In many debates about cognition enhancement the claim is that it would be bad, because it would produce compounding effects - the rich would use it to get richer, producing a more unequal society. This claim hinges on the assumption that there would be an economic or social threshold to enhancer use, and that it would produce effects that were strongly in favour of just the individual taking the drug.
I think there is good reason to suspect that enhancement has positive externalities - lower costs due to stupidity, individual benefits that produce tax money, perhaps better governance, cooperation and more great ideas. In fact, it might be that these benefits are more powerful than the individual ones. If everybody got 1% smarter, we would not notice much improvement in everyday life, but the economy might grow a few percent and we would get slightly faster technological development and better governance. That might actually turn the problem into a free rider problem: unless you really want to be smarter taking the enhancer might be a cost to you (risk of side-effects, for example). So you might want everybody else to take the enhancers, and then reap the benefit without the cost.
There's a historical IQ enhancer we can use to look for this effect: food.
Jamais Cascio writes in the atlantic:
Read the whole article here.
This relates to cognitive enhancement as existential risk mitigation, where Anders Sandberg wrote:
The main criticisms of this idea generated in the Less Wrong comments were:
These criticisms really boil down to the same thing: people love their cherished falsehoods! Of course, I cannot disagree with this statement. But it seems to me that smarter people have a lower tolerance for making utterly ridiculous claims in favour of their cherished falsehood, and will (to some extent) be protected from believing silly things that make them (individually) feel happier, but are highly unsupported by evidence. Case in point: religion. This study1 states that
Many people in the comments made the claim that making people more intelligent will, due to human self-deceiving tendencies, make people more deluded about the nature of the world. The data concerning religion detracts support from this hypothesis. There is also direct evidence to show that a whole list of human cognitive biases are more likely to be avoided by being more intelligent - though far from all (perhaps even far from most?) of them. This paper2 states:
Anders Sandberg also suggested the following piece of evidence3 in favour of the hypothesis that increased intelligence leads to more rational political decisions:
Thus the hypothesis that increasing peoples' intelligence will make them believe fewer falsehoods and will make them vote for more effective government has at least two pieces of empirical evidence on its side.
1. Average intelligence predicts atheism rates across 137 nations, Richard Lynn, John Harvey and Helmuth Nyborg, Intelligence Volume 37, Issue 1,
2. On the Relative Independence of Thinking Biases and Cognitive Ability, Keith E. Stanovich, Richard F. West, Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 2008, Vol. 94, No. 4, 672–695
3. Relevance of education and intelligence for the political development of nations: Democracy, rule of law and political liberty, Heiner Rindermann, Intelligence, Volume 36, Issue 4