Disclaimer: have been an /r/nootropics moderator for most of its life. Am basically inactive now, but sometimes answer modmail.
Be wary of Longecity (and /r/nootropics to a lesser, or at least different, extent). There are some Longecity users in the Brain Health forum who will seem to know what they're talking about if you haven't read through introductory neuroscience and pharmacology textbooks. The same is true in /r/nootropics, but there are a greater concentration of knowledgeable users and bad science tends to get readily downvoted. I know I have said some ridiculous things in the past on both forums, and /r/nootropics has been more willing to call me out for indulging in anecdotal evidence.
The Longecity forum also seems to have a slightly more experimental tone to it, given that Longecity as a whole is not a nootropics community but a life extension community. There's a tradition of doing "group buys" of new substances from overseas. /r/nootropics has gotten more openly experimental in the past couple years, but I don't believe anyone has tried to organize a group buy yet.
But yeah, the sibling comments have exhausted the options that exist today. As far as I'm aware there aren't any expansive surveys that span the whole of nootropics / cognitive enhancement. There are papers that compare specific classes of new substances or techniques, but no comprehensive treatment of the idea of cumulative/permanent pharmacological brain enhancement yet. For now we're stuck with two slightly quirky online forums (which both skirt the line between self-help and wannabe academia) and wading through the literature ourselves. There's also examine.com and wikipedia as starting points.
Thanks, I'm familiar with all those sites and they are great resources for subjective experiences but as you said the data often need to be taken with a grain of salt. It's actually a little surprising nothing like this has been done yet in academia given the increased interest in the topic in recent years.
> as you said the data often need to be taken with a grain of salt. It's actually a little surprising nothing like this has been done yet in academia given the increased interest in the topic in recent years.
Definitely. I probably should have emphasized, not the limitations of anecdotal evidence, but the danger of untestable, excessive or irrelevant speculation.
It's super easy to treat metaphor or simple models as truth when the reality is much more complex and, as such, relatively unstudied. The biggest issue with online nootropics communities is not that people share their experiences, it's that readers often take the average of experiences and generalize it into a pseudo-neuroscientific model.
Not only does this reflect terribly on the nootropics and practical transhumanist milieus, it does a disservice (as a third-order effect) to people such as yourself who just want palatable, accurate, expertly distilled information. The rampant generalization diminishes the validity of the entire field from a public perspective, which slows scientific progress in those places with the ability to generously allocate resources, which in turn delays the amount of time it takes for a significant body of literature to arise which might warrant a canonical survey or introductory paper collection.
It's a shame, and I have no clue what to do about it, or if there even is anything that can be done within the context of places like /r/nootropics or Longecity. Here's hoping that systems like Experiment.com do what they aim to.
