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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

#71

Post by marvin »

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…

Just out of curiosity, what do you mean when you say "holding me back in my life"?

I'd also say that browsing the web, learning new stuff, posting on forums, reading in general, is one of the things I use the most of my spare time on. And of course it takes time away from doing potential "productive" things, or more ambitious hobbies. On the surface, it seems like this has a lot of similarities with "information addiction". So I'm just trying to gauge whether this is a problem for me or not.

I've sort of made a deliberate choice that this is okay, since I spend 7 hours a day doing "productive" work anyway, and I get a lot of enjoyment out of this, and it would adversely affect my mental health to chase more ambitious things in my spare time.

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

#73

Post by johnvega »

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…

"Attention Hijacking" apps and websites along with FOMO leads to over-consumption of digital information or even digital addiction. It is subtle, micro habit forming that turns into part of daily routine. Overtime, it turns into "learned helplessness."

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

#75

Post by VBprogrammer »

AceJohnny2 wrote: post #69
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…

I've been using the StayFocusd [1] extension in Chrome, which gives you a daily allowance on sites you list. ... but then I found myself using Safari to get around that allowance. There's also Forest [2], which "gamifies" staying away from websites for a certain time. It's the Chrome extension version of the Forest iOS app [3] to stay away from your phone. I like to think of StayFocusd as the stick, and Forest as the…

> but then I found myself using Safari to get around that allowance.

Ha, that resonates with me. I use a chrome extension to block a bunch of stuff at work. Which I soon discovered had an easily accessible toggle switch for turning it off. So I hacked the source to remove it.

Then I discovered it didn't work in private mode until I found a setting to enable that too.

At the moment I have no trivial way of turning it off. Except browsing on my phone!

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

#76

Post by mthoms »

Zealotux wrote: post #49
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.

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…

I did this as well and it definitely helped. For Stack Overflow I've also removed the left sidebar entirely and upped the minimum width of the main content (so code doesn't get cut off nearly as much).

Another helpful one was removing the "next page" links on Reddit (I use the classic version). That way I can check on some things I'm interested in, but not get carried away.

I'm considering doing the same for Hacker News.

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

#77

Post by buboard »

Ok this fMRI study is showing something that is not quite unexpected. rewarding behaviour is likely to be mediated by reward pathways, and the authors are careful not to address digital information overload/addiction directly because they did not study that. This finding is expected and thus not very informative (pun intented) . Also the title shouldn't just say "information", but curiosity instead. The participants weren't randomly fed information mindlessly, but were actively seeking actionable information from a stream. That's not quite like how modern media does it - in fact the 99% of digital media consumption is non-goal driven. This may be applicable however to goal-directed information seeking, like search results, dating sites, financial news feeds.

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

#78

Post by PascLeRasc »

edoo wrote: post #20
VBprogrammer wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Honestly, sometimes I worry that watching engineering videos online is worse than the vacuous shit that normal people watch. I go through phases, things like aircraft, off grid living, hydropower, welding, CNC, machining, woodworking, electronics, gardening, farming, hydroponics. Few of those are relevant to my day job or even my current living arrangements. But when I get really interested in a subject I'll devour e…

I was always interested in electrical engineering and after a couple years of watching stuff on youtube and trying it out myself, all from a leisure time perspective, it turned out I became qualified enough to do it professionally. I've been doing firmware forever and now I design the gadgets too. It has been very valuable.

What EE channels do you like?

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

#79

Post by asdff »

jackstraw14 wrote: post #29
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…

In my experience the issue isn't so much cutting off the supply but what to do to fill the time. It's not as easy as taking up a new hobby, for me at least. I think information addiction is really tricky because it's compromising a key part of what humans are, information processors. We are always processing some kind of information, all the time. I can go straight from video gaming to reading a book, but my mind tak…

Once you bust through that 15-20mins you are home free as a reader. Take your book, leave your phone, and read outside. That way if you want to abandon your book to find some little dopamine hit to stay your ADD, you'd have to go all the way back inside.

Even just another room or nook works, or the public library, so long as all you do there is read. You'll begin to associate that spot with reading and have an easier time getting into the reading mindset.

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

#80

Post by Cpoll »

EGreg wrote: post #36

“I consider that a man's brain originally is like a little empty attic, and you have to stock it with such furniture as you choose. A fool takes in all the lumber of every sort that he comes across, so that the knowledge which might be useful to him gets crowded out, or at best is jumbled up with a lot of other things, so that he has a difficulty in laying his hands upon it. Now the skillful workman is very careful i…

Arthur Conan Doyle was no neuroscientist. Useless facts don't elbow out the useful ones, except perhaps in the time taken to acquire them.
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