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San Francisco, 2:54 PM
Wed Nov 25
23 posts in the last 24 hours
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10/01/09
p.s. Amphetamines won't make your memory better, they'll just keep you awake.
10/01/09
10/01/09
During the sixties they fell out of favour as recreational use amongst youth subcultures became more widespread. The recent rise in their use for "doping" is just a result of these drugs (particularly dexdrine) being proscribed far more frequently, which in turn makes them far more available.
Society's attitudes to drugs have, if anything, become less liberalized over time. So I wouldn't really hold out much hope for legal performance enhancers. Unless the lines being researched in legal nootropics suddenly stop sucking.
10/01/09
It only takes one country accepting performance enhancers and using them with visible benefits to get others to jump in the bandwagon in fear of being left behind.
10/01/09
10/01/09
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10/01/09
I don't like to take pain killers (and having a history of kidney stones and broken bones, I have some familiarity with them). I limit myself to a daily coffee or two, and the occasional beer, and very occasional martini or gin and tonic. I find myself to be as functional as I need to be, and don't like the side effects.
But with the increasing professional competitiveness that we all face in the global marketplace, I understand where both sides are coming from in this debate.
I agree with the comments here that suggest this will just increase the gap between the have and have-nots.
10/01/09
There's also a kind of social pressure that could develop if these drugs became commonplace. Let's say that like coffee, these drugs become accepted as the norm. Most people would take them and increase their performance in school. But those not willing to accept the side effects and refuse to take the drug would be relegated to lower marks and subordinate jobs.
This points to a fundamental flaw with a social order based on competition. Some competition is healthy, but having to compete for every aspect of your survival turns everything into an arms race, where only those with wealth, power, and a gross lack of empathy will rise to the top. That's not a situation that can be fairly called "civilization."
10/01/09
The book THE SOCIOPATH NEXT DOOR (I read a lot) suggests that sociopathy is more common than we might think. It's just that most sociopaths are high functioning and have learned to blend in. (I wonder if this is from where the vampire and werewolf myths originate.)
A study or two using standardized psych profile tests have suggested that executives in the higher corporate ranks are disproportionately sociopathic when compared to the general population. (I'm saying this being the CEO myself, albeit of a corporation of one.)
I will be so bold as to suggest that this is exactly what you are getting at.
Sounds like the start of another Richard Morgan novel.
10/01/09
Unfortunately, notions like rational self-interest tend to promote that sort of thing. But that's not a recipe for a healthy, happy society; it's a recipe for a free-for-all rat-race where aggression and stress is the norm.
At least; that's my somewhat hyperbolic view of things.
I just think it's sort of interesting to compare our own culture to more cooperative societies, which tend not to have many predatory people at all, and anyway wouldn't give such people any traction because there are no positions of power or great wealth for them to hoarde.
10/01/09
Nothing could ever go wrong with that, right? ;)
10/01/09
Being back in the school game its is everywhere. Its just as bad as the steroids game in sports.
10/01/09
I didn't get much studying done, though my kitchen did look great afterwards...
10/01/09
Now excuse me as I finish my second pitcher of coffee.
10/01/09
I'm guessing that a lot of the affects on the brain would be similar to the affects of meth on the brain. The older the person gets which means that the brain will age quicker and the affects will be more severe.
10/01/09
I suspect that this will be a major cost multiplier to the costs of current health care and pension plans of the world as Alzheimer's and Parkinson's is today.
10/01/09
10/01/09
10/01/09
And as for intelligence enhancing drugs, as long as the side effects aren't too horrible, their beneficial potential is enormous. Imagine if every scientist on the planet took drug that increased their intelligence approximately 1%. Not much difference could be noticed from an individual scientist, but on the worldwide scale, where we have about ten million scientists, it'd be like having 100,000 scientists more with no extra costs. And the development would probably not stop there...
10/01/09
And I can see the worry about the divide. If the rich/poor divide exists due to the fact that richer people don't have to work, this on top of that will only make things worse. And I'm far too much of a socialist to support anything that makes that divide worse.
10/01/09
Also, every single product of scientific research has been expensive and hard to get at first, but as the time goes by and production costs go down, along with the increasing competition, they become available to wider and wider groups of people. You can't step in and say that some product shouldn't be used because only the rich can afford it. Your computer is in serious danger if you do.
10/01/09
Sports are of value strictly for competition's sake. They provide an external award system, so one person "cheating" has a big impact on everyone else, and the sport as a whole.
Education, on the other hand, provides an internal reward system (or should). You're learning for the sake of learning, not to do better than anyone else. Sure, there are people that try to make it into a competition, just like there are people that try to make driving to work or having more friends on Facebook a competition. It isn't the nature of the system, though.
