I think the nootropics thing is like, faux-legibility, which is what bothers me. I said I agree with that anon who claimed Western society (“Western society”) overvalues legibility, but I think it’s more like… Western society (“Western society”) loves faux-legibility, metrizability that doesn’t correspond to what we actually care about. Because I do like legibility. One of the reasons I don’t mind caffeine is that its effects on me feel very legible, phenomenologically. I drink a cup of coffee and instantly I feel a noticeably more awake, maybe a little anxious if I have too much, this and that. The effect is not too strong, like being drunk, which I generally don’t like, because it changes too much and is a confusing, illegible experience.
But see, this is all feelings-based, internal. People talk about nootropics and they’re like “I take such and such milligrams of lsd every day and I can’t really feel anything but I think it’s been making me more open-minded overall, I’ve noticed XYZ improve in my life since I started doing this”. And this is like, this is like awful to me. I mean you do you but like. This is faux-legible, you know some dosage numbers but it’s not phenomenologically obvious what’s happening to you, you’re suggesting that this shit is changing your behavior in some diffuse way that you can’t pinpoint? Terrifying, baffling that you would do this to yourself. At least if I drink a bunch of coffee and then find myself sitting around worrying about something stupid, I can be like “oh, obviously this is because of all that coffee I just drank, I can tell I am too-many-cups-of-coffee anxious”. Like I’m sure drinking coffee has illegible effects too, literally everything you do has illegible effects, but trying to incur that shit on purpose through some kind of complicated scheme where you microdose this and that just seems disquieting.
It’s like… studies, right. Studies say that this and that is true, because we did a controlled trial and it was statistically significant. To me this is the worst type of science. Because like, I don’t doubt that if you do your experiments and stats well, the results are meaningful. Sure. But why? Why does the thing happen? What is actually going on. No idea, you just did a study. Whereas with physics it’s like, ok there’s still a philosophical “why” in the most abstract sense but at a more particular level it’s like “this magnetic field pushes on this thing and then makes that happen, blah blah”, it’s like, it’s describing this comprehensible sequence of events, that you can understand the workings of. That’s what science is for. To me. No wonder then that nootropics is loved by studies guys, by guys who read this and that study and are impressed by it. No wonder that nootropics is loved by such guys, according to me based on my gut right now.