Study drugs make people worse at problem solving, not better

That's a very far-fetched claim. Do you have any evidence other than personal anecdotes?

It doesn't fit with anything I've ever read or experienced with these drugs.

From the article: "Star performers during the placebo session fell to the bottom of the pack when they had taken the drugs."

That directly refutes your assertion they were doing a novel task for the first time.

> The real problems with these drugs are addiction,

Not addictive.

> side effects,

Same as caffeine while active. Irritating comedown after.

> and the phenomenon where you have to take higher doses over time to get the same effect.

Abstaining during weekends helps. The real problem is lack of sleep it can somewhat mask.

> Maybe one day we will get a drug that enhances mental function, that works effectively and has no real downsides.

We already have it. It's called having good company and plenty of rest. The problem is not that we don't perform well in this environment, the problem is that we don't perform well IN THIS ENVIRONMENT.

And then we search for hacks.

How do you propose then to isolate what may be the effect of the drug then vs the participant subconsciously trying to act out what they think the drug is supposed to make them do?

Coffee.

And to your main point, if you took people who’d never drink coffee before and gave them a caffeine pill, guaranteed they’d perform worse.

What's the closest we have today to an effective drug with "no real downsides", assuming that nutritional supplements don't count?

If such a drug exists, I want to know why the body hasn't evolved either to produce it by itself or to obtain the same effect in another way. (Possible answers include: it's something that would be very hard to synthesise in the body; the drug is only useful to humans in recent times; it was already present in people's diet until recently - but then I'd call it a "nutritional supplement" rather than a "drug"; it's only useful to people who have passed reproductive age - though such people may still have played a useful role in ancient societies.)

General more studying isn't better the more you do it. You need to do it right and that involves having enough brakes to let your brain digest. In turn many situations where study drugs are used are such where the user already doesn't expect high efficiency.

I would argue that any situation where it's not uncommon for pre-university students to take study drugs are a fundamental failure of the education system/society. Often by a mixture of not properly teaching how to learn and also by forcing stupid forms of "homework" or "skill evaluation" which encourage bad learning practices and kill of any efficiency.

For university students the same should hold, the problem is that we have some areas where you will have problems getting around bad learning practices due to their nature. I believe with todays technology we could solve many of such problems (not even considering the new AI stuff) but in practice we have not. Anyway non of this applies to pre-university content.

EDIT: I disagree wrt. the caffein, it does hurt and has negative side effect on learning but as long as you don't compare quite long time periods without _any_ coffeine with coffein usage it's hard to notice.

Adderall (correctly dosed) is precisely this.

> problems with these drugs are addiction, side effects, and the phenomenon where you have to take higher doses over time to get the same effect

Caffeine is terrible on all these points. I built up such a tolerance in my late teens that I was consuming something like 1000mg/day. The withdrawals were awful when I quit.

Provided it uses all that additional brainpower effectively. Can we honestly say that currently all the smart people are realising their potential?

Also, could well be a curse instead. Imagine society only performing this well thanks to a steady supply of the stuff.

Actually, we already have that in the form of fossil fuels and while they enabled massive progress, their supply hinges on authoritarians having their way in some corners of the world.

I was always a near-top (but not top) student in schools, got a PhD and am now working in a high paying job in a bank. Besides one or two years during my university years, I've always been extremely lazy. On the other hand, in all of these institutions there have been many people who have been very serious hard workers and perhaps even at the time been ahead of me in whatever metrics the institution happened to use to measure success. However, over time I've noticed that these sort of things sort of even out. People who worked very hard in the high school or during my PhD are not more successful than me anymore.

I don't know if it's just that life is so random that the effect of hard work gets washed out by random life choices or what. It's also plausible that working hard just puts you in a very non-creative mindset and creativity is what gets most of the work done in a complex environment in the end.

For many people, hard work often seems to be an end to itself and it matters less to those people where the work is directed at. As a result, people end up working crazy hours doing stuff that could be done in one tenth of a time by using a bit of creativity or just waiting the problem to somehow become irrelevant.

I grew up poor and didn't have access to parents, so I had to figure out things on my own, by trial and error, unfortunately. And, it took me 40 years to figure out that basic lifestyle improvements could help a lot.

In my 18 years of in-house software dev experience (several countries, companies of different sizes), not once have I even heard (in the real world, not online) of people using any sort of drugs like the ones mentioned in the article.

I'm not saying that you're wrong. But based on my personal experience, I also could bet the opposite of what you're saying and feel just as confident.

The study agrees with you =)