The Acceleration of Addictiveness
paulgraham.com
paulgraham.com
And what do you do if you're a startup founder at the next Zynga and discover, running the numbers one day, that 80% of your revenue comes from 2% of the population who cannot attend the user meetups because they can't bear to be separated from your service for that long?
It depends on what your goals were. :) If you were in it for the money you plow right ahead. If you waned to make the world a better place (and get paid for that) you dump it on your investors and move on to the next thing.
Another option is to see if you can put what you learned about compulsive behaviors to better uses - I think the world would be better off if people were compulsive about maintaining good finances, hygiene, business schedule etc. Better yet, compulsively making sure they did the best they could for their family.
But that won't suit the bottom-line of Blizzard.
[1] http://www.zacharyburt.com/2010/06/why-games-are-fun-the-psy...
I imagine they would, but that sounds like a hard problem to me. I suspect it's AI-complete; the only way to do it would be for post-singularity AI to control the destiny of the human species.
I've never seen the attraction of grind-y games like WoW or Farmville. (Caveat: I've never played farmville; I have played WoW and found it pointless). Perhaps games could be created that taught people useful skills, e.g. something like Guitar Hero that teaches you to play an instrument.
From: http://www.rockband.com/zine/rock-band-3-announcements
The Rock Band 3 Squier Stratocaster is a fully functional, full-sized, six-string electric guitar that also functions as a game controller that Fender and Harmonix have teamed up to develop.
Ever had someone ask you why you play plastic guitar instead of learning a real instrument? Now you can tell them you ARE learning a real instrument. Rock Band 3 empowers players to develop actual musical skills through the fun of Rock Band Pro gameplay. Start at Easy and work your way up through Expert on three different Pro Modes, just like you did with the plastic guitars and plastic drums.
It applies to drums (adds additional cymbals), keyboard (though it's only two octaves), and guitar, which according to promotional videos, if you play through expert on Guitar, you're playing every real note on the guitar.
I've said before that I think many resource-building games have similar reward mechanisms to running a business[1]
Look at, for example, eve online. I know at least one very smart guy who put more effort into accounting within that game than I put into accounting at my business.
If you could figure out how to exploit this; you know, to make doing the accounting for my business as rewarding to this guy as doing accounting in eve online, hot damn, you could make a lot of money.
There are various edge cases you'd have to treat individually-- e.g. if the median user wasn't an addict but all your revenues came from the addicts. In that case, again, I probably wouldn't want to do it.
This one is taken: http://addictionis.org/
Is Mark Pilgrim a big shot in the 'addiction' community or something? I am probably stumbling ignorantly into something by asking that question.
http://lesswrong.com/lw/h3/superstimuli_and_the_collapse_of_...
Ad land's been a long time darkside after http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edward_Bernays
I guess we all have our shadow.
pg is taking great pains to distance himself from real addiction, like crystal meth. Yet he never explicitly explains anywhere why the new "addiction" is actually bad, other than trying to loosely associate it with alcohol. I don't think that the "addictiveness" of a thing alone is enough to call it bad. I'm way more addicted to air than a meth addict is addicted to his fix, and I don't consider air addiction a disability.
Now perhaps he's right and it really is bad--but I think this is a fundamental assumption that needs to be discussed and argued, not swallowed whole.
* Is it morally bad?
* Is it dangerous?
* Can the claims of loss of productivity be scientifically substantiated? To what extent?
* To what extent is the comparison to alcohol valid? Is it mood-altering? Does it significantly affect decisionmaking?
I think these are important questions that we have somehow skipped in this discussion.
My personal take is that we simply have a lot more free time now than we did 50 or 100 years ago, where we needed to spend more time feeding and clothing ourselves, and so Farmville arises to fill the empty space. Could this be redirected into something productive? Maybe? But people also burn out and have inefficiencies, so I'm not sure you could extract much more productivity unless we returned to hand-to-mouth.
there is a clear trend in a shortening workweek each decade across industries.
drewcrawford's excellent stats are very clear on the point: "between 1880 and 1995 the amount of work per day fell nearly in half, allowing leisure time to more than triple."
* Is It *dangerous*?
* Can the claims of loss of productivity be scientifically substantiated? To what extent?
Let me rephrase the question a bit, because at extremes everything is dangerous. Is it any more or less dangerous, on average, than other things in society considered to be bad? Are there more or less hikikomoris than DWIs? Are there more or less WoW addicts than rich old men with boats or other (presumably harmless) unproductive activities?
> If an employee spends 8 hours browsing Reddit, instead of doing work that needed to be done, the loss of productivity is quantifiable
Are you sure? Did they really lose 8 hours worth of work? How is "time spent" any better a metric for productivity than counting lines of code?
I find, for me personally, that when I am burnt out I won't produce in any amount of time until I recharge, and when I'm fully charged I'm not interested in browsing Reddit. This is a personal anecdote, and not data; but can we get some data--any data--correlating productivity and browsing Reddit, positively or negatively? I suspect the relationship is a lot more complex than "X hours lost."
Coding is a poor example because there is no generally accepted metric for productivity. (Figure out good way of measuring programmer productivity and you'd have a mint.) However, some jobs do have a valid metric. Data entry: 300 forms take an average of X hours to do. After X hours reading Reddit and not entering forms, 0 forms have been entered. Simplistically, X hours have been 'lost'.
X hours of data entry have been lost. X hours of participating in the Reddit hivemind have been gained :) Steve Yegge once hypothesized that Reddit-like websites are the first incarnation of a new breed of superorganisms, which evolve into something called Rivers: https://docs.google.com/Doc?id=ddv7939q_20gw8h9pcx
Web 1.0 lets individuals create and express ideas
Web 2.0 lets groups create and express ideas
Web 3.0 lets societies create and express ideas
Notice that what causes each qualitative shift are new inventions/innovations that allow for increasing densification of nodes. Notice also that it's a rather beautiful idea in the mathematical sense, because web 3.0 is different from web 2.0 in exactly the same way that web 2.0 is different than web 1.0.
That's why I hate this whole "web 3.0 is the semantic web" meme, because it's completely arbitrary and lacking in any parallelism.
How about this: if in advance of the behavior, you intend to partake moderately, and in the event you consistently overindulge, and after the fact you regret your excess, then something about this behavior is bad.
I'm leaving aside some of the other points you bring up, but if you've got a habit that consistently leads to dissatisfaction and regret, I think it's fair to call it a problem for that reason alone.
My point is that you can always pick opposing activities that people will feel are time wasted or well-spent. But why? Because you have some implicit notion of ultimate value that helps you weigh time spent on one or the other.
In the absence of such a theory of good and evil you might as well criticize pg for becoming addicted to hiking or addicted to insightful thinking. Cool for him, but he's wasting his life if he doesn't have all the achievements in Team Fortress 2.
There is no way to create this kind of theory out of the subject's reflection on their own activities. After all, the subject might be wrong!
After all, the subject might be wrong!
"Wrong" being subjective, of course.
(This is not at all intended to be a joke:) In many cultures, homosexual activity would meet this criteria. There are many social and psychological reasons for guilt to manifest itself, and I don't think that these alone form a robust definition of badness.
Now I don't mean to trivialize those who really struggle with, say, reading HN or Reddit or playing WoW.
But I do think that a lot of the talk about internet "addiction" is really a misunderstood type of burnout. I consider it totally normal to "waste" 1-3 hours each day, and I have no impulse to blame Reddit. If it wasn't the internet, it would be something else. There's simply a finite amount of time that I can spend being productive.
And it comes in waves. Sometimes, coming off a particularly grueling schedule, I can't get anything done for a week or more. Is this bad? I think it's pretty normal. It's a result of pushing myself past my production limit, building up a "productive" debt. I just need some time to recharge.
