I've seen this link before (or perhaps some other version of it) and I think it's ridiculous. It starts off with an argument from ignorance: "That space flight is nearly impossible is clear from the failure of physics to provide any such method." Those words could have been written less than 70 years ago. The idea that because we have yet to discover a way to do something, it must be impossible, is simply a logical fallacy. Ironically we probably had a better understanding of space and physics in 1943 or even 1923 than we have of the brain today, despite all the advances in neuroscience.

From there it proceeds with a rambling, disjointed attempt to somehow substantiate the argumentum ad ignorantiam with a series of often inconsistent assertions. Evolution is a process that finds local, not global optima... Yet that couldn't possibly be the case with intelligence? Despite the enormous success of traditional medicine in improving human lifespans and general health since the stone age, we're still employing the same old bullshit argument that nature knows best?

It isn't even like nootropics in healthy humans is a thriving field of study. Most of the studies on nootropics are primarily targeted at developing drug therapies for people whose illnesses or injuries have left them at reduced mental capacity. Because that is what is marketable and profitable to make in today's market. Only incidentally do such substances, if they do, improve cognition in healthy humans. Gwern writes as if all the best brains in science have tried their hands at creating nootropics for healthy humans and failed, which is far from true. He also writes as if we have a complete understanding of cognition and its physical manifestation in the central nervous system, and therefore that we have all but exhausted our options there. We haven't even gotten started.

I'm not sure what the point of this essay is since at times it seems to veer off into opposite directions, and also because elsewhere the author has expressed optimism about nootropics, even if the effects of the current known batch are less dramatic than we might desire.

The human body is extremely complex. Not only is it enormously complex per se, it exists in symbiosis with billions of exogenous micro organisms. Only recently have we discovered the surprising fact that even such a seemingly irrelevant thing as the strain of bacteria in your gut can strongly impact thoughts, feelings and behavior. The brain is an ingenious mechanism we're far from understanding even halfway. And just in the past five years we have probably developed more psychoactive drugs than in the fifty before that due to the explosion of the research chemical/designer drug market. Affordable personal DNA sequencing is on its way; services like 23andme and whatever more advanced versions will be coming in the future allow for a much more targeted, individual approach to anything health-related--including the possibility of improving cognition--than ever before. We have so much to learn and we are living in truly exciting times when it comes to the brain, intelligence, learning, chemistry, pharmacology.

I'm a skeptic and pessimist at heart, but I like to think I have some sort of rational instinct to go along with it. I don't think the super-nootropics we have been promised and which intrepid explorers are group-buying as we speak can deliver on the idea of expanding your IQ by a standard deviation. I would not be surprised if at the end of my lifespan we are still no closer to finding such an intervention that actually works. But neither would it greatly surprise me if we actually did. We know so little in the big picture and there are so many avenues of research still available to us that it seems--excuse the wording--let's just say mentally challenged to blanket deny even the possibility of very effective nootropic interventions in healthy people based on flimsy theoretical arguments which rely on false assumptions and faulty syllogisms.

The sheer arrogance with which this was written should be enough to turn many of you away from it. As if we know all there is to know already and we've tried everything and nothing worked and now we should just give up. It's only been a century since Einstein taught us about the relativity of space and time, for fuck's sake. Less than that since we started developing quantum mechanics, and only a few decades after that we had nuclear power and nuclear weapons. Less than a century since the invention of information theory! Less than a century since Turing and Church invented the computer! Half a century since the internet! We've discovered more new shit in the last hundred years than in the previous thousand. No such breakthrough has been achieved in neuroscience or the study of cognition in general.

This poorly argued pessimist drivel ought to be buried and its author should be intellectually shamed of himself.