Not hypocritical at all. We have literally centuries of data on caffeine, and less than a decade's worth on electrical brain stimulation. Generations have lived and died drinking coffee and tea.
We know to multiple decimal places what a lifetime of regular caffeine intake in the form of coffee or tea will do to a person (not much, with the health benefits mildly outweighing any negatives) whereas no one has ever spent the bulk of their lifetime using this kind of brain stimulation regularly.
It may very well be harmless or even long-term beneficial. Or not. The only way to really tell is to perform the experiment, and as usual the early adopters will be taking the risks for the rest of us.
Well said. What freaks me out about electrical brain stimulation is the brain's well-known capacity for adaptation in response to repeated stimuli. What happens when the brain gets used to the stimulation, or even comes to depend on it? It happens with caffeine, after all. Who's to say it can't happen with an exogenously generated electrical current?
I'm excited for the possibilities here, but I'm in no hurry to be a guinea pig.
Most of the data is of the kind "people who drink moderate amounts of coffee show lower $BAD and/or higher $GOOD", so it isn't enormously compelling on the benefits (could easily be some confounding population characteristics despite attempts to get good controls) but is pretty compelling on the lack of harms.
There is at least some biochemical justification for the belief that coffee and tea are good for us--they contain things that are thought to have positive effects--but the chemistry is complicated and not well-understood.
And since humans are omnivorous hunter-gather-scavengers we are able to eat pretty much anything and still stay moderately healthy, so any strong claims relating diet and health are pretty close to Creationism: for humans to have a narrow, deep dietary optimum would have required our ancestors to be selected by processes that produced such a thing, and the life of omnivorous hunter-gather-scavengers is pretty much the opposite of that.
We know to multiple decimal places what a lifetime of regular caffeine intake in the form of coffee or tea will do to a person (not much, with the health benefits mildly outweighing any negatives) whereas no one has ever spent the bulk of their lifetime using this kind of brain stimulation regularly.
It may very well be harmless or even long-term beneficial. Or not. The only way to really tell is to perform the experiment, and as usual the early adopters will be taking the risks for the rest of us.