Hi! I’m Jimmy.

I’m a biochemist by training with advanced degrees in law and business, but I fashion myself a generalist autodidact and aspiring philo-/pantomath. I now work in property technology.

This blog is broadly purposed to rebuff an inchoate yet concerning trend I’ve seen in the young noosphere: wanton use of nootropics/psychotropics and other pan-ergogenic agents.

The blog’s name is a play on complexity theory and all the propounded nostrums in the ether. These range from supra-physiologic magnesium dosing to micro-dosing psychedelics in perpetuity to TRT for sub-50 populations.

Baseline human enhancement is good! It’s a primary interest of mine!

But unfettered insertion of drugs and supplements into a system as complex as human biology can have serious negative ramifying effects. What hubris to believe that naïve interventionism won’t lead to iatrogenic harm. Nassim Taleb has some thoughts on that, and so too does Robin Hanson.

It's tough to see smart people that I otherwise respect proselytize reductive monocausal solutions for complex physical and mental problems without having any real command of the underlying biology. A feature of my psychology is that I tend to far underweight anything else such people say going forward – call it Gell-Mann Hypermnesia!

This blog is therefore anti-reductionist look at human enhancement, inter alia. And while my Substack name “Melius abundare quam deficere” is generally a good guiding principle for information aggregation (assuming some triaging), the obverse is true for nootropics and their ilk.

And as for the inter alia…

The broader purview of my interests comprises economics, cliodynamics, and complexity theory—all undergirded by evolutionary biology and psychology.

Ultimately, I’ll write about any topic that interests me sufficiently. Recent learnings have been on prediction market arbitrage, the merits of litigation finance, philology, and intelligence science.

I suspect the total addressable market for my content is low; this has certainly been evinced on twitter. A happy coincidence is that I have an atelic need for self-edification, and limpid writing is the best way to get there (that’s a joke).

The ultimate aim is that this blog will be more of what I personally desire in a Substack post–a laconic, informative read with actionable information.

Thanks for coming on the ride! Per aspera ad astra!