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naraburns  nihil supernum  1yr ago (text post)   2620 thread views

Small-Scale Question Sunday for February 19, 2023

Do you have a dumb question that you're kind of embarrassed to ask in the main thread? Is there something you're just not sure about?

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Would a survey of the dietary habits of top-performing students at top institutions be the most conclusive answer to “what / how should we eat to maximize / optimize cognitive performance”?

It dawned on me that (1) cognitive performance tests in a lab may be too dissimilar to the “continuous” mental stress of an intense pre-med or engineering course load, and (2) there may be longterm benefits and detriments to diets that do not come out for many months. Also, (3) as academic performance in top departments are society’s largest competition, it’s likely that if there are students with a noteworthy performance benefit from nutrition that they will find their way to the top.

It's possible but I think dietary habits would have too small an impact over the short term to be measurable over a small sample size like that. I expect a 135 IQ student on a diet of pizza pockets to outperform a 130 IQ student on fresh Italian pizza with the best ingredients, all else equal. In some ways it might even be inversely correlated, if the student who has pizza pockets spends the hour they save browsing the grocery for good ingredients, cooking the food, and cleaning up on studying instead.

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