Even beyond that, what about students with genuine learning disabilities that prescription drugs help them to overcome? Who decides whether these students are "doping" or just "coping"?(sorry, that was bad)
This article pretty much sounds like a bored psychologist needed to write something to stay relevant. I think there's pretty much zero chance of this happening anytime in the foreseeable future.
tldr; Guy is blowing smoke. Keep feeding your kids whatever pills you want.
10/01/09
In short, I agree. Except for the pun. For that I beat you with a bag of doorknobs.
10/01/09
As one with a sever learning disabilities, I think that the idea of drugs that assist the learning process is a good idea, but I can see it getting twisted. Before we label them as bad or good, we need to see if there are any side effects and if we actually retain the information.
10/01/09
however, all that said i don't see the issue with popping pills to improve performance in school or in sports. why performance enhnacing steroids are still illegal in professional sports is beyond me.
10/01/09
Drugs that enhance your noggin will probably have some interesting side effects. We're just going to have to see if people are willing to gain the ability to learn a lot faster/easier at the cost of seeing pink ponies flying on the horizon every other Thursday.
10/01/09
10/01/09
But what happens if you do already? A, um, friend of mine sees pink ponies. Does this mean that I, er, he will see them more frequently in the future?
10/01/09
10/01/09
10/01/09
Little bit of an incentive.
And I wouldn't describe sports as strictly competition either. If you knew that with drug X you could beat a personal best it may in some people's minds be a worthy gamble.
And the reason they are illegal is athletes for some are role models.
10/01/09
Of course, I'm saying all this because I'd rather watch big burly men beat the shit out of each other than press conferences where big burly men weep on camera apologizing for injecting themselves in the butt with lady hormones.
10/01/09
1)Most of the drugs have potentially harmful side effects. While you can argue that it is the athletes choice, for many that choice boils down to take drugs or get another job. Add in the tremendous amounts of money to be made and the fact that most of these athletes are young and poorly educated and the concept of "choice" becomes moot.
2) The drugs are not available without a perscription, but are obtained that way. This is illeagal which brings a criminal element into the locker room which allows the spectre of fixing the outcome to become an issue. Even in non-athletic contests produced for entertainment (game shows), fixing is frowned upon. It takes away the whole reason to watch which is that the outcome is not known ahead of time and will be decided while you are watching.
3) The goal is supposed to be to reward the most talented and hardest worker in these contests of skill. Not the one with the best chemist on his staff.
Much of this is less of an issue in academics. Most everybody who graduates college gets a job in their chosen profession and works in that job for most of their life, as opposed to those that "major" in football or basketball where only a few percent will turn pro and most will ahve careers shorter than 5 years.
10/01/09
@tetracycloide: You're probably right on the grading on a curve argument, but that pushes me to the "grading on a curve is an outdated, stupid way of doing things."
Honestly, I couldn't tell you the last time (if ever) I was in a class that graded on a curve. In high school and college, I succeeded or failed on my own merits, not based on that of those around me.
Now, I went to college in England, where the grading system is kind of harsh to begin with (generally speaking, scores are out of 100, but on an essay, 80 points is awesome, and probably worthy of being published). Even so, it was based on the merits of your work, not how well someone else did.
What are the arguments for grading on a curve, anyway, out of curiosity? (I'm actually curious. I've never really heard the other side of it)
10/01/09
My opinion on the curve grading thing is that professors feel pressure from the school to not flunk every damn kid in the class, even if it IS full of morons. I remember one professor bitching about how there was an actual quota for "A"s in that particular course.
Of course, I barely managed to graduate, and that's cuz I rode the curve. So... yay?
10/01/09
I see what you're saying about the professors feeling pressure from the school. I wonder, though, if their students failing is the students' fault, the teacher's fault, or something else.
I've always seen curve grading as a kind of cop-out, both for teachers and students. Students not doing poorly can blame others for their failure "awww, smart kid blew the curve! blah blah sports blah halo", and teachers, like you said, don't have to fail all the stupid kids (just a couple of them), or, on the flip-side, don't have to make their course more challenging to keep everyone from breezing through it.
10/01/09
You're fitting the way that grades are naturally going to fall anyway.
You're never going to really have a class full of dumb kids or a class full of smart kids. There are going to be some dumb and some smart and the rest fall in the middle. Thats what a curve is.
10/01/09
If everyone in the class does well and gets 80-100%, you end up failing a couple of kids that would have had a B otherwise (unless I'm completely misunderstanding practical usage of the bell curve in education, which is entirely possible).
10/01/09
Saying, "why can't we use steroids in baseball?" is the same thing as saying "why can't we carry the bat to first base, and knock the first baseman out with it?" Because it's against the rules. Though I would totally watch that game.
College and high school are different, since the rules are based on correct output, rather than accurate adherence--colleges don't care what you had to do in order to [learn the material]/[get an A] (they use "getting an A" as a rough analogue for "learning the material," which is why they DO care if you "cheated" and got the A without learning it), therefore the idea that you can "cheat" at learning history doesn't make any sense.
