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What comes to mind is Paul Erdos being jacked up on Benzedrine and Ritalin nearly every day for the last 25 years of his life and undoubtedly contributing a massive amount to modern mathematics. (There was a life hacker in every possible sense.)

Of course, you're ignoring the contributions of thousands of equally impactful mathematicians who weren't "jacked up" on pills.

But no one, not a single person in history, has published more papers in mathematics than Erdos. Only a single person can have claimed to have published more pages than he, and that's Euler. I think its worth recognizing that his regiment of drugs likely increased, at the very least, the volume of his output.

[Wikipedia quote] His colleague Alfréd Rényi said, "a mathematician is a machine for turning coffee into theorems", and Erdős drank copious quantities. (This quotation is often attributed incorrectly to Erdős himself.)[7] After 1971 he also took amphetamines, despite the concern of his friends, one of whom (Ron Graham) bet him $500 that he could not stop taking the drug for a month.[8] Erdős won the bet, but complained during his abstinence that mathematics had been set back by a month: "Before, when I looked at a piece of blank paper my mind was filled with ideas. Now all I see is a blank piece of paper." After he won the bet, he promptly resumed his amphetamine habit. [/quote]

(I remember the story from his biography, but Wikipedia has the copy-and-paste advantage.)

However, one may wonder about the average quality of the papers. If he had laid of the drugs, he might have produced just the top 10% of the papers that he wrote under influence. One could argue that would actually have been a better result.

That depends on your opinion of his work.

Did the bottom 10% of his papers (under the influence) move the field of mathematics forwards? Perhaps.

Did the bottom 90% of his papers move math forwards? I'd argue yes.

If productivity is measured by Erdos number, they moved math forward immensely.

What if without the drugs he would have produced more and/or higher quality results? His contribution to mathematics might have been greater still. We don't know that he did as well as he did because of the drugs instead of in spite of the drugs.

after he stopped using them, he reportedly had difficulty coming up with 'new mathematical ideas' (see comments in 1st thread for the full quote)

Yes, but from what I read, he only stopped for a month. After using drugs for a long time, there is a significant come-down period and a month seems much much too short a time to be able to accurately compare. Its to be expected that everything feels duller or slower and that you feel less excited, less creative, less motivated and less focused after coming off drugs. So it makes sense that he would have had difficulty coming up with new mathematical ideas when he stopped. Id like to know if this would still be the case after six months or a year of not taking drugs.

Aside from the claim that there have thousands of equally impactful mathematicians (have there been 100?) that doesn't invalidate the claim that illegal drug use has had a positive effect on mathematical knowledge, even if Erdos has been the only human in history to benefit.

Nothing can invalidate that claim if you're not seriously considering the implicit alternative explanation that mahmud offers, which is that Erdos would have been just as productive without the drugs.

Using Erdos as a 'plausible example' of the positive effects of drug use is fallacious, because it's a statistic with N = 1. Especially given the fact that a side effect of these drugs seems to be that it reduces creativity, we may just as well suppose that Erdos was impaired by them and would have been even more brilliant if he had realized he could do it without the chemicals.

Erdős went off drugs for a month or so, and complained that he could not work as well as with the drugs. (Of course, you could still argue that the real alternative isn't one month off drugs, but no drugs at all. But that's a slightly weaker argument.)

Wikipedia (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paul_Erd%C5%91s) says:

> After 1971 he also took amphetamines, despite the concern of his friends, one of whom (Ron Graham) bet him $500 that he could not stop taking the drug for a month. Erdős won the bet, but complained during his abstinence that mathematics had been set back by a month: "Before, when I looked at a piece of blank paper my mind was filled with ideas. Now all I see is a blank piece of paper." After he won the bet, he promptly resumed his amphetamine habit.

Actually a much stronger argument. Anyone who has been taking drugs for that long is going to have serious withdrawal issues. This is analogous to a heavy coffee drinker complaining he is exhausted and has a headache because he missed his daily dose of caffeine; it isn't so much that people can't operate sans caffeine, it is that his brain has become wired to expect the daily stimulant.

