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‘Limbic Capitalism’ Preys on Our Addicted Brains

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Re: ‘Limbic Capitalism’ Preys on Our Addicted Brains

#51

Post by 0815test »

GavinMcG wrote: post #49
microcolonel wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Now imagine for a moment that you're not better than everyone else at thinking for them. Agency is the only option. It's not like the concept of agency was thought up in a society with no dumb people. If you want to live in a society where the state doesn't believe in agency, and where your difficult decisions will be made by people who are (on average) more intelligent than you, go ahead and move to the PRC, they're…

But we frequently are better off having others think for us. There are a broad spectrum of examples, from research that we don't have the time or resources to accomplish, to, say, getting advice from a friend, while in a crisis, that we fail to follow even though we would give that same advice.

The end stage of "having others think for us" is indentured servitude. Should we pass a Constitutional amendment to legalize that, too? Should we go back to the deeply repugnant idea that there are "natural" masters, and "natural" serfs? This makes no sense whatsoever. Freedom is an end, not just a means to something else. We are not made better off by having our freedoms restrained in arbitrary ways.

Re: ‘Limbic Capitalism’ Preys on Our Addicted Brains

#52

Post by CyanBird »

api wrote: post #45
microcolonel wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Now imagine for a moment that you're not better than everyone else at thinking for them. Agency is the only option. It's not like the concept of agency was thought up in a society with no dumb people. If you want to live in a society where the state doesn't believe in agency, and where your difficult decisions will be made by people who are (on average) more intelligent than you, go ahead and move to the PRC, they're…

This is exactly the problem: the fallacy of self exclusion on the part of those who would rule or otherwise think for us. If humans are all vulnerable to all these manipulative tactics, where are we supposed to get humans who are not? There is another alternative: reclassify exploitation of cognitive failure modes as a type of initiation of force. We already do this with deception in certain areas like con artistry,…

>The more I see of this emerging mass mind control dystopia the harder it is for me to think of non-radical solutions.

You should 100% see the adamn Curtis documentary I mentioned above and read up on manufacture of consent

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=tTBWfkE7BXU

What you mention is already the case, it is fully within the interest of the decentralized power holders and policy makers for them to control the population via the information that's fed to them, that's why the Iraq invasion happened in the first place, that's why the US continues to try spread fear about Iran or China.

There is no way to destroy that machinery, only repurpose it for different means

Re: ‘Limbic Capitalism’ Preys on Our Addicted Brains

#53

Post by danShumway »

GavinMcG wrote: post #49
microcolonel wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Now imagine for a moment that you're not better than everyone else at thinking for them. Agency is the only option. It's not like the concept of agency was thought up in a society with no dumb people. If you want to live in a society where the state doesn't believe in agency, and where your difficult decisions will be made by people who are (on average) more intelligent than you, go ahead and move to the PRC, they're…

But we frequently are better off having others think for us. There are a broad spectrum of examples, from research that we don't have the time or resources to accomplish, to, say, getting advice from a friend, while in a crisis, that we fail to follow even though we would give that same advice.

Voluntary delegation is different than involuntary delegation.

This is a hard thing for people to get over, and I don't really understand why. As an analogy, think about Right to Repair: I can simultaneously say that I want consumers to have the ability to control their devices, install custom firmware, and crack them open to repair them if they break, without making an assertion that every single consumer is qualified to do so.

With Right to Repair, I don't lose the ability to let someone qualified make decisions about my device, or to set device policies. It doesn't require a massive amount of faith in ordinary people, just an acknowledgement that a single company making those decisions for everyone is overall bad for the market.

And the fact that some individuals will make bad decisions and hand their iPad to Uncle Joe to fix with his power tools is an acceptable tradeoff, given that it means we're not forced to solve the much harder problem of deciding for everyone which modifications and usage is "correct" for every device.