There's even some research to back up this view. See Galliot et al: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/17279852
So again, not to trivialize long-term WoW players' addiction, but I am regularly unproductive for a few hours a day, at times for a week or more, and feel no guilt or regret. Is this addiction? Is this bad? Maybe I'm just in denial, but I sort of doubt it.
Huh? How does that work? Do homosexuals in such homophobic cultures... I dunno, intend to go to the local gay spot for just a blow job and wind up barebacking?
Yeah, I know about noprocrast. It doesn't stop my fingers from typing h-a-down-enter .
I would take the moral relativist approach to arguing that these things are bad. Suppose a hypothetical person who spends time on (e.g.) Facebook when there's something else they themselves would prefer to do with that time. Would the addiction be bad for this person?
If so, we only need to point to the existence of a statistically significant number of such people to substantiate the argument that their Facebook addiction is a "bad" thing. Unless we have reason to believe that Facebook addiction in general (not Facebook itself, just addiction to it) has benefits, we can transfer this to Facebook addiction in general.
Here's one person so identified: http://www.cnn.com/2009/HEALTH/04/23/ep.facebook.addict/inde...
To my knowledge, nobody's done a study of this, but I find it more plausible than not that there exist many people who spend time on Facebook that they would prefer to use doing other things.
I've picked on Facebook quite a bit here. This is not in any way meant to be a dig against the service or company; Facebook is just a convenient example.
Aging and all the other things you list as a burden are definitely affected by our use of 'air', but without that air you wouldn't live long enough to experience these effects. The positives seem to clearly outweigh the negatives.
I don't think there's a sharp distinction between "real" addiction and other types. I think there's a smooth continuum. Even among things at the extreme, like addictive drugs, there's a continuum.
Here's a silly contrived example: I am addicted to air. A suffocating person has no air. They are very well aware of their addiction. They wish they did not need air. They "don't want to want" air. The whole of NASA probably wishes humans could get along fine without air. But none of this means that dependance on air is "bad" or should be avoided in the normative case.
I agree with you 100% that there is a smooth continuum of addiction. Where we disagree (and where, I would say, you've forgotten to argue something) is that you believe addiction and badness are inherently correlated.
I wouldn't call it bad to want air. It doesn't bother me to have to breathe, though to be honest I hadn't thought about it any more than a medieval peasant would have thought about the possibility of flying across the Atlantic. But I'd be annoyed if I were no longer able to fly across the Atlantic, and it's not inconceivable that someone in x years might be annoyed at having to breathe.
My comment about the oxygen was trying to derail the equivalence of addictiveness with badness by a "proof by counterexample". The proof goes like this: If oxygen is addictive, and if it is not bad, then not all addictive things are bad.
I am having trouble parsing your reply, but it seems that the premise of the proof that you are attacking is not the goodness/badness of oxygen, which you do not dispute, but you do not think it qualifies as actually addictive because at some point it will be cured, just as the "dependence" on "[not] flying across the atlantic" was cured.
Again, it is late, and I am probably misreading you, but we will probably at some point find a cure for all sorts of addictions, but this does not make them any less real or potent right now. It might console you, as you suffocate, that someday people will no longer die this way. But it cannot help you. The need for oxygen is still substantial.
In general, something you (1) do often, (2) enjoy while you're doing it (immediate gratification), but (3) don't enjoy having done it in hindsight (gratifying recollection?), can be classified as the bad kind of addictive.
That said, a simple change of framing could make this activity non-addictive. If I think of this comment as engaging in a community of philosophical study of sorts, of "partaking in the hive mind", as they say on reddit, of "swimming in a River", as Yegge once called it, the memory of this comment suddenly has meaning and the recollection is suddenly gratifying.
If somebody decides that their biggest goal in life is to sell as many condoms as possible as a traveling nightclub salesman in order to add to the total amount pleasures felt by mankind, they might consider a habit of getting drawn into reading HN in nightclubs much worse than a habit of getting drawn into grabbing a drink from a hip flask.
Basically anything that yields pleasure (or suffering) can affect the way you perceive and evaluate things and make immediate choices in your life. I think this is the basic mechanism of mental addiction. The results of this mechanism can be either good, bad or somewhat of both.
I think it's only matter of semantics whether you wish to call things like wanting to take care of your children an "addiction" although they are usually personally and culturally perceived as mainly "good" behavior. I think we culturally attach a nuance of negativeness in the word "addiction" but I don't think Paul's essay really depends on that cultural assumption.
I think he is looking at the issue more from the side of the perceiving individual and you are trying more to define some objective measures and semantics for addiction. These are both valid points of view but in my opinion very, very different.
Oxygen is not inherently bad. Dependence on oxygen is bad.
For an obvious example, I want ice cream. I do not want to want ice cream. I know that eating ice cream is counter to my fitness goals and not overly good for my teeth either. Yet, I want ice cream. My first order desire is for ice cream, but I hold a second order desire to not want ice cream.
Your air example fails to be analogous because air is necessary for life. A person may very well be able to stop wanting air, but they will not be able to stop needing it to live.
So, saying that an addiction is about things you "don't want to want" makes sense if you add the caveat that it applies to things you don't need to survive as a human being.
EDIT: I should add that another way in which the breathing analogy fails is that for addictions, usually we refer to things that you do so much that it adversely impacts your everyday life in the sense it puts you in danger losing your job, your spouse, your friends, etc, or even if you don't lose them, you reduce your productivity and thus your overall chance at success in life. Even though we need to breathe every second, no one has lost their job or friends because they "breathed too much".
In fact, at a molecular level in the brain almost all addictive substances and activities have a physical component.
I once read a book about addiction, the title was 'from chocolate to heroin' or something to that effect. It listed an absolutely amazing number of substances that you can develop an addiction to. Oxygen wasn't one of those, but I get the point the OP tries to make, which is that there is physical discomfort associated with not being able to satisfy your cravings. Now in the case of Oxygen that 'discomfort' will lead to your rapid expiry, a thing that in the case of most - but not all - substances you can be addicted to will not occur. But there are addictions that will make you very ill indeed if you try to break your dependency bonds too quickly.
http://wiki.answers.com/Q/Does_cold_turkey_withdrawal_from_n...
The 'workaround' is to reduce drug consumption slowly or to use a surrogate (in the case of heroin methadone is usually used).
It's just that it is possible to end all existing addictions (alcohol, drugs, Facebook, etc) and still live, but no one can end the "addiction" to oxygen and still live.
That's why it's unreasonable to compare breathing to addiction.
Surely you could remove the "almost" from this sentence and it still be right. ALL deliberate behaviours are caused by brain activity, and therefore have physical components because the brain is a physical object.
Addiction is when you take too much of something; under 5 cigarettes a day don't give you cancer; 1 glass of wine a day actually makes you healthier. But if you get addicted to tobacco or alcohol (or bad food) these things end up killing you.
Incidentally can modern addictions pg's talking about, really kill you? Can you die from Internet addiction? Porn/TV/Farmville addiction? If they can't kill you can they be called "addictive"...?
a very sad example: http://www.sott.net/articles/show/209478-Update-South-Korean...
That's not the point. If you're addicted, then it isn't pleasurable anymore. You're "forced" by the addiction to do something that you don't enjoy anymore. It has nothing to do with productive/unproductive work.
I think that today it's harder to stay conscious, because there's more and more addictive stuff. What's better for a producer in a capitalist society then an addicted consumer?
Something that takes a lot of time certainly has an opportunity cost. The time it takes could have been spent doing something else. Someone addicted to a game may spend less time getting exercise, learning what it takes to get a ham license, learning to program, working on real personal relationships.... the list goes on and on.
Generally things that give instant gratification tend to be addictive. Has our society suffered from not living within its means? Have we fostered an environment that actually encourages addiction to spending?
Look at the nature of what's on commercial tv, and the ads. The programs are designed to keep us hooked. (they don't sell programs to us, they sell us to advertisers) And look at the nature of the ads and what we consume. To some, our purpose in life is to CONSUME. Just who is that good for?
