I miss all of the posts about transhumanism, the future of politics/law, medical science, etc on the old forum. I'm interested in writing some posts on these topics, and happy to do research, but a bit low on ideas at the moment. Anyone have prompts or posts they've been thinking of writing to share? Happy to collaborate or edit as well.
-- How do we define performance enhancing drugs? Historically the tests and justifications have been legality, negative side effects, and combining the two to say other competitors shouldn't be forced to take X to keep up. As medical science advances, to what extent will these arguments become irrelevant or old fashioned? Is WADA doing any kind of work towards new standards over time? Is the public drifting towards laxly tested sports versus highly tested sports? How do athletes doing medical tourism for eg stem cell treatments fit in?
-- How will future security cameras defeat the inevitable "deepfake defense" and maintain the ability to serve as conclusive evidence in court? I'm going after a gang of kids who vandalized a house we own, and I have decent camera shots of them, but a sufficiently skilled photoshopper could have done them, how do you get beyond a reasonable doubt?
-- How common are major and minor aesthetic procedures across young people in different countries, and how have aesthetic and cultural preferences changed in cultures where such procedures are more common? Already around me I see more and more Instagram face, and I find it unattractive, is that because it's naturally unattractive, because it's unoriginal and uncanny, or because it's culturally signifying that we wouldn't get along in the same way one of those clever joke t shirts would?
Those are ideas kicking around my head where I feel I lack the expertise to say anything, but I'd like to read someone as smart as you think about them.
Feel free to ask me about IPEDs, there are many interesting ones.
Now regarding your question, one should observe that the property of being a drug is contingent, and therefore the question of the legality or (di)incentivisation of Image and Performance Enhancers apply to everything, including innate genetics advantages (nature), and specific environmental enrichments and behaviours (nurture) and even the "in-between" of nature and nurture, such as the so called critical-periods.
About Nature, it is well known that many of the world champions in sports have specific genetic breeding/mutations (e.g. probably for Usain Bolt)
About Nurture, The science of behavioural and environmental performance optimizations is evolving in real time. Some things have evidence for benefits, e.g resistance training your legs leads to an acute testosterone release that will optimize the subsequent anabolicity of your arms muscles. A competitive athlete that lacks this niche erudition, will not be competitive eventually. However as with the rampant Universal Mediocrity of this timeline, no athlete on earth has ever attempted to combine all relevant niche optimizing behaviours.
Meditation brings neuro/synaptogenesis, but many behaviours/enrichments have mostly unknown effects, e.g. one really of the frontiers of realms is the ASMR. ASMR is scientifically the only externally inducible tactilo-auditive synesthesia that can be experienced by normal human beings. In addition to its interest in the field of studying qualias, like meditation is could be an atypical nootropic/nocitropic with unique performance altering properties.
About critical periods, well few know that some are actually reversible, for example basic epigenetic methylation induced by HDACs allow adults to develop an Absolute pitch.
So How do we define performance enhancing drugs?
I don't see an original answer, IPEDs definition is in the name, it's tautological. Is an IPED any drug (note we could define co-IPEDs) that enhance Image or "performance" AKA any desired behavioural metric. Therefore the scope is larger than what people have in mind, e.g. increasing your ability to love human beings (how many, how intensely, how long, how flexibly and how easily) could be seen as an IPED.
A co-IPED, would be a drug that become useful or maximally useful when concomitant to a behaviour(s) and/or even aforementionned critical periods.
As for the legality of IPEDs, one should distinguish between the legalisation for professionals/athlete and for the general public.
As for competitive athletes, the pros are:
Can improve their healthpan, lifespan and career-span.
Can improve their performance, therefore the show is (generally) more enjoyable for the public and for the athlete (many animes shows many sports with imaginary supra-human perfornance as an entairtainment). This is something I would like to see.
Alter the distribution/inequality of talent. There would be much more top performers, AKA more would reach a similar plateau.
speculative: would enable new sports? (e.g Imagine if we could make humans live underwater (cf famous rat study breathing when filled with a fluid), fly, etc)
other pros I'm too lazy to think about.
the cons are:
for drugs:
side effects risks therefore
possibly reduced healthspan, lifespan and career-span.
escalation to always wanting more IPEDs, hence reducing the health/perf ratio
other cons I'm too lazy to think about.
for nurture:
hypothetically some behaviours become too complex or costly, hence increasing talent distribution inequality and unhapiness.
