Intelligence Doping--Posner

"Sports doping"--the use of anabolic steroids and other drugs to increase athletic performance, as Barry Bonds, Roger Clemens, and other prominent professional athletes have been accused of doing--is intensely controversial. A recent article in Nature--Barbara Sahakian and Sharon Morein-Zamir, "Professor’s Little Helper," Dec. 2007--discusses the parallel phenomenon of "intelligence doping." The term refers to the use of drugs to enhance cognitive performance. These are drugs like Adderall, Modafinil, and Provigil that are used to treat genuine disorders, such as attention deficit disorder in the case of the former and narcolepsy in the case of the latter. But they can also be used by normal people, including students and academics, to improve cognitive functioning by increasing concentration, memory, wakefulness, and mental energy generally. Coffee has many of the same effects, but they are much weaker. As in the case of sports doping, there is concern that the use of these drugs may have long-term adverse effects on the health of the user. There is even less evidence of this in the case of sports doping, however. But this may be because these drugs are newer--which means that they are just the first wave of cognition-enhancing drugs and that the subsequent waves will be more effective. Becker and I blogged about sports doping on August 27, 2006. We pointed to the arms-race character of the practice. Because of the importance attached to winning an athletic event, anything that increases an athlete's performance, such as taking steroids, places pressure on other athletes to do likewise. The result is expense, and also possible ill health, without any certain improvement in the quality of athletic competition as perceived by fans. That is not necessarily a compelling argument for trying to ban sports doping; indeed I consider the argument weak because of the difficulty and hence cost of monitoring drug use, especially the newer enhancement practice of "gene doping," and because of the existence of borderline enhancement practices (borderline between "natural" and "artificial"), such as training at a high altitude in order to increase one's production of red blood cells, which in turn enables a greater absorption of oxygen, or undergoing eye surgery to increase visual acuity. If fans object for whatever reason to sports doping, then sports leagues and team owners will have an incentive to ban the practice; the argument for criminalizing the practice would then depend on whether purely private sanctions could achieve an adequate level of deterrence. Suppose teams, leagues, and players all want to ban sports doping whether because of health concerns or fans' preferences, but that detection is extremely difficult, so that the probability of catching an athlete doing sports doping is very low. Then the optimal punishment may be more severe than the team or league could impose. The argument is the same as for why embezzlement is a crime, rather than the government's leaving it to the bank to punish the embezzler by firing him or suing him for the money he stole. Fans appear to be ambivalent about banning sports doping, because they are concerned with absolute rather than just relative performance, and so enjoy the additional spectacle created by "bionic" athletes. In fact neither the teams (and leagues) nor the players' unions seem enthusiastic about banning the practice, which suggests that it does not decrease--it may actually increase--the incomes of the teams and (on average) the players. The case for banning intelligence doping is even weaker than the case for banning sports doping. One reason is that there is a strong positive externality from increased cognitive functioning, since smart people usually cannot capture the entire social product of their work in the form of a higher income. Like other producers, part of the benefit that their production occurs inures to consumers as consumer surplus. An example is patentable inventions. Because patents are limited in duration, usually to 20 years, any benefits that a patented invention generates after the patent expires enures to persons other than the patentee. Even if there were no positive externality--even if the user of an intelligence-enhancing drug captured the entire incremental income generated by that use--there would be a social benefit, since the user is part of society, and hence no economic argument for banning. What is a possible source of concern is that because there is competition based on intelligence, for example to get into good schools or win academic prizes or achieve success in commercial fields such as finance that place a premium on intellectual acuity, the availability of intelligence-enhancing drugs places pressure on persons who would prefer not to use them because of concerns over their possible negative health consequences to use them anyway. There is also a danger that such drugs produce only very short-term effects, for example on exam performance, that may exaggerate a person’s long-term ability. (This is one of the reasons for objecting to exam coaching.) But against this is the fact that it is even more difficult than in the case of sports doping to draw a line between permitted and forbidden uses of cognition-enhancing drugs. It is hard to define "normal" cognitive functioning in a meaningful sense. Should people with an IQ above 100, which is the average IQ, be forbidden to use such drugs, but people below that level permitted to use them until it brings them up to 100? That would be absurd. The person with an IQ of 120 would argue compellingly that he should be allowed to take intelligence-enhancing drugs in order to be able to compete for good school placements and jobs with people having an IQ of 130. And so on up. Of course the naturally gifted will object to any "artificial" enhancements that enable others to compete with them. But it is not obvious why their objections should be given weight from a public policy standpoint. It is not as if allowing such enhancements would be likely to discourage the naturally gifted from developing and using their gifts (it might have the opposite effect, by creating greater competition for them), let alone discouraging bright people from seeking out other people to marry and produce children by.

