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The Acceleration of Addictiveness

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Re: The Acceleration of Addictiveness

#111

Post by DenisM »

abstractbill wrote: post #94
DenisM wrote: post #74

It will actually become a reasonable strategy (or a more reasonable strategy) to suspect everything new. No. The reasonable strategy is, and has always been, defining the positive outcomes you want to reach rather than negative ones you want to avoid. The opposite of "drunk" is not "he avoids drinking", it's "he lives a fulfilled life without allowing alcohol to consume his existence". The opposite of internet addict…

The same is true for any other addiction. The internet, for me, has been different to any other addiction because it has changed so much as I've been using it (and very gradually, so I didn't notice for a long time).

but now you know, right?

Re: The Acceleration of Addictiveness

#112

Post by hugh3 »

DenisM wrote: post #74

It will actually become a reasonable strategy (or a more reasonable strategy) to suspect everything new. No. The reasonable strategy is, and has always been, defining the positive outcomes you want to reach rather than negative ones you want to avoid. The opposite of "drunk" is not "he avoids drinking", it's "he lives a fulfilled life without allowing alcohol to consume his existence". The opposite of internet addict…

Sure, but neither alcohol nor the internet is all that addictive. Most people are quite capable of controlling their usage of both, so it's not risky to try for the first time.

Heroin, on the other hand, is apparently so ridiculously addictive that just trying it once is a bad idea. Or maybe you can try it a few times before it gets hard to quit -- I don't know, and I don't particularly want to find out. It's a sensible strategy to stay away from all hard drugs as a result.

Maybe Farmville or World of Warcraft version 15.0 circa 2018 will be more like heroin than like alcohol.

Re: The Acceleration of Addictiveness

#113

Post by hugh3 »

Alex3917 wrote: post #10

"heroin, and crack have in common is that they're all more concentrated forms of less addictive predecessors." Heroin and crack aren't more concentrated, they just get absorbed faster into the brain. For whatever reason the faster a substance gets absorbed the more likely you are to get addicted to it. For any given drug smoking it is the most likely to lead to addiction, followed by injection, snorting, sublingual,…

While we're nitpicking, I'm not convinced that hard alcohol is actually more addictive than beer or wine.

Re: The Acceleration of Addictiveness

#114

Post by fragmede »

People can already be defined by what they say no (or yes) to. Amish? No Technology. Republicans? No to government assistance. Democrats? No to big business. On a more personal level, do you drink? do you do drugs? And so on.

Re: The Acceleration of Addictiveness

#115

Post by cageface »

DenisM wrote: post #89
cageface wrote: post #46

It's hard to escape the irony of the situation of the typical programmer. Programming requires extended periods of focus and deep concentration but the very medium in which most of us work is a firestorm of distractions. How can you be an effective mobile app developer if you don't immerse yourself in the experience of mobile media? We're like the crack dealer that has to constantly sample his wares. Like PG and othe…

Concentrate of fostering positive outcomes instead of fighting the negative ones. What do you want to accomplish? Say, you want to write a new mobile app. Your desire itself will consist of rational analysis and emotional drive, the former being required to make it a sound business and the latter required to plow through to the finish line. Before you start, ask yourself - how much will this project take? one month?…

I think your suggestion to reframe this in a positive way is a good one but the dilemma remains to some degree. For instance, I've cut out Facebook, Twitter and TV and cut my time spent on various online forums down to a bare minimum. This has certainly helped my concentration but I also feel less in the loop wrt web development as a result.

But it's better to be building the next bandwagon than jumping on the last, right?

Re: The Acceleration of Addictiveness

#116

Post by fmora »

gort wrote: post #103
fmora wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You start with an illegal substance. You are already breaking the law so what is the big deal with using an even stronger substance. That seems to be the rationale used by a lot of people. I guess I should have made that clear in my original example. Believe it or not your moral values start to decrease once you start breaking them. I'll take it to another extreme: Once a criminal has become used to breaking the law,…

You've now completely changed your argument. Originally it was "mild drugs lead to strong drugs". I noted that alcohol is a mild drug. Now your argument is "mild crime leads to strong crime". If I can summon a good argument against that, will you just come up with a third argument for what you're already committed to believing? Mild crime does not lead to strong crime. Like many people, in my teenage days I downloade…

I have not changed my original stance. I've just provided more arguments to this mild debate. I know, we've all downloaded illegal music and yes many of us believe this is no big deal even though objectively speaking it is wrong. Somebody worked really hard for those songs.

