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The Acceleration of Addictiveness

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Re: The Acceleration of Addictiveness

#171

Post by drewcrawford »

mattchew wrote: post #123
drewcrawford wrote: post #48

Let me play devil's advocate for a minute. Why is this "new" addiction wrong ? What does it mean to say it is bad ? pg is taking great pains to distance himself from real addiction, like crystal meth. Yet he never explicitly explains anywhere why the new "addiction" is actually bad , other than trying to loosely associate it with alcohol. I don't think that the "addictiveness" of a thing alone is enough to call it ba…

> What does it mean to say it is bad? How about this: if in advance of the behavior, you intend to partake moderately, and in the event you consistently overindulge, and after the fact you regret your excess, then something about this behavior is bad. I'm leaving aside some of the other points you bring up, but if you've got a habit that consistently leads to dissatisfaction and regret, I think it's fair to call it a…

> if in advance of the behavior, you intend to partake moderately, and in the event you consistently overindulge, and after the fact you regret your excess, then something about this behavior is bad.

(This is not at all intended to be a joke:) In many cultures, homosexual activity would meet this criteria. There are many social and psychological reasons for guilt to manifest itself, and I don't think that these alone form a robust definition of badness.

Now I don't mean to trivialize those who really struggle with, say, reading HN or Reddit or playing WoW.

But I do think that a lot of the talk about internet "addiction" is really a misunderstood type of burnout. I consider it totally normal to "waste" 1-3 hours each day, and I have no impulse to blame Reddit. If it wasn't the internet, it would be something else. There's simply a finite amount of time that I can spend being productive.

And it comes in waves. Sometimes, coming off a particularly grueling schedule, I can't get anything done for a week or more. Is this bad? I think it's pretty normal. It's a result of pushing myself past my production limit, building up a "productive" debt. I just need some time to recharge.

There's even some research to back up this view. See Galliot et al: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/17279852

So again, not to trivialize long-term WoW players' addiction, but I am regularly unproductive for a few hours a day, at times for a week or more, and feel no guilt or regret. Is this addiction? Is this bad? Maybe I'm just in denial, but I sort of doubt it.

Re: The Acceleration of Addictiveness

#172

Post by pg »

philwelch wrote: post #36

I actually want to get an iPad just to quarantine my internet addiction. If I treat my computer purely as a workspace I'll get more done while at my computer; if I've got an iPad for other things, I won't go through Hacker News withdrawals. This was inspired by something PG said in another essay--that he deals with internet addiction by using separate computers for work and internet. The iPad is just a purpose built…

It didn't work though. I always ended up slipping into using the Internet on my work computer. Even after I bought a new computer, nicer than my work computer, for using the Internet. So now I've gone back to one computer, which I basically treat as radioactive and have exiled to a corner of the room. I should add a warning notice to that essay.

Edit: Added one.

Re: The Acceleration of Addictiveness

#174

Post by queensnake »

xiaoma wrote: post #141
tmsh wrote: post #4

The link to the Paleolithic diet made me think that one strategy against increasing addition is to normalize for evolutionary time. Still requires a lot of learned, subjective insight. But basically, anything that has proved itself via evolution is more sturdy and is worth congregating around (these include immediate things that affect the body, but also the evolution of societies, etc.). Bravo on another great essay…

The Paleolithic diet is one of the dumbest ideas I've encountered in my entire life. Its followers tend to discount vast piles of medical research in favor of tiny experiments that suggest what they hope to be true. This kind of behavior is common for adherents of any fringe diet, but paleo goes a step further. Even its concept is flawed. Some things it discards, such as wheat are barely changed from what our ancesto…

Re: wheat being the same as it ever was:

http://heartscanblog.blogspot.com/2010/05/in-search-of-wheat...

> What we call wheat today is quite different from the wheat of Biblical times. Emmer and einkorn wheat were the original grains harvested from wild growths, then cultivated. Triticum aestivum, the natural hybrid of emmer and goatgrass, also entered the picture, gradually replacing emmer and einkorn.

