God Bless Longecity | Slate Star Codex

This is a forum where people discuss supplements and nootropics. I started looking at it when I was conducting the nootropics forum, assumed it was similar to every other forum that fits that description, and didn’t pay it more attention until today. Today I looked at it in more depth and discovered their group buys. The way this works is: people on the forum hear about some exciting new chemical that was found to have promising effects in an experiment, after which researchers say something like “this might be ready for human trials in a couple of years”. Then everyone pools their money together, pays thousands of dollars to get a research laboratory somewhere to synthesize them a big batch of the chemical, distributes it to everyone in the forum, and they all ingest it and see if they grow wings or a third arm or whatever. Needless to say this is a terrible idea and they will all probably die of some horrendous disease unknown to medical science. That’s not even in dispute. But I was

This is a forum where people discuss supplements and nootropics. I started looking at it when I was conducting the nootropics forum, assumed it was similar to every other forum that fits that description, and didn’t pay it more attention until today. Today I looked at it in more depth and discovered their group buys. The way this works is: people on the forum hear about some exciting new chemical that was found to have promising effects in an experiment, after which researchers say something like “this might be ready for human trials in a couple of years”. Then everyone pools their money toget