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Engineered Addictions

masonyarbrough.substack.com

361–370 of 467 posts

Re: Engineered Addictions

#361

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Then don't make a company with shares. This is like complaining in a tennis court that it's better to play football. Anybody who makes his business a company with shares will be beholden to shareholders, even if he's the only shareholder. There are plenty of venues for any activity, which isn't structured in this way. 1. Nobody forces you to use a smart phone. 2. Nobody forces you to have social media or use it. 3. N…

1 and 2 are simply false

#1, I’m forced to file taxes and use 2FA to log in to do so.

#2, I have to use SM for marketing.

To avoid these I’d need to basically be a homeless vagrant.

Re: Engineered Addictions

#362
post #338

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No cell phone at all, or do you carry a feature phone?

No cell phone at all as I do not wish to have my location sold, rely on proprietary tech, or to be reachable at all times. I also use cash exclusively IRL so my digital footprint away from home is virtually zero. I am happiest being intentional and present in whatever I am doing. I am reachable from my desktop by email, matrix, or VoIP SMS, when I am at my desk and have been able to run a profitable security research…

Which mechanical watch?

Re: Engineered Addictions

#363

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I suppose you could try to make a social media platform without dark patterns and charge a monthly fee for it, but how many people would pay for it? In 2022, mastodon.social was provisioned at a cost of 0.6EUR/year/user for 191k users [1]. This price is payable even by many people in poor countries. People would pay for something like this same as they pay for other stuff, assuming it was well designed and gave use…

The server costs would be tiny compared to moderation, legal, and R&D.

Seems like only solution for social media is to make it as open-source, tax-funded public service. No-engagement/gamification, no-ads, no-spyware.

Re: Engineered Addictions

#364
I was talking with a friend who is a camp counselor for a small summer camp the other day and they said that 4 of the 35 or so kids at the camp left because they couldn’t be away from their devices.

This power intermittent reinforcement in the on-ramp of addiction is scary powerful.

Do we have any ways to innoculate ourselves and the future generations against it?

The author poses changing the game which is support. I guess the trendy “dopamine fast” is a tool against this or weekly screen free time. Maybe more education on intermittent reinforcement or a D.A.R.E-like program for apps (a this one is a little tongue-in-cheek, but not really).

Re: Engineered Addictions

#365

Nope. There's no addiction involved here. Engineers should know better than to mis-use terminology outside of it's context. > We don’t all have ADHD. We have an addiction. Growing up, I barely knew a world without social media, and neither did my friends. We were the guinea pigs for Silicon Valley's great dopamine experiment, and now we’re waking up with the side effects. Saying it's a "dopamine experiment" is just a…

Behavioral addiction is real and more similar to substance addiction than you might think (source: https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC2607329/ )

And they're much more different than you might think. Lets be clear. Drug addiction is mediated either directly through effecting incentive salience via dopaminergic agonism, or, indirectly through glutamergic agonism as reward eventually training incentive salience. There's no need to actually enjoy the drugs, they just directly effect the reward prediction system and alter wanting and so behavior.

Very clear causation. Very clearly outside of human volition.

Now you have screens and sounds. Very clearly not effecting incentive salience directly. Very clearly not effecting glutamergic agonism (in the shell of the nucleus accumbens) directly. The only mechanism of action would be through the person actually finding the experience enjoyable repeatedly and learning to anticipate this real enjoyment. Just normal human experience. No more 'addictive' and damaging to ones life than the random interval operant conditioning of recreational fishing, and probably much less expensive.

Very abstract causation with a very weak effect. Very clearly not ouside of human volition.

And, btw, gambling disorder was grandfathered in (there are no non-substance addictions in the DSM or ICD as your article highlights at the start). Repeated calls for, and instantiations of, working groups in the DSM and ICD have covered these 'media addictions' and found the medical support wanting over and over the last 20 years. Much like uncategorizable gambling disorder would be rejected if considered these days with modern medical standards and understandings. Most of the support for these concepts come from commercial groups that profit off "treatments". It's very similar to the "gay conversion camps" model in terms of political advocacy without scientific support. But the memes for "dopamine screens" and the like have raged like wildfire among the uninformed which gives such evil for-profit groups a seeming gleen of legitimacy they definitely do not have.

If it was not clear from me addresing the points of the linked paper above, I did read the Philosophical Transactions B paper (a very low tier journal for any biology subject). In this review paper they collect a random assortment of other studies to try to say gambling disorder people's brains are similar to drug addicted people. If you've read it (then I don't know why you linked it) but you'd know they come away with no solid conclusions beyond one: gambling disorder people often have drug problems too. This does not support your argument in this context.

I recommend you check out some of the lay review articles coming out of Kent Berridge's lab: https://sites.lsa.umich.edu/berridge-lab/publications/

Re: Engineered Addictions

#367

I think the problem is more fundamental than this: When your monetization model is tied to usage, then of course you will try to maximize usage, rather than user benefit. It can't be any other way if your reward function is tied to product usage. Contrast with a car: Their monetization model does not depend on how much I drive it - as long as I find it useful enough to buy. Or a gym, where it actually runs in reverse…

I think you are correct, the root problem is that the targeted advertisement model is far more profitable than any paid model, thus outcompeting every sustainable alternative. I personally think the solution is simple, yet fairly draconian and therefore hard to implement due to the inevitable political backlash: ban all targeted advertising. You can still run ads on digital platforms, but the outcome of the heuristic…

Whilst thoroughly supporting the ban hammer on most forms of advertising, I'm pragmatic enough to understand multiple strategies are required.

We need to educate friends and family about ads, help them understand the harms, give them tools to avoid them.

No one should be browsing the internet without an ad blocker in 2025, certainly no one we love.

Re: Engineered Addictions

#369

Earlier quoted context omitted.

1 and 2 are simply false

#1, I’m forced to file taxes and use 2FA to log in to do so. #2, I have to use SM for marketing. To avoid these I’d need to basically be a homeless vagrant.

There are billions of people in the world who don't need to market on social media to survive. Are you genetically different from them?

Re: Engineered Addictions

#370
post #161

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Common good: humans, according to systems theory, have the same needs and there's a finite set. We can map them & then design systems so as to satisfice all of them.

One of humans' needs is for status which is by definition zero sum. Same with mating. If anything those two are probably the most important needs so it's not possible to build such a system.

Prove a need for status before building systems of oppression to meet it.
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