141–150 of 171 posts
"like getting really into healing crystals or Peloton." A dude with an apartment like that is going to tell me Peloton's a cliche?
I'm not a cyclist, what does reduced drag by biking in a group have to do with healing crystals?
How do you separate the enriching part from the addictive part? To me the problem is that my laptop and my phone are magical doors that lead to both smart people at HN and some niche subreddits/blogs that really make me think, change my opinion, make my life more interesting... and right next to it there are social media bubbles, overwhelming stream of news and insight porn that I can read/watch for hours anxious tha…
How do you separate the enriching part from the addictive part? To me the problem is that my laptop and my phone are magical doors that lead to both smart people at HN and some niche subreddits/blogs that really make me think, change my opinion, make my life more interesting... and right next to it there are social media bubbles, overwhelming stream of news and insight porn that I can read/watch for hours anxious tha…
The answer is discipline. That’s not the answer people generally like , but it is real and honest. I wake up at the same time every day, have the same routine every day, and have the same commute most days. To an extent, software has made it possible to chuck my own bad habits in the bin and start anew, but it doesn’t have a say in how I spend my time. I read Hacker News and comment here because I like to, but if I n…
How do you separate the enriching part from the addictive part? To me the problem is that my laptop and my phone are magical doors that lead to both smart people at HN and some niche subreddits/blogs that really make me think, change my opinion, make my life more interesting... and right next to it there are social media bubbles, overwhelming stream of news and insight porn that I can read/watch for hours anxious tha…
I'm coming to the conclusion that it may be best to somehow curate and control your own 'feed'. Eg for Youtube, block the suggestions and just rely on RSS from subscribed channels, or bookmark videos recommended elsewhere. What may also work well is to think of a topic that is really interesting, /then/ go searching for it on Youtube. Trouble is the suggestion algorithms also work to wear down discretion, as it seems…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yes. People who think they have better self control over something tend to just have a different level of enjoyment. https://www.vox.com/science-and-health/2016/11/3/13486940/se...
First of all, I completely disagree with this article. Anecdotally, I always had insane amount of will-power compared to my peers/people that I can gauge. From the article: "But if, for example, the change is to eat fewer sweets, and then you find yourself in front of a pile of cookies, researchers say the pile of cookies has already won." I use to do this daily on purpose, just to better my will-power. I bought tons…
How do you separate the enriching part from the addictive part? To me the problem is that my laptop and my phone are magical doors that lead to both smart people at HN and some niche subreddits/blogs that really make me think, change my opinion, make my life more interesting... and right next to it there are social media bubbles, overwhelming stream of news and insight porn that I can read/watch for hours anxious tha…
If you figure out a way to solve this problem, please let me know - as someone who works from home, internet distractions are the biggest thing that stand between me and success. I've heard the advice for writers of "turn of your wifi and just write without distractions". But, coding requires the internet in most cases. Hacker News is simultaneously enriching and distracting for me. Youtube is the source of all knowl…
I second that request and opinion.
Nostalgia isn't anymore what it used to be, but I quite fondly think back to the time where I really dove deep into learning computer science and technology. That was 20 years ago, and already back then I considered myself to be quite active on the internet:
Back then it was still dial-up – well for me ISDN, but still dial-up, with the connection metered by the second. Most "consumers" back then just installed their ISPs software on their machine and actively chose to "go online".
For me it was a little bit different. I had a small Linux box running in the cellar (which also worked as a Fax gateway for my mothers small business (thanks HylaFax)), which was essentially a communications hub. It ran an MTA+IMAP (somehow SuSE made creating a sendmail.cf manageable, on that box I never touched that part directly), a NNTP cache (Leafnode), Squid HTTP proxy. And a little script that would actively pull a set of predefined URLs (news sites) and domain local followup links into the Squid cache.
Dial-up happened on demand whenever a request could not be fulfilled from the local cache. And if a connection to the internet was made, all the caches got refreshed and mail fetched and sent out. The upshot of this was, that while you were working on your computer with an open browser, MUA and Usenet client, you might have the impression, that you were actually "online", but as a matter of fact, actually getting connected to the internet happened only sporadically.
But for this to work, you had to predefine, what you'd be interested in, so that it would be cached. For anything outside of the cache you'd hit by the time-it-took-to-dial-up penalty, which kind of discouraged mindless browsing between work.
