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.

So the religious people flunk out, everyone else has to work much harder, and in the end no student gains. Arguably future patients might gain from having better trained doctors, but I think this wildly overestimates the usefulness of the medical education system.

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.