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E-PrinceI’m writing this with five tabs up in my internet browser. I just finished my Dean’s Date paper, written over days punctuated by compulsive e-mail and Facebook checking. I regularly sit in classes and meetings where people (myself ...
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Not a bad analysis. For a provocative take on this by a real expert in neuroethics, see http://www.stanfordalumni.org/news/magazine/200... and http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v456/n7223...
"We think that college is a different world and that our habits will not continue after we leave the Orange Bubble. There will always be stressful situations, however, and we develop habits for how to deal with them. These habits will not disappear effortlessly in the real world."
This is so true, and I don't understand why more people don't mention it. If somebody can't do something as simple as get a paper in by a deadline that was likely given months in advance, how will they be able to function in a work environment?
Plus, if anything, college is less stressful than the real life will be, when people have spouses or children or employees depending on them. In college, we only have to take care of ourselves and most of us are still relying on our parents for that.
This is a subject that definitely deserves more attention. The rampant adderall use on campus surprised/discussed me when i got to Princeton. I'd say the author's unproven assertion about the users mostly being upper-middle to upper class fits with my anectodal experience. Of the people I know who used adderall in college, almost all of them were from well of backgrounds and/or regular illegal drug users.
embarrasing use of the word discussed. oh well, must have been my wandering attention.
adderall makes e-mail checking worse, in my opinion. It makes you interested in everything, whether that is cleaning your room or shopping for a new calculator online, or writing your paper, all of which I did lots of over break
I agree with distractions. I don't know how adderall users get "interested" in writing their papers.
I graduated Phi Beta Kappa and with Highest Honors in my department and never once considered seeking out a drug like Adderol to help me perform ! Common sense, learned from parents and educators in early life, ought to dictate that when having trouble writing a paper or completing an assignment one simply finds a healthy way to deal with the stress and frustration. Common techniques for palliating performance-related anxiety include: taking a short break to re-center and seek out inspiration, engaging in physical activity, or even enjoying a healthy snack. All of these methods for combating stress have to be practiced to be effective, but if they are, they can serve as an invaluable resource throughout life.
"The difference is a moral one. As others have pointed out, Adderall serves as an academic steroid, and it gives users an “unfair advantage” in their schoolwork — something explicitly prohibited by the Honor Code. Studies have proven that it can improve performance, even in athletics, a reason that the NCAA banned the substance in collegiate sports. Using Adderall without a prescription for a medical condition is like using steroids illegally."
Bracketing the question of fairness, the analogy to sports is drivel. Sporting competition is, roughly speaking, jumping through hoops for the sake of jumping through hoops. Designing good bridges, or understanding string theory, or writing a wonderful book aren't like that: the end product is intrinsically valuable, and it is for the sake of that product that we strive. No such value inheres in being able to (say) use a fiberglass stick to vault over six meters and land on a cushioned surface.
I watch Usain Bolt compete against his fellows for *fun*. So long as the competition is fair, it doesn't matter that much who wins or how. I care very much indeed whether Ed Witten one day discovers the grand equations of M-theory, and really couldn't care less if he did it using a "natural" brain or not. Speaking of which, and circling back to fairness for a moment, why on earth should genetic differences in ability be counted as "fair" when we've stipulated that pharmacological ones aren't?
The first commenter links to two excellent articles, written from a non-mystical/religious perspective. From there:
"Cognitive enhancement is different in a way that we state in the article. The world isn’t particularly better off if the weightlifting record is 402 kilograms instead of 400 kilograms. Or if the Turk wins the gold medal instead of the Iranian. Maybe it’s an academic bias, but we like to think that if people are smarter and working better—their brains are working better—the world will be a better place. We tried to avoid the analogy with sports because we don’t want people’s views of this to be so strongly colored by their views of sports. But I do think one can distinguish between the two in a number of different ways, the most important being that there’s the potential for real personal and social benefits from cognitive enhancement that is much, much weaker in terms of sports enhancement."
yawn yawn, this has been going around for years. I knew a kid who supplied half of Cottage with R back in the nineties, around exam time one could get $5.00 a pill and it was like gold when it came to trader for harder to get substances like boomers, the fifth letter of the alphabet etc. I heard of kids getting $10.00 a pill but to me that just seemed like extortion. I'll admit there's a bit of Robin hood in me, I used to encourage my friend to sell at a discount to some independents and the crew at TWC...how egalitarian of me....