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The Acceleration of Addictiveness

paulgraham.com

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Re: The Acceleration of Addictiveness

#201

Post by bambax »

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…

Nobody's addicted to air. You need air: just enough to get along. But you don't try to inhale as much as you can; you don't get sick getting too much of it -- although there is enough air around to inflate yourself like a balloon if you were actually addicted to it.

Addiction is when you take too much of something; under 5 cigarettes a day don't give you cancer; 1 glass of wine a day actually makes you healthier. But if you get addicted to tobacco or alcohol (or bad food) these things end up killing you.

Incidentally can modern addictions pg's talking about, really kill you? Can you die from Internet addiction? Porn/TV/Farmville addiction? If they can't kill you can they be called "addictive"...?

Re: The Acceleration of Addictiveness

#202

Post by tezza »

As a possible weakening of the addiction classification, I'd hazard that what may seem as Addiction is actually just Fashion.

Both Addiction and Fashion can be harmful... anorexia(addiction) and size-zero(fashion), but they are different.

Fashions may be all consuming for a long period, but then they change, often swiftly and brutally. A shift in customs (large,lengthy) is not required for a shift in Fashion.

Fashion and addiction can co-exist, and I'll offer an anecdote. The Dance Music scene in 1999.

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Here there was some people with a bona-fide addiction to dance party drugs (real addicts) co-existing with those who indulged in light drug taking in the fashion for dance parties. Dance parties grew to quite an peak and the associated drug intake too. But when the dance music scene burnt out in favour of rock... the fashion drug element receded with it.

Re: The Acceleration of Addictiveness

#203

Post by c23gooey »

bambax wrote: post #201
drewcrawford wrote: post #165

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Nobody's addicted to air. You need air: just enough to get along. But you don't try to inhale as much as you can; you don't get sick getting too much of it -- although there is enough air around to inflate yourself like a balloon if you were actually addicted to it. Addiction is when you take too much of something; under 5 cigarettes a day don't give you cancer; 1 glass of wine a day actually makes you healthier. But…

there are plenty of examples in Korea where people have died from "too much internet"

a very sad example: http://www.sott.net/articles/show/209478-Update-South-Korean...

Re: The Acceleration of Addictiveness

#204

Post by SirWart »

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…

It's strange to me that you use Guns, Germs, and Steel as an example of the virtues of wheat, when Jared Diamond called agriculture "the worst mistake in the history of the human race." (The article itself supports the basic idea that hunter-gathers were individually healthier than farmers: http://www.environnement.ens.fr/perso/claessen/agriculture/m...)

Re: The Acceleration of Addictiveness

#205

Post by HNer »

Mobile phones have always scared me, these are no doubt addictive and possibly very bad for ones health. In the sense that one is putting a transmitter which is outputting up to half a watt right up to your head. As a electrical engineer this was instinctively insane to me. We have long since forgotten the alarm bells which some sounded about this process, I only hope that we don't see a major backlash, like we did with asbestos etc etc.

Re: The Acceleration of Addictiveness

#206

Post by jacquesm »

sendos wrote: post #198
drewcrawford wrote: post #165

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

If you've ever seen someone go 'cold-turkey' then you realise that plenty of additions have reached the status of 'physical need'.

In fact, at a molecular level in the brain almost all addictive substances and activities have a physical component.

I once read a book about addiction, the title was 'from chocolate to heroin' or something to that effect. It listed an absolutely amazing number of substances that you can develop an addiction to. Oxygen wasn't one of those, but I get the point the OP tries to make, which is that there is physical discomfort associated with not being able to satisfy your cravings. Now in the case of Oxygen that 'discomfort' will lead to your rapid expiry, a thing that in the case of most - but not all - substances you can be addicted to will not occur. But there are addictions that will make you very ill indeed if you try to break your dependency bonds too quickly.

Re: The Acceleration of Addictiveness

#207

Post by cousin_it »

Alcohol is a dangerous drug, but I'd rather live in a world with wine than one without.

I don't believe PG has properly thought this statement through. It's extremely, unbelievably selfish. I like wine myself, but alcohol brings so much misery to the world! If I were offered a reliable method to make our Earth a world without alcohol (say, by tweaking the machinery of the human brain ever-so-subtly so that alcohol no longer works), but it entailed killing a random person in the street, I'd do it without a second thought.

Re: The Acceleration of Addictiveness

#208

Post by philwelch »

DenisM wrote: post #158
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…

And what do you do if you're a startup founder at the next Zynga and discover... It depends on what your goals were. :) If you were in it for the money you plow right ahead. If you waned to make the world a better place (and get paid for that) you dump it on your investors and move on to the next thing. Another option is to see if you can put what you learned about compulsive behaviors to better uses - I think the wo…

It's a tough career move, but I think you'd be morally obligated to destroy the thing you created instead of just passively abandoning it. Or at least fix it. Adding automatic crop harvesters/replanters to Farmville would do a lot to heal Zynga's soul. WoW though, you just might have to turn off.

Re: The Acceleration of Addictiveness

#209

Post by barry-cotter »

gaius wrote: post #200
moultano wrote: post #120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Only if the candidate you voted for won. If they didn't they're still the representative of your constituency, but not in any politically meaningful sense your representative.

Something closer to moultano's proposal would be a running referendum on everything, where you can choose to revocably delegate your vote (revocable as in you can remove the delegation, not reverse the vote).

Re: The Acceleration of Addictiveness

#210

Post by jacquesm »

SapphireSun wrote: post #142
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…

Actually, I'll call you on that. I think our collective addiction to air is HORRIBLE. Air oxidizes our tissues, causing aging, shortages prevent us from getting the most physical exertion, etc. If we didn't need air, we'd be much more capable. If someone could figure out a way to free us from this burden, we'd be better off running farther, staying young longer, and much much more.

The chemical reactions that drive your body are best compared to a very slow burn. Oxidisation (burning) needs oxygen, and oxygen needs to be somehow added to keep the 'fire' (your continued existence as an entity) going. Those that no longer consume oxygen (at least, those that are animals) are usually labelled as 'deceased'.

Aging and all the other things you list as a burden are definitely affected by our use of 'air', but without that air you wouldn't live long enough to experience these effects. The positives seem to clearly outweigh the negatives.

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