‘Limbic Capitalism’ Preys on Our Addicted Brains
quillette.com
quillette.com
To cut a long story short, if people have information about the market, they can use their knowledge of their own desires to act, which creates some sort of efficiency. Glossing over a load of stuff here because it's a large subject, but that's sort of the spiel you get when people are talking about all sorts of political/economic decisions. And you can generate both leftie and rightie policies depending on how you think about things.
The problem is if deciding things depends on free will and information, what do we do when it seems there are exceptions? I'll leave aside information problems since we're more talking about rationality.
But if it turns out people can know what WoW does to your studies, and they still end up doing this, how should we think about this? Easy answer is that their real desire is to play WoW all day, but that doesn't seem very satisfying. If they're making an irrational decision, that has other consequences on our society.
For instance, a whole load of behaviours need to be controlled. Obvious things like smoking and drugs, but what about overeating? Too much soda? Social media? And what exactly is the correct policy response to irrational behaviour? Keep in mind solutions like taxes/subsidies also rely on rationality.
Policy makers and politicians have been struggling with these problems for the last +150 years, and increasingly so in the last 30 ever since the creation of political microtargetting and the perfection of advertising, cambridge analytica and digital microtargetting+psychographics is just the cherry on top
Planet Money released an episode touching on all of these subjects "Ep 915 How to meddle in an election"
https://www.npr.org/2019/05/24/726536757/episode-915-how-to-...
Also, anybody that hasn't should absolutely watch "Century of the self" by Adam Curtis
Agency is the only option. It's not like the concept of agency was thought up in a society with no dumb people.
If you want to live in a society where the state doesn't believe in agency, and where your difficult decisions will be made by people who are (on average) more intelligent than you, go ahead and move to the PRC, they're right up your alley!
People are actively opting out of advertising, which is why major advertising businesses are pulling out all the stops (see Google's recent announcement that they will restrict advertisement and tracking blockers); these businesses will suffer with the new generation of "consumers".
I didn't read that in GP. Currently we seem to be very reluctant to admit that we're all vulnerable to being manipulated, and it might actually increase the total amount of agency available to individuals if we could restrict the ways we're allowed to manipulate each other.
Poorly-conducted industry-funded research? That's pretty straightforward; and in some sense it is not that different from other forms of fraud. I'm okay with punishing people for acting with intent to knowingly mislead.
On the other hand, you look at lending, and it becomes a little bit difficult. There are illegal interest rates in many places, and for setting an upper bound, that works fine; but people throw around a lot of dubious allegations about lenders.
At some point, if you deny the existence of agency, you end up telling people things you can't know, because you don't have the imagination to consider that they might know what they're doing.
That is tyrannical.
If humans are all vulnerable to all these manipulative tactics, where are we supposed to get humans who are not?
There is another alternative: reclassify exploitation of cognitive failure modes as a type of initiation of force. We already do this with deception in certain areas like con artistry, giving false testimony, bad faith in business, etc. Maybe we need to vastly expand our notion of tortious or civilly actionable deception to include clear use of dark patterns.
The idea that we are perfectly rational and can deal with any form of deception is perhaps the intangible analog of saying we are impervious to bullets. If that's not true, then it is the responsibility of law enforcement to protect us.
This is kind of radical of course. It would lead to regulations on speech that classify certain kinds of speech as assault.
The more I see of this emerging mass mind control dystopia the harder it is for me to think of non-radical solutions.
Yeah, I think there's some room for that, and the law (as you point out) is already somewhat headed that way. I think we need to be careful also not to write laws we can't afford to enforce fairly, or read too much into people's private interactions.
I remember having to help my employer prove that they were not the reason I wasn't in school when I was 17; and I think even with that they were still at my mercy. As a result of this, and a pretty large number of other experiences, I'm very very sensitive to the unintended outcomes of the law, and the limits of legislators' ability to understand what precisely they are doing.
