I think you might be slightly "too deep" in the sense that you mostly encounter AI when someone has deliberately chosen an expensive, capable model to solve a real problem

Yep... pen, paper, books and a good teacher are annoyingly hard to beat because they force the student to actually do the cognitive work

Notes on pen and paper do help retention, but there are pros and cons. I know people who write on touchscreens or take photos of handwritten notes for portability to get the best of both.

One to one teaching and self teaching are much better than a good teacher in a class though.

Technology can be very useful - research, resources, ebooks, visualisations, interactivity etc.

The bar should probably be even higher in education than elsewhere. If an AI tool saves a student 30 minutes but also removes the 30 minutes where they would have struggled with the material, it may look like a productivity win while being an educational loss

I agree with most of the diagnosis but I am less convinced that better UX around AI solves the underlying problem. Every product starts out saying "human in the loop" and "augment, don't replace" but the economic incentive is almost always to remove more of the human over time…

Add to this that so far I have only seen it augment mediocrity, and even this is a bad plan.

I read that passage a little differently. He explicitly says other kinds of blogging are fine; the "argue a point" rule seems more like a constraint he imposes on himself because it forces him to investigate the subject more deeply

Having it generate the argument is like letting the robot lift the weight. Having it poke holes in an argument you wrote yourself is more like having a spotter

Be careful you don't blindly follow what it says though. Maybe ask it for just one rebuttal?

There's a sweet spot where you know enough to ask useful questions but still remember which parts were confusing in the first place. Experts often lose that

Exactly. The relevant comparison for someone with insomnia isn't melatonin vs perfect natural sleep, it's melatonin plus some morning grogginess vs not getting enough sleep at all

Good point. For regular coffee drinkers, testing an hour after waking without their usual caffeine could be its own cognitive impairment experiment

It’s hard to do a blind test on yourself.

But I accidentally ran this test on myself recently and didn’t realise until I got home and found my full cup on the bench.

It was disturbing to know how much I need it.

As someone who (foolishly) only drank decaf until my early 40s, I can tell you that the mental difference when you start drinking caffeine is just amazing.

It is wonderful stuff. And not only can you finally think in the mornings, but provided you don't get heart issues from it, it appears to reduce your risk of Alzheimer's substantially.

Everyone is different. I'm in my 40s and throughout my while life have found that caffeine only has two effects on me: 1) If I have any later than afternoon, I can't fall asleep when I want to, 2) If I have too much at once (like a single diet pop), I get the jitters.

Otherwise, literally no effect. I sometimes drink tea in the morning for breakfast (a London fog) and it doesn't affect my cognition or mood at all.

You'd expect the standard OTC dose to be a sensible starting point, not potentially several times more than a younger person needs

For sleep aids this is often not the case. I'm in my early 50s and tried Doxylamine Succinate 2 years ago for the first time - an innocent Costco "Sleep Aid".

I was beyond groggy - quite nonfunctional - until the following afternoon and would not have trusted myself with operating a car even then.

Doxylamine succinate is a fairly powerful antihistamine. I only take it when I'm sick, and I take a half -dose. It has closer to a 12-hour half life, which is why you felt so groggy. I have to basically take it at 7pm if I want to be operational by 10am the following day.

You wouldn’t, if you remembered that medically speaking, younger people “needing” melatonin pills has been pretty fringe until very recently, and the number of young people who need it is still comparatively small.

You can find smaller pills. But you might have to try several chains or order online to get them.

It's been the standard recommendation for dealing with jetlag in the last 15-20 years. And usually people who regularly experience jetlag due to repeated international professional trips are not elderly.

If they are targeted at older patients, I'd expect them to be a sensible starting point for older patients

Last time I was in the US the lowest dose melatonin gummies I could find in a CVS were 1mg — kids gummies.

That's more than 3x the actual recommended dose for an average adult based on the research others have shared in this thread. So no, they're not starting from a sensible starting point.

Were they packaged as kid gummies or are you presuming that gummies = kids? Because that hasn’t been the case for a long time. Those vitamin D gummies I buy because I will take them instead of might take them consistently, are not child doses either. They’re marketing gummies to adults here.

There is no such thing as "older people" dose.

There is a rumour that the high doses are because the correct dose was under patent.

I can only find that in a comment here: https://slatestarcodex.com/2018/07/10/melatonin-much-more-th... but I could have sworn it was in the main article when I first read it. (If so that makes it less likely, because the author revises his articles for correctness)

That (albeit long) article is worth reading. For example, it explains that melatonin is a phase signal, so being saturated with too much melatonin actually makes the signal less clear (as well as potentially causing other issues).

That's not a "rumour", it's conspiracy theory. Because everything is a conspiracy theory now.

No, the dosage is not patented. It doesn't even make sense. How would it work? "Oh, 0.5mg is patented, so let's put 1mg in the tablets and never sell 0.5mg".

I can get all kinds of dosages from the pharmacy. However, most of what they stock is "too high", probably because there's very little research/wisdom/knowledge around the supplement.

You could actually look at the sources before dismissing them as a conspiracy theory. It took less than 2 seconds to click through to the patent, of which the very first claim is:

- 1. A method of reducing the period before the onset of sleep in an individual comprising administering to the individual a single dose of melatonin of less than 1 mg, said single dose effective to raise the peak plasma level of melatonin in the individual to within physiological nocturnal levels of normal untreated individuals.

And that patent was granted.

it's sold in the US as a more or less unregulated supplement, so not surprising to me that the dosing is nonsense