Credit: Ultra Heaven
In this post, I analyze nootropics ratings I gathered through a recommender system. Jump directly to What I learned if you don’t like caveats and methodology.
The effectiveness of a nootropic varies a lot from one person to another (your mileage will vary). This is why I built a nootropic recommendation system Enter ratings on nootropics you’ve tried, and it will spit out nootropics liked by people with similar rating patterns. This was initially based on the 2016 SlateStarCodex nootropics survey data. , which I suggest you try before reading this post.
Still, it is helpful to understand how good each nootropic is in general, if only to prioritize further research. Indeed, my cunning plan with this recommendation system was to incentivize people to answer a boring survey. My plan worked better than I expected, and I got 1981 people to enter 29,387 nootropic ratings Adding to it the original SlateStarCodex data, we have 36,163 ratings from 2,802 people. , which I analyse in this post. Thanks everybody!
All data and code can be found here.
People interested in the code or the details of the analysis can look at the RMarkdown notebook.
How to interpret these ratings #
I used the scale from SlateStarCodex nootropics surveys, which is:
0 means a substance was totally useless, or had so many side effects you couldn’t continue taking it.
1 - 4 means subtle effects, maybe placebo but still useful.
... continue reading