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The Acceleration of Addictiveness

paulgraham.com

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Re: The Acceleration of Addictiveness

#231

Post by orionlogic »

Most of the time we don't see surfing as pure procrastination that's why after spending too many hours we don't feel guilty. We are expecting the indirect returns of reading this or that, in the back of our minds.

Actually, iPhone is really useful location & time specific information gathering device. If you dont put your tweet,rss or any push notification apps (facebook included), than it realy enhance the way of life. I found it several times useful when i am looking for a book at bookstore and get very quick facts about the book.

The real dangerous device is iPad. From the day i have, i could not put it away. Its really content consuming device. My nights in my bed are no longer have the serenity of reading books but frenzy of consuming content channels.

Sometimes Gladwell's words keep coming to me: clearing big spaces of time. http://www.cbsnews.com/video/watch/?id=6058607n

Re: The Acceleration of Addictiveness

#232

Post by cousin_it »

arethuza wrote: post #229
cousin_it wrote: post #225

Earlier quoted context omitted.

By the conditions of PG's dilemma, I'm offered the power to choose between two possible worlds, nothing more, nothing less. If I could remove alcoholism without removing casual wine consumption, of course that would be preferable, but this choice isn't on the menu of the thought experiment. Any world I choose will make some people better off and other people worse off (that's inevitable), but not in equal degrees (fa…

I do believe that a world where people have the right to choose whether to consume alcohol (or consume drugs) is better than a world where these decisions are made for them.

You're not talking about the whole world, only one aspect of it. Maybe you meant to say "all else equal", but all else is not equal: people are suffering because of alcohol that wouldn't have suffered without it. Are you saying that's unimportant compared with people's freedom to consume wine? Are you unwilling to trade freedom for happiness on principle, no matter how many units of happiness people get for relinquishing one unit of freedom? Or is there a calculation behind your reasoning?

Re: The Acceleration of Addictiveness

#233

Post by jimbokun »

gwern wrote: post #194
jimbokun wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"(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).

I thought exactly of that, too!

Just didn't get around to working it into my comment. :)

I remember reading that, wondering who is today's equivalent of the Victorians. (The Victorians, of course, were the historical equivalent of the Victorians.)

Re: The Acceleration of Addictiveness

#234

Post by gaius »

barry-cotter wrote: post #209
gaius wrote: post #200

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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).

But even an MP I didn't vote for, I can still write to, or show up at their constituents meeting or whatever. They're still going to pay attention, a) they don't know how I voted anyway and b) they want my vote next time!

Re: The Acceleration of Addictiveness

#235

Post by kluge »

jimbokun wrote: post #20
sharpn wrote: post #12

I agree with the main thrust of this essay, but there are nuances & counter-examples that make me more optimistic: For example, a nuance: More people are giving up television, magazines & newspapers than ever before - perhaps we (as humans) have a finite need of/tolerance for distractions, and are satisfying this need/reaching this tolerance more efficiently via the internet now? A counter-example (on the increase in…

"More people are giving up television, magazines & newspapers than ever before" In many of the discussions about people giving up "TV," it turned out that many just turned off their cable and consumed video through Hulu, Netflix and other online sources. So, put another way, do you think even people who have given up TV, etc. have, on average, actually reduced their total amount of time consuming content of one form…

>In many of the discussions about people giving up "TV," it turned out that many just turned off their cable and consumed video through Hulu, Netflix and other online sources.

So you mean they've been superseded by more addictive technologies? :)

Re: The Acceleration of Addictiveness

#236

Post by arethuza »

cousin_it wrote: post #232
arethuza wrote: post #229

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I do believe that a world where people have the right to choose whether to consume alcohol (or consume drugs) is better than a world where these decisions are made for them.

You're not talking about the whole world, only one aspect of it. Maybe you meant to say "all else equal", but all else is not equal: people are suffering because of alcohol that wouldn't have suffered without it. Are you saying that's unimportant compared with people's freedom to consume wine? Are you unwilling to trade freedom for happiness on principle, no matter how many units of happiness people get for relinquis…

"Are you unwilling to trade freedom for happiness"

For the claim of happiness promised by authoritarian control - I would certainly not be happy to make such a choice.

Re: The Acceleration of Addictiveness

#237

Post by [deleted] »

arethuza wrote: post #236
cousin_it wrote: post #232

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're not talking about the whole world, only one aspect of it. Maybe you meant to say "all else equal", but all else is not equal: people are suffering because of alcohol that wouldn't have suffered without it. Are you saying that's unimportant compared with people's freedom to consume wine? Are you unwilling to trade freedom for happiness on principle, no matter how many units of happiness people get for relinquis…

"Are you unwilling to trade freedom for happiness" For the claim of happiness promised by authoritarian control - I would certainly not be happy to make such a choice.

[deleted]

Re: The Acceleration of Addictiveness

#238

Post by cabalamat »

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…

> I think the world would be better off if people were compulsive about maintaining good finances, hygiene, business schedule etc. Better yet, compulsively making sure they did the best they could for their family.

I imagine they would, but that sounds like a hard problem to me. I suspect it's AI-complete; the only way to do it would be for post-singularity AI to control the destiny of the human species.

I've never seen the attraction of grind-y games like WoW or Farmville. (Caveat: I've never played farmville; I have played WoW and found it pointless). Perhaps games could be created that taught people useful skills, e.g. something like Guitar Hero that teaches you to play an instrument.

Re: The Acceleration of Addictiveness

#239

Post by cabalamat »

jacquesm wrote: post #206
sendos wrote: post #198

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

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

Surely you could remove the "almost" from this sentence and it still be right. ALL deliberate behaviours are caused by brain activity, and therefore have physical components because the brain is a physical object.

Re: The Acceleration of Addictiveness

#240

Post by cabalamat »

cousin_it wrote: post #207

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…

> It's extremely, unbelievably selfish. I like wine myself, but alcohol brings so much misery to the world!

And so much happiness! I'm more of a beer man myself, but drinking alcohol in good company is something millions (billions?) of people get pleasure out of. Only a small proportion of alcohol users harm themselves or others through it.

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