Next time you play a game or pick something to watch, ask yourself what you're gaining, what it costs, and will you better of later or be a better person as a result?
Maybe the skills learned in those games aren't useful enough to be worth the price.
Of course if we measure lifetimes in man-hours and look at the numbers a different way can get some disturbing stats.
It's probably a leap to equate the cumulative hours lost to gaming to death. Perhaps it would be easier to accept if we measured the hours spent with updates and fighting malware? (That would make a catchy story... measure the lives lost due to Windows bugs LOL)
We don't have to be productive all the time, but shouldn't we find pleasure in ways that help our minds and bodies?
I think with new technological advances, etc, things are becoming better at being "false substitutes" -- i.e. masquerading themselves as the authentic ways in which we should best satisfy the natural human desires and instincts we all have within us.
Addiction comes into play when we are consistently using a false substitute instead of the real thing, so addiction is really much farther down the road - at that point your brain has been fully deceived to indulge in these false substitutes...
Examples:
1. Processed "Fat Free" garbage food and fad diets instead of healthy eating and normal exercise.
2. Facebook instead of "Face-to-face" social networking
3. HD porn instead of healthy sexual relationships
4. Online dating instead of learning human interaction
5. Books like "The Game" or PUA. Rather than addressing your inner confidence issues, you read this, learn the rules, and treat women like they're another sport
5. Passively watching TV and sucking up the Internet for mental "stimulation", rather than reading books, creating, and building things.
6. Constantly seeking your 15 minutes of fame and attention (which is FAR easier to get these days) rather than real love and affection
7. The list goes on...
I know for a fact this list will be controversial, but I think people will agree with me that these are, in fact, substitutes for the best way to satisfy the many human desires we have. Obviously if you're not addicted, then good for you. It's harsh though. Suck it up and desire to do better. I'm certainly guilty of some of them myself.
Large quantities of mass-produced food instead of meager quantities of undependable crops that you spend 90% of your working life growing;
Facebook instead of being lonely and isolated in your suburban home, miles from any of your friends;
HD porn instead of unhealthy sexual relationships;
Online dating instead of avoiding social situations because you never meet anyone you actually want to talk to, and when you do they're always seeing someone else;
Chess and WoW instead of mortal combat and intertribal warfare;
Football fandom instead of burning the fields of rival clans and kidnapping their women and children.
Inventiveness taketh away, but it also giveth.
> Large quantities of mass-produced food instead of meager quantities of undependable crops that you spend 90% of your working life growing;
Around the baby boomer generation until people 20 or so years younger there was a sweet spot where mass-produced food was available but more expensive than more traditionally-prepared and traditionally-grown food. Also, people spent a lot more time cooking (and less time watching cooking tv shows), which helped create a relationship with food that wouldn't stand today's fast food habits. At least here in Brazil.
> Facebook instead of being lonely and isolated in your suburban home, miles from any of your friends;
The solution to this existed before the suburbs (which are a post-ww2 phenomenon), and is called living in small cramped places in cities close to where you work and to most people you will meet. Some people still live like this, and enjoy it. Suburbs are soul crushing, but they are by no means necessary.
> HD porn instead of unhealthy sexual relationships;
Well, not every sexual relationship is unhealthy, and if you ignore the healthy ones this is vacuously good. The truth is, developing healthy sexual habits is a difficult part of growing up, and keeping people in fantasy land is not a solution to this anymore than giving everyone a government allowance is a solution to the problem that it's hard to find fulfilling jobs.
The other points are less glaringly false, but have small subtleties that can be teased out.
I think that was the whole point... mechanicalfish's list contains false dichotomies, in order to illustrate that the same is true of the original list.
(These data are eyeballed from http://www.gapminder.org/world/)
Okay. That is only a fraction of the population of Brazil, which has long had one of the highest Gini coefficients in the world.
My point still stands though, we're often addicted to or deceived by that which is an inferior and poorer substitute for the "real" thing. Sure, technology may improve our ability to better fulfill desires when it's the only option.
However, given the context (and this may just be me), usually I view addiction in a negative light, so my examples were used to demonstrate the negative effects of addiction to false substitutes.
Rarely do you hear the word addiction mentioned in a positive fashion about someone, such as "Oh, he's absolutely addicted to healthy eating!"
Even when we do joke that someone is "addicted" to something positive such as healthy eating, we're usually passively stating that we think they're doing something far in excess than what we believe is normal... so it's still ultimately a comment delivered with a negative subtext.
Of course, if I were to spend 100% of my time on Facebook and therefore completely neglect face-to-face social contacts (<cough>), then that would likely be a problem. The opposite (100% face-to-face contacts and no online ones) would arguably be a problem too, in this day and age.
That's been the case for the majority of human history. It's mostly the case now. Most non-religious, progressive thinking people, don't actually think through most issues for themselves. They believe in institutions - academia, NPR, etc. Most people believe what they do about nutrition for instance, not from reading studies themselves, but through accredited officials (PHD's) as interpreted by the NYTimes.
This is essentially just society optimizing itself through specification - just have 1 person become the nutrition expert and do all the tests and experimentation, and then they can share that knowledge with the rest. Whilst the nutritionist is busy, that leaves others free to invent fusion power and quantum computing.
This would be an interesting way of reimagining representative democracy in the digital age. Why should we bother limiting ourselves to a fixed number of representatives? Let everyone vote on everything _but_ let people choose to assign their vote to someone else.
Rather than electing representatives, I'd choose someone whose intellect and experience I trust, and delegate my voting rights to them. They'd become my representative. When someone accumulated enough other people's votes, they'd reach the political stature of people like senators.
Something closer to moultano's proposal would be a running referendum on everything, where you can choose to revocably delegate your vote (revocable as in you can remove the delegation, not reverse the vote).
No. The reasonable strategy is, and has always been, defining the positive outcomes you want to reach rather than negative ones you want to avoid. The opposite of "drunk" is not "he avoids drinking", it's "he lives a fulfilled life without allowing alcohol to consume his existence".
The opposite of internet addict is not someone who abstains from internet, it is someone who lives a balanced life with work and play in equal measures, and play being divided amongst all the nature requires from us - exercise, family, friends, sex, artistic self-expression, fooling around with no purpose etc.
The same is true for any other addiction.
The internet, for me, has been different to any other addiction because it has changed so much as I've been using it (and very gradually, so I didn't notice for a long time).
Heroin, on the other hand, is apparently so ridiculously addictive that just trying it once is a bad idea. Or maybe you can try it a few times before it gets hard to quit -- I don't know, and I don't particularly want to find out. It's a sensible strategy to stay away from all hard drugs as a result.
Maybe Farmville or World of Warcraft version 15.0 circa 2018 will be more like heroin than like alcohol.
EDIT: I see what you mean now, you were focusing on "same is true for any other addiction". I was mostly talking about "digital drugs" like facebook and the like that pg is worried about, rather than about chemical drugs like heroin. I guess I don't really care that much about heroin and the like, and don't want to argue about it as it gets away from the main topic.
> You can always ween yourself off heroin by checking into rehab - you just need to have the will to do that one step.
Rehab success rates are so abysmal that most will not even publish their results; Googling, I see generic rehab rates of 2-20%, and heroin is one of the harder drugs to quit. Apparently half or fewer of addicts will even finish rehab (http://ezinearticles.com/?Drug-Rehab-Success-Rates&id=14...), much less actually become drug-free.
Especially in the hacker set and in certain aspects of urban professional culture, the idea is that you let technology inform you of how you should be living your life. This is madness.
(I'm linking it not because I agree, but because it's an interesting example of an attempt to collectively change people's response to modern technology. Examples like the Amish are in a similar vein, but much more extreme.)
i've been surprised by just how true this statement is. i resolved to make some lifestyle changes this year to be healthier (without being overly zealous) and it's been amazing how reactions have made me feel like i'm behaving strangely. especially regarding alcohol at social events.
