My experiment with smart drugs (2008)
Why do articles about any drug that affects the mind always have a section about, "what if I used this during exams?"<p>Who cares?<p>School is an anomaly that's not worth discussing in the context of "mental enhancement".  Exams make you do the exact same thing as everyone else to see where you rank relative to them and produces no actual value.  Computers do this sort of work much better than humans, so there is really no <i>actual</i> point (except to assign rankings to individuals so the Corporate World doesn't have to come up with tough interview questions, or whatever.)<p>The real world is not like this; the game is not zero-sum.  When you write an article, it doesn't directly make someone else's articles more or less valuable, it merely adds to the sum total of human work.  Anything that allows the sum-total of human work to increase at a faster rate is good.  It doesn't matter if you opt-out of taking "viagra for the brain", your contribution is still just as valuable as before.  But if someone else does choose to take drugs, then they may be able to add value more quickly, which is as good for you as it is for them.  Now you have more stuff to build off of, which is always going to get you farther than any drug would.  (Try discarding 5000 years of human experience and seeing if a drug gets it all back.  It won't even come close.)<p>In the real world, artificial performance-enhancers don't matter.  And we shouldn't ignore their possible benefits because someone might get a higher test score if they take them; school is not so important that we should throw the rest of the world under a bus to cater to its strange needs.