I've found lots of examples of outstanding physical performance under a vegan diet, but I've been unable to find examples of bold theoretical breakthroughs being made under a vegan diet (the closest example I could find was Ramanujan, but there were other things about Ramanujan that suggest that there's absolutely no way most of us could live the same life and then end up in the same place), and my own experience has been really discouraging. After about 10 days on a vegan diet, regardless of my energy levels or legible performance metrics, I'll pretty reliably stop being able to, or stop being interested in progressing original ideas.
There are lots of possible exits here: Vegans and inventors were rare until very recent history, we shouldn't expect to have many records of people who were both, we might end up with none, even if there's no relationship between those things. It's also fairly likely that the effect would just be a result of a creatine deficiency, or a choline deficiency, or something like that, which can be fixed with a supplement (although Dr Gregger doesn't recommend it due to the incidence rate of high contamination in creatine supplements, but maybe you can find a brand you trust.)
(Anecdote on choline: I have a vegetarian friend who, at some point, stopped thinking in the sort of focused/precise/fluid/driven way that our project needed. They speculated that it might have been because they were on choline initially, then stopped. So I said yeah, I noticed a change, try getting back onto the choline? I don't think they ever got around to it. The lack of concern that they showed is actually one of the things that bugs me about this, because I also experience that, when I'm low: It kinda seems like we have be on the supplement to hold onto an understanding of why we need to stay on the supplement, and as soon as we lapse we forget what it was like, and how important it was? (Depression also seems to work this way. A depressed person often cannot imagine or remember not being depressed.))
There does seem to be a consistently replicated (edit: creatine findings not consistently replicated, actually!) finding that supplementing creatine enhances memory and intelligence in vegans. (and doesn't for omnivores) (baseline cognitive performance in vegans is similar to omnivores, but personally I'm kind of expecting it to turn out that to be a result of vegan-leaning demographics starting on a higher base, then being lowered)
But even if it can be fixed with a supplement, I don't think most of us are taking creatine and choline! We probably need to have a conversation about that.
Previous discussion of health and veganism, when they touched on concerns about cognitive impacts, generally failed to allay them.
You should only put approximately zero weight on anecdotes that got to you through a sensationalism-maximizing curation system with biases you don't understand, which I hope this wasn't? Regardless, the anecdotes are mostly just meant to be clarifying examples of the kind of thing effect that I am trying to ask about, I don't expect people to pass them along or anything.
I decided not to talk about biological plausibility, because I don't get the impression pharmacology or nutrition follows reductive enough rules that anyone can reason a-priori about it very well. It will surprise us, it will do things that don't make sense. I actually wrote out a list of evolutionary stories that end up producing this effect, some of them are quite interesting, but I decided not to post them, because it seemed like a distraction.
I guess I'll post some theories now though:
- This sort of phantasic creativity was not useful in pre-industrial societies, because there was no way to go far beyond the social consensus reality and prove that you were right and do anything with it (that's only the case today because of, basically, the investment cycle, and science and technology, which took hundreds of years to start functioning after it was initially proposed). The body needed an excuse to waste creatine, so in sapiens, it only did it when we ate an abnormal amount of meat, but sudden gluts of meat would occur frequently enough for the adaptation to be maintained.
- Or maybe eating lots of meat/fish was kind of the norm for millions of years for dominant populations (I can cite this if you're that interested). And maybe there's a limit to how fast the body can replenish brain-creatine (investigate this assumption, Gregger seemed implicitly sus about it). In that case, we might have an effect where the brain implements creatine frugality by lowering our motivation to think in phosphocreatine-burning ways, which then may lead to a glorification of that frugality, which then becomes sticky. This could be a recurring class of motivation disorder that might even generalize to early AI, so I'd find it super interesting.
The note about choline in wheat is interesting. I wonder if it's bioavailable? I think I can remember situations where I've craved meat/eggs and thought "but some good bread would also do".
Oh, but, I went and dug a little bit (because I take my immediate close friends' reports seriously) and it turns out that the "choline" in wheat is a pretty different molecule? betaine? https://veganhealth.org/choline/#rec Looking at it, I don't think it would be a big stretch to say that the resemblence between betaine and choline is only a little bit closer than the resemblence between phytoestrogen and estrogen... but maybe they mean that they've been observed to actually have similar effects?
Regardless, that page also says that you're probably not naturally going to get the AI from what you're eating (although you personally eat a lot of bean burritos, right? So maybe you actually are (and btw, I think you're very high in pragmatic-creativity! (You're the only person aside from me who ever designed a puzzle for crycog, and you did it immediately verbally after playing it. Your distributed computing stuff also seemed pretty great.))). This is the case for a lot of nutrients, but for choline it might actually matter quite a bit to be below AI.