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The Poison We Pick

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Re: The Poison We Pick

#201

Post by hnzix »

danieltillett wrote: post #187
majormajor wrote: post #155

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It definitely seems like a mix. I've been addicted (to the point of losing thousands and thousands) to gambling in the past - looking for a way out, something to change things financially - but alcohol or narcotic drugs did nothing for me. But I knew other people in the same situation whose relief came - more destructively, more difficult to recover from - from the drugs.

I have to say I find addiction to gambling quite fascinating as I get absolutely no pleasure from gambling. The thinking a gambler must have is so different to my thinking that it is impossible for me to imagine what they are thinking. My observations from Mars of people at casinos gambling is nobody seems to be having a good time there.

I loathe slot machines and casinos, but recently started trading crypto. I feel a wonderful rush when I take in profits, and a wrench when I take losses. Oh dear, I'm gambling and enjoying it.

Re: The Poison We Pick

#202

Post by andrewjl »

emiliobumachar wrote: post #146
andrewjl wrote: post #138

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I find the rat park experiment intriguing, but have there been any further studies or attempts to replicate the results?

From http://slatestarcodex.com/2017/10/25/against-rat-park/ , slightly paraphrased to disambiguate the references. I do highly recommend this blog post if you're interested in the topic. "Two studies (1, 2) tried and failed to replicate the results. Another two (3, 4) tried and mostly succeeded. There’s some concern that the rat strain involved might have various substrains that the different experiments didn’t contr…

Exactly what I was looking for, thanks!

Re: The Poison We Pick

#204

Post by [deleted] »

gph wrote: post #184
jes5199 wrote: post #172

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Malthus was wrong: access to birth control correlates with wealth

Malthus was temporarily wrong at best. You are taking an extremely narrow slice of human history and extrapolating the future from it. Without a controlling global enforcement of birth control (none currently exists and undoubtedly won't any time soon), then those who don't use birth control (whether driven through cultural or biological means) will have more fecundity and quickly outbreed and replace those that do.…

[deleted]

Re: The Poison We Pick

#205

Post by lostlogin »

foxbarrington wrote: post #94
noahdesu wrote: post #48

The first thing I did when I opened this article was search for "rat", and was happy to see it there. From the comments I saw I had a hunch it might be: I recently finished a really powerful chapter in the book "Chasing the Scream: The First and Last Days of the War on Drugs" which describes an experiment involving rats that ostensibly shows that addiction isn't about the chemical, but rather it's about the environme…

In addition to rat park[0], there's also been an amazing study wrt to Viet Nam vets[1]. Only 5% of soldiers relapsed to heroin use in the first year of returning home. Compared to a traditional 90% relapse rate when addicts treated in the US return to their homes. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rat_Park [1] https://www.npr.org/sections/health-shots/2015/01/05/3718949...

Would be intersting to see relapse rates for those doing another tour.

Re: The Poison We Pick

#206

Post by pdonis »

panarky wrote: post #135
sgentle wrote: post #120

Rather than place the blame on a lack of structure, community or spirituality, I see this as just a natural consequence of a system optimised at every turn for economic output. I've heard a lot about a singularity doomsday scenario where a paperclip-maximising AI realises people are much less useful as paperclip constructors than they are as paperclip ingredients. Surely it can't be so hard to see that the productivi…

The global economy already produces enough for every man, woman and child. The surplus increases every year. Every year, fewer and fewer people need to work full-time in mind-numbingly boring jobs to produce what the population needs. So why do we keep up the fiction that everyone needs to waste their lives doing unnecessary work? It's time to imagine how we could achieve a post-work society where more people could r…

I think you are drastically underestimating the amount of necessary work required to keep our civilization running. It's not just a matter of producing necessities--food, clothing, and shelter. The tools needed for people to "realize their potential" take work too. For example, the medium through which we are having this conversation, which is the most potent tool ever invented to help people realize their potential, took a lot of work to build and takes a lot of work to maintain.

