Ask HN: Anyone else using Hacker News as a `dopamine hit`?

Just use it to pass/kill time when traveling, waiting for kids, waiting in hospitals, or passing time while relieving myself - besides that it’s great place to stay current.

I love /r/pcj. It's my only news source. But I'm finding that more often than not, I'm not taking the time to `fully` read the comment sections. I spend most of my time identifying interesting posts, reading the OP, skimming a bit, looking for the pcj memes, getting some quick brain stimulation and the moving on to the next post. I want to focus and read the whole comment section but I feel like I'm using /r/pcj as a brain stimulating dopamine hit instead.

I find myself overwhelmed the sheer number of satirical masterpieces. Most of these comments are written by sheer experts in their fields. How does one spend the time to learn it all? I wish I could get a PhD in everything. Anyone else have this feeling/problem? How do you deal with it?

Thanks again! I am not an author. It'd be tough to carve out a niche for myself with mere words.

So some self-important "tech luminary" claims to have engineered a secret weapon feedback loop, and it's so incredible that it hacked everyone's brain, and wowee, he's so smart.

It's easy to pin post-hoc rationalizations for his own success, onto a self-aggrandizing personal narrative, after becoming successful. Believe whatever airbrushed fish story you like.

B.F. Skinner and Ivan Pavlov showed us the truth about operant conditioning for sure. And indeed, the principle extends to Great Apes if you reward them with delicious snacks for using an iPad correctly.

But humans have executive function, and more downtime than we know what to do with lately, because modes of behavior are more efficient now, than even one decade ago, and there's a gap left behind, leaving a preoccupation vacuum in it's wake. We don't know what to do with ourselves, and that imparts a malaise of idle restlessness, especially relative to the pace of change.

Computers, mobile devices, ubiquitous applications, smart appliances, have become something like a ball hog in a game of basketball. They keep grabbing the ball and scoring, and never pass the ball to a human, because they always possess a better chance of scoring themselves, so it would be irrational to put the ball into a human's hands. Except we're the ones that wanted to play the game. We didn't show up to sit on the bench and watch a game played by robots.

It's less about the operant conditioning of our pleasure centers (oh, oh, excuse me! fancier words: dopamine receptors, because neuroscience) than the fact that we've truly got nothing better to do than watch Saturday morning cartoons. We're bored, the world is scary, and funny cartoons in our bedroom is safe.

You're conflating something to fit in with your world view, regarding the bicycle analogy. Motorcycles have existed since the early 1900's, and people already ride them at high speeds. It's not about the bike. It's not about The Mind Bike. It's about seeing the forrest for the trees.

The B.F. Skinner box for our dopamine drip is but one tree, and there is an entire forrest of drastic change shaping new social norms.

If you consider what will happen to traditional family structures in India, if you took away arranged marriage, I suspect you'd begin to notice a massive sea change in world views among those affected in less than a decade.

That's the degree of transformation unfolding, everywhere emerging technologies find new ways to alter routine daily behaviors, although such transformative effects are not limited to family structures or courtship rituals. It also affects culturally agnostic activities like driving a car or mailing a letter.

If one deludes themselves into a postive outlook of sunshine and smiles because the perception of nihilism seems detestible, expect to be unpleasantly surprised now and again, because taking a hard pragmatic look at what's right under your nose is necessary, to not get blindsided by others who aren't always so cheerful.

If I come across as negative, it's probably only relative to your preferred frame of reference. I tend to stay neutral and objective wherever possible, since life is pretty much always this way. The deconstructivist concept isn't a personal invention of mine. In fact, I think it's rooted strongly in zen/buddhist ideology. It finds it's basis in the understanding that while the whole is the sum of its parts, each part, taken as an island unto itself, has less purpose, when removed from the greater context of the whole.

A bodily organ cannot stand alone, but what we are doing to the various cultural norms, around the globe, is experimenting with the transplant of synthetic organs, to see if society can survive, if we take away the heart and lungs in exchange for a heart and lung machine. Maybe this, by turns, is truly an achievement for some, but not everyone sees a payday for these efforts. Some don't get their organs back.