Hacker News Reader

I defined bad as things you don't want to want. E.g. because while they give you initial pleasure, they might give you net less pleasure in the long run. Though that isn't the only reason you might not want to want something. For example, you might dislike the environmental cost, or the thing might conflict with some principle you held.

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.

I don't think the phrase "don't want to want" has any semantic meaning if you try to break it down.

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 think the reason it seems meaningless not to want to want air is that we're influenced the apparent impossibility of doing without it. But imagine if it actually were possible. E.g. if in some advanced future technology the blood could be oxygenated directly, or our brain states were transferred to some form of computer. Then it's reasonable to imagine someone not wanting to be tied to tedious, corporeal respiration.

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.

Maybe I am too tired tonight, but I don't see how this reply addresses the question--why is addiction (perhaps specifically "internet addiction" or whatever you want to call it)--bad enough to warrant "hip flask" and other equivalences with alcohol?

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.

Here's an example: this back-and-forth between you and Paul was fascinating enough that I read every word, but now that I spent 5 minutes doing it, I realize I'd rather have been working on my startup idea. I didn't realize this as I was reading it, but now that I spent a somewhat significant amount of time reading (and now, also, answering), I wish I hadn't. Part of me wants to finish writing this comment and go write code, and another part wants to open github and start playing with implementations of ideas that have been building up over the past two weeks.

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.

We may be talking past one another. Perhaps it would help if you picked out a sentence or passage from the essay that seems false.

I'd say "bad enough" is usually judged individually case by case.

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.

Addiction limits our ability to choose our actions. If faced with a choice between being addicted and not-addicted to something, a rational person will prefer not being addicted. Therefore addiction is bad.

Oxygen is not inherently bad. Dependence on oxygen is bad.

This is something discussed extensively in the philosophy of mind and the philosophy of religion amoungst other places. It is sometimes referred to as a second order desire.

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.

The analogy to breathing is a bad one, because breathing air is not an addiction, it is a physical need. If you stop breathing, you die. If you stop reading HN or Reddit or Facebook, you don't die.

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".

If you've ever seen someone go 'cold-turkey' then you realise that plenty of additions have reached the status of 'physical need'.

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.

There's a difference between a physical response to withdrawal and a physical requirement to live. As far as I'm aware there aren't any addictions that change your physiology to the degree that you have a permanent dependency (would be fascinated to know if there are any though).

Yes, going 'gold turkey' can induce a heart attack which in turn can cause you to die:

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).

I never claimed there was no physical component to addictions or that withdrawal symptoms can't be very bad.

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.

> In fact, at a molecular level in the brain almost all addictive substances and activities have a physical component.

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.

Yes, you're right.

Nobody's addicted to air. You need air: just enough to get along. But you don't try to inhale as much as you can; you don't get sick getting too much of it -- although there is enough air around to inflate yourself like a balloon if you were actually addicted to it.

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"...?

there are plenty of examples in Korea where people have died from "too much internet"

a very sad example: http://www.sott.net/articles/show/209478-Update-South-Korean...

I don't think this example, however sad, is valid: - addiction should harm the addicted, not somebody else - from the article: "The girl, who was born prematurely and weighed 5 pounds (2.25 kilograms), was often fed rotten formula and was beaten when she cried out of hunger, the affidavit said." so what killed this child is not "Internet addiction" but being born to abusive parents...

Consider "want to want" as "would do in the limit of complete knowledge, infinitely fast thought processes and perfect self-control", i.e., reflective equilibrium. If you had perfect self-control then you would choose to breathe, but not to play World of Warcraft.

I think I can explain. I want to breath, but I never wanted to stop breathing. I want to play games, but I really wish I didn't want to. Not that I want to become a vegetable with no desires. I want some replacement that feeds my emotions and instincts just like games but adds "energy" instead of taking it away. By energy I mean anything that improves the chance of my genes survival (or genes of my species): health, money, safety, experience, knowledge.

It does, because people's preferences do not obey the rules of rationality. They differ inconsistently across different time-scales, so that it's very common (eg) to have a very strong desire for something immediately gratifying (a cigarette, more ice cream, whatever) and a weaker desire to not want them. This is a fairly well-studied phenomenon; you can [start here](http://picoeconomics.org/breakdown.htm) with the work of George Ainslie.

I'd say that I'm addicted to the Internet, but I do want to want it. I just don't want to want it as much.

> What does it mean to say it is bad?

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.

You're assuming that dissatisfaction and regret mean the activity was bad. What if you overindulge in learning and regret knowing all kinds of details about Lisp? Some outside observers don't consider your time wasted, quite the contrary. But by your measurement, regretting knowing Lisp would mean that knowing Lisp is bad.

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!

I don't think pg's argument relies on an objective definition of bad. The subjective one works fine.

After all, the subject might be wrong!

"Wrong" being subjective, of course.

> 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.

(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.

> (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.

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?

If I wasted 1-3 hours each day I would be okay. Some days I waste far less than this and feel good. But some days, I have lots of stuff to do, and I accidentally spend like 5 or 6 hours on HN and then I feel really shitty afterwards. _That_ is why we are trying to fix this problem. Maybe this doesn't happen to you, and that's good. But it does happen to me sometimes.

Dr Drew always says the hallmark of addiction is progressive use in the face of adverse consequence (effects on school or work, health, finance, legal, relationships).

Who's Dr. Drew?

http://lmgtfy.com/?q=Dr.+Drew

These are things that, as pg put it, I don't want to want. I don't care what changed on HN in the last 15 seconds, so why do my fingers type this reflexively when I've opened my browser to do something else? I was just here, I've already read the stuff I'm interested in. I don't want to be here.

Yeah, I know about noprocrast. It doesn't stop my fingers from typing h-a-down-enter .

The two points I can address:

  * Is It *dangerous*?

At the extreme, yes: hikikomori - http://www.nytimes.com/2006/01/15/magazine/15japanese.html?p...

  * Can the claims of loss of productivity be scientifically substantiated? To what extent?

If an employee spends 8 hours browsing Reddit, instead of doing work that needed to be done, the loss of productivity is quantifiable. So how about 5 minutes? 20 minutes? 40? An hour?

>At the extreme, yes

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."

> 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?

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'.

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

I think the best way way to conceive of technological progress is in terms of node density, where each node is a person. That is why I define the following terms the way I do:

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.

Aside from direct damage which varies from negligible to substantial, the indirect costs should be taken into account. They're not always easy to guage.

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?

"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."

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?

Very interesting perspective.

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.

Actually, I'll call you on that. I think our collective addiction to air is HORRIBLE. Air oxidizes our tissues, causing aging, shortages prevent us from getting the most physical exertion, etc. If we didn't need air, we'd be much more capable. If someone could figure out a way to free us from this burden, we'd be better off running farther, staying young longer, and much much more.

The chemical reactions that drive your body are best compared to a very slow burn. Oxidisation (burning) needs oxygen, and oxygen needs to be somehow added to keep the 'fire' (your continued existence as an entity) going. Those that no longer consume oxygen (at least, those that are animals) are usually labelled as 'deceased'.

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 disagree with the fact that people currently have more free time as compared to 50-100 years ago.

According to http://eh.net/encyclopedia/article/whaples.work.hours.us

there is a clear trend in a shortening workweek each decade across industries.

I stand corrected. Thanks for pointing the data out.

Definition of "free time": "time available for hobbies and other activities that you enjoy"

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."