OK. So lets agree that doing Marijuana may not 100% of the time lead to cocaine use. That doesn't mean that it doens't increases the likelyhood of using it because you've already broken multiple moral values that go beyond just drinking or smoking.

Another example: Does smoking mean that you are going to get cancer? No. But it has been proven in plenty of studies that it does increases your chances of getting cancer. And I think we can agree that using Marijuana is a step closer to using cocaine than just drinking alcohol. For once, if you are using Marijuana that means that you already have a person providing you an illegal substance. That same person can probably get you cocaine and anything else you want. If you only drink alcohol you would still have to find this illegal substance distributor.

Finally, are you making the claim that there is nothing wrong with smoking Marijuana. If so does that mean that you would be OK if your kids smoke Marijuana? Now please be honest.

Re: The Acceleration of Addictiveness

#117

Post by jseliger »

This: "I worry we may be heading for a future in which only a few people plot their own itinerary through no-land, while everyone else books a package tour. Or worse still, has one booked for them by the government.

Sounds very similar to much of Neal Stephenson's work, especially Anathem, where the Avout plot their own way and everyone else is merely addicted to the world. Snow Crash also has aspects of what the world is starting to look like, and I wonder if Stephenson is particularly well-placed to look at some of these trends because he's got a lot of the hacker ethos and yet makes his living by writing very long, very detailed books that demand attention if they're going to be read and digested.

Re: The Acceleration of Addictiveness

#118

Post by fmora »

DenisM wrote: post #108
fmora wrote: post #22

Being addicted to cigarrettes is one thing. They are bad but not as bad as drugs like Marijuana (Maybe, don't know, I don't smoke). It seems that for a lot of people that do Marijuana it eventually becomes too mild for them. Also, once they are using drugs, using more potent ones doesn't seem like a big deal. This is only an anecdote: I had a friend who started using Marijuana. He said he only used it once in a while…

You have a problem with logical reasoning. First, there are at least two possible explanations for the the even you witnessed - one that marijuana was a gateway drug for your friend, and the other is that your friend was simply fucked up to start with and found his solace in drugs. You have dismissed one of the options and then concluded the truthfulness of the other (which is a serious defect of cognition). Your sec…

That is why I called it an anecdote to begin with. It is a serious defect in cognition that you did not realize that this is why I spelled it out as such. I knew him during high school. From what I know about him I think he just gave in to peer pressure as many do.

Re: The Acceleration of Addictiveness

#119

Post by patio11 »

I worry about the acceleration of addiction in particular subgroups of the population. WoW (or Farmville), for example, is not crystal meth... but that flippant observation is a response to a core truth that some people just have a lot of trouble saying no. Maybe they're poorly educated, maybe they're genetically predisposed to addiction, maybe they're clinically depressed, for whatever the reason they've got a weakened psychic immune system. It gets dramatically easier (A/B testing! end to end analytics! using their own friends' pictures as your call to action!) and stupendously more profitable (virtual goods!) over time to pay extraordinarily savvy engineers and marketers to design the Skinner's Box From Hell and extract money from them.

And what do you do if you're a startup founder at the next Zynga and discover, running the numbers one day, that 80% of your revenue comes from 2% of the population who cannot attend the user meetups because they can't bear to be separated from your service for that long?

Re: The Acceleration of Addictiveness

#120

Post by moultano »

jacoblyles wrote: post #70
NickPollard wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not sure whether you're particularly referring to media bias and dumbed-down science journalism, which is certainly an issue, but the general practice of 'trusting an expert' seems sound to me - the effort required to become an expert yourself in every field that affects you would be incredible, whilst trusting someone else who has that expert knowledge to translate into layman's terms for you is more efficient.…

This phenomenon, also called "rational ignorance" by economists, is a problem for democracies. Not every person has the time to become an expert on everything, but they still vote on it.

I wonder how many people would be happy to "delegate their vote" if there was some officially supported way of doing it.

This would be an interesting way of reimagining representative democracy in the digital age. Why should we bother limiting ourselves to a fixed number of representatives? Let everyone vote on everything _but_ let people choose to assign their vote to someone else.

Rather than electing representatives, I'd choose someone whose intellect and experience I trust, and delegate my voting rights to them. They'd become my representative. When someone accumulated enough other people's votes, they'd reach the political stature of people like senators.

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