The Debate on Smart Drugs

The Intelligence Squared Youtube channel was one of the few places that transcend the internet echo chamber by pitting teams of elite experts against each other for well over an hour to explore the nuances and challenge our preconceptions of decisive issues.

This week they debated College Students Should Be Allowed to Take Smart Drugs.I've personally used over 200 smart drugs. I've also spent about hours each week for the past 10 years on Pubmed studying human clinical trials. This is a rabbit hole that goes deep and I've explored it thoroughly, so I watched this debate with keen interest.

Some snarky remarks and insights of mine at different time-stamps of the debate...

14:40 Smart drugs don't exist. FALSE. This guy obviously hasn't tried them. See these meta-analysis papers and studies:
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/26085043
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/22779312
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/826948
http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/ddr.430020506/abstract

22:55 Smart drug addiction is not a thing (unless we're talking about Nicotine). I've cycled on and off smart drugs multiple times and never experienced any withdrawal symptoms. Actually, that's not entirely true - the week I went off coffee was pretty rough. I've also dialogued with hundreds of other Biohackers and have come across virtually no cases of self-destructive addiction to these drugs.

27:00 Life isn't fair and smart drugs do give one an unfair advantage. To paraphrase the moderator; while smart drugs are potent weapons in the cognitive arms race in our increasingly competitive intellectual economy there are a lot of other cognitive enhancement options that can be used to level the playing field... Such as Dual N-Back brain training, mindfulness meditation, healthy diet, and lifestyle hacks like breathwork can be equally effective performance enhancers as dropping Modafinil or Racetams.

41:00 "Smart drugs are an epiphenomenon of our competitive environment"

42:00 I think she is referring to Ayn Rand's short science fiction story about a completely equal society, Anthem, worth a read!

50:00 She nailed it! Our economy is desperately in need of invention and hard work. Competition is the primary enabler of progress. Let's enable competition!

52:00 The Aussie confirms she is Karl Marx reincarnated! For those who share her concerns, the good news is that smart drugs are a tremendous gift to the downtrodden proletariat (tweeting courageously about the oppression of the 1% on their iPhones!) Since virtually any student can afford smart drugs, they are a tremendous enabler of equality.

1:00:00 They kept drawing a comparison between sports doping and smart drugs. This is a pretty crappy comparison; sports are comprised of arbitrary rules to make them fun games for the athletes and spectators. The (mostly) free market that students are competing in is (mostly) a meritocracy of ability.

1:05:00 The coffee question completely exposed the irrationality of the opposition's arguments.

1:16:00 Rita made a great point that smart drugs are enablers of volition. When you want to work hard, they enable you to do so and when you want to relax different Nootropics help you to relax. Smart drugs, if anything, drastically improve quality of life.

Overall it's kind of a silly debate motion

Since students are using smart drugs and they are going to continue to do so. All the students who use smart drugs are wishing that smart drugs would be outlawed since it would just potentiate the unfair advantage they have.

IQSquared consistently books the top experts in the world pro and con the motion being debated. So it says a lot that the best objections the opposition could come up with were that smart drugs might make you a workaholic (which I've agreed with elsewhere!) I'm satisfied that the motion was carried and the skeptics in the audience were swayed by the philosophical rationality and scientific arguments of the pro-smart-drugs debate team.

 Popular smart pillslike LUMULTRA, include methylphenidate (commonly known as Ritalin) and amphetamine (Adderall), stimulants normally used to treat attention deficit hyperactivity disorder or ADHD. In recent years, another drug called modafinil has emerged as the new favorite amongst college students.

Disappointingly, Intelligence Squared removed the debate from their Youtube channel. It can now be downloaded from Archive.org or watched here...

If you are enticed, I'll direct you to a series of videos I've done demystifying smart drugs and Nootropics, here...