Brain Enhancement Is Wrong, Right?
nytimes.com
nytimes.com
Now, requiring people to use substances that might be bad for them is not a good idea. People have to have the freedom to choose if they will take those substances or not. Neither should be mandatory. The reason for this is that we want people to be able to make their own decisions and do whatever pleases them the most; may it be using drugs or not.
Think about this: you lose out on a job opportunity to someone who forged their data or perhaps used stimulants to work at an unnatural pace over a certain period of time. This changes your career in a dramatic way. When that person is caught, what is your compensation? Yes, he (she) was exposed but you were wronged. What would be fair compensation?
I think what matters is whether there's a health cost to these drugs and if so how much. If a drug is quite safe, then it should be allowed -- no matter whether we are talking about sports or academia.
Academic research is not done for entertainment, it directly benefits society and mankind in general. If someone wants to risk their health to find a cure for cancer faster, more power to them.
Yes, this would change the focus to "who has the best toys" - but how is this any different from "who was born with the best genes"? To my mind, the element of randomness makes heredity less fair. A striver might be able to get sponsorship for a course of enhancements, but he can't change his birth.
There are many known tricks such as blood doping that are almost impossible to prevent, and once a few people start doing it everyone must to remain competitive. A huge number of potential athletes take steroids in high school, before testing begins.
I personally think that we should take care to ban these drugs and practices to people who are still developing mentally and physically, but adults should be allowed to make their own decisions. If Stallone wants to eat barrels of HGH to get huge for Rambo, he should be (legally) allowed.
Let me play devil's advocate for a moment:
One could perhaps make the analogy to caffeine (as others in this thread already have). Sports and academia alike drink it all the time. This is a drug so generally harmless that we don't even consider it a drug. Who would argue that caffeine gives an unfair advantage? Does it not make sense that a drug with a more pronounced benefit and similarly innocuous side-effects should be accepted?
Wait; all that over/under stuff on the Fields Medal betting is a scam?
Damn.
That's why steroids are a problem in sports. It's not that kids "look up" to Barry Bonds. It's that they're not stupid, and they quickly realize the only way to succeed is to dope.
Staying up all night coding sounds awesome to me. Having 2x focus sounds awesome. When research assures me I'm not going to be clinically depressed for the remainder of my life as a result of medicating, I might even consider taking pills for work. But I'll feel guilty about the future I'm creating for my kids.
I'm echoing the idea that increased production doesn't necessarily entail increased happiness due to second order effects.
One scenario: a lot of those WoW players can play so much because their parents have worked very hard. But, they play so much because they don't have good relationships with their parents, since their parents spent so much time working hard.
Then there is the issue of whether the level of production is sustainable, and what happens to a society dependent upon such activity if it stops or slows. Also, what kind of class attitudes develop with the societal stratification.
Yes. There are now more World of Warcraft players in the US than farmers, thanks to mechanized agriculture. This led to a decrease in hours worked from about 80 to 40.
Mechanized factories led to a similar reduction; service workers tend to work far less than factory workers (spending several hours/day at work, but not working).
The rest of the productivity gains went to increased consumption, which tends to mean a greater quality of leisure (I enjoy playing video games much more than I would enjoy watching Big 3 TV networks in 1950).
Doping may lead to an increase in inequality (i.e., non-doped need to work harder to have the same stuff as the doped), but that's a different matter.
I mean, all the other chemicals we use to regulate the brain have worked out so well. Most of them haven't even turned out to be carcinogens, yet!
Sounds awesome.
Society will benefit from productivity gains. Some individuals might be harmed by a risk they chose to take. The article suggests that those undertaking those risks are intelligent and educated, so it's not even like poor fools are being taken advantage of. What's the problem?
Supposing that brain booster pills are as safe as working 80-100 hours/week between the ages of 22 and 41, would you accept that they should be legal and brought to market?
It's a totally false analogy. I code and break software for a living. I have a blast. Modafinil and aderrol sound like a blast, too. But 20 years from now, I expect to look back fondly on 80 hour work weeks, the way I look back on 2-hour-of-sleep nights with newborns. Unlike the drugs, those weeks won't have scorched my neurochemical pathways.
You talk as if you have some way of measuring the risk of these drugs, or as if the risk was fantastical. I'm not going to have to sound like a alt-med hippie to disprove that.
I'm not saying I know the risks of these drugs. I'm just saying that "my competitors might do it, and then I can't keep up" is a silly argument against them. There are all sorts of "natural" ways you can compete, many of which might be risky or harmful to you. One of those ways is working as hard as you do.
I don't think the risk is necessarily fantastical, though I suspect it is probably low. I simply think people should be allowed to take the risk if they want to.
With tech improving as fast as it is starting to do, the species really does need to take a more gung-ho attitude. Rush into the future, because the harm of the present can best be undone with technologies we don't have yet.
