Given the mention of coffee on that page and the title of the site (not to mention other recent events):<p><i>"It is by caffeine alone I set my mind in motion. It is by the beans of Java that thoughts acquire speed, the hands acquire shakes, the shakes become a warning. It is by caffeine alone I set my mind in motion."</i>
This page led me to rediscover the name of the digit-to-consonant mnemonic system I absorbed from the 2000-vintage internet (probably Everything2): the Major System [1].<p>Fittingly, I'd forgotten the name of this technique, though I still sometimes absentmindedly perform it on phone numbers and other digit strings in my environment when I'm walking around or whatever.<p>Basically, you map the digits 0 through 9 to specific consonants, then come up with vowels to build out phrases that are more memorable than a bunch of boring numbers. I think I stopped practicing the system around the time I started storing phone numbers in cellphones, but reading this has reminded me to pick it back up and see if I can find any practical uses.<p>[1] <a href="http://www.ludism.org/mentat/MajorSystem" rel="nofollow">http://www.ludism.org/mentat/MajorSystem</a>
The Critical Thinking section starts off with:<p>"Thinking logically is something we all can do. We find ourselves so often taken in by fallacious arguments, though. How can we identify them in others' arguments and our own thought?"<p>Well, I'd start with "Thinking logically is something we all can do."<p>If considered as a low-dimensional binary, it's true: we all <i>can</i> think logically, in that each individual can probably get <i>at least one answer correct</i> on a logic test. However, <i>stating that fact as</i> "Thinking logically is something we all can do" seems like it might run the risk of people not taking the time to consider the importance (or existence) of the variable: [<i>the degree to which</i> we can <i>consistently</i> think logically], which I think should include the ability to detect when the premises one is working on top of have potential imperfections contained within (such as in this example).<p>Might theories like this offer some explanation for why the rationalist approach seems to not produce the outcomes that one would "logically" expect, or why it's not much harder to find incorrect assertions in rationalist communities than it is in less intellectually rigorous communities?<p>It seems to me that sayings like "It Ain’t What You Don’t Know That Gets You Into Trouble. It’s What You Know for Sure That Just Ain’t So." are not just clever, but they also contain a lot of wisdom.
I visited the page on nootropics (<a href="http://www.ludism.org/mentat/SmartDrug" rel="nofollow">http://www.ludism.org/mentat/SmartDrug</a>), and it seems pretty weak (for example, the basically empty table on mechanisms and effects of the major racetam drugs or the 'key resources' being populated by websites that are completely blocked by my adblocker).<p>Is there a good resource that collates the research on nootropics in one place? I haven't looked in a long time, but the last time I looked everything seemed quite bullshitty. You can find articles like eg <a href="https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/2854355/" rel="nofollow">https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/2854355/</a> or <a href="https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/2690149/" rel="nofollow">https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/2690149/</a> or <a href="https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/20166767/" rel="nofollow">https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/20166767/</a> but ideally I would like to have a resource that has done a literature review and describes the evidence (with any caveats like "this only has been demonstrated in rats that were adrenalectomized + have chemically-induced dementia" or "this has never been reproduced") in a way that doesn't seem like it is an advertisement for some shitty piracetam company. This hypothetical resource probably doesn't exist, but I figured I'd ask anyway.
If curious see also<p>2015 <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10684327" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10684327</a>