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Comment by DenisM | Hacker News Reader

It will actually become a reasonable strategy (or a more reasonable strategy) to suspect everything new.

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.

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Agreed. This old article from Wired (http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/1.06/1.6_amish.html) describes how the Amish aren't just rejectionists. Unlike the rest of us, they have a tradition of thinking deeply about technology before adopting it into our lifestyle.

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.

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).

but now you know, right?

Sure, but neither alcohol nor the internet is all that addictive. Most people are quite capable of controlling their usage of both, so it's not risky to try for the first 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.

You can always ween yourself off heroin by checking into rehab - you just need to have the will to do that one step. And I suggest that the will comes from knowing what you seek in life, rather than knowing what you wish to avoid.

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.

It's a good thing you don't want to argue about heroin, because you're pretty wrong:

> 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.

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