You should 100% see the adamn Curtis documentary I mentioned above and read up on manufacture of consent
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=tTBWfkE7BXU
What you mention is already the case, it is fully within the interest of the decentralized power holders and policy makers for them to control the population via the information that's fed to them, that's why the Iraq invasion happened in the first place, that's why the US continues to try spread fear about Iran or China.
There is no way to destroy that machinery, only repurpose it for different means
This is a hard thing for people to get over, and I don't really understand why. As an analogy, think about Right to Repair: I can simultaneously say that I want consumers to have the ability to control their devices, install custom firmware, and crack them open to repair them if they break, without making an assertion that every single consumer is qualified to do so.
With Right to Repair, I don't lose the ability to let someone qualified make decisions about my device, or to set device policies. It doesn't require a massive amount of faith in ordinary people, just an acknowledgement that a single company making those decisions for everyone is overall bad for the market.
And the fact that some individuals will make bad decisions and hand their iPad to Uncle Joe to fix with his power tools is an acceptable tradeoff, given that it means we're not forced to solve the much harder problem of deciding for everyone which modifications and usage is "correct" for every device.
The reason people go in so hard on individual freedom isn't because individuals are amazing -- individuals are flawed as heck. It's that it is extremely difficult to figure out when someone is fit to take over someone else's decision power, and that getting it wrong comes with massive risks. Given that we don't have an easy formula to tell when delegation is the right choice, or even to define what happiness is, or even to define whether or not happiness should be a universal goal, we (when possible) leave it up to individuals to make their own decisions or voluntarily delegate their decisions to another person.
Individual freedoms allow us to practice Defense in Depth on a societal level, at the cost of making us more vulnerable to some manipulations and allowing individuals to make some bad decisions about who they delegate their thinking to.
It's not perfect, but it is terribly practical, and nobody that I know of has come up with a better scheme yet.
"It's difficult" doesn't mean it's a task that should be completely abandoned because of some ideological notion.
I brought up the Defense in Depth angle because I think it's kind of the same category of problem. Why do we need multiple layers of security on our devices -- why shouldn't Apple just validate the code on everything that gets submitted to the store? Why shouldn't developers just write code that's bug free?
Because they just can't.
It's not that everyone has stopped trying to answer questions like "what is the purpose of society?". Nobody's talking about abandoning anything. If you think the problem is solveable, you're welcome to jump into philosophical circles right now and solve it. And once you've solved it, I promise I will happily move over to a totalitarian system where a perfectly informed formula decides what my life should be.
In the meantime, we need a pragmatic solution, and individual freedom is the best one I've seen proposed.
Passing laws is not the difficult part, any government can do that :)
The difficult part was browbeating the cigarette companies.
Right -- in most cases through a voluntarily elected representative democracy, or something similar. In the US, a decent portion of these taxes are even imposed by individual state laws, not just through the federal government. This is, maybe not the complete opposite of totalitarianism, but it's pretty close to the opposite.
But you might be missing the point of what I'm saying. If you want to move to a totalitarian system where we centralize all decision-making power, it's not enough to find a couple of things we all agree on. You have to be right nearly all of the time.
Go back to the Right to Repair analogy I made earlier. There are generally accepted best practices for most devices (for example, I don't want to be able to overcharge the battery until it explodes). But just because we can think of a couple of examples of this, it doesn't necessarily follow that a single company should control everything I can do with my device. Why? Because my concern isn't that Apple or Google will never get anything right, it's that their priorities won't in general align with mine, and that if something goes wrong, I won't have a recourse to correct the problem (The Defense in Depth analogy).
The same concerns are present with any system of government. If you want to remove user/citizen agency, you need a consistent framework or set of tests that can be applied to every decision you make. You need a way to make a decision and, without getting the consent or input of the general populous, figure out whether it's in their best interests. That's the difficult, impossible task.
