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Comment by drewcrawford | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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...

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.

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