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Information is like snacks, money, and drugs to the brain

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Re: Information is like snacks, money, and drugs to the brain

#41

Post by nostrademons »

soVeryTired wrote: post #19
Bartweiss wrote: post #15

Is 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.

Drugs is the direct medium. You can think of food, info, and status as things that we have evolved to desire, because they usually correlate highly with survival. The mechanism through which we desire them is neurotransmitters in the brain; drugs are chemicals which just happen to mimic the action of those neurotransmitters. And then money is a social abstraction we've created that can be traded for all of food/info/status, so we've learned through association to desire that too.

For a programming analogy, food/info/status are like API functions that all rely on the same kernel syscall, and then drugs hack that syscall without going through the API.

Re: Information is like snacks, money, and drugs to the brain

#42

Post by dgudkov »

Bartweiss wrote: post #15

Is 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 provides safety and freedom and is crucial for happiness on low to medium-income levels. However, with more money neither safety nor freedom doesn't increase significantly (sometimes it's even the opposite) hence no increase in happiness.

Re: Information is like snacks, money, and drugs to the brain

#43

Post by komali2 »

dmix wrote: post #32
dillonmckay wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What? Hunting? Foraging? Peyote? Mushrooms? Willow bark?

I'm sure the environmental folks would love it if even a small percentage of the human population started doing that on a regular basis instead of relying on agriculture and industry.

Lots of people do have gardens already

Re: Information is like snacks, money, and drugs to the brain

#44

Post by dmix »

komali2 wrote: post #43
dmix wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm sure the environmental folks would love it if even a small percentage of the human population started doing that on a regular basis instead of relying on agriculture and industry.

Lots of people do have gardens already

So they can have a couple tomatoes and bunches of arugula to last maybe a month or two after their harvest time? Meanwhile 99% of the food they eat still comes from agriculture.

There really is no real alternative to agriculture and food markets, besides the things that are more of a hobby than a serious option.

Re: Information is like snacks, money, and drugs to the brain

#46

Post by gwern »

oytis wrote: post #11

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...

Doesn't look like it differs much from the published version: https://www.gwern.net/docs/rl/2019-kobayashi.pdf (as usual...)

Re: Information is like snacks, money, and drugs to the brain

#47

Post by superkuh »

Is everyone just going to ignore that the "information" they're talking about is information about the odds during gambling for money?

That obviously makes this headline untrue. Gambling for money and learning the rules of gambling is not general information. This is not applicable to click-bait.

Re: Information is like snacks, money, and drugs to the brain

#48

Post by Dajsvaro »

edoo wrote: post #7

This 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.

Honest question.

Maybe I'm old, or maybe I'm not a visual or aural learner, but I don't get much out of watching Youtube videos. Do you find them a better learning tool than reading a well produced document or tutorial?

Re: Information is like snacks, money, and drugs to the brain

#49

Post by Zealotux »

xchaotic wrote: post #18
danr4 wrote: post #16

I 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.

While Stack Overflow is great for solving issues, I still had to block the "Hot Network Questions" suggestions from the sidebar because it was an almost systematic distraction that would inevitably send me down a rabbit-hole of unrelated questions.

Any system designed to solve the attention problem will have to be opinionated, blocking specific websites, or at least parts of it, I guess it's an interesting case study for machine learning.

Re: Information is like snacks, money, and drugs to the brain

#50

Post by crankylinuxuser »

ketzo wrote: post #26
xchaotic wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Feeds. Gotta block feeds out of your life. The never-ending treadmill of new information is what's really problematic, at least for me.

I would have to agree.

Overeating, overfeeding.... They share a lot of similarities.

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