Not passing the law; not quieting the companies that opposed it. That stuff might not be trivial, but we know how to do it. We do it all the time. We don't have any idea of how to objectively determine whether or not a random policy is in the public's (or an individual's) best interest without their input.
And it's worth noting that even in drug policy, even representative democracies struggle with this. In the US, we had prohibition, which was an attempt to say, "come on, alcohol is obviously bad for society". That failed pretty spectacularly. Now we do cigarette taxes, but we haven't gone so far as to actually ban cigarettes, even though we're all pretty much agreed it would be better if they stopped existing. And more recently, we're starting to see states decriminalize marijuana, which is a clear example of citizens/states rejecting a centralized "common-sense" decision about what was good for them.
Corrections like this are examples of the system working as intended.
You're looking at this through a government vs. corporation regulatory lens that I'm not really following. I'm arguing that voluntary delegation of a decision making process is different than involuntary delegation, and that preserving individual freedom doesn't mean you can't ever delegate a decision to someone else. I don't understand how cigarette taxes relate to that idea.
I mean, this is 100% correct, yet that's not quite the problem, and stating it that way leads to overall confusion, the issue is that policy makers, companies and other profit motivated groups found ways to get inside the root unconscious mental proceses which lead to concious decision making, this just means that said groups can hijack the agency of thousands of people at the same time with the same set of tools. That is what's happening right now, it had been the case that groups were using mass media to manufacture consent, but this new machinery is far more efficient and less expensive than previous systems
The defense in depth analogy is indeed very good, yet the agency of a critical amount of people has been compromised by this new machinery, and this machinery preys on people's unconscious instincts, fears and epigenetic predispositions. Those are things which simply can't really be postdoc taught to hundreds of millions of people at a whim
Yeah, very good point.
What we're trying to get at is this idea that some of the voluntary decisions people make aren't really voluntary.
What's (sometimes) proposed though is that this somehow invalidates the idea that people should be able to make their own decisions at all -- that they're incapable of it.
To go back to the idea of people controlling their devices, a hacker might trick me into giving device permissions for something I don't want -- because I misunderstand the permissions, or because they have some kind of leverage over me, or because they convince me that the permissions are no big deal.
I'm all for efforts to address 'Limbic Capitalism' that involve educating consumers and trying to plug those kinds of holes and giving people ways to interact with brands where brands can't sidestep informed decision-making processes. I disagree with someone who looks at those holes and says, "well clearly freedom isn't working", for the same reasons I disagree with someone who looks at Android's horrible permissions system and says, "well, clearly users shouldn't be able to decide whether or not an app gets location privileges, clearly only the smart people at Google should."
On the software side of things, we've learned that things like upfront permission prompts on app installation circumvent user agency, and we've started to move more towards forcing apps to only ask for permissions at the moment they need them. We've also given users tools like the ability to grant a permission temporarily rather than permanently.
Those kinds of solutions help defend against exploitative behavior without robbing users of agency.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20069693
I think that the only hope remains in the newer generations, and try to taught them as good as possible of the dangers this newly opened Pandora box released...
I studied international relations and this kind of thing keeps me up at night, I know that the Cia and other intelligence agencies are and have been exploiting this for a long, long, long time, and that there is no true defense against this problem other than "making it illegal" because sure as heck that didn't stop them from doing anything ever..
Anyhow, thank you for being around and help bounce ideas around!
This is the problem, agency is dead, or at least in the grand scales, manufacture of consent has been a thing for a long, long, long time now and it won't go away simply because some people are afraid of looking into the reality of things
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=tTBWfkE7BXU
Also, not sure if you saw the provided podcast, but most of the things you mention are addressed there
I think you interpret that passage to mean: "All influences must be from science OR religion, but not both. It is from religion. Therefore, it is from science." However, I interpret it more along the lines of: "Science has not backed up this idea of free will. So, how did we get this idea in our culture, you might ask, if it's not real? Well, it is inherited from Christian myth." This second reading is not an argument (he's not proving why free will is not a scientific reality), but an explanation of why the idea of free will exists.
