty as charged of not being an engineer. But did you see the paper I cited for this, https://sci-hub.st/https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/art... ? I also think the fact that the price has come down by several times already and is still nowhere near an economy of scale suggests it can do so more in the future. I didn't mean Moore's Law as a literal "it will always go down by exactly the same amount every year"

I agree with this, but the reason I'm focusing on intellectual curiosity was that of all the traits measured in the survey, it was the one that did show a significant effect of firstbornness, and it was also the only personality trait with a significant effect of firstbornness in Rohrer's study.

I'm not just assuming it, I'm saying that two analyses showed it was the only trait that mattered, and then it suffices to explain the current data.

5,523 before December 25, when I posted the pre-registrations. 2,254 after.

Of the before-posting people, 2199 had exactly one sibling, and 71.1% of those were the older.

Of the after-posting people, 776 had exactly one sibling, and 72.3% of those were older.

A t-test revealed no difference between the two groups, p = 0.527.

That post starts with "Please don’t read on until you’ve taken it, since this could bias your results."

But I checked the data I received before and after I posted that, and the birth order effects are about equally strong throughout.

I don't remember mentioning that prominently before the survey. Can you link me to the relevant quote?

I think another important consideration might be that peak plasma concentrations on Vyvanse would be lower than on Adderall (because it's more spread out over time). Some effects only happen at certain plasma concentrations.

The reason doctors don't like prescribing it is because it's not FDA-approved for ADHD. It's not FDA-approved for ADHD because of bureaucratic/economic reasons, AFAIK.

"The dose I take would make a non-ADHD person into an obsessive hyper-focused teeth-grinding mess, but it basically just makes me normal. Adderall is real medicine which cures a real problem."

I believe you, but couldn't you equally say "The dose of human growth hormone I take would turn a non-Chronic-Shortness-Syndrome person into a freakish giant, but it basically just makes me normal"?

1. Are you finding "approximately 5th percentile in the population" somewhere in the DSM, or did you make it up?

2. This is no longer considered true; see any of the recent research on adult ADHD.

The last two are obviously good ideas, but they don't really winnow down the pool very much.

What kind of response bias are you expecting here and how would you fix it?

I mean, obviously there is a bias in favor of people who use more nootropics and find nootropics more effective. But since all I was doing was ranking nootropics relative to one another, that should mostly cancel out. I'm not sure why respondents would, for example, be expected to be a group disproportionately likely to have a stronger response to modafinil relative to bacopa compared to the general population.

More pressingly, I'm not sure how I can avoid it besides gathering hundreds of people together and forcing them to try nootropics one by one in controlled conditions, for which I don't have the resources. Even professional studies that select their subjects ahead of time have atrociously high dropout rates. If you have an implementable idea for avoiding response bias on next year's survey I'm happy to go ahead with it, but "not collect any survey data at all because available methodology isn't perfect" seems strictly inferior.

I feel like I hedged myself pretty appropriately: " we can't get good data without way more effort and resources than anyone is willing to put in, but if we ran a survey we could at least get better anecdata", "This survey does not intend to rectify [the confusion as to whether nootropics work at all]", "a pessimist might say that [this is] extracting patterns from random noise", et cetera. But given the choice between giving up because it wasn't perfect and going ahead with hedges, I figured I might as well go ahead.