Comments

[John2]

A superstar user of "intellectual performance-enhancing drugs" was
Paul Erdös.

http://www.nytimes.com/books/first/h/hoffman-man.html

Paul Hoffman writes, "Erdös first did mathematics
at the age of three, but for the last twenty-five years of his life...
he put in nineteen-hour days, keeping himself fortified with
10 to 20 milligrams of Benzedrine or Ritalin, strong espresso,
and caffeine tablets. "A mathematician," Erdös was fond of saying,
"is a machine for turning coffee into theorems."

"At five foot six, 130 pounds, Erdös had the wizened, cadaverous
look of a drug addict, but friends insist he was frail and gaunt long
before he started taking amphetamines."

"Before Erdös died, on September 20, 1996, at the age of eighty-three,
he had managed to think about more problems than any other
mathematician in history. He wrote or co-authored 1,475 academic papers,
many of them monumental, and all of them substantial. It wasn't just the quantity
of work that was impressive but the quality...." Some people think that the
modern field of concrete mathematics that is the basis for computer science
could not have been developed without his efforts.

Although he was a superstar producer it seems he was not motivated by
ordinary economic stimuli. "What little money Erdös received in stipends
or lecture fees he gave away to relatives, colleagues, students, and strangers.
He could not pass a homeless person without giving him money....In 1984 he won
the prestigious Wolf Prize, the most lucrative award in mathematics. He contributed
most of the $50,000 he received to a scholarship in Israel he established in the name
of his parents. "I kept only seven hundred and twenty dollars," Erdös said, "and I
remember someone commenting that for me even that was a lot of money to keep."
Whenever Erdös learned of a good cause--a struggling classical music radio station,
a fledgling Native American movement, a camp for wayward boys--he promptly made
a small donation." When a student borrowed $1,000 from him to go to Harvard,
and later wanted to pay it back, he suggested that the student do the same as he did.

For him competition was important, he often used money as prizes to challenge
mathematicians to solve problems he alone could not do, however his general way
of working was to show up at a mathematician's doorstep and sit down with them
for some days and work on solutions, he was a problem-solver more than a
theoretician. "With 485 co-authors, Erdös collaborated with more people than any
other mathematician in history."

He never drove himself, it is hard to imagine how his drug use could harm others.
"Like all of Erdös's friends, Graham was concerned about his drug-taking. In 1979,
Graham bet Erdös $500 that he couldn't stop taking amphetamines for a month.
Erdös accepted the challenge, and went cold turkey for thirty days. After Graham
paid up--and wrote the $500 off as a business expense--Erdös said, "You've showed me
I'm not an addict. But I didn't get any work done. I'd get up in the morning and stare at a
blank piece of paper. I'd have no ideas, just like an ordinary person. You've set mathematics
back a month." He promptly resumed taking pills, and mathematics was the better for it."

His inability to cope with everyday life was legendary. "When asked by US immigration,
as he returned after a conference in Amsterdam in 1954, what he thought of Marx, Erdös
made the ill judged reply:-

I'm not competent to judge, but no doubt he was a great man.

Erdös was not allowed back to the United States [for a number of years] but no reason was given.
The files indicate that the official reasons were not the answers Erdös gave to the above questions, but the fact
that he had corresponded with a Chinese mathematician who had subsequently returned from
the United States to China and also Erdös's 1941 FBI record."

You have to think that in today's War on Drugs he would have been arrested and deported.

I as many other people have lived through the distressing consequences of a loved one
addicted to amphetamines. Currently governments probably spend more money on trying
to shut down methamphetamine production than anything else, even though when you look
at externalities such as mortality figures, overdoses from prescription drugs such as methadone
or Xantax are many times more common.

The question of amphetamines increasing "intellectual" production needs more research.
Some military experiments seem to show that pilots can stay awake longer but maybe
not fly any better. In the case of Paul Erdos one has to remember that his genetic heritage
has been speculated as an independent factor for his productivity: he was a Jew from
Budapest just like the very famous physicists and mathematicians in the Manhattan Project
(who are not known for taking drugs). There is some research to show that in some lines
of work it is not intelligence so much as hard work that is the major factor. Maybe the
case of Bobby Fischer and the Polgar sisters provide some evidence for the effort theory,
while in the case of Soviet chess the government did support the production, but individuals
such as Botvinnik wisely also trained for other jobs and so maybe were not so successful.
In chess and math, early effort seems to be important, Erdos is rare for being able to be
productive until age 83, maybe drugs played a role in that.

Although it can be argued that Erdos' drug use was an individual choice, and therefore should
be tolerated, most likely if put to a vote most people would not want to live in such a confined
and strange way, but rather emphatically like neighbors. Certainly there is no reason to
believe that government's promoting or tolerating general use of amphetamines would lead
to social benefits such as mathematical theorems. The question is really in the case of these
superstars, and of course celebrity is a factor in assessing behavior, they are singled out
as society's role models and so the eccentric behavior that accompanies their achievements
cannot be made known, or they must be subject to the rule of law that applies to everyone else.

