> I think we all feel that we occasionally get some beneficial information from them. I know I do, and even this very post I feel has some benefit. But we also see it as time wasting because the majority of the time, that's what it is.When a chess engine searches a billion of notes to find the best one, it wastes time, because the next move of the opponent will make the most of found nodes as unneeded. /s
If I read random articles and one of ten is interesting for me, it doesn't mean that I wasted my time reading nine others. (Though I do not read random articles, I read headlines first, I click may be on one of 20, and then I do not read every article through.)
Yeah, I know about addictive behavior in general and the gambling addiction in particular. But we shouldn't believe to an opinion that an addiction is inherently bad. It doesn't. If it was bad, it would be wiped out by an evolution. People just talk more about negative consequences of an addictive behavior, while positive consequences they tend to explain by a "dedication" or something like that. When some socially awkward nerd hiding from people in his basement did something great, no one is going to paint this story in a way that makes his awkwardness to be the reason of his achievement. People will appoint something else to a role of a cause, something that is considered "good", like his skills, brains, dedication, and so on. "Good" outcomes we like to explain by "good" reasons, while "bad" outcomes we like to explain by "bad" reasons.
Addictive behavior supports us when we search for something valuable in a vain. It doesn't mean that addictive behavior is an inherently good thing. (This last sentence doesn't need a justification, so I'll skip it, to not talk about completely obvious things)
So we have: addictive behavior is neither inherently good, nor inherently bad, it just is. But what the collective unconscious does next? It says "addictive behavior is fun, therefore it must be avoided". But it is bullshit. As addictive behavior is neither inherently good nor bad, so fun is neither inherently good nor bad.
The very idea that we must consciously drive ourselves through the life, to think rationally and do not allow self to relax is a bad idea. We have no mental capacity to predict our life good enough. We are doomed to make choices that turns bad in a hindsight. So when we allow our mind to wander a little, to do some activity that have no rational justification, we are preparing ourselves to unexpected turns. We cannot know what information or skills will come useful for us. We do not know how different learned things interacts in our mind (does learning chess makes me a better coder or vice versa?) Therefore a "rational" behavior rejecting fun just rejects the evolutionary tools we have to keep ourselves adapted to a changing environment. We are rejecting our intuition (with its evolutionary roots and deep neural nets to see patterns), that uses "fun" to say what it predicts would be better for us.
From other hand, just following fun is worse than rejecting it entirely. So a lot of people choose an easy way, they reject fun, because it is a guaranteed one step from the worst strategy. But I personally see it as a weakness: people are afraid of themselves, and doesn't dare to make the next step, because it may become a step back.
Or, if we stop listening for what people say, and look at what they do, we'll see that they are exploiting a great strategy. They are using an idea that addictive behavior is bad to restrict it, but nevertheless allow themselves some fun of reading HN and commenting. =)