2 ms·
I'm going to go against the grain here, and argue that "normal" is irrelevant - "desired" is the target here. If people want themselves/their children to think
by bermanoid 15y ago
I'm going to go against the grain here, and argue that "normal" is irrelevant - "desired" is the target here.
If people want themselves/their children to think/act a certain way, and this opinion is widespread, then it's completely valid to treat that as the target, even if 90% of the people in society need to be chemically modified to make them act that way.
Evolution isn't perfect, and at no point has it tried to optimize for happiness, it only goes for reproductive success, which we as individuals don't care too much about, at least in the short term. If there are interventions that we can impose that better optimize for happiness than letting us exist naturally would, we have no reason to avoid these interventions.
That said, I have no idea what the optimal desired mental function would look like...
- _delirium 15y agoI have some sympathy for that argument, but I think we should still distinguish the cases and talk about them accurately. If the situation really is that 90% of people need some sort of intervention to reach the desired mental functioning, then we could just say that and argue for it openly; the pro-nootropics community makes those kinds of arguments, for example. I think when loaded terms like "abnormal" or "ill" or "treatment" are used, though, they're only really accurate if we're talking about pathological deviations from a species norm. But actually my interest in what constitutes the "norm" is somewhat more basic; I think how human attention works is quite interesting as a subject of scientific study, and I wish there were more aggregate data on how it varies in different situations and across the population.