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.