Unfortunately the act of unapologetically refusing to participate in something that most other people do is often considered smug. This is rather similar to the way atheists are considered smug by many religious people where as agnostics are not.
The second version doesn't really come off as smug, unless you're just someone that is easily offended. Interpreting that as anything more than an explanation of why the person doesn't want to accept your offer of meat (or something with meat) is spending too much time reading into it.
Some people get offended at conversations like this:
smoker: You got a smoke?
non-smoker: Sorry, I don't smoke.
I quit drinking for quite a long time - and in some situations it was impossible for me NOT to be rude. I very politely said "Nope, just a diet coke thanks!" when first asked for a drink.... then they'd keep pushing and pushing...... I'd drop a polite "Sorry man, I don't drink...".... no smug at all. It's after that that I might pull some attitude, when you just can't leave it alone and won't respect me enough and KEEP ASKING ME TO DRINK. If you're not a friend, and not a colleague, then i'll just ignore you likely. If you are a friend or colleague, you are showing a distinct and inappropriate lack of respect for my decision not to drink. Now - if you are already wasted, I'll grant you a grain of salt or two... I want you to have fun (I'm having fun) - but if you KEEP pushing me, I'm going to KEEP flatly refusing, and at some point, when I'm not having fun anymore, I'm going to leave - and I refuse to be the bad guy in that situation.
I quit drinking for quite a long time - and in some situations it was impossible for me NOT to be rude. I very politely said "Nope, just a diet coke thanks!" when first asked for a drink.... then they'd keep pushing and pushing...... I'd drop a polite "Sorry man, I don't drink...".... no smug at all. It's after that that I might pull some attitude, when you just can't leave it alone and won't respect me enough and KEEP ASKING ME TO DRINK. If you're not a friend, and not a colleague, then i'll just ignore you likely. If you are a friend or colleague, you are showing a distinct and inappropriate lack of respect for my decision not to drink. Now - if you are already wasted, I'll grant you a grain of salt or two... I want you to have fun (I'm having fun) - but if you KEEP pushing me, I'm going to KEEP flatly refusing, and at some point, when I'm not having fun anymore, I'm going to leave - and I refuse to be the bad guy in that situation.
http://www.theonion.com/articles/area-man-constantly-mention...
The whole "I'm a vegan!" is similar to "I'm a Christian", "I'm an environmentalist!", "I'm an Objectivist!", "I'm an Atheist!", "I'm gay!" phrases I often hear or read, and that social signaling can easily come off as smug/arrogant/annoying/pushy, and in general just make us not like the person. More action-oriented phrasings like "I don't smoke", "I don't eat meat", "I don't believe in any deity" seem more reasonable and I think they produce better conversation.
What is more interesting would be if your not drinking but are still relaxed and are lively with other people present, whether you seem strange because your not drinking or whether it's got to do with your interactions due to not drinking.
I personally don't see anything wrong with not drinking unless your acting condescending to those that have had a few.
Maybe it was those improv classes...
It probably helps that said friends are mature adults who don't use drunkenness as an excuse for antisocial stupidity.
The long hikes that PG mentioned are a good idea. I've started to do things that exercise my ability to focus. Reading challenging novels and writing are good drills.
I've also started trying to recognize when I try to do two things at once and look for opportunities to focus on only one thing. This can be trivial. I'll fold laundry while watching a tennis match, but I avoid browsing the web. I've noticed that if I do this while watching sports, I quickly lose track of what's going on in the game.
Lastly, I'm more certain than ever that you really need to be engaged (maybe even passionate) with your work to stand a chance against distraction. About 6 months ago, I was really enjoying my programming project, and focus came easily. It took no motivation to get started. I did check HN, but I wasn't killing time on it.
While reading the article, I couldn't help but think back to a David Foster Wallace essay (I think it was E Unibus Pluram, on the nature of television) that proposed the following definition of addictiveness:
Something is addictive in the worst way if it proposes itself as a solution to the problems that the addiction itself creates.
For example: - I enjoy practicing Judo, but Judo isn't addictive. It isn't because it isn't a solution to the problems associated with it (i.e.: I don't play more Judo to elevate injuries). Whereas if I drink and feel guilty for drinking, I can drink more to elevate the guilt, which just leads me to feeling more guilty, and so then I drink some more, etc et all.
(Or if I feel guilty because I'm on the Internet so much, I can go find a game or surf Facebook or do fake work to elevate the guilt - so I can 'worry about it later', and this leads me down a vicious cycle of procrastination.)
The point I'm making here is that not everything we want will turn out addictive - that is, not everything can propose itself as a solution to the problems it creates. Those traits are limited to only a few kinds of things.
And so it would perhaps be better to say that addiction is accelerating because accelerating technology allows us to create more things, and some of these things are bound to have those addictive traits.
Bravo on another great essay though. This made me smile:
You can probably take it as a rule of thumb from now on that if people don't think you're weird, you're living badly.
This is really much of the appeal of Christianity, and other forms of culture that have survived some test of time. I say this in response to pg's foot note:
"Unless we mass produce social customs. I suspect the recent resurgence of evangelical Christianity in the US is partly a reaction to drugs."
Not just drugs, but all the different things pg cites as addictive. Plugging in to older value systems is one way of putting a brake on those impulses. This, of course, is true of many other religious and cultural systems that have stood the test of time, not just Christianity.
I am also struck by how successful families and subcultures often have strong mechanisms in place to stigmatize these addictive impulses. Modelling self control and discipline has a lot to do with how success and prosperity is transferred across generations. By itself, accumulated cash will dissipate very quickly if the necessary character traits are not transferred along with it.
It's very fashionable in the hacker community to treat Christianity as an anti-science establishment, but that's really a brash generalization that isn't even supported by facts. You'll even find a lot of evangelical Christians who are stauch proponents of the theory of evolution.
It's a rather tired meme that Evangelicals are engaging in an all-out assault on the scientific establishment, when that simply isn't true. There is a large, vocal evangelical contingent that espouses creationism, but 'evangelicals' are a much more complex and noisy bunch than one might expect.
To put it simply: I've been to quite a few churches that were direct examples of the overload culture that PG is writing about. Some of them were evangelical, most of them had congregations whose political beliefs are in no way uniform. And again, evangelical is in no way a synonym for right-wing. PG is overreaching here. But, it was a footnote, so I've already gone on more than is justified.
Many Christians I know refer to modern evangelical Christianity as "evangelicalism." It connotes a social construction that has its roots in church life, but its purpose is a far cry from a biblical understanding of the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ. IMO, this accounts for the rise of Beck, Limbaugh, and other talking heads. They preach a message that isn't watered down. They sound impassioned and convictional, unlike the guy standing in front of them on Sunday morning.
I hope I was not the only one who instantly thought of Neal Stephenson's _The Diamond Age_ and its phyles (especially the Victorians).
Just didn't get around to working it into my comment. :)
I remember reading that, wondering who is today's equivalent of the Victorians. (The Victorians, of course, were the historical equivalent of the Victorians.)
Inside the US? I'd go with the Amish first, inasmuch as they pretty much are from the Victorian era. (Technically they were much earlier, but I figure they've drifted that far forward.)
Outside of small or weird groups, I would guess the Asian-Americans (Japan/China/South Korea, to be exact) are the closest in their high valuation of education, thrift, repressed social mores, and reputation.
Even its concept is flawed. Some things it discards, such as wheat are barely changed from what our ancestors were eating long before agriculture or town settlements. One reason wheat was adopted so widely so early is that it didn't need to change much to be domesticated (see Guns Germs and Steel). Strawberries on the other hand, weren't domesticated until medieval times, and the same is true of many nuts, most notably almonds. Cattle has also undergone a far larger genetic transformation than many of our primary grain crops. Most damning to the idea of a paleo diet is that we have, too.