10/01/09
1) How is this different from any other choice? Either you put in the hours and hours of physical abuse to your body that is required to play at a professional level or you don't. What makes the side effects of drugs and the side effects of rigorous training like breaks, sprains, strains, and concusions any different from each other? It's clearly a job with high physical demands on the human body reguardless of the players drug habits.
2) The simple soultion would be to make 'athletics' a legal reason to proscribe these drugs. The decisions would still be in the hands of a doctor which would lend invaluable oversite to a practice that currently is done so clandesdinely that users risk side effects more than is really necessary. That said i don't buy the 'one crime leads to another' slippery slope argument. There's simply no reason to assume fixing the drug abuse are in any way directly related.
3) The drugs don't work that way. No drug obviates the need for work and training much less skill. You can be on all the performance enhancing drugs in the wrold and still have a forward fake you out of your socks or a pitcher bust you lower than a limbostick and carnival time. Even in dead lifts there are techniques involved that, properly applied, dramatically affect the outcome of each attempt.
10/01/09
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10/01/09
1)If you take some undereducated but fast/strong 16 year old and say to him, if you take these pills/shots you could make millions of dollars and be adored but if you don't, you will be lucky to get a job at the qwik-e-mart and stay out of prison...well, it's not a hard choice, even if the pills will make his boobs grow and his balls shrink. If when he's 21 he realizes that he's not quite good enough without the stuff, or that he can make a few extra million with it, is he really going to quit?
2) Absolutely introducing an illeagal element into the clubhouse introduces the possibiltiy of other illeagal activity. If I buy performance enhancing substances from the club house boy who is actually working for Fat Tony, I may get a call from some of his friends suggesting that if I want to keep the supply coming and I don't want my career achievements and my contract invalidated and my good name dragged through the mud, maybe I shouldn't get a hit today and if a slow grounder comes my way, would it really be to much to ask that it roll through my legs? This is exactly the reason that pro athletes who gamble are viewed with, at best, suspicion and, at worst, like Pete Rose. it's also how the White Sox threw the World Series 90 years ago. And gambling is legal.
3) I didn't say you don't have to work while on the juice, I just said that you shouldn't be rewarded for adding that to your regimen.
10/01/09
10/01/09
1) 16 year olds in high school or 21 year olds in college are not competing with professionals they're competing with each other. if anything legalizing steroids professional will reduce the availability of drugs that beat the tests because there will no longer be professionals with deep pockets to underwrite the costs.
2) people can be blackmailed for anything so this makes as much sense as saying pros shouldn't be able to get married because if they were ever unfaithful it could be used as leverage against them. and adultury is legal. the simple solution would be to make steroid legally proscribable which would removed the criminal element from the equation anyway.
3) what difference does it make? athletes get rewarded for doing unnatural things to their bodies all the time. what makes this any different?
10/01/09
Frankly, I think the bat rule would make a much better game.
10/01/09
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10/01/09
if all the professionals are on steroids and all the high school kids aren't then how has the bar moved at all? the nominal differences between the two levels is bigger, sure, but the relative differences between the two are exactly the same. talent scouts cannot watch high school kids play against professionals, they watch them play against high school kids. so while they are looking for to potential to play at a professional level they are not looking, nor are the able to look for, a professional level of play. ultimately they take the best talent they can find so there's an incentive to cheat no matter what the professional rules are.
@dr emilio lizardo: there's no such thing as a 'kid' who isn't in college that's 21. after they turn 18 if they are no longer financially independant on their parents for college funds a child becomes an adult. if we're not ok with a 19 year old drafted directly into the NBA doping (assuming the rules and laws were changed to allow this and it was supervised by a phyasician) without the imput of a guardian of some sort then this would also call into question all of their other choice rights at that age.
10/01/09
If I'm considering hiring Bill the engineer to build a bridge, then yeah, it might be nice to know Ben is better and Bob is worse, but what's vital to know is whether Bill can build a decent bridge.
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Grade curves are supposed to eliminate noise in the grading system: does Dr. X make harder tests than Dr. Y for the same class? Does Dr. Z give everyone high marks to make his teaching look good?
The problem is that they also eliminate real information. Maybe everyone in Dr. Z's class actually got high marks because Dr. Z is a damn good teacher, and so all his students actually know the material far better than their peers in other classes and schools.
This is why standardized testing appears so appealing at first glance: in theory, a standardized test should get the signal (how much do students know), but not the noise. Of course, in theory communism is also a good idea. Not so much in practice.
What it comes down to with grade curves is: what's more important, absolute perfomance, relative performance, or some combination of the two? And there's no one-size-fits-all answer. Some jobs need you to be good at them, while others need you to be better than the competition (or your competition to be worse than you).
03/20/09