‘Limbic Capitalism’ Preys on Our Addicted Brains • Hacker News Board

Re: ‘Limbic Capitalism’ Preys on Our Addicted Brains

#61

Post by gtfratteus » Sat, Jun 01, 2019, 5:21 PM UTC

coldtea wrote: post #26

gtt wrote: post #23

I think usage of Capitalism here is a misnomer, because replacing 'capitalism' with 'human greed' or 'human fallibility' changes nothing. The problem is not caused by markets or property rights. If anything, competition actually makes games least toxic. Look how pay2win games being replaced by vanity items selling games.

Yes, but capitalism is the system that says "human greed is good" and that basing everything self-interest turns out for "the best". From Adam Smith: "“It is not from the benevolence of the butcher, the brewer, or the baker that we expect our dinner, but from their regard to their own self-interest." To Gordon Gecko: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greed_Is_Good_(disambiguation) Via countless others...

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Re: ‘Limbic Capitalism’ Preys on Our Addicted Brains

#62

Post by danShumway » Sat, Jun 01, 2019, 5:29 PM UTC

crdoconnor wrote: post #57

danShumway wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

But it's not just a hard problem we can solve once, it's a wildly difficult problem that we haven't been able to solve for thousands of years.

I brought up the Defense in Depth angle because I think it's kind of the same category of problem. Why do we need multiple layers of security on our devices -- why shouldn't Apple just validate the code on everything that gets submitted to the store? Why shouldn't developers just write code that's bug free?

Because they just can't.

It's not that everyone has stopped trying to answer questions like "what is the purpose of society?". Nobody's talking about abandoning anything. If you think the problem is solveable, you're welcome to jump into philosophical circles right now and solve it. And once you've solved it, I promise I will happily move over to a totalitarian system where a perfectly informed formula decides what my life should be.

In the meantime, we need a pragmatic solution, and individual freedom is the best one I've seen proposed.

Re: ‘Limbic Capitalism’ Preys on Our Addicted Brains

#63

Post by CyanBird » Sat, Jun 01, 2019, 5:31 PM UTC

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…

>Voluntary delegation is different than involuntary delegation

I mean, this is 100% correct, yet that's not quite the problem, and stating it that way leads to overall confusion, the issue is that policy makers, companies and other profit motivated groups found ways to get inside the root unconscious mental proceses which lead to concious decision making, this just means that said groups can hijack the agency of thousands of people at the same time with the same set of tools. That is what's happening right now, it had been the case that groups were using mass media to manufacture consent, but this new machinery is far more efficient and less expensive than previous systems

The defense in depth analogy is indeed very good, yet the agency of a critical amount of people has been compromised by this new machinery, and this machinery preys on people's unconscious instincts, fears and epigenetic predispositions. Those are things which simply can't really be postdoc taught to hundreds of millions of people at a whim

Re: ‘Limbic Capitalism’ Preys on Our Addicted Brains

#64

Post by CyanBird » Sat, Jun 01, 2019, 5:36 PM UTC

homonculus1 wrote: post #50

convolvatron wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

in this world how does the government decide whats the best choice is? one of the reasons we ended up with 'people should decide for themselves unless it harms someone else' is that we dont have any other basis to evaluate options. the church, the monarchy, and the market have been 3 other go-to deciders. maybe a 1970s style AI with flashing lights?

You've hit on the center of the sheer arrogance of these tech bros and authoritarians. Freedom isn't a failure because people make suboptimal decisions. Freedom was NEVER SUPPOSED to lead to people making their best decisions. It's a safeguard against something inevitably far worse, which is having to obey the type of people all up and down this thread who want to impose their ideas about how much sugar I should eat…

I gotta say those folks on Brave New World seemed quite happy tbqh

Re: ‘Limbic Capitalism’ Preys on Our Addicted Brains

#65

Post by danShumway » Sat, Jun 01, 2019, 5:38 PM UTC

CyanBird wrote: post #63

danShumway wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

>Voluntary delegation is different than involuntary delegation I mean, this is 100% correct, yet that's not quite the problem, and stating it that way leads to overall confusion, the issue is that policy makers, companies and other profit motivated groups found ways to get inside the root unconscious mental proceses which lead to concious decision making, this just means that said groups can hijack the agency of thou…

> this just means that said groups can hijack the agency of thousands of people at the same time with the same set of tools.

Yeah, very good point.

What we're trying to get at is this idea that some of the voluntary decisions people make aren't really voluntary.