Human evolution has clearly accelerated with population growth. According to some anthropologists, modern humans differ more from those 5,000 years ago than those humans differed from Neanderthal.
http://www.reuters.com/article/idUSN1043228620071210
In short, the paleo diet rests on flawed assumptions about evolution, the history of agriculture and ignores the main body of nutritional research and is rightfully considered a fad diet by the NHS and similar organizations.
Edit: It's also horribly unsustainable. A hummer-driving vegan doesn't have anywhere near the ecological footprint of a bicycle-riding "paleo" dieter.
I'll just say that since switching to a diet that contains whole foods consisting of meat, vegetables, fruits, nuts, and seeds, I've never felt better or been in better shape. I've seen the same results in many friends. If I have a big meal of grains I'll feel sick and almost hungover as a result.
Your mileage may vary, but have you tried it and seen what happens to your body? I've experimented with many types of diets, including strict veganism for about 3 months. So far a "paleo" diet has worked the best, for me.
Since then I've become more sedentary, but have still maintained lower cholesterol and blood pressure than the majority of people in their 20's. I started eating richer foods several years ago in Taiwan and put on some weight, but found it disappears quickly after returning to a more normal (Chinese) rice and vegetable based diet.
http://heartscanblog.blogspot.com/2010/05/in-search-of-wheat...
> What we call wheat today is quite different from the wheat of Biblical times. Emmer and einkorn wheat were the original grains harvested from wild growths, then cultivated. Triticum aestivum, the natural hybrid of emmer and goatgrass, also entered the picture, gradually replacing emmer and einkorn.
> The 25,000+ wheat strains now populating the farmlands of the world are considerably different from the bread wheat of Egyptians, different in gluten content, different in gluten structure, different in dozens of other non-gluten proteins, different in carbohydrate content. Modern wheat has been hybridized, introgressed, and back-bred to increase yield, make a shorter stalk in order to hold up to greater seed yield, along with many other characteristics. Much of the genetic work to create modern wheat strains are well-intended to feed the world, as well as to provide patent-protected seeds for agribusiness.
He goes on to try einkorn bread, and doesn't get the same reactions and BG rise that he does with regular bread. Search for 'einkorn' on that blog if you're curious.
but I do realize wheat has changed in some ways, primarily in that it sprouts every season now. Try subjecting popular "paleo" foods to the same scrutiny you just subjected wheat to-- most currently popular fruits weren't eaten at all until the past few hundred years, walnut trees had to be grafted in order to be cultivated and most almonds killed people who ate them! Similarly, big game on each continent was hunted to extinction, especially in Australia and the Americas. Domesticated animals have been bred to be far different than anything our ancestors encountered.
Wheat has changed little by comparison.
While there is indeed a paleo re-enactment fringe that tries to live as they understand our ancient ancestors would, not just nutrition-wise, I find that there's actually a good bit of research-based and evidence-based thinking going over these "vast piles of medical research" you mention and finding that they don't really support the current accepted dogma of nutritional recommendations, and that indeed this research is pretty flimsy itself, if you were to believe Taubes, Lustig, Cordain, Eades, others, and tellingly now there is an alarming increase in obesity, diabetes and other chronic diseases as an apparently direct result of the public by-and-large complying with common-wisdom "healthy" recommendations.
> Even its concept is flawed. Some things it discards, such as wheat are barely changed from what our ancestors were eating long before agriculture or town settlements
Oh? Wheat requires several months from cultivation to being ready for consumption. Perhaps it was consumed "long before agriculture or town settlements" but then it seems quite implausible that it would amount to anything significant in terms of nutrition, not to mention that it still requires quite a bit of processing before it can be eaten so it isn't exactly readily available nutrients.
But lets for a moment assume that yes, there have been many changes and genetic transformations to fruits, nuts, the meats we consume and ourselves. How is it unreasonable, given the catastrophic results of following current nutritional dogma, to look into our over 2 Million- year evolutionary history for clues on what we may be doing wrong, and noting that we've had agriculture for only 0.5% of that time. Even if after agriculture our rate of change multiplied 10-fold, we would still have a nutritional heritage of over 95% of our history where we most likely did not consume, in general, 60-80% of our nutrients from grains and certainly not from sugar, or refined vegetable oils.
That sounds like a pretty good clue to me.
> is rightfully considered a fad diet by the NHS and similar organizations
And then people all over are giving these ideas a go, and lo! they're feeling better, losing their excess weight, reversing chronic diseases, feeling energetic, not having hunger ups-and-downs, not feeling bloated, etc. (granted, this is all anecdotal evidence) And yet this is one of the dumbest ideas you've encountered in your entire life? You must be pretty lucky having a life of plentiful great ideas.
> It's also horribly unsustainable. A hummer-driving vegan...
There was the shadow of a reasonable argument there. It is entirely possible that given our current population of over 6 billion people, not all of us could follow the exact same diet, then again, there's no reason why anyone would suggest that. A good 1/5th of earth's population does not eat cattle for cultural reasons, cattle is not the only meat, and it can be raised sustainably (while being more nutritious), and there are other good sources of the necessary nutrients from the paleo perpective, and the needs of a male vary from those of a female, from a baby, from a child, from youth to middle age to old age, from summer to winter, from health to injury to fertility vs infertility, from athletes to sages, etc. There's plenty of wiggle room for me to believe that it is indeed sustainable.
Sorry for the long post.
I'm not sure what you're talking about when you say "current nutritional dogma". What I was talking about was the fact that the longest lived people in the world eat rice as a primary nutritional staple, or a combination of rice and wheat. All of the countries with the worst obesity and life-style disease epidemics are countries which consume far more protein than necessary and a great deal of meat in general. Not only that, but the proportion is linear-- the US and Mexico consume the most animal products and have the worst rates of lifestyle diseases, with Canada and the UK slightly behind that, and so on all the way to the leanest and least "paleo" countries in eastern Asia.
Even in the healthiest of countries, i.e. Japan, S. Korea, etc, those people who have adopted higher-protein western style diets are the same people starting to manifest some of the same lifestyle diseases westerners have had for decades. Those eating more traditional, mostly plant-based diets are not.
As someone who has lived in Asia for the most of my life it sickens me to see fat people who eat too much meat grasp and Atkins, paleo and other fad diets that involve eating even more of what made them sick in the first place. I know a lot of people who eat rice or noodles every single meal and not a single one are as fat as the average person I see when I go back to visit the US.
The avoidance of highly processed food is sound, but the overall diet is anything but.
Denmark is the world leader in per-capita meat consumption, followed by New Zealand and Luxembourg. The USA is number 4. Canada is in the top 10, but the UK and Mexico are not. Mexico isn't even in the top 30.
Likewise, consider two of the main diet-influenced lifestyle diseases: heart disease and diabetes. Countries in Eastern Europe are all ahead of the US in heart disease incidence and deaths per capita, as are Germany, Norway, Ireland, the UK, New Zealand, Sweden and Australia. There is a higher incidence of diabetes per capita in Germany, Argentina, South Korea, Spain, Mexico and Puerto Rico vs. the US.
If you don't adjust per-capita, the countries with the most heart disease and diabetes are China, India and Russia.
United States Leads World Meat Stampede http://www.worldwatch.org/node/1626
It's also worth pointing out that S. Koreans have a longer life expectancy than people in either the US or Denmark, despite being less economically developed and have a much smaller social system. Note that the countries topping the life expectancy rankings, Japan and HK are both big rice eaters, and that #3, Iceland gets most its meat as fish.
