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.
In the exact same boat here. Using stimulants is the most obvious solution to meeting ever rising demands, but is it the best? I agree with you that working hard is a difficult pill to swallow (har har), especially when the benefits of said work are--at most--nebulous.
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.
What do you guys think government policy should be on this stuff?
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.
I'd also call myself libertarian, so lean towards 'people can take care of themselves' (which can also be translated as 'people can make their own mistakes').
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.
The article mentions that we should have equal opportunities, namely people with low cognitive abilities should be able to enhance them so they can compete with those people whose nature has given high cognitive abilities. Perhaps, if cognition is something completely hereditary and nurture plays a very small role, then sure allow them to have equal capacity, but as the story of Alex clearly shows this does not create equal opportunity but unfair advantage and competition. The guy is able to go out there drink and party and then do the paper in a short time and not really gain the greater knowledge from lecturers. So he is hacking education and focusing on only these papers and gets better grades, but surely he is not a better man for the job than the person who spend his time studying and attending lectures although short of time failed to finish all the essays to a high standard.
So I think they create unfair competition and advantage hence should be banned.
Instead of learning how to manage his time and show some discipline in committing to a reasonable schedule, this kid took neuroenhancers to help compensate for "partying all weekend, or spen[ding] the last week being high." Just as the kid who reads Cliffs Notes instead of The Iliad deprives himself of an intellectual experience, this guy deprived himself of the opportunity to train himself to develop natural work habits that he will need as he embarks on a career.
Several pharmaceutical companies are working on drugs that target nicotine receptors in the brain, in the hope that they can replicate the cognitive uptick that smokers get from cigarettes.
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.
apparently those where nicotine consumption is socially acceptable are winning
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.
> 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.
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.
Well, I do feel it's a bad thing. Cigarettes are so far down the scale of drug delivery methods that I feel we have an obligation to do better. Surely something similar to an asthma inhaler that delivered a hit of nicotine or similar would not be too expensive to develop, and could provide mental relief without the same physical costs.
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.
> Well, I do feel it's a bad thing. Cigarettes are so far down the scale of drug delivery methods that I feel we have an obligation to do better.
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.
* Lots of people smoke in Egypt, Greece, and France, but none of those countries is a trailblazing economy.*
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.
"Alex was happy enough to talk about his frequent use of Adderall at Harvard, but he didn’t want to see his name in print; he’s involved with an Internet start-up, and worried that potential investors might disapprove of his habit."
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 am not an investor nor do I play one on TV, but that would worry me, sure. First, there is the issue of burnout or escalating addiction or withdrawal or all the usual problems that could threaten the business. Secondly, many VCs see investing in a startup not so much as an investment in the business, but in the founder(s). Would you place your chips on a guy who can't organise his life without the aid of pills?
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 organise his life without the aid of pills?
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?
Good point, but you're still not 100% right because FBI for example requires its agents to have a pretty good vision (http://www.fbijobs.gov/1113.asp#2).
In a combat/police role, you might always lose your glasses/meds/cyborg suit and end up fighting hand-to-hand, naked. Such requirements make sense there.
sounds like Freud's temporary conviction that cocaine was the key to liberating man from his natural limitations. What goes around comes around...I guess writers like these articles, because we're always on the cusp a social change, and there will always be new people trying drugs for the first time and getting some positive benefits.
tl;dr; 'intellectuals get high like everyone else - film at 11'.
Indeed. I, as many others I'm sure, have always wondered if my inability to concentrate was ADHD (although I'm sure it's not). I liked the other article today (link: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=570893) about focus. I'm going to pick up a few of those books to see if I can get inspired, although I believe the key is doing concentration calisthetics.
Regarding other drugs and intellectuals, this article comes to mind as well:
I have chronic case of ADHD (medically diagnosed) although I am not currently taking any drugs for it. Good habits help as do good tools (Gmail has literally lowered my blood pressure), but the most important aids are an understanding but challenging partner and/or employer. I don't think of it as a disorder but as a condition, neither good nor bad; I'm lucky enough to have a high IQ that allows me to exploit the upside and try not to use the downsides as an excuse for inactivity.
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.
I've tried all these drugs at one point or another during college, and let me tell you from first hand experience that coffee is the hands down winner.
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.
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.