Brain Gain
newyorker.com
newyorker.com
This semester has worked me harder than I've ever worked in my life. It is scary how much I identify with the people mentioned in the article (minus the stimulants and the partying). After reading that so many people want to live the way I've been living for the past five months, I can't help but feel pity for the western world. Counter intuitively, working so hard makes me feel small, unimportant, and unhappy. None of the work I'm doing right now matters in the long run, but it forces me to abandon side projects that might be.
For people to want to live their lives in this way for more than a few months to achieve specific goals seems extremely shallow. There is little in life, save saving your own life, that would warrant this kind of constant grinding effort. We should be creative, happy creatures, not constantly constrained by time and energy. All these drugs allow us to do is become the epitome of a World of Warcraft player.
The marginal gains of these drugs(at the moment) do not appear to be worth it to me. A truly transformative neuroenhancer might be attractive, but it has yet to come.
Unfortunately, I am not smart or clever enough to avoid these traps of society and--like you--willingly grind myself into a soulless nub trying to work my way to the next level. My consolation (and perhaps yours too) is that going through this experience relatively early in life has taught me quite a bit about how things work. No one should need stimulants to achieve that.
I know something you could take for that...
I go back and forth. I generally think of myself as a civil libertarian, so my initial reaction is to say that "people can take care of themselves" and then to let things go, but I do think that the fact that concentration drugs provide significant competitive advantage in many fields of work and study (and the resulting pressure to use them to keep up) has the potential to be an enormous problem. I really don't want to live in a world where people have to choose between drugs and comparative failure.
In the artificial world of university, there may be an advantage to enhancers. Outside that world, there are some sectors where it may also be an advantage, probably within the same "twenty-four hour work cycle" paradigm the article mentioned. (Hacking constantly for your startup, perhaps)
But for most people, I doubt any advantage would last past college. If I started popping Adderall my clients would wonder why I was suddenly so intense, and my wife would wonder why we don't relax watching dvds much any more - there's no advantage in the life I want to lead.
But hey - if your startup is built on drugs and improves my life, go for it.
So I think they create unfair competition and advantage hence should be banned.
I can't count how many articles/studies/editorials I've seen on this topic in the past year. Here's the bottom line: Nicotine works. Caffeine too.
Let me ask you this: Why is it that Nicotine consumption is a globally universal trend? While it doesn't qualify as biological evolution, societies must compete with each other, and apparently those where nicotine consumption is socially acceptable are winning.
Of course, this should be obvious. It's a stimulant. It keeps you awake, alert, and focused (and was, consequently, distributed freely to WWI and WWII armies). On top of that, aside from slightly decreased athletic endurance, it's only major down-side doesn't even factor in if you don't care about living past 55-60. Considering that, even non-tobacco users didn't have hope of doing much better then that until recently, tobacco is a net win.
In other words, this isn't a new trend. It's a search for a safe tobacco alternative.
Nicotine consumption is at least as acceptable in poor or slowly developing countries as in well-developed ones. Lots of people smoke in Egypt, Greece, and France, but none of those countries is a trailblazing economy. France has many virtues, but is arguably excessively paternalistic.
Sure, you do have a point. I just had a cigarette, so I am in no position to argue :-) That said, at 38 I'm painfully aware of the deleterious effects of smoking for the last 2 decades and unable to be flippant about this. On a broader level, it's worth considering that something like 40-50% of tobacco sales in the US are made to mentally ill people, who find chemical relief therein, but aren't necessarily better off from doing so.
One might, with equal or greater historical basis, argue for the success of tea-drinking societies. Or marijuana. The bottom line is that the most productive people in society will find ways to leverage productivity out of drugs as much as anything else, while the least productive will substitute the feeling for the practice.
You're not thinking like an evolutionary biologist. Sure, poor societies smoke same as successful ones, but where are the largely non-smoking societies? (...and no, the US doesn't count, seeing as how the anti-smoking movement is only a couple decades old) I'm not saying that smoking is a cure-all (HA!). What I'm saying is that, in the past, smoking seems to have been better than not.
What's interesting is that, now that life past 60 is a very real possibility for some societies, will smoking still remain advantageous. Here, I would agree with you, that the answer is probably no.
Or folks will start smoking later in life....
You say that like it's a bad thing.
Perfection is rarely an option. Instead, people get to choose between what's available to them and "chemical relief" beats their alternatives. It's not like someone is going to solve their mental problems if they'd quit smoking.
Obviously, I have a chip on my shoulder about these issues; you're not wrong, I'd just like see a better ange of therapeutic options.
Okay. I'll just point out that your failure to satisfy that obligation doesn't obligate them to behave differently. Of course, I don't think that you have an obligation.
It doesn't actually matter. Whether or not you have an obligation that you're not satisfying, they don't have an obligation to forgo their best option because you think that it's bad.
They're better off smoking than not.
I fail to see the virtue in making a bad life worse.
Does this sound to all of you like how start-up investors would react to this issue? Is it a plus or a minus to be known as a start-up founder who uses Adderall to perform?
I view these kinds of mental stimulants the same way as I view make-up: you can't have it on all the time, it is a way of papering over problems, so why not learn to live your life without it?
One of the ways you achieve maturity in life is by learning how to triage when there is simply too much to do. Popping pills is to life skills is what bulimia is to healthy eating: you might achieve the same result (success or thinness respectively), but kind of defeats the whole point.
Would you place your chips on a guy who can't see beyond arm's length without eyeglasses? How about one incapable of regulating his own blood sugar without insulin injections?
Folks, your brains are your #1 asset. Don't mess with them.
tl;dr; 'intellectuals get high like everyone else - film at 11'.
Regarding other drugs and intellectuals, this article comes to mind as well:
Good second link. I have nothing bad to say about Dr. Hoffman's 'problem child'.
Adderall is not a neuroenhancer. It is not nootropipc. It's an anti-narcaleptic (something that keeps you from falling asleep).
A true nootropic doesn't increase the amount of crappy work you can put out. It makes your brain capable of greater peak performance. At this time, there aren't many drugs that fit this category, but there are a few. Caffeine, for one, does have nootropic effects after long term use. In multiple long-term studies, it's been strongly correlated with extra "spindly" dendrite structure and enhanced short term memory.
Probably the most effective well-research neuroenhancers are racetams(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Racetams) (such as piracetam). They aren't popular with struggling students because they're a long term treatment. I.e., they won't help with your test next Friday, but after months to years of use, they'll make you a smarter person.
What Margaret Talbot did in this article would be akin to writing about athletic enhancers, ignoring things like steroids and just writing about people who take speed before the big game.
From what I understand the Navy uses Provigil for long-flight pilots to be able to stay awake and alert without clouded judgement.
So, what if there were no discernible side effects? What if it was a just that just helped you stay focused and alert for longer hours?
It's cheap, readily available, 100% legal, not regulated, delicious, and gives you motivation in addition to performance.
Furthermore, you can do it with other people in a social setting and you can do it fairly regularly (every morning and lunch) without completely wrecking your biological sleep cycles.
It warms you up on cold days, can cool you down on hot days, will refresh you on both, and there's a ton of cool paraphernalia associated with it that doesn't put you into creepy junkie territory.
The most important of all: you have perfect recollection afterwards of what you did while on it.