The Pitters' Place

http://medicalxpress.com/news/2015-03-b ... ality.html" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;

TL;DR: Popping a pill containing tolcapone, a drug which prolongs the effects of dopamine in the prefrontal cortex, has been supposedly shown to increase prosocial behavior and sensitivity to social inequality. The researchers had subjects play a game in which they divided money between themselves and someone else, and the ones who received the pill divided more money between themselves and the stranger than the ones who took a placebo. They say the drug causes people to be less tolerant of economic equality, because it affects an area of the brain that evaluates our judgements of equality.

Not sure how much to make of this study by itself, but I think it does show something profound, which is how easily supposedly immutable human traits can be altered through purely biological means. This kind of goes to something I've been thinking about a bit recently. There's a kind of dichotomy in our political culture right now that says that liberals tend to think human nature is very flexible and adaptable can be altered easily by social change and consciousness-raising, and that conservatives by contrast tend to think human nature is very narrow and "fixed" by our biology and therefore completely resistant to social change. So, if you're more conservative-minded, you'll be suspicious of any attempts to change the world by utopian social conditioning. And if you're liberal, you'll be very hesitant to say that a particular human trait is biological as that would heavily imply that it's "fixed" and you can't do anything about it.

But I think studies like this show that that dichotomy isn't really based in reality, at least not anymore. Even if everything important about ourselves is "fixed" by our biology and immutable to social change, that doesn't mean we can't change our biology relatively easily. There are many things technology can do to change human nature which pure social engineering will never be able to do. So just because some things might be biological, that doesn't mean they're "fixed" or "essential" or "immutable" or that that really means anything for the medium-term future. In fact it might be the exact opposite, as generally the more "fixed" things are in the brain or in our genes the more amenable they might be to brute-force engineering.

Thoughts?

I'm a bit suspicious of biologistic explanations or solutions to problems that are sociologic.

Individuals are different. There may be some statistically significant differences between groups of people (like women picking more careers in social sciences, and men picking more careers in technology), but there are still individuals who differ from the average.
Now if it was possible to "fix" people biologically: Who gets to decide the direction?

And what's more: What if not everybody reacts to the drug in the same way? What if a small part of the population who takes the drugs becomes sociopaths? Like the Reavers?

Maybe drugs would be a way to fix people who really are sociopaths. But I wouldn't want to fix something that is not broken.
And I believe that people being competitive is not a problem, as long as nobody gets hurt, and as long as everybody has a chance of becoming happy.

Ok, multiple points:

1) All social problems are biological, ultimately, as all of social behavior has biological underpinnings; the problem is finding out where to put the conceptual divide between society and biology. But all such divides will be arbitrary.

2) I'm not sure what your "individuals are different" point is. Certain drugs might only be marketed to very general populations based on some crude and arbitrary stratification, but that's a practical problem, not a foundational one, and drugs are only one proposed remedy for biological problems anyway.

3) Who gets to decide the direction we fix people in today? We're making value judgments already. All medical diagnoses are value judgments. They're based on constantly shifting and updating social and cultural norms, and that's presumably how it'll be in the future.

4) Again, that's a problem today. It's not a big enough problem to simply forgo medications. Nothing is perfect.

5) Our conception of what's "broken" is determined entirely by arbitrary sociocultural standards, which in turn are partly determined by technological forces. Perhaps in the future many things which we currently consider normal and acceptable will be viewed as broken as standards are raised.

6) I don't agree with you on competition not being a problem, at least for how you'll probably define it, but even so, the article didn't mention competition.

GRRR.

I had just written a long post adressing your points, and then my browser (or the server) glitched, and the post was gone.
Maybe I'll try to write one again later; but right now, I'm angry.

New attempt.

In my first post I was assuming a scenario where drug administration would become mandatory, in order to create uniform human beings, who all more or less think and feel alike. Maybe I got distracted by the topic title "Tolcapone is the future".

Now to your points.
"Individuals are different" means: Some people have more empathy than others. But as long as the people with less empathy do not become psychopaths, there's nothing wrong with it in my opinion. So no need to "fix" people in one or the other direction. I mention the other direction, because if it's possible to enhance empathy with drugs, then it could also be possible to inhibit it. And maybe some neocons believe that a society full of "bleeding-heart liberals" would be eaten up by China.

Which brings us to the direction in which people are "fixed". While empathy is part of human nature and beneficial for survival, some people might believe that less empathy is beneficial for competing with others. People don't agree on the direction.

And competition is not a problem in my opinion. Competition means that there are winners and losers. But as long as the losers still have a chance at happiness in life, I don't see a problem with it.
In your first post, I assume you meant to say: "They say the drug causes people to be less tolerant of economic inequality, because it affects an area of the brain that evaluates our judgements of equality." And this looks to me like: There are no winners and losers; everybody gets a prize.
I don't believe that this would work. All communist countries have failed. They either became extinct (like the Soviet Union), or became capitalist (like China or the former COMECON states). Third-world countries like Cuba or Venezuela are not really role models either.

But you probably did not have drug administration on a wide scale in mind. And I agree that drug enhanced personality changes for psychopaths or sociopaths might be a good idea. After all, these psychopaths and sociopaths are harmful.

Yeah, my title was facetious. I couldn't really think of a title.

Don't really care what neocons think. IMO neocons are a lunatic gang of dangerous psychopaths who are a menace to global civilization and should be locked up before they cause any more damage than they've already done. I take their opinions on these things about as seriously as I would take the opinions of a KKK member on the state of race relations today. Not at all.

My opinion on competition has been strongly influenced by the book No Contest by Alfie Kohn, which shows that the failure of competition in the workplace and the classroom is a very corroborated finding in sociology. Cooperation is a much stronger and more positive force. Of course I don't think competition should be eliminated, or even that it can be, but it should be put in context. But again... the article didn't mention competition, so this isn't really an issue. In any case competition can be changed to be a more positive force than it currently is.

I'm not advocating for Communism, I'm just thinking about how our intuitions of fairness could be influenced.