You may still not be convinced by his assertion, but I don't think it's a false dichotomy. Additionally, he may make such assertions in his work Homo Dues (which I have not read), but I don't think this is necessarily an example of fallacious reasoning.
There are many philosophical lines that do not base free will on divine punishment.
It's also wrong, as it makes people unhappy. The whole idea of a real free will breaks down if we are looking at substance abuse at the latest. The underlying machinery of our brains limits the rationality of our decisions, and ultimately the freedom of our will.
I am afflicted with ADHD and know this first-hand. I still managed to get an education and a qualified job in software, but for years I hated myself for not being able to simply do tasks at hand. Libertarians would say I value goof-off time on reddit more than a steady job, but that's not true, in fact I would be a happier person if the internet just vanished or I finally got my procrastination under control.
Also, it helps to realize that high stress, crunch time situations are where I thrive. Major outage bringing the company to its knees? I got this. I'm calm, even. Tight, almost impossible deadline? I work extremely quickly and deliver high quality results.
Simple bug that's super easy to fix with no pressure? I'll need three weeks to do it. 1 minute to fix it, the rest of the time for unit tests. I get distracted more easily during these times.
On the plus side, my tangents sometimes pay off. I get curious, add instrumentation, discover relationships between various metrics, and use that to save millions of dollars, sometimes tens of millions.
On the other hand, ADHD also has some emotional side effects and I thus have a higher chance of pissing people off without meaning too. I also score higher on various autism tests, so that could be a factor (though I've never been diagnosed). So my (sometimes) good work is balanced by a weaker ability to collaborate.
Exercise helps, if I am able to do it regularly and frequently (which is currently not the case due to family and health). I tried medication but Ritalin would make me anxious and various SSRI/SNRI would nuke my sexuality. I am rather strict in not using my smartphone in bed, as that wrecks my sleep patterns.
Apart from that, not much, I am afraid. I tried various systems to organise my work, from having a to-do list buddy (I would regularly tell them what I have to do and report back) to pomodoro, but in the end, my discipline is too lacking, and I get distracted too fast.
I stopped working self-employed and am now working for one of the top 100 biggest companies. That helped a lot since I can sweep procrastination episodes under the carpet (the expected intensity of work is rather low), but is insanely frustrating because I have low leverage to improve our way of work.
ADHD has the upside for many that they will absolutely rip into information and devour it as long as it is interesting. In my case, that means I am the "go-to" person in our department because I know more about software development, tools, languages than most, even if I am probably not the most productive coder. Currently trying to develop into some kind of internal consultant for digital transformation/disruptive business ideas - I seemingly have the right ideas, now hoping for someone higher up to notice them.
I absolutely think things like loot boxes, sugar and gasoline should be regulated or taxed to decrease their potential to do damage. But at the end of the day you have to provide positive opportunities for people to do the productive thing.
Err, don't the two statements contradict each other?
(1) especially widespread behaviour, is rarely irrational
(2) Sweden has become surprisingly unpragmatic in recent years
Maybe we can take the lessons learned in adtech et al., and apply them to governing irrational people.
That will mean less "freedom", though...
Private society is actually getting better at avoiding misuse of food, drugs, and communication platforms; my young sister is well aware of a lot of the pitfalls, and monitors her use of social media rather carefully, she watches her food intake carefully and asks interesting questions about the effects of certain foods. In general, I have high hopes for the next generation, I think they will figure this stuff out fast enough.
What I feel is that, regardless of regulation on a societal level, it is up to us as individuals to decide what we feel comfortable with in regards to the products we create and the risk of harming others that we are willing to take on. We should be able to acknowledge the fact that - regardless of whether or not addiction is a personal failing or an inescapable biological flaw - intentionally leveraging and profiting off of it is an unethical action. It is exploitation regardless of the nature of the flaw being exploited.
