{"id":1517,"date":"2008-12-09T07:43:24","date_gmt":"2008-12-09T11:43:24","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/other-worlds-cafe.com\/news\/blog\/?p=1517"},"modified":"2008-12-08T11:23:45","modified_gmt":"2008-12-08T15:23:45","slug":"what-could-possibly-go-wrong","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/other-worlds-cafe.com\/news\/blog\/?p=1517","title":{"rendered":"What Could Possibly Go Wrong?"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>An opinion piece published online in <A HREF=\"http:\/\/www.nature.com\/nature\/journal\/vaop\/ncurrent\/full\/456702a.html\">Nature<\/A> examines the illicit use of &#8220;brain-boosting&#8221; drugs like Adderall and Ritalin by college students, and concludes&#8230;that we should totally do more of that.<\/p>\n<p>The seven authors&#8211;at least two of whom are consultants for pharmaceutical companies&#8211;argue that we &#8220;should welcome new methods of improving our brain function,&#8221; and say that doing it with pills is no more morally objectionable than eating right or getting a good night&#8217;s sleep.  They sort of gloss over the fact that getting a good night&#8217;s sleep doesn&#8217;t come with a warning label (unlike Adderall, which carries warnings about the possibility of sudden death, heart attack, or stroke).<\/p>\n<p>I think they kind of buried the lede, where the authors note that steps would have to be taken to ensure that the benefits of these drugs didn&#8217;t make socio-economic inequalities worse.  There have already been a few reported cases of overly gung-ho parents dosing their healthy children with Ritalin in order to give them an edge in school; it&#8217;s not hard to envision a scenario where unmedicated kids wind up with a competetive disadvantage in school and employment.<\/p>\n<p>Should we allow unfettered access to this type of brain-boosting drug?  We already alter our brain function with drugs like caffeine; is this really all that different?  If having unregulated brain chemistry becomes a great liability, wouldn&#8217;t parents be remiss if they didn&#8217;t help their kids compete?  A lot of SF examines this kind of human bootstrapping; perhaps this is the first step to a real-life Uplift.  Or maybe it&#8217;s just a really, really bad idea.<\/p>\n<p>What do you think?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>An opinion piece published online in Nature examines the illicit use of &#8220;brain-boosting&#8221; drugs like Adderall and Ritalin by college students, and concludes&#8230;that we should totally do more of that. The seven authors&#8211;at least two of whom are consultants for pharmaceutical companies&#8211;argue that we &#8220;should welcome new methods of improving our brain function,&#8221; and say [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2,8],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/other-worlds-cafe.com\/news\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1517"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/other-worlds-cafe.com\/news\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/other-worlds-cafe.com\/news\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/other-worlds-cafe.com\/news\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/other-worlds-cafe.com\/news\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1517"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"http:\/\/other-worlds-cafe.com\/news\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1517\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1521,"href":"http:\/\/other-worlds-cafe.com\/news\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1517\/revisions\/1521"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/other-worlds-cafe.com\/news\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1517"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/other-worlds-cafe.com\/news\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1517"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/other-worlds-cafe.com\/news\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1517"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}