Exactly. If he had been off the drugs for, say, a year, instead of just a month, then his argument would be a lot more convincing.

Indeed. But, alas, Erdős only wanted to win the bet, not run a scientific experiment.

By the way, I remember that Erdős reported that he felt better after a month off drugs. It was just that mathematics suffered.

I would wager that his creativity would come back after a few months. If he felt better, but mathematics suffered, then I imagine that it really was just a post-drug drop in creativity and motivation and that normally passes.

I don't know. I don't even know, if it was a lack of creativity that held him back, or not being able to focus, or maybe something else.

lack of creativity, lack of motivation, lack of focus - all of these things are to be expected after giving up drugs, I didn't specifically just mean creativity. The longer you are dependent on the drugs, the longer the comedown will be. I have experimented in the past, and I say this from personal experiences.

Having said that, it could well have been something else entirely that prevented him from producing as many or as good results and I'm not saying that the drugs didn't really improve his ability - I am saying that we don't have enough information to know for sure and that a month may not have been long enough to be conclusive.

> Using Erdos as a 'plausible example' of the positive effects of drug use is fallacious, because it's a statistic with N = 1.

Um, a "statistic with N = 1" is exactly what an "example" is.

Yeah, but the plausibility of the example is quite small, due to the often found side-effect of reduction of creativity.

As an aside, you could argue that an example is one instance from a larger set, where N >> 1 and where the other instances lend credibility to the reported example. Erdos's story, on the other hand, would be anecdotal evidence, not supported by any other similar story.

"You shouldn't have mentioned the stuff about Benzedrine. It's not that you got it wrong. It's just that I don't want kids who are thinking about going into mathematics to think that they have to take drugs to succeed."

Paul Erdos, re: a 1987 Atlantic Monthly article profiling his work

Isn't that quote a bit hypocritical?

It's like telling your kids you don't have to smoke to be cool, while smoking daily yourself. It's not very convincing, but not hypocritical either.

He started taking it it because of his depression, not because he wanted to boost his productivity - he was devastated after his mother died.

At some point he was bet that he couldn't go without it; he did, but then said that doing so had set back mathematics for as long as he had been off the drugs. So I'd say he thought it boosted his productivity.

Uppers : mathematics :: steroids : baseball. We can give moralistic lip service to "Winners Don't Use Drugs" but at the cutting edge of today's best of the best, when performance actually counts you'll find that the real winners actually do have chemical help...

How do we know what the result would be without drugs?

I mostly agree with you.

I do think however, as the article pointed out, there’s something a bit unsettling about concern for their kids’ futures causing parents to medicate perfectly normal/healthy children with drugs that have unknown long-term consequences.

To be sure, this is a general structural problem inherent in a school system which uses “high-stakes” standardized tests and attempts to rank people on an absolute scale. Unfortunately, there’s not a lot we can do to dismantle the whole school testing apparatus in the immediate future.

Which isn’t to say that (e.g. religious fundamentalist) parents don’t do plenty else to screw up their kids, under social pressure, or that widespread use of “neuro-enhancing” drugs by teens would be the worst thing that could ever happen to the society.

This is a popular argument in support of mind-enhancing drugs in the "real world," and it's completely wrong. You could make almost exactly the same argument in favor of nootropics in schools: "anything that allows the sum-total of human learning to increase at a faster rate is good."

That's just not true in either case. If the widespread use of a substance accelerates human work (or learning) by 10% (whatever that means) but halves life expectancy, it almost certainly isn't good. That's obviously pathological but my intention here is only to show that your argument is bad, not your conclusion.

Moreover, you seem to believe that, outside of schoool, people would only take nootropics if the net benefit to humanity outweighs the net detriment; the real world, after all, isn't a competition. The problem is that it often feels a lot like one. If I'm competing with a coworker of roughly equal skill for a promotion and a nootropic is available to both of us that will increase job performance by 5% but noticeably decrease quality of life -- again, this is pathological -- we're put in a prisoner's dilemma: both of us would much prefer that neither of us take the drug if the alternative is that we both take the drug, but both of us have a strong incentive to take the drug no matter what the other one does.