It's complicated, because I think there are many types of products that can't avoid the potential for addictive use. In those situations, we have to ask ourselves whether we're targeting that addictive use, or whether it's an undesired side effect that a user may come across - and in that latter situation, to find ways to mitigate those harmful outcomes. If we want to provide outcomes that help our customers and provide them value, we need to be willing to accept that we may have to create awkward-feeling and profit-limiting mitigations.
Flawed as it is, education and the promotion of people developing self-awareness about their addictions is a strong tool we have for mitigation as long as it isn't something buried where users won't easily find it. Setting limits or ceilings on spending (spending of both time and money) is another mitigation. Avoiding monetization models such as gambling mechanics that inherently exploit addiction is another. Promoting and sticking to direct sales of products for discrete costs is another. But there is still so much we need to learn, and many potential pitfalls.
I moved into compiler work and line of business apps, which surprisingly I find just as enjoyable. I never really regretted avoiding games because there are enough things to get me in trouble already.
We should criminalize the act of hacking individuals, as the hardware can not be changed and applying security updates and bugfixes has proven ineffective or impossible. It should be viewed not as a weakness of the person but a vile act on a vurnerable creature. Similar in nature to the human rights, in which we grant us one another - animals as we are - inmuteable dignity. This dignity is violated, if one is hacked/manipulated against his/her own interest to serve the interests of another individual, cooperation, nation-state or a idea.
This sort of behaviour is not new. There have been precedences, where gurus, churches and whole nations, have overriden the individuals possibility to think or act different.
What I do think is a problem is the fact that we have much better data collection on how people use video games and internet services. Absent that information, developers had to think about crafting a good overall experience that people were willing to pay for. With that information, people optimize for overall time used instead of the quality of the experience. Hours and dollars spent is an easy metric to show to executives, judging the overall quality of the experience is much more subjective.
Just like we have always done, if something constantly disturbs day to day activities, then it is an addictive behaviour
>That is, the addictive behavior “spills over” into several dimensions of one’s daily life
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3210595/
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>What I do think is a problem is the fact that we have much better data collection on how people use video games and internet services
I think this doesnt get to the core of the issue, and that's that, humans have always sought better and more efficient ways to get enjoyment out of things, people would infuse their rectums with alcohol way back in Egyptian times to get a stronger alcohol "high".
The difference between lets say, 1980's arcades and modern mobile games is simply the tools available, the aim is the same. Only now we can do it faster with A/B testing, with the knowledge of Skinner boxes, etc
Having worked in GameDev, one of the most flooring things I have faced is people asking me for me to introduce said addictive inducing systems and mechanisms.... They want the enjoyment, they want to be "addicted", they want a game "so good" that they can't put it down.
And when it comes to what you mention of the metrics, yeah, 100%, modern digital era metrics are all based in the so called "Attention Economy", specially for social platforms, in the case of Netflix or Fortnite, their biggest competitors are people actually working, or asinine things like taking a walk, cooking, spending time with family, etc. We are in a race to the bottom for people's attentions and lives, HackerNews itself is yet another Skinnerbox for those that enjoy learning things. Reddit, Twitter, Youtube they all are designed to be addictive, Limbic Capitalism, and to not do so would mean that said platforms would lose in the free market against others that did employ said tactics...
We are optimizing for human pleasure, yet what happens when said pleasure is actually a potential enemy?
This is what I'm talking about though. Back when games were bought on a disk or cartridge and didn't feature any sort of micro-transactions there was no point in making a game addictive. It didn't matter if players played the game for 2 hours or 200 hours. All that mattered is that the game was good so that people enjoyed it, became popular, and sold well. In some sense, getting players addicted to any one game might actually be undesirable as it would reduce willingness to pay for subsequent games.
Nowadays, so many games are trying to be "lifestyle games" that are meant to be continuously consumed instead of played through once or twice.