> The 25,000+ wheat strains now populating the farmlands of the world are considerably different from the bread wheat of Egyptians, different in gluten content, different in gluten structure, different in dozens of other non-gluten proteins, different in carbohydrate content. Modern wheat has been hybridized, introgressed, and back-bred to increase yield, make a shorter stalk in order to hold up to greater seed yield, along with many other characteristics. Much of the genetic work to create modern wheat strains are well-intended to feed the world, as well as to provide patent-protected seeds for agribusiness.

He goes on to try einkorn bread, and doesn't get the same reactions and BG rise that he does with regular bread. Search for 'einkorn' on that blog if you're curious.

Re: The Acceleration of Addictiveness

#175

Post by pg »

drewcrawford wrote: post #165
pg wrote: post #145

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I defined bad as things you don't want to want. E.g. because while they give you initial pleasure, they might give you net less pleasure in the long run. Though that isn't the only reason you might not want to want something. For example, you might dislike the environmental cost, or the thing might conflict with some principle you held. I don't think there's a sharp distinction between "real" addiction and other type…

I don't think the phrase "don't want to want" has any semantic meaning if you try to break it down. Here's a silly contrived example: I am addicted to air. A suffocating person has no air. They are very well aware of their addiction. They wish they did not need air. They "don't want to want" air. The whole of NASA probably wishes humans could get along fine without air. But none of this means that dependance on air i…

I think the reason it seems meaningless not to want to want air is that we're influenced the apparent impossibility of doing without it. But imagine if it actually were possible. E.g. if in some advanced future technology the blood could be oxygenated directly, or our brain states were transferred to some form of computer. Then it's reasonable to imagine someone not wanting to be tied to tedious, corporeal respiration.

I wouldn't call it bad to want air. It doesn't bother me to have to breathe, though to be honest I hadn't thought about it any more than a medieval peasant would have thought about the possibility of flying across the Atlantic. But I'd be annoyed if I were no longer able to fly across the Atlantic, and it's not inconceivable that someone in x years might be annoyed at having to breathe.

Re: The Acceleration of Addictiveness

#176

Post by billswift »

rictic wrote: post #148
kirse wrote: post #55

Maybe PG and I would agree on this, because I do think things are becoming more "addictive", but I don't believe he's addressed the root cause of the problem. I think with new technological advances, etc, things are becoming better at being "false substitutes" -- i.e. masquerading themselves as the authentic ways in which we should best satisfy the natural human desires and instincts we all have within us. Addiction…

There's a word for a substitute that's more compelling than what it copies: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Supernormal_Stimuli

There has been a lot of discussion of superstimuli on Less Wrong, here is an example that ties in fairly well with pg's essay Superstimuli and the Collapse of Western Civilization http://lesswrong.com/lw/h3/superstimuli_and_the_collapse_of_...

Re: The Acceleration of Addictiveness

#177

Post by philwelch »

moultano wrote: post #120
jacoblyles wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 representativ…

And when someone accumulates over 50% of other people's votes, they'd become dictator.

Re: The Acceleration of Addictiveness

#178

Post by philwelch »

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.

The obvious solution is to abolish democracy and set up a specialized class of governors.

Re: The Acceleration of Addictiveness

#179

Post by pg »

patio11 wrote: post #119

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 weake…

In practice I would draw the line at things that are mostly consumed by addicts. So I'd have no problem being a vintner, but I wouldn't want to be a heroin manufacturer, even if it were legal.

There are various edge cases you'd have to treat individually-- e.g. if the median user wasn't an addict but all your revenues came from the addicts. In that case, again, I probably wouldn't want to do it.

Re: The Acceleration of Addictiveness

#180

Post by philwelch »

dejb wrote: post #77
fmora wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think this because there are plenty of vegetarians and non-smokers, and non-drinkers around that people overall don't really find it weird. I myself do eat meat and drink alcohol but it is so little overall in a year that you could almost count me as a vegetarian and as a non-alcohol drinker. I do not smoke at all. Also, I've noticed that people that claim to be vegetarians do it in such a way that they come off sm…

> I've noticed that people that claim to be vegetarians do it in such a way that they come off smug. Unfortunately the act of unapologetically refusing to participate in something that most other people do is often considered smug. This is rather similar to the way atheists are considered smug by many religious people where as agnostics are not.

On the other hand, a lot of those people really are smug. I'm sure you've met the people this is a spoof of:

http://www.theonion.com/articles/area-man-constantly-mention...

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