The reason people go in so hard on individual freedom isn't because individuals are amazing -- individuals are flawed as heck. It's that it is extremely difficult to figure out when someone is fit to take over someone else's decision power, and that getting it wrong comes with massive risks. Given that we don't have an easy formula to tell when delegation is the right choice, or even to define what happiness is, or even to define whether or not happiness should be a universal goal, we (when possible) leave it up to individuals to make their own decisions or voluntarily delegate their decisions to another person.

Individual freedoms allow us to practice Defense in Depth on a societal level, at the cost of making us more vulnerable to some manipulations and allowing individuals to make some bad decisions about who they delegate their thinking to.

It's not perfect, but it is terribly practical, and nobody that I know of has come up with a better scheme yet.

Re: ‘Limbic Capitalism’ Preys on Our Addicted Brains

#54

Post by gtfratteus »

CyanBird wrote: post #18
lordnacho wrote: post #15

I've been thinking about this a lot. In terms of political economy, there's a lot of reliance on the ideas of information, free will and rationality. To cut a long story short, if people have information about the market, they can use their knowledge of their own desires to act, which creates some sort of efficiency. Glossing over a load of stuff here because it's a large subject, but that's sort of the spiel you get…

Our entire idea of "agency", "individuality" and even "freedom" needs to be re-thinked. Basically all of what we have built resides in one way or another on the idea that individuals bar exceptions such as with physical drugs have some sort of inalienable agency to them. That entire rockbed is simply not really true, and more like highly idealized thoughts from thinkers of the 1800's Policy makers and politicians hav…

This is probably the most alarming post I've seen in HN in a while. Are you seriously arguing against freedom right now?

Worse yet, you're not calling it freedom, you're calling it "agency." Likely because you know this opinion is utterly despicable, so you're trying to deceive people into agreeing with it by using coded language.

Re: ‘Limbic Capitalism’ Preys on Our Addicted Brains

#55

Post by CyanBird »

0815test wrote: post #51
GavinMcG wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But we frequently are better off having others think for us. There are a broad spectrum of examples, from research that we don't have the time or resources to accomplish, to, say, getting advice from a friend, while in a crisis, that we fail to follow even though we would give that same advice.

The end stage of "having others think for us" is indentured servitude. Should we pass a Constitutional amendment to legalize that, too? Should we go back to the deeply repugnant idea that there are "natural" masters, and "natural" serfs? This makes no sense whatsoever. Freedom is an end, not just a means to something else. We are not made better off by having our freedoms restrained in arbitrary ways.

I think that what you are missing is that this is not an option, this is a reality, Cambridge analytica already happened and since then they have moved into manufacturing consent in many other countries elections

For a long time, marketing and political propaganda have gone hand in hand

Manufacture of consent is something that has been happening for a long time now

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=tTBWfkE7BXU

The difference now is that it can be done far cheaper, and on a bigger scale and more effectively than ever before, I would indeed recommend you to check out the planet money podcast at the least

Lastly, just because you see the value of mental agency and thought liberty, it doesn't mean that other people will value it the same way you do, or as much as you do. Psychographics is also a thing, and used to great effect when it come to manipulating people this way

Re: ‘Limbic Capitalism’ Preys on Our Addicted Brains

#57

Post by crdoconnor »

danShumway wrote: post #53
GavinMcG wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But we frequently are better off having others think for us. There are a broad spectrum of examples, from research that we don't have the time or resources to accomplish, to, say, getting advice from a friend, while in a crisis, that we fail to follow even though we would give that same advice.

Voluntary delegation is different than involuntary delegation. This is a hard thing for people to get over, and I don't really understand why. As an analogy, think about Right to Repair: I can simultaneously say that I want consumers to have the ability to control their devices, install custom firmware, and crack them open to repair them if they break, without making an assertion that every single consumer is qualifi…

>It's that it is extremely difficult to figure out when someone is fit to take over someone else's decision power

"It's difficult" doesn't mean it's a task that should be completely abandoned because of some ideological notion.

