Til Eulenspiegel wrote:
>
> Finally, while I'd like to see many things here on the list: a
> moonbase, Zubrin's Case For Mars prizes, better internet access,
> X-Prize funding, etc., let me make my pet idea public. A few million
> dollars for effective water-soluble nootropics suitable for
> supplementing public-water supplies would please me. Of course, it's
> hard to counteract the trend of water filters and bottled water here
> in USA. Perhaps such a program could help comprise a general public
> water-works upgrade.
I object to this. The brain is a balanced system; you can't enhance one
thing without dehancing something else. Cholinergic nootropics may look
like great bargains for the long-term memory system, but I would
speculate that they would also tend to increase the brittleness of
memory, make it harder to reductively analyze symbols, and so on.
Nootropics that increase energy may interfere with the semantic bindings
that route cognitive information to creative abilities like causal
analysis. I do not want you or anyone else monkeying with my water
supply. *I* will decide that for myself, thank you very much. And that
goes triple for the water supply of brain-damage patients or people
taking easily-disrupted medications.
Start a company to produce and advertise a nootropic-loaded "thought
bar", or educate the public about existing alternatives - that might be
worth doing. But if you try to introduce it into the water supply, half
the country will scream "thought control!" and I will be among them.
--
sentience@pobox.com Eliezer S. Yudkowsky
http://pobox.com/~sentience/beyond.html
Member, Extropy Institute
Senior Associate, Foresight Institute
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