From: Byrne Hobart (sometimesfunnyalwaysright@gmail.com)
Date: Tue Aug 14 2007 - 13:52:05 MDT
> Well, I wasn´t really thinking of ultrashort term uppers and downers.
Uppers and downers are crude tools. I was thinking more broadly: if you
found a way to medically induce 'flow', you'd be able to raise productivity
substantially in some positions -- you might have programmers accomplishing
five or ten times as much if they spent a normal eight-hour day utterly
engrossed in a problem.
But the gains top out fast; it's not like you can spend more than 100% of
your time being 100% productive, so it's a linear gain rather than the
exponential ones a Singularitarian looks for.
Psychotropics have had a rate of progress since Prozac came up that's
> unparallelled even by computers, IMHO. An entire field of consumer
> psychiatry has come up. Before Prozac, psychiatry was basically a
> repressive force making up categories for those who didn't fit. Now
> it's a consumer market and they're getting better and better at fixing
> a large category of "design errors". Psychiatric drugs can actually
> stimulate neuron growth.
Wow! I hadn't heard about this happening in humans. Where would I go for
more information?
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