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The Acceleration of Addictiveness

paulgraham.com

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Re: The Acceleration of Addictiveness

#191

Post by gwern »

dejb wrote: post #184
dedward wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yup... (not that there aren't plenty of smug people to go around....) I quit drinking for quite a long time - and in some situations it was impossible for me NOT to be rude. I very politely said "Nope, just a diet coke thanks!" when first asked for a drink.... then they'd keep pushing and pushing...... I'd drop a polite "Sorry man, I don't drink...".... no smug at all. It's after that that I might pull some attitude,…

You do realize that your friends are possibly becoming increasingly drunk as they repeatedly ask you if you want a drink.

Don't try to pin that on devil drink.

Re: The Acceleration of Addictiveness

#192

Post by pg »

drewcrawford wrote: post #187
pg wrote: post #175

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 respiratio…

Maybe I am too tired tonight, but I don't see how this reply addresses the question--why is addiction (perhaps specifically "internet addiction" or whatever you want to call it)--bad enough to warrant "hip flask" and other equivalences with alcohol? My comment about the oxygen was trying to derail the equivalence of addictiveness with badness by a "proof by counterexample". The proof goes like this: If oxygen is addi…

We may be talking past one another. Perhaps it would help if you picked out a sentence or passage from the essay that seems false.

Re: The Acceleration of Addictiveness

#193

Post by gwern »

DenisM wrote: post #139
hugh3 wrote: post #112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 sensi…

You can always ween yourself off heroin by checking into rehab - you just need to have the will to do that one step. And I suggest that the will comes from knowing what you seek in life, rather than knowing what you wish to avoid. EDIT: I see what you mean now, you were focusing on "same is true for any other addiction". I was mostly talking about "digital drugs" like facebook and the like that pg is worried about, r…

It's a good thing you don't want to argue about heroin, because you're pretty wrong:

> You can always ween yourself off heroin by checking into rehab - you just need to have the will to do that one step.

Rehab success rates are so abysmal that most will not even publish their results; Googling, I see generic rehab rates of 2-20%, and heroin is one of the harder drugs to quit. Apparently half or fewer of addicts will even finish rehab (http://ezinearticles.com/?Drug-Rehab-Success-Rates&id=14...), much less actually become drug-free.

Re: The Acceleration of Addictiveness

#194

Post by gwern »

jimbokun wrote: post #15
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…

"(these include immediate things that affect the body, but also the evolution of societies, etc.)" This is really much of the appeal of Christianity, and other forms of culture that have survived some test of time. I say this in response to pg's foot note: "Unless we mass produce social customs. I suspect the recent resurgence of evangelical Christianity in the US is partly a reaction to drugs." Not just drugs, but a…

> Not just drugs, but all the different things pg cites as addictive. Plugging in to older value systems is one way of putting a brake on those impulses. This, of course, is true of many other religious and cultural systems that have stood the test of time, not just Christianity.

I hope I was not the only one who instantly thought of Neal Stephenson's _The Diamond Age_ and its phyles (especially the Victorians).

Re: The Acceleration of Addictiveness

#195

Post by gwern »

guelo wrote: post #156
abstractbill wrote: post #56

Technological progress means making things do more of what we want. There are two reasonably distinct categories of things I want. I don't have good names for them, so I'll just label them A and B: A is things like: Artificial organs, cheap clean energy, cheap clean and fast transportation, robot house-cleaners, faster-and-faster computers. B covers things like: When I was quitting smoking, I wanted more alcohol and…

Artificial organs, cheap clean energy, cheap clean and fast transportation, robot house-cleaners, faster-and-faster computers. Rich people problems

What's your point?

I could characterize nutritionally-void foodstuffs like coffee or tea, or expensive entertainment like TV or the Internet, as 'rich people stuff' too. If you're in the West, you're 'rich people'.

Re: The Acceleration of Addictiveness

#196

Post by [deleted] »

pg wrote: post #192
drewcrawford wrote: post #187

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maybe I am too tired tonight, but I don't see how this reply addresses the question--why is addiction (perhaps specifically "internet addiction" or whatever you want to call it)--bad enough to warrant "hip flask" and other equivalences with alcohol? My comment about the oxygen was trying to derail the equivalence of addictiveness with badness by a "proof by counterexample". The proof goes like this: If oxygen is addi…

We may be talking past one another. Perhaps it would help if you picked out a sentence or passage from the essay that seems false.

[deleted]

Re: The Acceleration of Addictiveness

#198

Post by sendos »

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…

The analogy to breathing is a bad one, because breathing air is not an addiction, it is a physical need. If you stop breathing, you die. If you stop reading HN or Reddit or Facebook, you don't die.

So, saying that an addiction is about things you "don't want to want" makes sense if you add the caveat that it applies to things you don't need to survive as a human being.

EDIT: I should add that another way in which the breathing analogy fails is that for addictions, usually we refer to things that you do so much that it adversely impacts your everyday life in the sense it puts you in danger losing your job, your spouse, your friends, etc, or even if you don't lose them, you reduce your productivity and thus your overall chance at success in life. Even though we need to breathe every second, no one has lost their job or friends because they "breathed too much".

Re: The Acceleration of Addictiveness

#199

Post by astrofinch »

"You can probably take it as a rule of thumb from now on that if people don't think you're weird, you're living badly."

Based on available statistics, middle schoolers and high schoolers spend 4-5 hours a day watching TV. But in middle school and high school, I heard my classmates discussing television fairly infrequently, presumably because TV is not a very cool subject to discuss. So the guy who didn't watch any TV (me) didn't seem weird--for that reason, at least.

Re: The Acceleration of Addictiveness

#200

Post by gaius »

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…

But that is how it works. I delegate my vote to my MP, and they vote on my behalf in Parliament.
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