Or you take some individual responsibility to moderate them.
Everyone forgets about this option.
Everyone forgets about this option.
Personal responsibility is not a policy that can’t be applied across a population. You might have a combination of will, mental health state, and life advantages that puts you in the the 80 or 90th percentile of being able to resist or avoid addictive activities but you are not common.
Willpower is finite and companies have thousands of lifetimes worth of resources.
I don't believe personal responsibility and willpower is a fixed quantity, even at the population level. In fact, I think they are negatively impacted by emphasizing the influence of external factors in personal behavior.
Telling an addict that they are powerless to regulate their consumption only erodes their ability to improve. External factors my have led them to their addiction, but they can't fix an additional without assuming agency taking control of their behavior. Yes, this is HARD, but no addict can recover without it.
The only durable solution that will help people is shifting the curve such that more people are able to resist or avoid addictive activities. Policy solutions are simply too ineffective and porous to have a durable effect.
Social media platforms are giant algorithmic feedback engines creating the most reliable way for their regular users to fulfill their neuro-chemical and social needs. That these people cannot find better information in their mediasphere means that we need to encourage people and remind them of their agency - yes - but we cannot leave it at "words of encouragement" when the other end is "massive highly personalized feedback loop of all the people you miss seeing"
I think much of the problem with duality dissolves once you eliminate the concept of the soul or free will. People tend to ignore the fact that the individual still exists as an information processing agent that takes actions, even if you remove free will.
If a program fails to provide the desired output when given an input, it is neither the input or that code that is to blame, but an incompatibility between the input and code that is at fault. You it is possible to get the desired outcome by modifying either, or more likely both.
I'm sure I am overlooking some implications or counterpoints, so I look forward to reading your suggestion.
Same deal with obesity.
Blaming individuals is how we’re wired, but it’s not functional when you’re concerned about population behaviours.
Like obesity, no amount of health warnings, sugar taxes, ect on products will solve the obesity epidemic if more individuals don't assume agency for what they put in their body and the bodies of their children.
Free will is an illusion
Even a fully deterministic computer takes input/instructions and completes actions.
Humans are complex logic engines with programing. They can be programed to need external input to take an action, or take actions without external input.
You can program a child to think they need permission to go to the bathroom, or to think they can get up and go without permission.
You can program an addict to think they helpless to resist a drug, or that they can resist the urge and stop.
In this sense, humans can be programed with logic that either helps them achieve their goals, or prevents them from doing so.
Human "agency", "willpower", and "control" is simply shifting a person's program to take actions less on environmental inputs based more on their core values (e.g happiness - also programed).
I think that telling humans that they are helpless to control their behavior and need outside input is bad programing which harms their outcomes.
People overestimate the helplessness and dependence on circumstance. It is better to program people to act with more self control.
Take obesity for example, do we know why so many people have gained so much weight? If I were to judge what I think your opinion might be from your response so far, it would be purely that people are eating too much.
So what causes that behavior? Do people just eat as much as the person next to them? Eat as much as their parents? Do they eat what's available and that just happens to be highly reinforcing (salt, simple sugars, fats) and easily available? Are there hormonal signaling pathways that control feeding behavior? Maybe there are environmental factors, such as hormone disruptors that weren't there 100 years ago? Is there a high prevalence of genetic disorders relating to weight control and feeding behaviors?
There may be multiple causes, and some may overlap.
Also this puts far too much on the end consumer, when there are also emergent patterns that come from behaviors of businesses and markets such as locations of grocery stores and stock in those stores. All of this, all of us.
We are all part of the same system and we should not attempt to place blame on any certain part when there are many many contributing factors. We should attempt to figure out which parts need to be adjusted and how, and its never going to be only one thing such as the agency of the individual.
>Admitting we are powerless allows us to investigate and change the factors that truly lie behind the behavior
I couldn't disagree more. I am all for scientific investigations but think that behavior psychology is vastly under evaluated relative to environmental or biological priming.
>Take obesity for example, do we know why so many people have gained so much weight? If I were to judge what I think your opinion might be from your response so far, it would be purely that people are eating too much.
People are eating to many calories, this is irrefutable. We can discuss why they are eating too many calories, which is the more nuanced question
<We are all part of the same system and we should not attempt to place blame on any certain part when there are many many contributing factors. We should attempt to figure out which parts need to be adjusted and how, and its never going to be only one thing such as the agency of the individual.
This reads as self contradiction to me: "There are many contributing factors but we should not assign blame" vs "We should attempt to figure out which parts need to be adjusted"
Figuring out which part of the system is the cause is how one decides what needs to be adjusted. You can not ignore the psychological decision making process. Why one person has self control, and another does not.
To say that the perception of agency of the individual is out of scope is ridiculous to me. Actualizing one's own agency was crucial for every addict, obese person, or depressed person I have ever known.
As examples: if Facebook spreads misinformation, my government gets worse. I may even lose individual liberties, like women currently losing the right to medical privacy.
If Facebook gives children eating disorders, my health insurance premiums go up.
Even if I only care about myself and police myself, Facebook can still rip apart the society that I live in.
> Everyone forgets about this option.
No they don't. You seem to have forgotten about externalities.