That said, after reading your post and once again researching the statistics, I'm absolutely shocked how quickly rich countries other than the US have been increasing their meat consumption. I couldn't find lists that looked at total consumption of animal products, but the rankings in terms of meat itself have changed a lot. I'm still 100% sure that eating rice at breakfast, lunch and dinner is part of the traditional Japanese diet, and that they out-live the heavy meat/cheese/butter eaters in other rich countries.
You're correct that there's no good nutritional reason to only eat "paleo" foods (though certainly, almost all the foods that you should definitely avoid, like chocolate, chips and cheesecake, are non-paleo). You're also correct that a modern "paleo" diet doesn't have all that much in common with a hunter-gatherer's diet anyway.
But as a useful heuristic for coming up with a healthy diet for weight loss in the modern world, it's not too bad. If you're trying to lose weight only three things really matter:
a) Are you maintaining a calorie deficit?
b) Are you getting enough nutrients?
c) Is the diet easy to stick to, or does it make you hungry/give you cravings?
The paleo diet seems to work fairly well by all of these metrics. It's really just a standard low-GI diet with a few other things unnecessarily banned (beans, dairy). The restrictive nature of the diet means you eat a diet rich in meats and vegetables, which are nutrient rich and fill you up with relatively few calories. The low-GI nature of the diet stabilizes your blood sugar and stops you getting the hunger pangs you'd get on a more carb-rich calorie-restictive diet. And it seems to be relatively easy to stick to with only a moderate amount of willpower -- I've been on it for nearly three weeks now and the idea of eating a brownie just gives me a headache.
I don't think I'd recommend it to anyone trying to maintain weight, since I think it would be difficult and expensive to consume enough calories for a healthy lifestyle without eating modest amounts of grains. And the prohibition on beans and dairy is probably unnecessary. But as a workable heuristic for weight loss, "eat paleo foods" isn't half bad.
In short: humans have always adapted better than predicted to change - so far.
In many of the discussions about people giving up "TV," it turned out that many just turned off their cable and consumed video through Hulu, Netflix and other online sources.
So, put another way, do you think even people who have given up TV, etc. have, on average, actually reduced their total amount of time consuming content of one form or another, when Facebook and everything else on the Internet is included?
i) The same thing, but at a time of your own choosing, or:
ii) Only niche programmes of interest to you.
Or some combination of the two. Either way, mediocre programmes are less likely to occupy your time.
Video on demand makes it easier to watch a specific content, but harder to just zone out in front of the tv, which is the most addictive and destructive activity.
So you mean they've been superseded by more addictive technologies? :)
There are two reasonably distinct categories of things I want. I don't have good names for them, so I'll just label them A and B:
A is things like: Artificial organs, cheap clean energy, cheap clean and fast transportation, robot house-cleaners, faster-and-faster computers.
B covers things like: When I was quitting smoking, I wanted more alcohol and coffee. When I was doing a boring job, I wanted to browse the internet more. When I was exhausted from a long commute I wanted more and more TV in the evenings.
Category B is full of things I want, but which I don't want to want. What I really want is all the stuff in category A. I only ever "wanted" each thing in category B as a short-term quick fix to some other underlying problem in my life.
Capitalism is great as far as it goes, but I don't believe it is able to distinguish between these two senses of want. Perhaps it needs an upgrade?
Rich people problems
I could characterize nutritionally-void foodstuffs like coffee or tea, or expensive entertainment like TV or the Internet, as 'rich people stuff' too. If you're in the West, you're 'rich people'.
Like PG and others in this thread I've tried to combat these distractions by limiting email and internet time, leaving the mobile phone off, and deliberately spending free time doing things like reading books and going on long hikes out in the woods. It's hard not to feel a bit at odds with my profession though.
Removing the internet connection may improve efficiencies in some areas but I'll be a whole lot more efficient if I can have the connection and manage to not be distracted.
Say, you want to write a new mobile app. Your desire itself will consist of rational analysis and emotional drive, the former being required to make it a sound business and the latter required to plow through to the finish line. Before you start, ask yourself - how much will this project take? one month? Let's make it three months - a good estimate for overruns. Do you have enough drive to plow through it without distraction? If the answer is a resounding, enthusiastic form-the-top-of-your-lungs yes, go right ahead - you will not be distracted because the shining beacon of the goal will pull you in the right direction.
If the answer came up short of "super yes", you need to plan a set of activities that will replenish your enthusiasm. Early user feedback works best for me (and if you can't get it your business itself is iffy). Peer encouragement is second best, if you can get it(that's a good reason to apply to YC). Quality business metrics themselves are motivating in an addictive way, just make sure to get addicted to the right metrics. Lastly, try something that your family and non-techie friend can relate to. If you keep telling everyone in your social circle what you do and they keep staring blank in return it will get to you one day, underminign your motivation. Plan ahead and don't let that happen.
And finally, remember back to what motivated you in the past and do more of that. When you sit right now in front of the computer reading this post you might not remember much right away, but as you spend more time thinking about "what really gets me going" in the coming days, things will start coming to the surface. Write them down as they do.
But it's better to be building the next bandwagon than jumping on the last, right?
I don't believe PG has properly thought this statement through. It's extremely, unbelievably selfish. I like wine myself, but alcohol brings so much misery to the world! If I were offered a reliable method to make our Earth a world without alcohol (say, by tweaking the machinery of the human brain ever-so-subtly so that alcohol no longer works), but it entailed killing a random person in the street, I'd do it without a second thought.
Any world I choose will make some people better off and other people worse off (that's inevitable), but not in equal degrees (fallacy of gray - thinking that all gray is the same color). While making the choice, I don't have a strict deontological prohibition that freedom of any single person must never decrease, all else be damned. If saving one person from extreme harm requires reducing the consumer options of two other persons, I go for it. It's a matter of balance, you have to weigh all the consequences, not just the ones that affect you.
To disagree with my original comment you'd have to believe that a world with alcohol is truly better than a world without. I don't think you believe that. To determine your real opinion, imagine you're given the option of introducing another new addictive substance to the Earth's population. You know in advance that it will spread worldwide, such-and-such percentage of humans will be affected, and such-and-such percentage will lose everything they had and die miserable deaths as a result. To counterbalance that, some other people will have fun using the substance casually. Would you introduce the substance? How is this different from introducing alcohol to a world without it? And how is that different from choosing one possible world over the other?
For the claim of happiness promised by authoritarian control - I would certainly not be happy to make such a choice.
And so much happiness! I'm more of a beer man myself, but drinking alcohol in good company is something millions (billions?) of people get pleasure out of. Only a small proportion of alcohol users harm themselves or others through it.
I think the counter-addiction technology will have to be psychological. Perhaps research could determine if certain practices make people more resistant to addictive things, and it could become customary to have such a practice. Meditation, self-hypnosis, ritual, counseling, introspection. Maybe just doing things that are hard. I suppose there is a danger that any of those could become addictive. Maybe the best you can hope for is to have a choice of what you're addicted to.
Internet usage is a crappy ground state. You can easily do six things at once, all borderline-interesting, none useful. I think I'll make internet-free Sunday a weekly event.
But for people who work with a computer for their day job, avoiding the cause of the addiction is much tougher.
It's like if a TV critic had a TV addiction. He/She couldn't just stop watching TV altogether to defeat the addiction.
Sometimes I think the only solution for extreme cases is to take a sabbatical from work and become something like a waiter for a few months. No computers needed and lots of human interaction.
86 points by whatusername 196 days ago
Heroin and crack aren't more concentrated, they just get absorbed faster into the brain. For whatever reason the faster a substance gets absorbed the more likely you are to get addicted to it. For any given drug smoking it is the most likely to lead to addiction, followed by injection, snorting, sublingual, and eating in that order. Obviously this doesn't change your point at all, but I only mention it because it stands to reason that the addictiveness of other things works the same way. (For example, you might be able to keep HN equally useful but make it less addictive if there were a way to slow down the rate of gratification.)