This is what you are missing, they were already addictive, it was only not a wide spread thing because games in general didn't had mass appeal back then, it was a niche thing that could be ignored by the broader population.
There's a quasi-infinite amount of stories of people becoming addicted to playing StarCraft Broodwar, and that game came in 1998, same with Quake, Counter Strike, Age of Empires.
Yes, it is true that said games have become multiplied, but said games are simply filling what people ask for.... As I stated in my previous comment, people want this, they want the addictive parts of said games, and Capitalism will always be happy to provide...
Also, what you mention of "games that can be played once or twice", I think that you are seriously misunderstanding the situation, Go has been played for thousands of years, same with Chess, compact self contained games with campaigns are actually something quite modern, the standard has been for games to be multiplayer.
The games that usually destroy people's lives are those that have social or competitive roots, and it is because we as humans are intrinsically tied to our relations, ego, personal achievement, etc. "Addictive games" are not something external to the individual, but they use the individual itself.
Lastly, the very reason why StarCraft, Age of Empires, Counter Strike/Half Life, Quake all sold so well early on is exactly because they were addictive/enjoyable. Had they not been then they wouldnt have
________
Quick question to all HN's; Is Dark Souls "Addictive"?
I think the important question is whether playing is impairing the person's ability to function normally.
I don't think so. I'm a heavy dark souls fan plus Bloodborne and Sekiro. I've been playing since Demon's Souls. Probably one of my top 5 favorite franchises of all time, aggregate playtime probably in the high hundreds maybe thousands of hours.
Personally, I can play the game more than maybe a couple hours at a time because they require a level of attention so great that I'm exhausted after a couple hours. I have to put it down after some time.
is this really true? when I was a kid (long enough ago that there were no skins or loot boxes), the most effective way to make me want a game was to see my friends playing it and having fun. there were probably tons of short single-player games that I was never aware of because people would just finish them quickly and not play while friends were over. but I still have vivid memories of watching people play smash and desperately wanting my own N64.
maybe the industry wasn't so ruthlessly capitalistic back then, but there had to be some execs that realized how much free marketing you get out of addictive console games.
I think addictiveness it's probably for this medium. I remember the news forums, they peaked way before capitalism reached the Internet, and were better designed and more addictive than Reddit.
I highly agree with your point in general, but I highly disagree that this is a straightforward distinction to make.
In order to tell when something is disrupting day-to-day life, we need to have agreement about what day-to-day life is and what changes to day-to-day life count as disruption.
It is not true at all for me that non-addictive, beneficial forms of media have never disrupted my day-to-day life. Arguably, getting into programming itself has been the biggest disruption -- because I got into programming the way I thought about problems changed, I started spending additional money on books and computers, my hobbies and friends changed to accommodate the new activity I was focused on.
You'll see the same changes in behavior, groups, friends, and time management for someone who starts getting heavily involved in a local church, or exercise, or volunteer work. We don't think of these activities as "addictive" in the traditional, harmful sense because we think that the changes they force you to make to accommodate them are desirable.
And who hasn't had the experience of reading a book so powerful and compelling that they couldn't get it out of their head the next day at work, or where it changed their worldview to the extent that it affected their daily routine?
These sound like pedantic arguments, but I've been in communities that disagreed about whether a behavior was addictive purely based on the idea, "well, people are spending a lot of time on it, and it's causing them not to do things that everyone else does."
No, the qualification of an addictive behavior is one that disrupts what our daily life should be, and while we can easily classify some behaviors (smoking, for example) as being problematic, it is much harder to draw an objective line in the sand on everything else. How you classify addiction is partially dependent on your worldview, because your worldview helps define what "normal" functioning looks like.
Yep, 10000000% agreed, this is why this question needs to be answered by the individual itself with the help of a therapist.
There is simply no clear line as you well said between legitimate enjoyment and addiction, in my home country wherever the gaming addiction is brought up, then football players whom also straddle the line between addiction and commitment are also mentioned.