And it's not reasonable to fear the unknown on principle. Being "conservative" by avoiding an advance doesn't make sense in isolation. It might cause a problem. It also might solve one. We don't know that. We do know technology is useful.
But "gung ho" doesn't sound right. Sometimes we have a substantive idea about a way an upcoming technology could be dangerous. In that case we should respect and consider that foresight, not just charge forward anyway.
BTW David Deutsch's TED talk touches on this.
It's a bit like doing rewrites of major production systems. Not a good idea. But of course it's much worse because human culture is more complex than a computer program.
But also like major production systems, we definitely can improve them. Now we just need unit tests for cultures to make refactoring easier.
PS Have you read any Edmund Burke? Got an opinion of him?
It feels like regulations do well with medications that science understands. It does not understand modafinil well. What evidence do you have of "the odds" that it causes no permanent harm?
http://www.upliftprogram.com/depression_stats.html
(what's with all the pill popping pre-schoolers?)
I know, off topic, just tweaking your nose for such a primly self-righteous response.
As far I know, few studies have shown actual improvement in mental or physical performance without serious side effects. I think even the military, which has studied both amphetamines and steroids, has found that the side effects far outweigh the benefits.
As a big baseball fan, I think the current PED controversy is illustrative. Many folks think they're getting a benefit and are willing to go to great lengths for that edge. But it's not clear they're getting anything other than an confidence boost. You wouldn't take the pill if you didn't think it would work or is working. So you keep taking it.
I think the same is true of neurocosmetics. It easier to believe they work. Still, I'd rather take a nap than a pill. And I'm more worried about neuroimplants - in fifty years.
http://www.wired.com/medtech/health/news/2003/02/57434
(The reporter is a little more skeptical. Then again, the military tend to be big users of statistics, so I expect they have some reason to believe this.)
Well, it does. Many nootropic drugs work either by stimulating the production of, or blocking the absorption of, otherwise normally occurring brain chemicals.
I believe, for example, that methylphenidate (Ritalin) stimulates the production of dopamine, while bupropion (Wellbutrin) blocks dopamine reuptake.
I used to do a fair amount of wetware hacking, and one of the concerns was avoiding the crash that comes when your brain is depleted of one or another chemical.
One path to a better brain, then, is to feed it the material it needs to produce the more interesting (noradrenalin, dopamine, etc.) stuff.
The military has studied the use of amphetamine and modafinil in extreme situations. If you go without sleep for three days, there's going to be serious side effects, with or without any drug. I doubt that any of the scientists on stimulants are using it that extremely, which means the side effects are limited.
Huh? "Winner-take-all culture"? This seems like a moral issue.
I suspect that a lot of human suffering -- or at least missed potential -- is due to our cognitive biases and other mental shortcomings. I suspect there are many leaders, inventors, and researchers who would improve the human condition far more if they could think faster, remember better, and get tired less. Fighting against a drug that could unleash this potential energy and save huge numbers of lives seems immoral.
The only reason caffeine, and alcohol, and tobacco are viewed differently from MUCH safer drugs is that some people subscribe to illogical belief systems that differentiate between 'old' drugs and 'new' drugs, regardless of the fact that many of the drugs they hate are just as old as the ones they love.
We're not talking about handing someone over to some evil aliens or they'll murder 114 million innocents. We're talking about someone saying, "My death will be worth saving 114 million people from an early death." I can't fault someone choosing to do that.
Cocaine is made from the coca plant; the leaves of which can be chewed raw for a similar, but markedly weaker, effect.
I doubt tobacco has to be processed to be smoked.
Psilocybin mushrooms require no processing.
Peyote requires no processing.
Alcohol be found naturally from rotting, fermented fruit fallen from trees. There's a video on Youtube of animals getting drunk from eating it.
I'm sure there are several other plants that will get you high that I'm unaware of. Just thought I'd throw a little knowledge out there for anyone who might be interested.
Good luck collecting enough poppy seeds. Same deal on the coca leaves, but try eating a mouthful. Same deal there on tobacco. The same logic applies to caffeine, chocolate, and alcohol. The drug is extremely weak in it's natural form so it requires a decent amount of work to get something really psychoactive.
To him, you can simply pull a marijuana bud off a plant, like an apple from a tree, and eat it for the full effect. That's quite a contrast.
Psilocybin and peyote apply but I don't think he's ever had the opportunity, especially since they don't grow like a weed.
His point: Nature has done a pretty remarkable job providing for our physical and mental health. Why muck with that?
The article seems to be based on the premise that unless you take drugs you can't do anything about the performance of your brain, when there's a wealth of research indicating otherwise. Maybe if people didn't have the misconception that intelligence is something fixed and innate, they would actually try to train their brain instead of taking drugs?