PG is right though, the internet is addictive. The question of what to do about it is still left open, though. For now, I'm going to disconnect for a few hours. Hopefully when I get back on I'll have something productive to show for it.
This was inspired by something PG said in another essay--that he deals with internet addiction by using separate computers for work and internet. The iPad is just a purpose built machine for that, in my view.
Edit: Added one.
That said, TV and newspapers are arguably just as bad (or worse) and they've been around for ages. So that's... reassuring.
However I think the iPad an iPhone are good in the sense that they remove the social isolation involved with logging onto the net.
How are newspapers as bad or worse than internet addiction? You don't have most of the members of a family going off to read newspapers in different parts of the house.
I eventually grew out of the habit, and now don't find PC or console games appealing anymore. The fact that I naturally gave it up without any intervention means it wasn't an addiction.
Most other computer enthusiasts that I know or work with have a similar story of "growing out of" their addiction to computer games. I imagine many on HN have similar stories to tell.
I think the examples in PG's essay are "phases", not addictions.
And I predict that most of the people PG knows who self-identify as Internet addicts will eventually out-grow their compulsion.
Being "just a phase" for a lot of people (myself included) doesn't make it less likely for it to be an addictive thing, makes it more (how many healthy normal non-addictive activities are considered "phases" by some people but end up eating out entire lives?).
Job aspirations - granted, this is usually children and teenagers.
Religious or Political ideologies. For instance, as a highschooler I was convinced that Socialism was the best system - so long as you could do it Right. I have since become more cynical.
But, yeah, the other examples qualify as phases without being as toxic as drugs.
His argument is roughly that strongly addictive behaviors arise to soak up spare time created by technological advances, e.g. gin halls in the 17th century england as a response to the industrial revolution and TV/Radio/Etc in response to the dramatic drop in hours worked per week in the 20th century.
Hopefully our society will create new ways to use time in productive ways (a challenge especially appropriate to those of us on HN) pulling many, otherwise unsuspecting, away from worthless addictive pursuits.
Anathem is set on and around the planet Arbre. Thousands of years prior to the events in the novel, society was on the verge of collapse. Intellectuals entered concents, much like monastic communities but without the religious elements. Here, the avout—a term for intellectuals living under vows and separated from saecular society [...]—retain only limited access to tools and technology and are watched over by officials answering to the outside world (known as the Sæcular Power).
Still, he's definitely right that the world is getting more addictive.
Before HULU it was very easy to keep myself from wasting the US average of 4.5hrs of TV watching a day. I just gave away my TV. During that period I had a lot more time to work, enjoy books, friends, the outdoors or other more enjoyable but less addicting activities.
Now however TV is a part of the internet and I have difficulty blocking it. I've tried editing hosts files, rescuetime, and even made my own app (8aweek YC W08). But I'm on a losing battle with this addiction so far.
Introspectively, the problem with my addiction lies in the acceleration of production as well as distribution. There are more movies being produced, more novels being written, and more content in general to consume. Technology has been making producing these mediums easier and easier. Musicians used to have to write down lyrics and notes on paper - now there are programs which can practically generate a whole song for them. News can be written by your friends who just got the latest scoop at a major conference. Producing content has never been easier.
At the same time on the distribution side, the internet has made all this content available at your finger tips instantly. As bandwidth increased, it became almost too easy to spend 10 minutes watching news or entertaining on YouTube or a myriad of other free media streaming sites.
These processes will only get more efficient and more effective. As a corollary, the media which seems highly targeted and interesting to you will become increasingly prevalent.
There are no easy answers, and I for one am taking the issue relatively seriously. Getting away for extended periods of time without internet is vital - which is also why I don't own a smart phone.
I have to agree with the main thesis, though: however you define it, things are getting more addictive. That seems like an almost necessary consequence of capitalism. If your product or service is addictive, you can cause much more discomfort to your customers without losing them. Almost every way of improving the bottom line without improving the product involves causing discomfort to your customers (the only exception being "get more customers"), and any of those things can be done at the same time as improving the product. Just look at credit cards: everybody hates them, their policies are extremely abusive, but people are addicted to the convenience they provide. It's not worth giving up capitalism for (it's still the worst economic system except all the others, with posthumous apologies to Churchill).
I think there's perhaps a business model in managing the increasing addictiveness of the world around us. I'm not sure where, but it's such a potential value that there must be one.
I remember a philosophy professor discussing this a decade ago. And as time has gone by what she said has made more and more sense. Maybe because technology continues to accelerate while relatively speaking our social customs stay (nearly) the same.
EDIT: added to it. Clarified.
Sounds very similar to much of Neal Stephenson's work, especially Anathem, where the Avout plot their own way and everyone else is merely addicted to the world. Snow Crash also has aspects of what the world is starting to look like, and I wonder if Stephenson is particularly well-placed to look at some of these trends because he's got a lot of the hacker ethos and yet makes his living by writing very long, very detailed books that demand attention if they're going to be read and digested.
With regards to the diet itself though: works for me, so I'm happy with it.
But I would like to educate myself about paleo, especially since it provides some compelling arguments while sounding yummy.
As far as being vegan goes, check out 'the vegetarian myth' by Leirre Keith, I've been reading parts of it and it's both entertaining and it really gets under your skin.
But what is PG's opinion here?
> we'll have to figure out for ourselves what to avoid and how
At its most basic Paleo Nutrition is mostly about avoiding or minimizing so-called neolithic agents of disease: refined carbohydrates, grains, processed oils.
> It will actually become a reasonable strategy… to suspect everything new
It may be that thinking of it as a "modern" approach to nutrition (ironic in that it's supposed to be the "ancestral" way of eating, but the linked Wikipedia article does call it modern) can help the adoption of the Paleo diet, because "it's new" and because it's new, "addictive".
When cigarettes first appeared, they spread the way an infectious disease spreads through a previously isolated population.
...is not literally true. Cigarettes are hundreds of years old. They were apparently being manufactured in Europe in the 1830s.
Of course, this doesn't affect PG's point in the slightest; he's remarking on how the smoking boom stopped, not how it started.
I wonder why cigarettes went through such a huge boom in the mid-20th century. Perhaps it's simply a matter of better manufacturing techniques leading to a decline in costs.
(I had a little trouble there with the adjective "better" applied to Madison Avenue's promotion of cigarettes).
150 years ago, they were not that different from the surrounding culture. They became distinct as the pace of innovation took off.
As new innovations come, they allow a whole generation to consume it on the outside, then consider adopting it only after it's been out for decades.
They seem kinda weird to us, but its a very wise strategy. Just because its shiny doesn't mean its helpful for human living.
This is a great line. Never seen it articulated quite as well.
This time, however, you wrote a good essay. Broadly-scoped, yet with enough cogent sparkles to make it a worthwhile read.
Glad to see you continuing to engage on this.
My hope is that we're going to develop new social norms for what is "normal" -- best operating range. This time in our evolution might be like when heroin first was introduced. For a time, normal as in "regular people" were people who used drugs. Normal as in best operating range were people who abstained. They were probably pretty boring people, actually. Here's hoping the boring people save the day.
Heard a new phrase last week, "digital drugs". I like it. Seems to fit.
Also, for more reading, here's a shameless plug for "Technology is Heroin" which I wrote a year and a half ago on the same topic http://www.whattofix.com/blog/archives/2009/02/technology_is... You said at the time you wanted to address this issue, and I'm glad it's still on your radar.
In the case of hacker news, what we're addicted to is startup news and gossip. It's ironic that this very morning I was thinking about how to produce some sort of audio version of HN for my daily commute.
Not me. I'm more interested in programming technology and understanding how trends in technology shape society -- and reading PG's essay has helped me do this.
Actually, iPhone is really useful location & time specific information gathering device. If you dont put your tweet,rss or any push notification apps (facebook included), than it realy enhance the way of life. I found it several times useful when i am looking for a book at bookstore and get very quick facts about the book.
