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Mitchell_Porter comments on Open Thread, October 1-15, 2012 - Less Wrong Discussion
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So, Yvain posted a blog post recently. I was disappointed. I'm posting about it here because I'll have an easier time following a conversation about my thoughts here than in livejournal comments. I will note that he claims the post is, at most, 60% serious, but that seems at least ten thousand times too high.
A major supporting claim is that if modafinil were legal, it would become expected, and everything would be harder to match the increased ability of humans to be productive.
A parable:
In the Old Country, the people once did not know of iodine. It was not illegal, but only a very specific kind of geek would eat dried seaweed carried long miles on the backs of beasts and men. One day, a stranger came to the village, preaching of this mysterious substance, claiming that its consumption would make all men cleverer.
The elders convened and discussed this 'boon,' if you could call it that. If one man is cleverer, he profits, but if all men are cleverer, then no man profits. No elder spoke this more loudly than the one whose wife feasted on seaweed, and whose children were free of the stunted look of cretinism. To spare the people from having harder lives, the elders sent this stranger on his way, to not change the ways of the village.
A commentary:
Yvain has seen the misery of Haiti and India firsthand; but it seems only with his eyes.
What is his main proposition? He has a model of the world in which enormous amounts of energy and money are being spent running a rat race where the satisfaction only comes from winning it, not from running it, and meanwhile there are numerous places where just a small fraction of that energy and money could be spent, creating great and lasting benefits. His proposition is that in the current situation, modafinil is known mostly to a minority which includes people working on some of those important neglected matters, but if modafinil becomes as well known as Prozac or Viagra, its main consequence will be that the rats in the rat race will all run faster, with no net benefit.
Your comments imply that you disagree with this model, but you need to say where and why.
I think that Yvain's thoughts on the matter are poisoned by working in a poisoned field. Would doctors be better if they studied 16 hours a day, instead of 10? Some, but not much. Perhaps people would live a bit longer- but better for everyone to adopt intermittent fasting than to slightly improve the quality of doctors.
But why only give modafinil to studying medical students, and not those who hold lives in their tiring hands instead of books? Given the hideous prevalence of medical errors, and their known association to fatigue, I would far prefer a doctor chemically warded against fatigue to one without such armor.
(I might agree that financiers all turning to modafinil would not noticeably improve the world, and make them worse off- but, truly, he made his example doctors?)
Few engineers, scientists, or programmers that I know would give voice to the complaint that others might work harder. Their whole fields are suffused with positive externalities. When the other groups in my field discover more truths, I am enlightened by their work. When an engineer designs a better device, I am the richer for it. When a programmer writes more and better code, the world hums along more smoothly for it. If more of the world moved at startup speed, and it took new chemicals to make it that way, then all hail the new chemicals! As mentioned in the comments on the livejournal post, caffeine and tobacco are linked to the industrial age, as firmly as alcohol is to the agricultural age. If modafinil becomes the drug of choice for the information age, we will all be the richer for it.
To put it in terms of the model: yes, enormous amounts of energy and money are being spent on positional goods. But modern man's hampster wheel is enough of a ladder that spinning it around faster will result in it climbing more swiftly. Why think that it is solely our tribe that propels the world forward? We do not wear shoes made by rationalists, but by rats.
Indeed, consider what it would look like if Prozac or Viagra were Schedule IV substances, only used by a very specific kind of geek. Would the world be superior, or are happiness and horniness absolute goods, not positional? It seems to me as ridiculous to declare that it is good that the teeming masses do not use modafinil as it would be to declare that it is good that the teeming masses do not use antidepressants. Such altruism and love for one's fellows!
A lot of code is written to win arms races, not improve the world. Online ads, algorithmic trading, the defense industry...
Arms races are strong driver of world improvement.
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No, the new equilibrium would be 96-hour shifts, with doctors to their physical limits and making as many errors (modulo differences in attention at constant fatigue induced by modafinil, if any).
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