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DuncanS comments on Rationality Drugs - Less Wrong
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I have heard of genetic disorders, and know that they occur, and why they are found in the gene pool. And in such cases, it's entirely appropriate to take medication for them. I take your point that perhaps I could have mentioned this class of DNA earlier, and that it is appropriate to take medication for that class of diseases, as it doesn't improve your quality of life to leave it as it is.
I didn't think we were discussing genetic diseases particularly. I am convinced of your argument that if you have a genetic disorder that affects your intelligence, you should take medication for it. I don't see why this is relevant to the more general case of people who don't have a particular genetic issue. Evolution is a good balancing algorithm - but it works by trimming the outliers. If you are unlucky enough to be one of the outliers, there's likely something that needs correction. But generally, I don't see the relevance.
As for your second point - well, we did. Cancer is very rare in the natural environment. It's only in our much safer modern environment that we live long enough for it to become a problem again.
You may have missed my points...
Given the genetic variance in IQ, it's obvious that most people don't have optimal genetics for intelligence. Whether this is a "disorder" is an interesting semantic question, but the point remains that we know that the general class of "human brains" has a maximum that's higher than where most people are at.
Equally, our brains evolved for a much different environment with much different trade-offs. Just like cancer wasn't a threat in our ancestral environment, the ability to do a second order differential equation wasn't a benefit.
In short, medical science suggests that, actually, there's plenty of room to improve humans, both because we're extremely inconsistently built, and because we're not built to handle our current environment.
Actually I agree with all of this - there's a tremendous difference between average intelligence and the top end of the bell curve, and we have no reason not to think it can't go higher. We are the first species on this planet to attain general purpose intelligence, and there's no good reason at all to think that either more isn't possible, or indeed that the process of human evolution in this respect has stopped - quite the reverse I suspect. We have every reason to assume that at the moment human intelligence is evolving like mad - it's being very strongly selected for in a very large gene pool.
But my point is that this all has nothing to do with the proposed methods of improving the brain. If we really knew how it worked, and were able to model the consequences of our actions better, then it would be less of a guessing game whether there was a longer term price to the short term gain.