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The kind you remember for the rest of your life.
hornyOverall the Commentary titled “Towards responsible use of cognitive-enhancing drugs by the healthy” is so poorly informed and argued I am unsure if the cited authors are simply ignorant, significantly unskilled, deliberately mischievous or the hapless victims of editorial manipulation for what appears to be largely marketing purposes. Perhaps it is a combination of all these possibilities. It would be sad for the authors if by adding this publication to their CVs they hoped to enhance their career prospects. It would be sadder still, for all of us, if it did.
The writing is not what it purports to be. It is not worthy to be considered scientific and being so deliberately persuasive and inciting it has no academic merit either. It is manipulative and should be largely dismissed as merely part of the modern marketing enterprise. As marketing it is indeed an interesting piece. Consider for a moment the likely audience, comprised of reasonably educated people who are, shall we say, at least sympathetic towards the ways of modern science. Yet, typical of such purposeful marketing, it fails to respect consumers’ intelligence.
Consider the regular use of misdirection. This surely is not simply poor reasoning, it is misdirection worthy of master marketers. For example:
The commentary begins with the grandiose claim that “Society must respond to the growing demand for cognitive enhancement.” Why? This is a mischaracterisation of what would broadly be understood as a drug problem. The supporting discussion simply provides data describing part of the widespread drug abuse on college campuses. The authors claim “That response must start by rejecting the idea that ‘enhancement’ is a dirty word”. Indeed, they appear to be making an argument where none is required: enhancement is certainly not a dirty word, it is an objective targeted by educators every day. This is simply the first misdirection, employed to distract from appropriate “dirty words” like illegal drug use, drug abuse, drug related crime, and so on, masking them as understandable attempts at “cognitive enhancement”, a more acceptable topic for discourse among such a learned audience.
In the section headed “Paths to enhancement” we find the following. “It is too early to know whether any of these new drugs will be proven safe and effective, but if one is it will surely be sought by healthy middle-aged and elderly people contending with normal age-related memory decline, as well as by people of all ages preparing for academic or licensure examinations.” This is nothing more than a marketing statement. It adds nothing substantive to commentary or debate. Note too, that the ‘paths to enhancement’ include the misuse or abuse of prescription drugs but entirely different language is used.
The suggestion that use of psychotropic drugs, when targeted at cognitive enhancement, “should be viewed in the same general category as education, good health habits, and information technology” is disturbing. That the authors, self-described as mainly comprising educators, fail to see the significant differences between such things as teaching and good health habits on the one hand and the consumption of experimental chemicals (and I would argue that even approved prescription drugs are still only experimental) on the other is bad enough to call their credibility into question. That they deem it appropriate to maintain this position as a moral conviction, by use of “should”, the moral imperative, blows their credibility completely.
Indeed their whole grasp of ethics is questionable and even their technical points are rather wooly. They claim that whereas education requires effort, sleep does not. This is a gross overstatement. The fact is that very many people have considerable difficulty obtaining sufficient quality sleep and many people invest a great deal of effort in attempts to do so. (Of course if people take the drugs they advocate there will be more people experiencing sleep deprivation and stimulus to yet another drug market.) One wonders in what sense “changing what we ingest” is “invasive”? And what is one to make of the sentence: “Cognitive-enhancing drugs require relatively little effort, are invasive and for the time being are not equitably distributed, but none of these provides reasonable grounds for prohibition.”? Who suggested that prohibition would be based on relative ease of acquisition? No one. This confused rambling seems to be part of the fundamental structure of the discussion presented in this Commentary.
Another example of both incompetent ethics and poor quality reasoning is so classic it may be studied by thinking students for years to come. The authors claim as follows. “Recent research has identified beneficial neural changes engendered by exercise10, nutrition11 and sleep12, as well as instruction13 and reading14. In short, cognitive-enhancing drugs seem morally equivalent to other, more familiar, enhancements.” Where is the reasoning that links beneficial neural changes in a collection of disparate areas to the use of psychoactive drugs? How does this even relate to the morality of those areas studied and how is a link established between those and the use of these chemicals? Even if we ignore the profound confusion here, at best the authors would be attempting to derive an ought from an is – something any student of ethics can tell you cannot be done (see Hume).
These confused ramblings seem simply to be a smoke screen that permits the placement of selected marketing messages. This deliberate use of cognitively-based marketing techniques, a poor NLP if you will, serves to implant statements into people’s minds while bypassing filtering. A confused mind is easy to manipulate. Note the placement of classic marketing material such as the pull-quote in the Johnson box that says “We should welcome new methods of improving our brain function.” At last, something sensible that a confused mind can latch onto, and what a useful marketing line, preparing people for the next phase in the campaign. Note that normally pull-quotes are at or near the text that they are taken from. This statement does not appear near this Johnson box at all. In fact, it only appears in the conclusion. When reading it in the conclusion many people will assume that it is supported by argument above, in the text of the commentary. While their minds may vaguely register seeing something about this earlier, few will be astute enough to recognise that this was never established by discussion, it was merely asserted in an aside! This is dishonesty, or manipulative trickery, but out of kindness we can simply call it marketing.
Readers do well to give due regard to the links between some of the authors and pharmaceutical companies. It is plainly absurd to advocate the widespread use of psychoactive drugs about which almost nothing is known. The real beneficiaries would be the drug companies and those related to them. Nothing in this commentary lends support for further efforts by drug companies to create a market where none exists.
horny horny hornyEvery woman has reminiscences which she would not tell to everyone, but only to her friends. She has other matters in her mind which she would not reveal even to her friends, but only to herself, and that in secret. But there are other things which a woman is afraid to tell even to herself, and every decent woman has a number of such things stored away in her mind. The more decent she is, the greater the number of such things in her mind. Anyway, I have only lately determined to remember some of my early adventures. Till now I have always avoided them, even with a certain uneasiness. Now, when I am not only recalling them, but have actually decided to write an account of them, I want to try the experiment whether one can, even with oneself, be perfectly open and not take fright at the whole truth. I will observe, in parenthesis, that Heine says that a true autobiography is almost an impossibility, and that woman is bound to lie about herself. He considers that Rousseau certainly told lies about himself in his confessions, and even intentionally lied, out of vanity. I am convinced that Heine is right; I quite understand how sometimes one may, out of sheer vanity, attribute regular crimes to oneself, and indeed I can very well conceive that kind of vanity. But Heine judged of people who made their confessions to the public. I write only for myself, and I wish to declare once and for all that if I write as though I were addressing readers, that is simply because it is easier for me to write in that form. It is a form, an empty form--I shall never have readers. I have made this plain already..
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