Cognitive-enhancing drugs and ethics (thread split)

[coffeeintotheorems]

Split from previous thread

How much of an improvement did Erdos get from using amphetamines and are there any ethical implications involved as with when athletes who use performance enhancing drugs?

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how did his colleagues feel about that? In a sense, mathematics is not a competition like sports, so his colleagues weren't necessarily disadvantaged by his use

I personally think you're overthinking this. I, for one, never worry about ethics when I take drugs; my sole concern is potential long-term effects, and the evidence I've seen on this is mixed (i.e. some potentially bad long-term effects, though mainly from abuse of the drugs, and some good.)

We're not talking about NZT and Limitless here. If that were a reality then I would be willing to consider ethics, since Eddie Morra was so far ahead of the rest of the human race that he became superhuman, and he used his abilities to gain power over others. That story was an extreme thought experiment, though, and so it's off my philosophical radar for the present.

Or, on the other hand, maybe there's nothing wrong with using performance enhancing drugs and we should all be using them to advance our respective fields to the betterment of the human race?

I would avoid the normative "should" here. But it may not be a bad idea to do so anyway:

http://www.npp.wisc....yTheHealthy.pdf