For those who want more snacks and drugs, here's the preprint of the actual article: https://www.biorxiv.org/content/early/2018/05/17/324665.full...
Information is like snacks, money, and drugs to the brain
11–20 of 128 posts
Re: Information is like snacks, money, and drugs to the brain
#12This can easily be channeled into a positive. If you are consuming information that has value I don't see the problem. I binge a little on engineering videos each week that add to my personal and professional life. I love absorbing new information. It is a far cry from going down youtube holes of reality tv highlights, celebrity news, or other modes of cultural decay.
Honestly, sometimes I worry that watching engineering videos online is worse than the vacuous shit that normal people watch.
I go through phases, things like aircraft, off grid living, hydropower, welding, CNC, machining, woodworking, electronics, gardening, farming, hydroponics.
Few of those are relevant to my day job or even my current living arrangements. But when I get really interested in a subject I'll devour every shred of information I can find on it.
The problem is, I doubt I'd get distracted in the middle of the working day thinking about Love Island, not so for the more "useful" things I've read and watched.
Re: Information is like snacks, money, and drugs to the brain
#13For all but the last instant of our cultural evolution, humans have been information starved. In one generation we have become a culture that has instant access to unbounded quantities‡. In the same way, over the last century or so, we became a species with ample access to calories‡. With foods containing the evolutionary markers of high calorific content (i.e. sugars, carbs and fats) being the cheapest. It doesn't s…
also compounding this abundance are the ways social media/entertainment (games) basically takes the model of gambling and juices it to insane levels
“diseases of abundance”
Re: Information is like snacks, money, and drugs to the brain
#14In terms of neural networks that doesn't seem so strange. Neural networks can "overfit" and behave like a hash table instead of generalizing. One method of "regularization" is putting in a score that represents network complexity, information content, etc. and then adding it against the reward function.
So, what does that mean in terms of a user manual for human brains? We should discount low information dense sources ? or sources that are a long way off in graph terms?
Well, sugary drinks/other crap, healthy food and food in general, has a label with their nutritional facts. Maybe we will benefit from a a similar label next to every piece of info we are going to consume.
“This newspaper is high in doubtful info and low in facts” probably a third party should label all the content
Re: Information is like snacks, money, and drugs to the brain
#15Is it just me, or is "money" the odd one out here?
Snacks and drugs both have direct, obvious 'value' to the body - food is about the simplest evolutionary case imaginable, and a host of animals will get drunk given the chance. And it's easy to make a case for 'information' as something any reinforcement learner will value and seek out, since it's essentially a prerequisite for all other learning and decision-making.
Money, though, is exclusively a proxy for some other future benefit, and lots of other examples imply we haven't made it into a strong first-order feedback loop. Money v happiness studies both show weak happiness benefits from money (once you're not in dire need), and find that "how you spend it" strongly mediates the effects. Slot machine design is devoted to the idea of intermittent reinforcement and works very hard to create non-monetary, directly limbic rewards to keep players engaged.
Given all that, "food, drugs, and info" actually sounds like a much more natural grouping to me than "food, drugs, and money". I don't know of any research here, though. Could you take a well-known study like prisoner's dilemma or the ultimatum game and get different results with non-monetary rewards, or prime people by discussing certain things they could do with the money?
Re: Information is like snacks, money, and drugs to the brain
#16I consider my information addiction as one of the top 2 personal problems that are holding me back in my life.
The only thing that works for me every once in a while is going cold turkey and blocking off as many websites as I can in my hosts file.
I'm surprised there isn't a serious accessible product that helps people manage this addiction, because unlike drugs you can't realistically not use the internet ever again and nowadays it's SO easy to go down the rabbit hole even from innocent and serious sites.
Every once in a while I humor myself with a building such a product, but I really don't know what features would work. Any suggestions?
Re: Information is like snacks, money, and drugs to the brain
#17Earlier quoted context omitted.
So, what does that mean in terms of a user manual for human brains? We should discount low information dense sources ? or sources that are a long way off in graph terms?
Well, sugary drinks/other crap, healthy food and food in general, has a label with their nutritional facts. Maybe we will benefit from a a similar label next to every piece of info we are going to consume. “This newspaper is high in doubtful info and low in facts” probably a third party should label all the content
From an information theory viewpoint, information means something in particular. For instance a black hole event horizon has the highest area information density in the universe but it like a frame of television static.
In particular, once you are exposed to information it ceases to be information anymore.
I think the behavior of "scanning" where you reload the front page of Hacker News or Google News or look at the newspaper over and over again hoping to get something new is particularly pernicious. You are exposing your brain to "information" in once sense but not real information in the sense of learning.
Contrast a compulsive reading habit, where you are getting new information that you need to incorporate into long term memory as opposed to a compulsive video game habit for something like League of Legends or Advance Wars where you are recombining the same elements over and over again. I found that switching from the first to the second helped me feel less anxious, but I still read plenty about topics like 1970-era mainframe transaction processing or whatever I am into.
Re: Information is like snacks, money, and drugs to the brain
#18I consider my information addiction as one of the top 2 personal problems that are holding me back in my life. The only thing that works for me every once in a while is going cold turkey and blocking off as many websites as I can in my hosts file. I'm surprised there isn't a serious accessible product that helps people manage this addiction, because unlike drugs you can't realistically not use the internet ever again…
How would you decide what to block? Wikipedia or Stack Overflow can be extremely useful but you can waste time there as easily as on Facebook, Twitter or Hacker News.
Re: Information is like snacks, money, and drugs to the brain
#19Is it just me, or is "money" the odd one out here? Snacks and drugs both have direct, obvious 'value' to the body - food is about the simplest evolutionary case imaginable, and a host of animals will get drunk given the chance. And it's easy to make a case for 'information' as something any reinforcement learner will value and seek out, since it's essentially a prerequisite for all other learning and decision-making.…
One could think of money as a proxy for power and prestige. I think for social animals "Food, Drugs, Status" is a pretty decent list of priorities. Honestly, drugs looks like the odd one out there.
Re: Information is like snacks, money, and drugs to the brain
#20This can easily be channeled into a positive. If you are consuming information that has value I don't see the problem. I binge a little on engineering videos each week that add to my personal and professional life. I love absorbing new information. It is a far cry from going down youtube holes of reality tv highlights, celebrity news, or other modes of cultural decay.
Honestly, sometimes I worry that watching engineering videos online is worse than the vacuous shit that normal people watch. I go through phases, things like aircraft, off grid living, hydropower, welding, CNC, machining, woodworking, electronics, gardening, farming, hydroponics. Few of those are relevant to my day job or even my current living arrangements. But when I get really interested in a subject I'll devour e…
I was always interested in electrical engineering and after a couple years of watching stuff on youtube and trying it out myself, all from a leisure time perspective, it turned out I became qualified enough to do it professionally. I've been doing firmware forever and now I design the gadgets too. It has been very valuable.