[BruceM]

overdoses from Xantax? If they meant Xanax, it's practically impossible to O/D from xanax without mixing it with alcohol (and then, the o/d is really from increased alcohol effects moreso than from the benzodiazepine alzrazolam).

[Michael Brophy]

John2, thanks for mentioning Erdos' story. 10-20 mg of Ritalin is not a very big dose. Ritalin is ~ 1/3 as potent as Adderall. I suppose benzedrine was pushed out of the market for abuse; Jack Kerouac wrote of using it. Vyvanse, the most recent amphetamine concoction, lists (cardiac) ventricular hypertrophy and hypertension as side efects. It may be given with guanfacine, a BP lowering drug that reduces the needed dose of stimulant. A clinical example beyond that of the typical ADHD patient is that of a child who answers questions well in grade school but finds that he/she can't maintain concentration and grades as junior high or some other stage comes up. It is as if a processor for information is good but as you progress the buffer needed to retain information for processing is insufficient. So subtly even a case like Erdos may represent a kind of ADHD, the central criteria of which is "maladaptive" inattention.

[neilehat]

One question, Is the "ADD/ADHD" diagnosis real or is it really an institutional response to trying to control behaivor? Such that, instead of trying to maintain or develop academic systems that deal with such behaivor (possiibly a naturally occuring developmental behaivor) the institutions in question find it easier to dose students with chemicals and drugs. The whole issue is much akin to the misuse of the diagnosis of schizophrenia sixty to seventy years ago and the use of prefrontal lobotomies.

There was a reason for "Recess" once. Does any one remember it?

[Michael Brophy]

'Recess' is kind of an interesting idea in relation to ADHD. Recess gives the kids time to go to a 'fun' state. Hopefully, they can then carry that 'fun' over to their work when they come back. It's obvious people can pay more attention when they're having 'fun,' the reward center of the brain is dopamine mediated; stimulants cause dopamine stimulation. Presumably there is some spillover of dopamnergic excitation with 'recess,' known to adults as 'the weekend.'

[dopamine]

Everyone who is interested in this post should read the milestone paper on addiction and rationality.

http://ideas.repec.org/a/ucp/jpolec/v96y1988i4p675-700.html

[Anonymous]

This great website offers a platform where sports professionals can spot young sports stars and train them with healthy activities such as a sports club to meet and exchange ideas. The sports scouts should be able to organize training camps and sports programs to keep the young aspiring sports athlete abreast of competition.

For more details please visit: http://sportalentsvc.com/

[Anonymous]

nice
مركز تحميل

[Anonymous]

thanks
بنت الزلفي

[Anonymous]

Thank you, you always get to all new and used it
شات صوتي

[Anonymous]

ÿØÿ±ÿØÿ¥ÿ©
___
صور

[Anonymous]

Excuse me. There are always survivors at a massacre. Among the victors, if nowhere else.
I am from Brazil and also am speaking English, give please true I wrote the following sentence: "Buy sell custom community blog your etsy poetry chapbooks."

Thanks for the help :D, Bill.

[Anonymous]

Beautiful site!

[Anonymous]

thanks for your

ÿ¥ÿßÿ™

دردشه

[Anonymous]

thanks to tell me that,i think thats ao usefully----
tiffanys
links of london

[Anonymous]

Great. Now i can say thank you!

[Anonymous]

دردشة برق

دردشة الخليج

[Anonymous]

Very nice site!

[Anonymous]

Just dropping in nice site.
I am from Monaco and learning to write in English, tell me right I wrote the following sentence: "Adult dating online adult dating website for finding like minded people searching for an affair, adult dating or just wanting to flirt."

Thanks :). Chapman.

[Anonymous]

JMnYVS Perfect site, i like it!

[Anonymous]

Good evening. I never vote for anyone; I always vote against.
I am from Ireland and know bad English, give true I wrote the following sentence: "Why credit counseling doesn work for most debtors."

Thanks for the help 8), Trey.

[Anonymous]

Hi all. The charity that hastens to proclaim its good deeds, ceases to be charity, and is only pride and ostentation.
I am from Timor and too bad know English, please tell me right I wrote the following sentence: "But they also agree that very few uprights can and so they also have a maxima vacuum cleaner to vacuum there."

Thank you very much :(. Tristar vacuum cleaners.

[Anonymous]

Yes.
">avril lavine nude

http://javascriptcompressor.com/members/didvwpbxw/default.aspx

[Anonymous]

Sorry. All great truths begin as blasphemies.
I am from Guinea-Bissau and learning to read in English, give please true I wrote the following sentence: "Change your attitude zig ziglar video."

THX :-(, Bainbridge island kitchen bath remodelers.

[Anonymous]

U know guys I just want to say hello :) Keep in touch ;).
I am from Botswana and learning to speak English, please tell me right I wrote the following sentence: "This is the spy of the bag, which is a design classic and a legend in his own right."

Thanks for the help ;-), Buy used designer handbags.