Increasing Your Stats

In my last post, I mentioned show how when creating a Dungeons and Dragons character, you have the ability to choose your character's strength, intelligence, dexterity, and so on. Unfortunately, it isn't that easy in real life - but that might be changing thanks to new technology. In a series of articles in Slate magazine (http://www.slate.com/articles/health_and_science/superman.html),

The author discusses how new technologies and medical developments are enabling people to improve

human performance in a variety of areas. If you are interested, you should read the articles, I don't want to just repeat

them here. The article that was my favorite was "Spark of Genius", especially the link to the YouTube video and

the thing about the effect being reversed if you switch the positions of the electrodes. My general comments about

all of these ideas for human enhancement are as follows:

- Just to get this out of the way, I don't have any plans to try any of these on myself, so don't worry.

- Yes, some of these procedures may have long-term negative health effects. But there's lots of stuff we do that we

KNOW has long-term negative health effects (junk food, cigarettes) and there are no calls to outlaw those. So why

are there calls to outlaw human enhancement on that basis?

- A common argument against human enhancement compares it to the use of steroids in sports. But there is a very

important difference. Let's take, say, sprinting as an example. If by taking steroids I can run 5 percent faster, then

that is a huge advantage. If everyone takes steroids our relative ranking is the same, and it's not really significantly

more exciting to viewers, so nobody really benefits. If, in contrast, I can take some sort of cognitive enhancement drug to make myself do 

5 percent better in a test, and everyone does that, then yes, it's true that relative ranking doesn't change, BUT

now everyone learns 5 percent more, which is good. And considering the hundreds of billions of dollars we spend

each year in education, anything that improves learning even by a few percent could have huge economic benefits.

And, if the problem is that the drug makes you do better on the tests but doesn't improve actual learning, then that

is evidence that the tests don't measure actual learning, so a better approach would be to improve the tests rather

than blame the cognitive enhancement drug.)

- Another common argument against human enhancement is that it will increase inequality, because the poor won't

be able to afford it. However this argument seems seriously flawed to me:

--- 1. It is easy to come up with scenarios where enhancement helps the poor, rather than hurts it, even if only

the rich have access. For instance, let's say there are two classes of jobs, skilled and unskilled, and enhancement

moves some people from the unskilled to the skilled labor category. That increases the supply of skilled labor

relative to unskilled labor, and thus reduces the wage premium for skilled labor. Thus this could increase wages

even in the unskilled labor sector. Or let's say that scientists use cognitive enhancement on themselves, and that

makes them smart enough to invent a cure for cancer, then that will obviously benefit everyone, both rich and poor.

--- 2. There are lots of things that improve life outcomes that are more accessible to the rich than the poor

(good schools, access to educational resources, good role models, etc.). It would be silly to say that those should

be banned in the name of equality; rather, it makes sense to try to improve access so that the poor can have them too.

The same thing could be done with cognitive enhancement, if it works. And the problem of cheaply manufacturing

and distributing small electronic devices or synthesized chemical compounds (whichever enhancement method we

would want to use) is MUCH better understood than the other educational and social problems I mentioned.

(Of course, all of the above analysis assumes that the enhancement methods work long-term. That is still somewhat

speculative at this point, and if it doesn't work, then, well, it doesn't work, so no reason to use them.)

More Interesting Stuff

A couple days ago I started the Weight Watchers diet program. Weight Watchers is cool because it is based on a point system, where each food has a point value based on the amount of fat, carbs, protein, and fiber, and you can eat whatever food you want provided you stay under the target point value depending on your weight and activity level.

I just finished my classes, so no more tests or exams ever! But I still have plenty of work to do because I have to write a paper for a conference which is due on July 6, and then I have to expand that paper into a thesis which is due on August 8.

Today in the mall in Champaign I found a stall selling "Power Balance" bracelets which are similar to the bracelets I mentioned in the previous post in that they work by the placebo effect. They cost about $30, but you can save a lot of money and buy functionally equivalent "placebo bands" here.

Another thing I am planning to do more often on this blog is to post links to other web sites which I find interesting. One interesting web site I found is Cheap Talk, a blog written by two economists. They have lots of discussions of economic theory applied to a variety of topics including game theory and ticket scalping. (Under the "game theory" tag if you scroll down you will see a post called "how to get bumped" about how to score free airline tickets, and below that is one about ticket prices in restaurants which is also interesting.)

I just got an email asking me to support Illinois athletics by switching my energy provider to "Fighting Illini Energy." One of the options that they say they offer is the ability to choose a plan that provides 50% or 100% of your energy from renewable energy sources. (What does that even mean? I mean, isn't electricity fungible? All of it goes from the power plants, onto the grid, and then into your home. I didn't even think it was possible to track a particular "unit" of electricity from the power plant to your home.)

The gaming club on Saturdays at UIUC is still going on over the summer. Since it is summer the building we normally play in - the English Building - was locked so we ad to go into the student unoin. The only problem was that the area of the student union we played in had a TV tuned to MTV, so whenever a song came on that any of the other players had heard before, they would all start singing along and making lots of noise, and they kept doing that even after I asked them to stop several times. Apparently they thought it was funny. I think what I will do next time is say something like "Let's say you had a friend who was in a wheelchair, and you kept taking the wheelchair away so he couldn't get around. Now maybe you might think it was funny but probably he wouldn't think it was funny. So just like some people have a hard time getting around without wheelchairs, I have a hard time playing games when everyone is making lots of noise. Maybe you might think it's funny to make lots of noise so I can't concentrate, but I don't think it is funny."

Weird Stuff

Today in the airport I saw a group of people handing out literature for the LaRouche movement. I've heard that the LaRouche movement is a bunch of kooks, but I was interested in learning more. Part of what they said made some sense, like how we should spend less money on the bailouts and more money on technology and infrastructure. But a lot of their literature descended into conspiratorial kookery, such as claiming that JFK was assassinated by "British Empire bank-connected assassins" for wanting to get us out of Vietnam, claims that White House science adviser John Holdren supports forced population control (no, he doesn't). But their literature also taught me something about science that I didn't already know: it talked about using electromagnetic fields to predict earthquakes, and I thought that didn't make any sense but I looked it up and it turns out there is scientific evidence for that.

Another thing sort of related - in the mall today I found a stall selling "negative ion bracelets" for $25. It is an ordinary rubber bracelet that (according to the person selling it) had a small amount of volcanic ash embedded in it to emit "negative ions" that supposedly improve your strength and balance. I asked for a demo and he gave me a "balance test" with and without the bracelet, but the bracelet didn't make much of a difference, which makes sense because there's no scientific evidence that the bracelets do anything. Also, it seems that the people who wrote the brochure about it didn't know much science either, because it said something like "negative ions are natural ... when water mist falls to earth, it loses an electron, which turns it into a negative ion." (Of course, electrons have a negative charge, so if the water "lost" an electron it would gain a positive charge.)

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And also, something that might be interesting on the Internet - the web site I linked to above is part of a network of "Stack Exchange" web sites which allow you to ask questions and get and look up answers on a variety of topics - it started off with computer programming but on expanded into lots of other fields like math and statistics. It works a lot like Wikipedia in that it is entirely community driven where people post answers to and edit each others' questions.