introduction
section 1, part 2

"...who were expelled from the academies for crazy &
publishing obscene odes on the windows of the skull,
who cowered in unshaven rooms in underwear,
burning their money in wastebaskets and listening
to the Terror through the wall,"

"Howl", Allen Ginsburg

The eien_meru of four years ago was a budding logician at the height of his undergraduate career. As the only pure math major in his class, the university was his oyster, and he practically had two whole departments full of professors at his disposal. I don't really resemble anything like that, anymore, but the reason I changed has a lot to do with the peculiar tone of urgency of the first two parts.

After all, the conclusion of cognitive limits seems rather outlandish, like something I must have thought up after reading too much Frank Herbert. Is society really so desperate for mathematical (or scientific, or political, or...) knowledge that we ought to bend our contemporary mores and allow our scholars to take stimulants and intelligence-enhancing drugs? What's to stop our academics from becoming "angelheaded hipsters burning for the ancient heavenly / connection to the starry dynamo in the machinery of night"?

Before we get that far, I'd hate to break it to you, but the future is now. If you really believe that the only drugs being used in the university are ones that numb your mind and/or give you the munchies, you're sadly mistaken. I've known physicists who worked twenty-two hours a day on nothing more than coffee, Adderall, and the unstoppable desire to learn. It was common knowledge among the students that the law students at a certain university had a formal, organized system for obtaining and distributing Ritalin. I'm not to that point, yet, and I may never get there, since it's currently illegal in my jurisdiction to self-medicate for anything other than a diagnosed condition. I'm still concerned that the long-term studies will show that the overall benefit of these pharmaceuticals is negative.

Having said that, I need to explain the why. What's the rush? Since the beginning of grad school, my new friends often ask me why I care more about solving the homework in the course of a day when I've got all week. At first I responded with the mantra of Galois, but that's somewhat inappropriate and over-romanticized. The real answer is that during the two years in which I wasn't doing mathematics (2007 and 2008), I was following the path of the academic who thinks that everything will be solved eventually. I didn't need a reason to study esoteric French philosophers, because knowledge for its own sake was enough, and all the better if I could get some schmuck university to pay me for it. That is, until I couldn't.

The rush is because the problems that I want to solve are non-trivially hard. (That's mathematician-speak for "really hard", e.g., "Finding the cure for cancer? Yeah, that's non-trivial.") How do you keep six billion people from dying of thirst because humanity has gone and polluted almost every available source of fresh water? I don't know. The problem is so huge and has so many facets that I can't even imagine it all in one thought. Only an extraordinary effort will solve this problem. The only way I have a chance of getting to where I want to go is if I follow the advice of Eliezer Yudkowsky: "Run right up the mountain!" [6] "Shut up and do the impossible!" [7]

I know I'm not the only mathematician who wants to solve a problem that humanity needs solving. If you want to see a group of scientists who are doing the impossible right now, look at CERN and the LHC. They've managed to keep spirits — their own and their financial backers' — high despite numerous setbacks and delays in their search for something they've never even seen. Do you think the scientists at the LHC feel that there's no rush, because even if they don't succeed, some other government will fund a multi-billion dollar supercollider? Hell no.

That's why I care about training for speed. If you train yourself to take a week to learn a new concept in, say, complex analysis, in your post-graduate career you're going to be accustomed to taking that amount of time. Maybe you won't have the willpower to rally yourself and run right up the mountain. Maybe you'll be more likely to fail your task. Failing to solve a problem that needs solving doesn't help anyone. So yes, when it becomes socially acceptable and safe to use cognition-enhancing drugs, we all should sign up immediately. We're going to need all the momentum we can get.