The real dangerous device is iPad. From the day i have, i could not put it away. Its really content consuming device. My nights in my bed are no longer have the serenity of reading books but frenzy of consuming content channels.
Sometimes Gladwell's words keep coming to me: clearing big spaces of time. http://www.cbsnews.com/video/watch/?id=6058607n
Both Addiction and Fashion can be harmful... anorexia(addiction) and size-zero(fashion), but they are different.
Fashions may be all consuming for a long period, but then they change, often swiftly and brutally. A shift in customs (large,lengthy) is not required for a shift in Fashion.
Fashion and addiction can co-exist, and I'll offer an anecdote. The Dance Music scene in 1999.
.
Here there was some people with a bona-fide addiction to dance party drugs (real addicts) co-existing with those who indulged in light drug taking in the fashion for dance parties. Dance parties grew to quite an peak and the associated drug intake too. But when the dance music scene burnt out in favour of rock... the fashion drug element receded with it.
I'm reminded of the atomic bomb: we had the technology to destroy ourselves before (we feared) we had the emotional and cultural institutions to show restraint.
In this case, what's become dangerous is the technology of satisfying human desire.
We see this in pretty much every designed human experience, to varying degrees. Yes, it's in World of Warcraft and Twitter on your iPhone and crystal meth. But it's also in game mechanics in your hybrid car's display, airline loyalty programs, and summer camp rituals that keep campers coming back every year.
All the things in your life that know how to push the happy button.
Very thought-provoking essay.
Based on available statistics, middle schoolers and high schoolers spend 4-5 hours a day watching TV. But in middle school and high school, I heard my classmates discussing television fairly infrequently, presumably because TV is not a very cool subject to discuss. So the guy who didn't watch any TV (me) didn't seem weird--for that reason, at least.
I think it's wider than that: religious fundamentalism is a response to the future shock Alvin Toffler wrote about. Christian (and Muslim) fundamentalists find the world a scary place and want to retreat into a mythical past that has more certainty in it.
Yet, neither cigarettes nor hard liquor have managed to snare me, and I gave both quite a fair shot. Nor has WoW wrapped me in it's tendrils.
The ironic thing is I definitely have fixations and addictions, but they are to stupid things you never would have thought you could be addicted to.
I am looking for strategies on how to deal with this addiction. How to start? Where to get help? Where to find the force to escape? How to convince myself that I want to change and WHY?
It is because same instinct that keeps us alive works when we get addicted.
Addiction is fun some time but painful at times. Just like life. We are rarely happy still everyone wants to live. Then everyone is in same boat, we all are addicted.
A lot of the articles on HN are inspiring.
Sometimes it is good to switch off and relax with a movie or a computer game.
And so on...
Does that make it harder or easier to keep one's identity small? - http://paulgraham.com/identity.html
If you were doing a startup right now, would you get an iphone?
And vice-versa.
... he goes to his bishop with this proposal: "I like to try this out." Bishop says to Ivan, "Okay Ivan, do whatever you want with this. But you have to be ready to give it up, if we decide it is not helping you or hurting others." So Ivan acquires the tech and ramps it up, while his neighbors, family, and bishops watch intently. They weigh the benefits and drawbacks. What is it doing to the community? ... [1]
Inertia and a cost/benefit calculation, two things that are often absent in the normal Addictive iGadget buying process.
[1] http://www.kk.org/thetechnium/archives/2009/02/amish_hackers...
This is only an anecdote: I had a friend who started using Marijuana. He said he only used it once in a while and it was no big deal. That it wasn't that bad really because he didn't use any of the more potent stuff like cocaine as other guys did. In his mind I supposed he was convincing himself that the really bad guys are using cocaine. According to him using Marijuana is no big deal. Two years latter I had a conversation with him and he tells me he was arrested for using cocaine while driving. He tells me it is no big deal because he only uses it every once in a while and that he is not like other guys that use more potent drugs. No big deal really.
It seems to me that starting with a mild drug can lead to using more dangerous drugs. And yet every once in a while I read somebody saying that you should use Marijuana or that Marijuana is no big deal.
No point really, just ranting a little. I guess I would like to tell you Marijuana users that if you like it don't try to convince the rest of us into thinking it is no big deal. Go ahead and use your crap if you want but don't advertise it to the rest of us as if it is no big deal.
You take the fact that cocaine users have almost invariably first used such substances as evidence supporting your theory, without recognising that this pattern is what we would expect to observe in any event. The idea of a cocaine user who has never touched alcohol is a bizarre one.
(By the way, why the focus on marijuana? Can you formulate a version of your argument that doesn't apply just as well to alcohol? I'll grant you that cigarettes have only a mild effect, but the effects of alcohol and cannabis are broadly similar; if anything, alcohol has a stronger effect.)
Many people will not switch from cigarettes to Marijuana because their moral values does not allow them to. i.e. They see using an illegal substance as immoral. However, if somehow you convince them to use Marijuana and break their moral value what many of them will do is to rationalize that using Marijuana is no big deal. Especially if a lot of peers are re-inforcing that notion (as many are trying to do here in Hacker News. Or to put it another way, a rotten apple will rotten all the others). That moral value is lost. Since there is no longer a moral value stopping them from using illegal substances using Cocaine is really no big deal anymore.
I hypothesize that this is how criminals are created in general. The first time the commit a crime they may be really nervous, eventually they get used to it and many may go on to commit worse crimes. I guess this is why it is so important to teach kids strong moral values. Also to keep them away from bad influences. They are the most vulnerable in their teenage years from breaking their moral values. If they have not broken their moral values after their mid twenties they are probably not going to anymore.
Mild crime does not lead to strong crime. Like many people, in my teenage days I downloaded some music illegally. Most of us didn't become burglars. But I guarantee you almost all burglars (of the correct age group and technical skills) have downloaded music illegally.
OK. So lets agree that doing Marijuana may not 100% of the time lead to cocaine use. That doesn't mean that it doens't increases the likelyhood of using it because you've already broken multiple moral values that go beyond just drinking or smoking.
Another example: Does smoking mean that you are going to get cancer? No. But it has been proven in plenty of studies that it does increases your chances of getting cancer. And I think we can agree that using Marijuana is a step closer to using cocaine than just drinking alcohol. For once, if you are using Marijuana that means that you already have a person providing you an illegal substance. That same person can probably get you cocaine and anything else you want. If you only drink alcohol you would still have to find this illegal substance distributor.
Finally, are you making the claim that there is nothing wrong with smoking Marijuana. If so does that mean that you would be OK if your kids smoke Marijuana? Now please be honest.
The amount who try marijuana that move on to cocaine isn't even close to 100%. Even if I was to grant you that marijuana was a stepping stone, statistics put the number less than 50%. Most polls put the amount of American adults who've tried marijuana close to 42%. Only around 16% have tried cocaine. http://www.time.com/time/health/article/0,8599,1821697,00.ht...
Also, most marijuana dealers only deal enough to smoke for free plus a little extra. They certainly aren't getting rich off it. And many of them don't have connections to other drugs.
That said, there is some truth to what you are saying... In school we are taught that ALL drugs are bad, that they will kill you, ruin your life, etc. Then people try marijuana, and realize it actually isn't a big deal. So that can lead some people to incorrectly conclude that all they learned was lies, not just the part about marijuana, and so they recklessly continue trying other drugs. I'll grant you this happens occasionally. But the fault there not within marijuana, but within the current education policy of treating all drugs equally. Give kids the truth and a little respect, and they just might surprise you.
First, there are at least two possible explanations for the the even you witnessed - one that marijuana was a gateway drug for your friend, and the other is that your friend was simply fucked up to start with and found his solace in drugs. You have dismissed one of the options and then concluded the truthfulness of the other (which is a serious defect of cognition).
Your second problem is that you are treating an anecdote as data. It ain't.