Librarians in the past whom would read "excessively" were tagged as "addicts to reading"
The line needs to be set by the individual itself, there is simply no reliable way to do otherwise unless in the extreme cases where people's lives break down around them
That's it. There is a lot of data about people's habits, and that enables companies to tune digital products right into people's gratification systems. It's a psychological hack. Even when you're aware of it, it's hard to resist video games / facebook / twitter / hackernews cravings.
But these addiction issues are being talked about more, and people are becoming more aware and starting to self-control, so I don't think a catastrophic mind-control scenario will happen soon (except in dictatorships like China, but that's another story).
The most dangerous AI is not the killer robots scorching the Earth a-la the Terminator movie. The most dangerous AI is the one that will make humans fall in love with it.
The meaning is less fun.
Oh god that's such a wondrous name, the perfect descriptor
Stalin’s regime: 10 million deaths
Khmer Rouge: 2 million deaths (25% of Cambodia’s population)
East Germany “denazification efforts”: tens of thousands of deaths, possible as high as a hundred thousand
I don’t entirely disagree with the nuance you’re trying to make, but it’s worth keeping in mind that some things are very measurable when it comes to these communist/totalitarian regimes.
Throwing numbers around as if the decentralized killing or the fami es within non-totalitarian systems weren't comparable is just silly
The guy is t advocating for anything of the sort, and the article doesn't mention governments themselves, but decentralized profit driven enterprises....
Regarding your accusations, it’s hard to settle anything now that the author deleted their comment. However, I stand firm by my statement that one cannot make claims to the effect of “life wasn’t so bad in $past_totalitarian_regime” without keeping numbers of direct human deaths - from executions, interment camps, famines - at the forefront of our minds.
Doubtful, they all work via the same underlying hardware and excitation of the Limbic system doesn't care for the causes.
>The nature of addiction has implications—more precisely, temptations—for businesses that sell habituating products. One is to encourage early and frequent consumption. Treat the lads, the saloonkeepers used to say, and you’ll have their money in the till when they’re adults. And the more they drink, the greater the profits. To this day, 80 percent of alcohol sales go to the 20 percent of customers who are the heaviest users, a pattern that applies across the business of brain reward. More than half of all marijuana finds its way into the lungs and stomachs of those who spend more than half their waking hours stoned. Insofar as addictions to marijuana, or to anything else, develop most often among the poor, the marginal and the genetically vulnerable, they are sources of inequality and injustice as well as illness.
I used to smoke weed all day everyday for 10 years, and knew a ton of others that did so. None of us were poor, all had good jobs and made good income.
Moreover, people that only smoke rarely and have never smoked get the wrong impression about what smoking all day does to you. I would hardly call it being 'stoned', more like being slightly buzzed and less anxious. I don't think anyone who didn't know me would have ever been able to tell, unless I smelled like weed or something.
I now don't smoke at all, and the difference in experience is pretty minimal. I feel about the same as I did when I was smoking constantly, which is a testament to the powerful ability for neuronal self-regulation in the brain; both on and off drugs.
Surprisingly, my cognitive performance declined severely for a period of a couple weeks, as measured by dual n-back performance against my on weed baseline. After those two weeks, it started getting better. About a month later, I was at my on weed baseline. Two months after that, I have exceeding my weed baseline by a significant margin. I took an IQ test and realized about a 10 IQ point gain from my baseline IQ, which I was pretty happy with.
In regards to accomplishing it, I dunno, I guess I just stopped all at once. I'm not the type of person who can handle moderation of anything really, so just quitting all at once worked really well. I had previously quit heroin a long time ago in my youth, so quitting weed wasn't really a big deal compared to that.
It's been maybe 6 months since I last smoked at this point, and I don't really feel any different, besides my cognitive improvements I suppose.
Instead, when there's a good article, post a substantive comment if you have one, or simply don't post.