The athlete like many professions can be seen as having an utilitaristic budget and indeed we could afford to alter the healthspan and lifespan of athletes negatively, to an extent.
And then we enter in a classic allocation tradeoff optimization problem.
E.g we could compromise and allow IPDEDS as a parallel league, therefore you would either be a regular athlete or a transhuman athlete and they would not play together (by default).
This has cons (split the talent pool) but still would be a net benefit in many sports.
The other questions is if we allow IPEDs, which one and how much (rationning)
The use of anabolics such as steroids has diminishing returns (yet bimodal) regarding health/vs performance benefits (IIRC it shows the potent retardation of mankind when you realize testosterone supplementation worldwide would save more lives than the current criminal de facto stigma on TRT, let alone depressions).
Therefore I would be for allowing up to a max. The max would indeed not be a dose, but take into account the massive endogenous testosterone production inequalities and the body capacitance.
However many IPEDs have mostly beneficial health effects (don't remember about low dose EPO though), e.g. probably apply to ALCAR, BPC-157, growth hormone if taken young, (and antioxidants if we consider performance enhancing over career-span)
Finally, one should understand that the regulation/controls for doping are broken and can't really work.
The biggest barrier to doping isn't anti-doping controls.. it is of course the extreme scarcity of humans being pubmed erudite.
I have seen many atypical anabolics that have not even a single mention on the whole reddit website nor a wikipedia page.
Even among the popular unpopular anabolics, such as the insect anabolics ecdysteroids, there are no control for them IIRC. Let alone for fungal anabolics (used in the Cow industry).
IIRC even regular anabolics like growth hormone and long ester steroids, have latent durable IPED effects and are "undetectable"
Messi is probably the #1 in the world because he took growth hormone therapy. That's not the only reason, but probably a necessary reason.
As for the legality of IPEDs on regular human beings, well as with most things with serious consequences, the legality should be conditional on the obtention of a diploma, after positively answering a quizz proving that the user understand said consequences and current known unknowns (like we should do for voting in "democracies").
Despite homeostasis, the use of drugs often has permanent effects on the human body, it's just that they are often low-observable, not necessarily insignificant.
The legality could mandate the concomitant use of protectors/mitigators, such as HCG for testosterone.
One striking example of permanent consequences is Melatonan-II, which simply makes you black.
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Notes -
I miss all of the posts about transhumanism, the future of politics/law, medical science, etc on the old forum. I'm interested in writing some posts on these topics, and happy to do research, but a bit low on ideas at the moment. Anyone have prompts or posts they've been thinking of writing to share? Happy to collaborate or edit as well.
-- How do we define performance enhancing drugs? Historically the tests and justifications have been legality, negative side effects, and combining the two to say other competitors shouldn't be forced to take X to keep up. As medical science advances, to what extent will these arguments become irrelevant or old fashioned? Is WADA doing any kind of work towards new standards over time? Is the public drifting towards laxly tested sports versus highly tested sports? How do athletes doing medical tourism for eg stem cell treatments fit in?
-- How will future security cameras defeat the inevitable "deepfake defense" and maintain the ability to serve as conclusive evidence in court? I'm going after a gang of kids who vandalized a house we own, and I have decent camera shots of them, but a sufficiently skilled photoshopper could have done them, how do you get beyond a reasonable doubt?
-- How common are major and minor aesthetic procedures across young people in different countries, and how have aesthetic and cultural preferences changed in cultures where such procedures are more common? Already around me I see more and more Instagram face, and I find it unattractive, is that because it's naturally unattractive, because it's unoriginal and uncanny, or because it's culturally signifying that we wouldn't get along in the same way one of those clever joke t shirts would?
Those are ideas kicking around my head where I feel I lack the expertise to say anything, but I'd like to read someone as smart as you think about them.
Here's your blog post about IPEDs:
Feel free to ask me about IPEDs, there are many interesting ones.
Now regarding your question, one should observe that the property of being a drug is contingent, and therefore the question of the legality or (di)incentivisation of Image and Performance Enhancers apply to everything, including innate genetics advantages (nature), and specific environmental enrichments and behaviours (nurture) and even the "in-between" of nature and nurture, such as the so called critical-periods.
About Nature, it is well known that many of the world champions in sports have specific genetic breeding/mutations (e.g. probably for Usain Bolt)
About Nurture, The science of behavioural and environmental performance optimizations is evolving in real time. Some things have evidence for benefits, e.g resistance training your legs leads to an acute testosterone release that will optimize the subsequent anabolicity of your arms muscles. A competitive athlete that lacks this niche erudition, will not be competitive eventually. However as with the rampant Universal Mediocrity of this timeline, no athlete on earth has ever attempted to combine all relevant niche optimizing behaviours.
