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Comment by tptacek | Hacker News Reader

I offer no judgement, but note that if performance-enhancing drugs become the norm in academia and industry, those who opt not to chemically alter (and perhaps harm) themselves are obviously going to be marginalized.

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.

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I would accept a world where you need enhancement to get ahead, for the same reason I accept a world where you need a phone and a car to get ahead. Some people may grumble, but everyone is better off.

http://network.nature.com/forums/naturenewsandopinion/816

http://66.179.50.166/s.aspx?sm=xrWEV6jaPOhKbAU_2blNRDBQ_3d_3...

links from http://www.boingboing.net/2008/03/09/debate-around-brain.htm...

We'd all get a little bit further if child labor were allowed, too.

Personally I'd allow it. There's no huge sector of starving families as in the 19th century. Parents would let their kids take jobs - as work experience and character formation. Plus it would divert the unteachables from an education they merely disrupt.

I know, off topic, just tweaking your nose for such a primly self-righteous response.

Yes, and a corollary is that this doesn't necessarily mean the non doped can just go live easier lives because the doped are doing so much more work. The same thing has been said about most of technological revolutions, but do people live more leisurely, relaxed lives today because of our advances?

>The same thing has been said about most of technological revolutions, but do people live more leisurely, relaxed lives today because of our advances?

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.

And when we find out that modafinil fucks up some useful neurological chemical pathway, or desensitizes the brain to their natural equivalents; well, that's just the price society pays for innovation.

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.

If you don't take pills, it's not your problem. Which is the point I was addressing

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?

Incorrect: if I don't take pills, and all my competitors do, and they're given a competitive boost that they only pay for when they commit suicide at age 41, it is my problem.

The exact same criticism could be levied against your competitors who have no life and work 80-100 hours/week. I suspect that 100 hour work weeks are also more likely to encourage suicide than concentration pills.

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?

Nonsense. I'm one of those people with no life --- I have a startup, and I have my family, and that's it. I'm depressed when I'm not working.

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.

So you are harming your competitors by engaging in activities which are potentially risky. Those competitors who can't keep up are harmed, either due to you stealing their clients or because they kill themselves (figuratively) trying to keep up. I have a number of friends working in finance who are in such a situation.

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.

What it breaks, we will learn to fix.

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 if it can't?

We can't avoid all problems, so the general strategy we need is to get more knowledge so we can be better at solving unforeseen problems.

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.

Yeah, that's more what I'm getting at. I don't like straight knee jerk conservatism, but sometimes it is a useful instinct and it warns us to count the costs.

IMO revolutionaries are worse than conservatives. They are more destructive. And there's more ways to be wrong than right.

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.

Plus, most revolutions aren't really revolutionary in idea. They mainly retread tired, broken ground that the "conservative" position was meant to fix. I'd say a significant amount of innovation in the political, social, and philosophical realm is merely forgetfulness.

Want to give a couple edifying examples?

PS Have you read any Edmund Burke? Got an opinion of him?

The odds that modafinil causes permanent harm of any kind seems pretty unlikely to me. Obvious abuse of modafinil to stop sleeping would cause permanent harm, but that seems unlikely. The FDA doesn't have a perfect track record, but they do have standards that mean something.

You mean like with ritalin, or the antidepressants? I don't think your argument sticks.

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?

Even with all the free time, people don't seem so happy. Some stats on depression:

http://www.upliftprogram.com/depression_stats.html

(what's with all the pill popping pre-schoolers?)

How is this a corollary? As a result of increased productivity in society, everyone becomes better off. And yes, people today live more leisurely, relaxed lives materially because of increased productivity.

He argued that in academics and sports, increased performance due to chemical abuse will pressure the non abusers to do the same. This is bad if the abuse is bad for the user.

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.

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