"If you could take all the pain and discomfort you will ever feel in your life, and compress it into a 12-hour interval, so you really feel ALL of it right then, and then after the 12 hours are up you have no ill effects - would you do it? I certainly would.""
Hubris. You don't know, can't know, how that pain would/could be instrumental in processing external stimuli in ways that enable you to make better decisions.
"The sort of pain that builds character, as they say".
The concept of processing 'pain' in all its forms is rooted very deep in humanity -- get rid of it entirely (as opposed to modulating it as we currently do), and you run a strong risk of throwing the baby out with the bathwater, especially if you then have an assurance that your life will have no pain going forward. There's a strong argument to be made for deference to traditional human experience in the face of the unknown.
A search through the comments on this article turns up exactly zero instances of the term "Vietnam".
Taking a hard look at what Schelling tried when faced with the real-world 'game' in Vietnam is enlightening as to the ups and downs of actually putting his theories -- or game theory in general -- into practice.
Fred Kaplan's piece in Slate from when Schelling won the Nobel is a good start:
Boo to whoever voted this down in the first place. Great link.