What's (sometimes) proposed though is that this somehow invalidates the idea that people should be able to make their own decisions at all -- that they're incapable of it.

To go back to the idea of people controlling their devices, a hacker might trick me into giving device permissions for something I don't want -- because I misunderstand the permissions, or because they have some kind of leverage over me, or because they convince me that the permissions are no big deal.

I'm all for efforts to address 'Limbic Capitalism' that involve educating consumers and trying to plug those kinds of holes and giving people ways to interact with brands where brands can't sidestep informed decision-making processes. I disagree with someone who looks at those holes and says, "well clearly freedom isn't working", for the same reasons I disagree with someone who looks at Android's horrible permissions system and says, "well, clearly users shouldn't be able to decide whether or not an app gets location privileges, clearly only the smart people at Google should."

On the software side of things, we've learned that things like upfront permission prompts on app installation circumvent user agency, and we've started to move more towards forcing apps to only ask for permissions at the moment they need them. We've also given users tools like the ability to grant a permission temporarily rather than permanently.

Those kinds of solutions help defend against exploitative behavior without robbing users of agency.

Re: ‘Limbic Capitalism’ Preys on Our Addicted Brains

#66

Post by CyanBird » Sat, Jun 01, 2019, 5:41 PM UTC

GuiA wrote: post #59

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/total…

I'm sorry, but this is such a cheapo propaganda like comment to what the other guy said

Throwing numbers around as if the decentralized killing or the fami es within non-totalitarian systems weren't comparable is just silly

The guy is t advocating for anything of the sort, and the article doesn't mention governments themselves, but decentralized profit driven enterprises....

Re: ‘Limbic Capitalism’ Preys on Our Addicted Brains

#67

Post by hsitz » Sat, Jun 01, 2019, 5:51 PM UTC

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…

Yuval Noah Harari has thought this through pretty well, it seems to me. At least about why it is a problem, not necessarily with the answer. He talks about this in all his books. For intro on his thinking on this issue, see this article: https://www.theguardian.com/books/2018/sep/14/yuval-noah-har...

Re: ‘Limbic Capitalism’ Preys on Our Addicted Brains

#68

Post by CyanBird » Sat, Jun 01, 2019, 5:56 PM UTC

danShumway wrote: post #60

CyanBird wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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…

>but I highly disagree that this is a straightforward distinction to make.

Yep, 10000000% agreed, this is why this question needs to be answered by the individual itself with the help of a therapist.

There is simply no clear line as you well said between legitimate enjoyment and addiction, in my home country wherever the gaming addiction is brought up, then football players whom also straddle the line between addiction and commitment are also mentioned.

Librarians in the past whom would read "excessively" were tagged as "addicts to reading"

The line needs to be set by the individual itself, there is simply no reliable way to do otherwise unless in the extreme cases where people's lives break down around them

Re: ‘Limbic Capitalism’ Preys on Our Addicted Brains

#69

Post by jaggednad » Sat, Jun 01, 2019, 6:13 PM UTC

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…

You’re presenting a false choice here. Either we live with free market limbic capitalism, or we live with a totalitarian PRC like state. There are other options that mitigate some of the issues with limbic capitalism without being totalitarian

Re: ‘Limbic Capitalism’ Preys on Our Addicted Brains

#70

Post by CyanBird » Sat, Jun 01, 2019, 6:13 PM UTC

danShumway wrote: post #65

CyanBird wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Voluntary delegation is different than involuntary delegation I mean, this is 100% correct, yet that's not quite the problem, and stating it that way leads to overall confusion, the issue is that policy makers, companies and other profit motivated groups found ways to get inside the root unconscious mental proceses which lead to concious decision making, this just means that said groups can hijack the agency of thou…

> this just means that said groups can hijack the agency of thousands of people at the same time with the same set of tools. Yeah, very good point. What we're trying to get at is this idea that some of the voluntary decisions people make aren't really voluntary. What's (sometimes) proposed though is that this somehow invalidates the idea that people should be able to make their own decisions at all -- that they're in…

One of the guys below posted a beautiful analogy comparing us people to cracked poorlywwritten legacy software/hardware

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20069693

I think that the only hope remains in the newer generations, and try to taught them as good as possible of the dangers this newly opened Pandora box released...

I studied international relations and this kind of thing keeps me up at night, I know that the Cia and other intelligence agencies are and have been exploiting this for a long, long, long time, and that there is no true defense against this problem other than "making it illegal" because sure as heck that didn't stop them from doing anything ever..

Anyhow, thank you for being around and help bounce ideas around!