Sorry to be so late, but I’d like to nominate self-directed education, or unschooling. As long as our institutions of social science are bound up with our schools, it’s probably going to be difficult to get good science about alternatives to schooling.

Or even: can we manufacture new drugs, that have heightened psychedelic effects, while minimizing harmful side effects?

The psychedelic effects ARE harmful side effects. The price is acceptance of what you’re seeking to purchase.

If you change the course of a river, the new ground it flows across begins to erode. You cannot cause the brain to malfunction without causing it harm, if only because the wiring of the brain is part of a feedback mechanism. Alter its functioning and you alter its structure. Trip on LSD, cause the activity of one subsystem to spill into another, and you’ve sensitized the connections between them, potentiated a new set of relationships. Divert the river and you carve a new course.

The vast majority of non-medical drug discussion is merely “drugs are bad (or illegal)”. The second group is, “here are the harmful medical effects from this particular drug”. But nobody seems to rigorously investigate, if you wanted to choose a drug-based experience, which chemical or application style would be the best choice? Or even: can we manufacture new drugs, that have heightened psychedelic effects, while minimizing harmful side effects?

And to be clear, I don’t mean specifically that scientists avoid these topics and others because of fear from religious people or because they were raised with religion, etc., but that they avoid them because the normative Christian assumptions are ingrained to a lesser and greater extent in the minds of every single one of them, regardless of whether they’re religious or not.

2)Barefoot lifestyle to delay the onset of peripheral neuropathy in diabetes.

The Society for Barefoot Living surely qualifies as silly (or very silly). Nevertheless, topics important enough for academic research do emerge.

Exercise confers substantial health benefits on sedentary workers. Running is a popular form of exercise. The anecdotes are that many middle aged runners give up due to knee problems. This is presumed to lead to a decline in health due to failing to substitue other forms of exercise. The claim is that running barefoot invokes a different gait that puts lower shock loads on the knee joints, sufficient to avoid knee problems, continue with exercise, obtain long term health benefits. The topic seems straight forward to research. It looks cheap to research, with the possibility of health pay offs much larger than the cost of research. It looks undoable because it is so silly.

The complications of diabetes include foot ulcers, sometimes leading to gangrene and amputation. We can work one or two steps backwards up the causal chain. Peripheral neuropathy precedes ulcers and allows minor injuries to pass unnoticed and become infected. Circulation seems somehow implicated as a cause of peripheral neuropathy. The anecdotes on the Society for Barefoot Living mailing list are that walking barefoot to go places, (shops, work, recreation) leads to large improvements in the circulation of the blood in the foot (in the normal population) and this is able to reverse the early stages of peripheral neuropathy in diabetics. This again looks to be cheap to research not least because diabetics need close monitoring anyway because of the substantial burden of long term morbidity resulting from foot ulcers. Yet the idea that diabetics should stop wearing shoes is too silly to be considered.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yL_-1d9OSdk

ampakines (modafinil, adrafinil)

‘racetams

nutritional/supplementation strategies for neurotransmitter support (this stuff is taken seriously, but not in the context of enhancement beyond normal, healthy adults)