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Comment by quotemstr | Hacker News Reader

If you think Modafinil and Provigil are controversial today, wait until we have genome-editing techniques for increasing intelligence. Transhumanism is inevitable. I really do not understand the opposition to allowing individuals to increase their intelligence.

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Genome-editing techniques for increasing intelligence look like they are a very long way off, as I have learned from the behavior geneticists with whom I participate in a journal club.[1]

[1] http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0160289614...

What is the connection between that paper and your claim?

I don't think there's an opposition to it. People just don't want to shoot themselves in the foot by gambling on Modafinil having no long term effects.

>I don't think there's an opposition to it.

There is definitely opposition. It's mostly on religious grounds, a la "My beliefs dictate that I should prevent you from 'playing god', because that privelege is reserved for my deit(y|ies).".

I bet they all consume copious amounts of coffee while saying it.

Don't forget alcohol! Watching people climb up on a pedestal and try and tell me that alcohol is somehow not a drug makes my blood boil every damn time I hear it. I think it's hard to correct these people's thinking because our society drills the very phrase "drugs AND alcohol" into children's brains from a very early age including in the DARE programs in our schools. Somehow everyone is okay with casual abuse of alcohol because they don't think of it as a drug. "What else can you take into your body that fucks you up like alcohol does, but is not a drug?" is the retort I've been using in recent years.

Tell that to the idiots who make every slightly risky (aren't they all?) drug illegal or, if we're lucky, prescription only.

Oh, that includes Modafinil, and I'm counting the days until someone notices Phenylethylamine.

>I'm counting the days until someone notices Phenylethylamine

You can't ban chocolate in the current world. Dark chocolate can contain up to 0.7% of PEA.

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