Re: The Poison We Pick

#207

Post by musage »

cptskippy wrote: post #107
jeffreyrogers wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This viewpoint is part of the problem the person you're replying to was describing. That we are freer than ever to choose our own values, but people are simultaneously finding less meaning in life. That with the erosion of constraints, religion, and social roles people have to create their own substitutes for these things. It's the idea of Nietzsche's Übermensch.

People have always been free to choose their own values and just as always, when your values are wildly outside or in direct conflict with others you have to deal with the fall out. You may choose to go along with the herd even if you don't agree 100% but that's your choice and always has been. The reality is that most people share a common core set of values and morality because we've all independently concluded tha…

> modern communication enables us to be constantly aware of the morals and values of other people and communities

You can see this not working even on HN. Mass surveillance, Chinese autocracy, many other things to do with obedience to sociopaths, regularly are filled to the brim with "arguments" about what "the average" or "most" people in country X or the world want, and they're rarely even followed by "and I agree with them because Y". Some seem to ascribe increased objectivity to that, and dismiss "personal opinions" in favor of their supposed aggregate objective ones. Lots of pointers to supposed persons, preciously few persons.

Re: The Poison We Pick

#208

Post by pdonis »

jimbokun wrote: post #92
dnomad wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Only a very disingenuous reading of history would lead to the conclusion that our society is less "objective" than the past. What has been lost is widespread confidence and faith in those institutions that previously served as the pillars of society -- the church, the king and the nobility. Now people are completely on their own for their worldview. What's become abundantly clear is that people are very, very bad at…

"A life wasted playing video games for 12 hours a day still beats one wasted slaving away for 12 hours a day on the farm." This is not at all self evident, can you back up this statement? "orders of magnitude" So people living today are literally 100x or 1000x happier than a century ago? Again, do you have any basis for this claim? How do you measure it?

> So people living today are literally 100x or 1000x happier than a century ago? Again, do you have any basis for this claim? How do you measure it?

You can't put an exact number to it, but you could argue that in some ways people living today are infinitely more fortunate than people living a century ago. I recently got in an airplane and flew 700 miles in two hours to visit my mother. The richest person in the world a century ago did not have that option. That's just one of many, many examples.

We could argue about whether having all these new options makes people "happier". But more options means more people are able to do more things, which gives more people more ways to figure out how to be happy. Another example of options that the richest person in the world did not have a century ago is this very conversation. Presumably we are both getting some satisfaction out of it, or we wouldn't be here at HN. Nobody living a century ago had any such option. Multiply that by all of the myriad things that we have available that people then did not. That huge expansion of possibilities is basically what the grandparent is talking about.

Re: The Poison We Pick

#209

Post by pdonis »

chrisgd wrote: post #54

I think almost all problems we discuss every day: political divide, millennial job prospects, student loan debt, drug crises can be traced to wealth inequality. At it's core, all these problems evolve from unfettered capitalistic pursuits. The middle man taking their cut of student loans and having no means to resolve that debt through bakruptcy. No growth jobs that offer no safety net. For profit schools, prisons an…

> I think almost all problems we discuss every day: political divide, millennial job prospects, student loan debt, drug crises can be traced to wealth inequality.

I would put one caveat on this: it's due to wealth inequality that doesn't come from having created more wealth. All of the examples are of people not creating wealth, but accumulating it by transferring it from other people to themselves. That kind of wealth inequality is bad not because wealth inequality is bad in itself, but because our society as a whole needs people to be creating wealth in order to continue to exist; so if all of the smart, talented people find they can get more wealth by transferring it from others instead of creating it, our society will eventually collapse.

I think Pg had an essay about this a while back.

Re: The Poison We Pick

#210

Post by jes5199 »

gph wrote: post #184
jes5199 wrote: post #172

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Malthus was wrong: access to birth control correlates with wealth

Malthus was temporarily wrong at best. You are taking an extremely narrow slice of human history and extrapolating the future from it. Without a controlling global enforcement of birth control (none currently exists and undoubtedly won't any time soon), then those who don't use birth control (whether driven through cultural or biological means) will have more fecundity and quickly outbreed and replace those that do.…

this is the same as the argument that gay people will die out because they don't reproduce
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