So maybe that's a way to tackle this problem: Instead of blocking "harmful" websites, just add some significant delay to loading them and make them load slow.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> But what if the space is only confined to "succumb to bad habits" for some people? No person would be so constrained. The space of possible behaviours is simply too large, so you're arguing a moralistic stance from an unreasonable assumption. Furthermore, free will and determinism are not at odds. Even if someone were fully constrained to act in only a single way, that doesn't entail they would not be morally blame…
> No person would be so constrained. The space of possible behaviours is simply too large, so you're arguing a moralistic stance from an unreasonable assumption. Can you elaborate on why the space is simply too large to make this a possibility? From my observations of people suffering from severe addictions, it seems entirely possible that they have no agency when it comes to combating their addiction. They either ar…
The easy solution here is to simply claim that free will is something you can give up, and once lost it can be near impossible to regain.
I also pretty firmly believe that it's a self fulfilling prophecy. Without the belief in the ultimate power of your own free will, it would seem perfectly obvious that you can be constrained the the point of impotence. I don't judge or disparage people who choose not to believe as I do, for me it is a tool to enable myself to take responsibility and own my outcomes.
When the author mentioned the joy brought on by having that "digital retreat" it reminded me of my cross country motorcycle trip this past March. I rode from Boston to Chicago to Seattle to San Francisco to Utah and Colorado and then back to Boston in 3 weeks. If you do the math, I think it averaged out to like 450 miles a day on a motorcycle. Which if you've ridden you'd know is a shit ton of riding back-to-back. So…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> But what if the space is only confined to "succumb to bad habits" for some people? No person would be so constrained. The space of possible behaviours is simply too large, so you're arguing a moralistic stance from an unreasonable assumption. Furthermore, free will and determinism are not at odds. Even if someone were fully constrained to act in only a single way, that doesn't entail they would not be morally blame…
> No person would be so constrained. The space of possible behaviours is simply too large, so you're arguing a moralistic stance from an unreasonable assumption. Can you elaborate on why the space is simply too large to make this a possibility? From my observations of people suffering from severe addictions, it seems entirely possible that they have no agency when it comes to combating their addiction. They either ar…
I think you'd agree that the space of choices falls on a sort of spectrum, with comatose patients on one side, and the most intelligent or able people on the other. The set of choices available to comatose patients is the empty set, the set of choices available to the other end are enormous. Addiction will carve out a segment somewhere on this spectrum that is not the empty set. If it were the empty set, they would not be able to satisfy their addictive impulses. They're clearly rational enough to be able to figure out how to get their next fix. Agreed so far?
> I don't think GP assumes moral blameworthiness necessarily entails punishment. I think, rather, he assumes that immoral acts are worthy of punishment.
Immoral acts are morally blameworthy. I don't see the difference you're trying to point out.
> That is, if we happen to decide to punish a certain set of actions, we should punish immoral actions. I think this is a fair assumption. The primary goal of morality discussions is to determine which actions we want to strive for and which actions we want to avoid.
Nothing in this paragraph justifies punishment over say, rehabilitation. And that's the point: you simply can't get to retributive justice, or any form of justice, merely from the conclusion that free will exists.
You always require an additional assumption, but I've had countless arguments with people like the OP where they start with the assumption that punishment isn't justifiable, and then work backwards and conclude that therefore we should eliminate the concept of free will as if that solves the problem. It doesn't, it introduces a whole other set of problems, and punishment remains as a viable option given the right assumptions even without free will.
IMO we should fight to consume the modern Web and apps in ways that benefit us and not somebody else. Throwing away the devices is a radical and unrealistic measure for many. If you need to live on a lonely island somewhere in the Pacific for 18 months then by all means, do so. I quite like it in the civilization when I am focused and not constantly distracted though. And that's achievable.
> IMO we should fight to consume the modern Web and apps in ways that benefit us and not somebody else. That's kind of a self-defeating statement. The modern web and it's requiring the end user to blindly run third party code to even get text to show on a webpage is the problem. And 'apps' on locked-down, proprietary computer devices like smart phones only makes it worse. My solution to the problem was to not start.…
Not really self-defeating. I am pretty sure you don't inspect every line of code of every software you run. There are reasonable compromises but we currently don't live in a system that has them (not in the widely used software anyway).
> My solution to the problem was to not start.
Good for you. I will again repeat however that there are many people like me who consume responsibly and make the system work for us, not we for it.