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The Acceleration of Addictiveness

paulgraham.com

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Re: The Acceleration of Addictiveness

#221

Post by Eliezer »

drewcrawford wrote: post #165
pg wrote: post #145

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I defined bad as things you don't want to want. E.g. because while they give you initial pleasure, they might give you net less pleasure in the long run. Though that isn't the only reason you might not want to want something. For example, you might dislike the environmental cost, or the thing might conflict with some principle you held. I don't think there's a sharp distinction between "real" addiction and other type…

I don't think the phrase "don't want to want" has any semantic meaning if you try to break it down. Here's a silly contrived example: I am addicted to air. A suffocating person has no air. They are very well aware of their addiction. They wish they did not need air. They "don't want to want" air. The whole of NASA probably wishes humans could get along fine without air. But none of this means that dependance on air i…

Consider "want to want" as "would do in the limit of complete knowledge, infinitely fast thought processes and perfect self-control", i.e., reflective equilibrium. If you had perfect self-control then you would choose to breathe, but not to play World of Warcraft.

Re: The Acceleration of Addictiveness

#222

Post by zackattack »

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…

This is exactly what I'm doing now. I used principles that I elaborated on in this post[1] to help guide construction of my new social app, http://www.EndAnts.com, built to combat thinking disorders.

[1] http://www.zacharyburt.com/2010/06/why-games-are-fun-the-psy...

Re: The Acceleration of Addictiveness

#223

Post by cdr »

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…

This is why I don't think I could, ethically, ever work at a manufacturer of Facebook-type games. Probably not even at a MMORPG maker.

Re: The Acceleration of Addictiveness

#224

Post by jacquesm »

ollysb wrote: post #216
jacquesm wrote: post #206

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

There's a difference between a physical response to withdrawal and a physical requirement to live. As far as I'm aware there aren't any addictions that change your physiology to the degree that you have a permanent dependency (would be fascinated to know if there are any though).

Yes, going 'gold turkey' can induce a heart attack which in turn can cause you to die:

http://wiki.answers.com/Q/Does_cold_turkey_withdrawal_from_n...

The 'workaround' is to reduce drug consumption slowly or to use a surrogate (in the case of heroin methadone is usually used).

Re: The Acceleration of Addictiveness

#225

Post by cousin_it »

arethuza wrote: post #217
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…

Who are you to decide what others cannot do? If I want to drink wine occasionally (which I do) or take drugs (which I don't) and I don't cause any harm to others, I don't see why I shouldn't be able to.

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 (fallacy of gray - thinking that all gray is the same color). While making the choice, I don't have a strict deontological prohibition that freedom of any single person must never decrease, all else be damned. If saving one person from extreme harm requires reducing the consumer options of two other persons, I go for it. It's a matter of balance, you have to weigh all the consequences, not just the ones that affect you.

To disagree with my original comment you'd have to believe that a world with alcohol is truly better than a world without. I don't think you believe that. To determine your real opinion, imagine you're given the option of introducing another new addictive substance to the Earth's population. You know in advance that it will spread worldwide, such-and-such percentage of humans will be affected, and such-and-such percentage will lose everything they had and die miserable deaths as a result. To counterbalance that, some other people will have fun using the substance casually. Would you introduce the substance? How is this different from introducing alcohol to a world without it? And how is that different from choosing one possible world over the other?

Re: The Acceleration of Addictiveness

#226

Post by JesseAldridge »

drewcrawford wrote: post #187
pg wrote: post #175

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think the reason it seems meaningless not to want to want air is that we're influenced the apparent impossibility of doing without it. But imagine if it actually were possible. E.g. if in some advanced future technology the blood could be oxygenated directly, or our brain states were transferred to some form of computer. Then it's reasonable to imagine someone not wanting to be tied to tedious, corporeal respiratio…

Maybe I am too tired tonight, but I don't see how this reply addresses the question--why is addiction (perhaps specifically "internet addiction" or whatever you want to call it)--bad enough to warrant "hip flask" and other equivalences with alcohol? My comment about the oxygen was trying to derail the equivalence of addictiveness with badness by a "proof by counterexample". The proof goes like this: If oxygen is addi…

Addiction limits our ability to choose our actions. If faced with a choice between being addicted and not-addicted to something, a rational person will prefer not being addicted. Therefore addiction is bad.

Oxygen is not inherently bad. Dependence on oxygen is bad.

Re: The Acceleration of Addictiveness

#227

Post by eru »

philwelch wrote: post #208
DenisM wrote: post #158

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

It's a tough career move, but I think you'd be morally obligated to destroy the thing you created instead of just passively abandoning it. Or at least fix it. Adding automatic crop harvesters/replanters to Farmville would do a lot to heal Zynga's soul. WoW though, you just might have to turn off.

Just add perma-death to WoW (and some incentives for not just grinding, but risking your virtual life).

But that won't suit the bottom-line of Blizzard.

Re: The Acceleration of Addictiveness

#228

Post by sendos »

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…

I never claimed there was no physical component to addictions or that withdrawal symptoms can't be very bad.

It's just that it is possible to end all existing addictions (alcohol, drugs, Facebook, etc) and still live, but no one can end the "addiction" to oxygen and still live.

That's why it's unreasonable to compare breathing to addiction.

Re: The Acceleration of Addictiveness

#229

Post by arethuza »

cousin_it wrote: post #225
arethuza wrote: post #217

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Who are you to decide what others cannot do? If I want to drink wine occasionally (which I do) or take drugs (which I don't) and I don't cause any harm to others, I don't see why I shouldn't be able to.

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.

Re: The Acceleration of Addictiveness

#230

Post by alisey »

drewcrawford wrote: post #165
pg wrote: post #145

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I defined bad as things you don't want to want. E.g. because while they give you initial pleasure, they might give you net less pleasure in the long run. Though that isn't the only reason you might not want to want something. For example, you might dislike the environmental cost, or the thing might conflict with some principle you held. I don't think there's a sharp distinction between "real" addiction and other type…

I don't think the phrase "don't want to want" has any semantic meaning if you try to break it down. Here's a silly contrived example: I am addicted to air. A suffocating person has no air. They are very well aware of their addiction. They wish they did not need air. They "don't want to want" air. The whole of NASA probably wishes humans could get along fine without air. But none of this means that dependance on air i…

I think I can explain. I want to breath, but I never wanted to stop breathing. I want to play games, but I really wish I didn't want to. Not that I want to become a vegetable with no desires. I want some replacement that feeds my emotions and instincts just like games but adds "energy" instead of taking it away. By energy I mean anything that improves the chance of my genes survival (or genes of my species): health, money, safety, experience, knowledge.
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