There's no getting around the fact that allowing nootropics in the real world at least has the potential to instigate exactly the same sort of prisoner's-dilemma-esque mental arms race that allowing nootropics in schools generates. Some of the side effects of that arms race might be good, sure, but some of them might be very bad. This issue isn't anywhere near as cut-and-dried as you make it out to be.

There's a large difference between steroids and Provigil, at least from the limited information given in the article. Assuming that there are no side effects from Provigil; Steroids have a definitive list of side effects that ravage the human body. In that sense, there are no comparisons. Considering the impact of the two drugs from societies view, there is also no comparison as physical strength, especially in sports, does not contribute very much to society as a whole while according to the author, Provigil has large potential to enhance every scientist to create more and better ideas that could further the human race.

I would think also, that if Provigil is something that does create smarter people, perhaps we might find that there is a deficiency in our genome that through further research could be changed to the point where no drug was needed. Of course, I for one have no problem with gene therapy and enhancement.

There always come a ethical dilemma because we have been ingrained with the belief that we are not worth of meddling with our own bodies and destiny, usually from religious sources. If not religious factors, then usually from people that wish to maintain the status quo as they are usually benefiting.

The thing is that it would be hard to say that there was a "widespread deficiency in the genome". For the conditions under which we evolved, it's very unlikely that an always-provigil state is unambiguously better, or that would have become the dominant type.

But if the lack of appetite thing is always true, I suppose that could have historically outweighed the cognitive benefits, and now it clearly doesn't. In which case I guess you could call it a deficiency in the genome for current conditions. There might be other, longer term side effects, though.

School is an anomaly that's not worth discussing in the context of "mental enhancement"

If I include a university education under 'school', then I would say that an enhanced ability for learning would enable you to gain much more knowledge during those few years of dedicated learning. When hungry for knowledge, knowledge outside of the curriculum is as nutritious as knowledge required for exams.

The real world is not like this; the game is not zero-sum.

In many school systems outside the US, the game isn't zero-sum either, because you aren't judged relative to everyone else. An exam where 80% succeeds with 8/10 or higher is possible there, if the class is interested, motivated, etc. Similarly, I know of an instance where 80% failed an exam and had to take it again.

> "If I include a university education under 'school', then I would say that an enhanced ability for learning would enable you to gain much more knowledge during those few years of dedicated learning."

That depends on one of the facets I would like to know about before using such a chemical. When one takes it and is able to read volumes quickly, what is the useful recall rate of that information later?

I'm not convinced that our brain's memory writing systems can be speed up without some loss in the number of conceptual connections made which are part of the basis for useful recall. But if the chemical also speeds up the forming of those connections, maybe it balances out well and is overall a net gain. Some data on it would be nice.

> "The real world is not like this; the game is not zero-sum. When you write an article, it doesn't directly make someone else's articles more or less valuable"

Are you sure about this? It's always zero-sum game! When somebody (Apple and Google) creates a new smartphone devices, it make someone else's (RIMM and Nokia) smartphones less valuable.

Even it financial industry, when they say, that derivatives are zero-sum game, while equities aren't. It's not completely true, because equities are hedged by derivatives and vice versa. All assets are interdependent.

You have missed the point of my comment, and you're also wrong.

The next generation of smartphones will enhance the technology that the current generation of smartphones introduced. Sure, you might get some extra profit by releasing your cool new feature a month sooner, but your competitors also get an extra month to play with your new feature and make it even better for their next generation of phones. And so the cycle continues; making the iterations shorter with mind-enhancing drugs doesn't make much difference in the end.

In the financial industry, we have much better tools for trading derivatives than humans on Provigil. They're called "computers".

Because exam scores often matter for things like getting into school.