Why stop there? If you can't write your own browser engine or router firmware, are you really competent enough?

If you can’t program why pretend to be a programmer? What could possibly go wrong?

JavaScript is not assembly and life isn’t so hard to warrant the level of sympathy asinine comments like this expect. I am merely suggesting people should know how to do what they claim, and clearly they cannot. I have no sympathy for that.

I agree with your sentiment but this is a poor way to dismiss an argument.

"Doses are at the high end of those administered in clinical practice, reflecting typical doses in nonmedical settings, where use tends to be occasional rather than chronic."

I think the point is to highlight that using these drugs as a one-off is not effective. To the surprise of no-one, poorly dosed medications perform poorly.

There's going to be very little crossover between 1) people who need to see this paper, and 2) people who are the types to read papers on dosage efficacy.

Multiplying out the average time for the tasks, they spent about 25 minutes total. If their goal was to recreate the conditions where people take these drugs in non-medical settings, they failed. It is not when you have a half hour of puzzles, and someone sitting next to you and scoring your work. It's when you have 24 hours of work and 16 hours to do it. Or, a 15 minute task that feels like pulling off your own fingernails.

> when you have 24 hours of work and 16 hours to do it

We used to call this a compressed work day.

Which compression algorithm is this? I bet it is pretty lossy.

Then the authors should have lead with the purpose in their abstract and also highlight this fact in their discussion. They choose not to. Instead, their paper is titled "Not so smart?“Smart”drugs increase the level butdecrease the qualityof cognitive effort", with the abstract leading with "The efficacy of pharmaceutical cognitive enhancers in everyday complex tasks remains to be established."

Sorry, but that's just attention grabbing nonsense. Should have said "for people undiagnosed with cognitive impairments".

Maybe 'unfit', 'ill-suited' or 'irrelevant' would be more suitable.

I love Cal's writing, but I feel like it's really going against his mantra (of Deep Work) to be making posts like this that try to pluck meaning out of nothing for the sake of marketing.

I guess in that case you could still say its 0.6 orderS of magnitude... So not entirely false.

It still wouldn't be 'more than one order magnitude'.