Re: ‘Limbic Capitalism’ Preys on Our Addicted Brains

#58

Post by CyanBird »

microcolonel wrote: post #38
CyanBird wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Our entire idea of "agency", "individuality" and even "freedom" needs to be re-thinked. Basically all of what we have built resides in one way or another on the idea that individuals bar exceptions such as with physical drugs have some sort of inalienable agency to them. That entire rockbed is simply not really true, and more like highly idealized thoughts from thinkers of the 1800's Policy makers and politicians hav…

Now imagine for a moment that you're not better than everyone else at thinking for them. Agency is the only option. It's not like the concept of agency was thought up in a society with no dumb people. If you want to live in a society where the state doesn't believe in agency, and where your difficult decisions will be made by people who are (on average) more intelligent than you, go ahead and move to the PRC, they're…

>Agency is the only option.

This is the problem, agency is dead, or at least in the grand scales, manufacture of consent has been a thing for a long, long, long time now and it won't go away simply because some people are afraid of looking into the reality of things

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=tTBWfkE7BXU

Also, not sure if you saw the provided podcast, but most of the things you mention are addressed there

Re: ‘Limbic Capitalism’ Preys on Our Addicted Brains

#59

Post by GuiA »

michalu wrote: post #56

.

China’s Great Leap Forward: 50 million deaths

Stalin’s regime: 10 million deaths

Khmer Rouge: 2 million deaths (25% of Cambodia’s population)

East Germany “denazification efforts”: tens of thousands of deaths, possible as high as a hundred thousand

I don’t entirely disagree with the nuance you’re trying to make, but it’s worth keeping in mind that some things are very measurable when it comes to these communist/totalitarian regimes.

Re: ‘Limbic Capitalism’ Preys on Our Addicted Brains

#60

Post by danShumway »

CyanBird wrote: post #11
manfredo wrote: post #8

How do we differentiate from a compelling and effective form of entertainment with an addictive activity? Most people wouldn't look down on someone who stays up till 3 AM reading a gripping book, but many would if we swap the book with a video game. Definitely people who can't hold down jobs or education due to addition to video games or social media is a problem, but I suspect that a lot of the concern is due to an…

>ow do we differentiate from a compelling and effective form of entertainment with an addictive activity? Just like we have always done, if something constantly disturbs day to day activities, then it is an addictive behaviour >That is, the addictive behavior “spills over” into several dimensions of one’s daily life https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3210595/ _______ >What I do think is a problem is the fac…

> Just like we have always done, if something constantly disturbs day to day activities, then it is an addictive behaviour.

I highly agree with your point in general, but I highly disagree that this is a straightforward distinction to make.

In order to tell when something is disrupting day-to-day life, we need to have agreement about what day-to-day life is and what changes to day-to-day life count as disruption.

It is not true at all for me that non-addictive, beneficial forms of media have never disrupted my day-to-day life. Arguably, getting into programming itself has been the biggest disruption -- because I got into programming the way I thought about problems changed, I started spending additional money on books and computers, my hobbies and friends changed to accommodate the new activity I was focused on.

You'll see the same changes in behavior, groups, friends, and time management for someone who starts getting heavily involved in a local church, or exercise, or volunteer work. We don't think of these activities as "addictive" in the traditional, harmful sense because we think that the changes they force you to make to accommodate them are desirable.

And who hasn't had the experience of reading a book so powerful and compelling that they couldn't get it out of their head the next day at work, or where it changed their worldview to the extent that it affected their daily routine?

These sound like pedantic arguments, but I've been in communities that disagreed about whether a behavior was addictive purely based on the idea, "well, people are spending a lot of time on it, and it's causing them not to do things that everyone else does."

No, the qualification of an addictive behavior is one that disrupts what our daily life should be, and while we can easily classify some behaviors (smoking, for example) as being problematic, it is much harder to draw an objective line in the sand on everything else. How you classify addiction is partially dependent on your worldview, because your worldview helps define what "normal" functioning looks like.

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