Meditation brings neuro/synaptogenesis, but many behaviours/enrichments have mostly unknown effects, e.g. one really of the frontiers of realms is the ASMR. ASMR is scientifically the only externally inducible tactilo-auditive synesthesia that can be experienced by normal human beings. In addition to its interest in the field of studying qualias, like meditation is could be an atypical nootropic/nocitropic with unique performance altering properties.
About critical periods, well few know that some are actually reversible, for example basic epigenetic methylation induced by HDACs allow adults to develop an Absolute pitch.
So How do we define performance enhancing drugs?
I don't see an original answer, IPEDs definition is in the name, it's tautological. Is an IPED any drug (note we could define co-IPEDs) that enhance Image or "performance" AKA any desired behavioural metric. Therefore the scope is larger than what people have in mind, e.g. increasing your ability to love human beings (how many, how intensely, how long, how flexibly and how easily) could be seen as an IPED.
A co-IPED, would be a drug that become useful or maximally useful when concomitant to a behaviour(s) and/or even aforementionned critical periods.
As for the legality of IPEDs, one should distinguish between the legalisation for professionals/athlete and for the general public.
As for competitive athletes, the pros are:
Can improve their healthpan, lifespan and career-span.
Can improve their performance, therefore the show is (generally) more enjoyable for the public and for the athlete (many animes shows many sports with imaginary supra-human perfornance as an entairtainment). This is something I would like to see.
Alter the distribution/inequality of talent. There would be much more top performers, AKA more would reach a similar plateau.
speculative: would enable new sports? (e.g Imagine if we could make humans live underwater (cf famous rat study breathing when filled with a fluid), fly, etc)
other pros I'm too lazy to think about.
the cons are:
for drugs:
side effects risks therefore
possibly reduced healthspan, lifespan and career-span.
escalation to always wanting more IPEDs, hence reducing the health/perf ratio
other cons I'm too lazy to think about.
for nurture:
The athlete like many professions can be seen as having an utilitaristic budget and indeed we could afford to alter the healthspan and lifespan of athletes negatively, to an extent.
And then we enter in a classic allocation tradeoff optimization problem.
E.g we could compromise and allow IPDEDS as a parallel league, therefore you would either be a regular athlete or a transhuman athlete and they would not play together (by default).
This has cons (split the talent pool) but still would be a net benefit in many sports.
The other questions is if we allow IPEDs, which one and how much (rationning)
The use of anabolics such as steroids has diminishing returns (yet bimodal) regarding health/vs performance benefits (IIRC it shows the potent retardation of mankind when you realize testosterone supplementation worldwide would save more lives than the current criminal de facto stigma on TRT, let alone depressions).
Therefore I would be for allowing up to a max. The max would indeed not be a dose, but take into account the massive endogenous testosterone production inequalities and the body capacitance.
However many IPEDs have mostly beneficial health effects (don't remember about low dose EPO though), e.g. probably apply to ALCAR, BPC-157, growth hormone if taken young, (and antioxidants if we consider performance enhancing over career-span)
Finally, one should understand that the regulation/controls for doping are broken and can't really work.
The biggest barrier to doping isn't anti-doping controls.. it is of course the extreme scarcity of humans being pubmed erudite.
I have seen many atypical anabolics that have not even a single mention on the whole reddit website nor a wikipedia page.
Even among the popular unpopular anabolics, such as the insect anabolics ecdysteroids, there are no control for them IIRC. Let alone for fungal anabolics (used in the Cow industry).
IIRC even regular anabolics like growth hormone and long ester steroids, have latent durable IPED effects and are "undetectable"
Messi is probably the #1 in the world because he took growth hormone therapy. That's not the only reason, but probably a necessary reason.
As for the legality of IPEDs on regular human beings, well as with most things with serious consequences, the legality should be conditional on the obtention of a diploma, after positively answering a quizz proving that the user understand said consequences and current known unknowns (like we should do for voting in "democracies").
Despite homeostasis, the use of drugs often has permanent effects on the human body, it's just that they are often low-observable, not necessarily insignificant.
The legality could mandate the concomitant use of protectors/mitigators, such as HCG for testosterone.
One striking example of permanent consequences is Melatonan-II, which simply makes you black.
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