The problem is not caused by markets or property rights. If anything, competition actually makes games least toxic. Look how pay2win games being replaced by vanity items selling games.
From Adam Smith: "“It is not from the benevolence of the butcher, the brewer, or the baker that we expect our dinner, but from their regard to their own self-interest."
To Gordon Gecko: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greed_Is_Good_(disambiguation)
Via countless others...
Altruism, yes, is enlightened.
> From Adam Smith: "“It is not from the benevolence of the butcher, the brewer, or the baker that we expect our dinner, but from their regard to their own self-interest."
Smith wasn't saying greed is "good". He was saying that self-interest is unavoidable, so the economic system must accept that inevitability.
I don't think you'll find anything in the work of Smith, celebrating greed the way that Gordon Gecko quote does, or that Ayn Rand and her acolytes did.
Smith talks just as much about the near-universal human need to be both "loved" and "lovely"; i.e., to be thought well of both by one's self and by others:
Man naturally desires, not only to be loved, but to be lovely; or to be that thing which is the natural and proper object of love. He naturally dreads, not only to be hated, but to be hateful; or to be that thing which is the natural and proper object of hatred. He desires, not only praise, but praiseworthiness; or to be that thing which, though it should be praised by nobody, is, however, the natural and proper object of praise. He dreads, not only blame, but blameworthiness; or to be that thing which, though, it should be blamed by nobody, is, however, the natural and proper object of blame. [1]
There doesn't seem to be anything consistent with "greed is good" in that, or in anything I've seen attributed to Smith.
[1] http://motivatedmastery.com/adam-smith-on-human-nature-and-o...
Well, self-interest is not unavoidable. There were societies where doing what's honorable or good for the many, was more celebrated than self-interest.
By taking it as inevitable, why make self-interest not just an acceptable, but a celebrated even trait.
> Well, self-interest is not unavoidable
We agree, don't we, that below a certain level, a lack of self-interest will lead to our rapid death, or inability to do anything useful (and indeed even make us a burden on others).
I.e, if we don't take care of our own safety, warmth, sustenance and health, we'll soon die, or become unable to function and cease to be able to do anything beneficial for anyone, ourselves included.
On this basis, it's normal and healthy for us to take care of our own basic needs first, then those of our family members and near neighbours, then any with any surplus energy and resources we have to share, we can contribute to the wellbeing of others less close to us.
This reality applies regardless of the economic system under which we live, however the incentives of that economic system will be a significant influence on the extent to individuals focus more heavily on their own interest vs those of others.
But it's not as if self-interest and benevolence are polar opposites. The better resourced and energised one is, the more good they are able to do for others - whether it be via running non-profit organisation, a public organisation, or a private company where one is employing people and producing goods/services for the benefit of customers. So in this sense, taking care of one's self-interest can easily lead to better outcomes for others.
None of this is consistent with the assertion that "capitalism" or the economic philosophy described by Adam Smith (who never used the word "capitalism") is a philosophy that celebrates greed or selfishness, and only alternative economic philosophies celebrate benevolence.
Selflessness and generosity is broadly celebrated and admired by most people in countries that are largely "capitalist". Gordon Gecko was an anti-sympathetic caricature. People who idealise and engage in excessive selfishness are largely shunned and isolated by polite society.
On the flipside, writers and activists who have idealised "seizing the means of production" could hardly be presumed blind to the power self-interest.
Please understand, I'm not making any black vs white argument. I'm not any kind of "capitalism" activist. I'm personally deeply interested in working towards economic systems that are most effective at providing for the wellbeing of all. I live in a country with a mixed economy (Australia) with a socialised health system and a large welfare system (much like Scandinavian countries), and I think our system works well but I'd love for it to work better for those less well off.
So it's a topic I think/read about and care about a lot.
Which is why I think it's important for us to have more sophisticated positions than "capitalism celebrates greed", when the reality, like human nature itself, is far more nuanced than that.