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Without engaging with the rest of your comment (which I'm inclined to agree with), I'm tackling this bit.
Modafinil? It's long-acting coffee as far as I'm concerned, and about as benign. I would know, I was on it, and it was a self-prescription to boot. I quit because I built up a tolerance and knew that upping doses beyond 200mg was futile. I had no issues quitting.
It has next to zero addiction potential. Patients consistently report mild euphoria once, on their very first dose, and never again no matter how much they up it. Dependency is also a non-issue in practice. You don't see junkies shooting it up on the streets, not that they'd be nodding off.
It's arson, murder and jaywalking in the flesh.
Amphetamines? Well, I do have a Totally Legitimate Diagnosis of ADHD, and while I have not had the luck of trying actual amphetamines, just Ritalin, they're not dangerous at therapeutic doses. You don't need a diagnosis of ADHD to benefit from taking them, it boosts performance for pretty much everyone, including neurotypicals or those with high conscientiousness already.
I recall Scott writing about it at length, pointing out how they're much less dangerous than popularly conceived.
https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/know-your-amphetamines
I'm all for better living through medicine, and I would, if I had a gun put to my head, say that for the modal Mottizen the benefits of taking either modafinil or therapeutic doses of outweighs the risks.
(GMC, please note that this is not medical advice, and provided under duress, I did mention being held at gunpoint. Unbelievable in a British context? Uh.. He had a very pointy umbrella)
I belong to a profession where not only is there a great demand for large amounts of focus and cognitive output, but by virtue of being medical professionals, they would have a far easier time getting prescription stimulants if they desired them.
We don't see that happening, at least nowhere I'm personally aware of, even anecdotally. A doctor on a reasonable dose of stimulants is a harder working and more attentive doctor, but there's hasn't been a red queen's race.
The close analogue to that might be med students who are tempted to take them to cope with the enormous amounts of coursework, but I have not heard of abuse at rates >> than any other class of students.
Coffee is a cognitive enhancer. Most people working regular jobs drink at least some amounts of it. This doesn't seem to strike most people as an intolerable state of affairs!
While rarer in the UK, more doctors than I would prefer were heavy smokers in India, a habit induced by the insane levels of pressure at work. This did not force all or most doctors to smoke either. And leaving aside the meek modafinil, I would expect a society where ~everyone is on prescription stims would be a healthier and happier one than where everyone smokes a pack a day.
I'm a regular user and early adopter of LLMs, I'd probably be a power user if my work flow wasn't particularly friendly for them. I still wouldn't want to use them to write comments for me, especially on the Motte. I expect that most of us here enjoy the act of crafting their own prose, and the amount of boilerplate they stand to avoid is surprisingly small.
I expect that since GPT-4, maybe even 3.5, it would have been possible for someone to slip in an account that used exclusively AI generated text, and likely not even be noticed beyond being a rather bland and boring user.
We could easily have been overrun with bots, but we haven't. I doubt that unless we end up Eternal September-ed with an OOM more new users, bot-apocalypses are not a very serious risk for the Motte as a forum.
I am a radical transhumanist, so we might very well have a difference at the level of fundamental values, at which point we can't do more than acknowledge each others opinion as valid, but not actually get closer to agreement here.
In a hypothetical world where you were diagnosed with ADHD and your parents were just as overstretched, but medication for it wasn't available, would your childhood and adolescence have been better?
I doubt it. The absence of ADHD meds don't turn parents more capable of parenting, and their existence doesn't make them worse. Being denied vyvanse wouldn't have given your parents more time to spend with you while you did your homework.
I also reject the framing that a "crutch" is a bad thing. Driving a car to a supermarket half an hour away is a "crutch" for not being willing to spend 2 hours walking. I prefer it over the alternative.
Ozempic is a crutch for not having better dietary habits by default. Why is that a bad thing? It still makes people lose weight and become healthier. A world where everyone takes it, both to reduce their obesity, and out of the pressure of everyone else being on it (a world we're approaching right now) is still a better world than everyone being fatter and unable to anything about it in practice. A similar analogy applies for cellphones and cars, society is broadly better off even though they've become de-facto necessities, even if the people who don't like them are marginalized.
There are ways for society and cultures to burn up their slack and leave everyone strictly worse off than if they had put a line in the sand, but as far as I'm concerned, stimulant meds or the use of LLMs in a reasonable manner wouldn't do the same to us.
I think the most unique and widespread-enough example I can think of with medics “misusing” a drug more than other professions would be beta-blockers prior to interviews and exams.
Interesting. I don't know if this is common outside of Japan, but it's the first time I'm hearing it.
The pharmacy next to my med school had a rather lax approach when it came to doling out controlled substances and prescription meds, even to med students. I know that personally, because I certainly asked for them (I could have brought along a valid prescription if needed, but I knew they wouldn't ask). I don't recall anyone from my cohort taking advantage, and I didn't see any obvious signs of abuse. Even in my medical career, I never heard of a doctor I personally knew or worked with admitting to abusing meds or being caught out doing so. Nobody clearly zooted on stims, or sedated from benzos or opioids.
Not that anyone is really abusing beta blockers, and you wouldn't be able to tell unless they passed out or something. Interestingly enough, I did take a few when my palpitations from my methylphenidate became overwhelming, but I was aware of minor negative effects on memory and cognition and did my best not to take them before exams. I suppose if someone has crippling anxiety, it beats the alternative!
Yeah, no disagreement — it’s as benign as it can get, really. I actually thought this sort of habit came from the West though!
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Why is it a problem for certain professions to require safe stimulants for the highest tier of success? Your post treats the wrongness of this idea as self evident, but I don't accept it. We require that athletes train, after all.
And there it is --- the puritanical idea that people experience unavoidable suffering because suffering is good for the soul.
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