Emotionally Numb: Expertise Dulls Consumer Experience (2021) | Hacker News Reader

Emotionally Numb: Expertise Dulls Consumer Experience (2021)

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43 pointsshortcrct52 comments

Just my personal experience, but I would say this does not hold with regard to observing nature. Once I know the name of a new fly, fish, or flower, I care more about it, and I enjoy seeing it, and connecting that knowledge with other ecological knowledge.

I feel the same way. Since the subject of this interest is alive, and endlessly diverse, the more I learn about nature, the more wonder I feel. Definitely not numb.

Maybe what needs to be a focus of this study is measuring "numbness" across different subjects of interest.

Nature? Bah! How do you market nature? People can just get it for free! Get with the program, we need to exploit hedonism-seeking for the widest possible range of consumers to keep our numbers up! Keep them lusting after the next big thing, keep them confused and incompetent for as long as possible so they keep buying new versions of it. From us.

You cannot market nature, but you CAN market everything around it: Tourism, clothing/footwear, camping gear, even technology (cameras, GPS etc). All of them to give you the "upper hand" over your peers - And of course, you can buy that from us!

> How do you market nature? People can just get it for free

If you're Booz Allen, you get the rights to run the reservation system for the US national parks and tack on fees for yourself.

It's proved that kids that name their chicken, pig, lamb, rabbit, fish, dog or horse cannot accept them to be killed and cannot eat them. thus numbers on farm cattle.

For every 4H kid who cries, there are a dozen more who don't.

> thus numbers on farm cattle.

Try to imagine a farmer setting aside time to individually name a thousand pigs. Lol.

Anecdotally, I am sceptical that this is true (at least universally). My dad grew up with animals, and his family named and are plenty of them.

I grew up on a farm and we routinely named the cattle that stood out. I don't recall any one of us protesting when they were sent away. But I suppose cattle aren't very sociable compared to the animals that you listed.

At the end of the day, it's just the cycle of life, and we knew that from an early age.

This is obvious nonsense to anyone who grew up in a rural area

Once you let your kid name an animal, it is a pet.

I have a bit of experience with this since we have been running a chicken retirement community for the past four or five years as our chickens, now beloved pets of my teenage daughter are well into their senior years. We get eggs, but they are very expensive eggs given the feed cost/egg ratio is changing significantly as egg production wanes and feed prices are on a continuous trajectory upwards.

We do have limits - my daughter has accepted that I draw the line at vet visits. If a chicken is sick enough to need a vet, it will be allowed to die peacefully or be euthanized if there are severe injuries.

Complete and total nonsense. I've eaten plenty of family pets that I've named, and so have many of my family members and relatives

No, farm cattle have numbers because that's the most efficient way to keep track of them. The farms might be large, and the cattle might change ownership at various stages. It just doesn't work to name them, just like naming computers in a datacenter doesn't scale past a certain point.

And as a counter-example, I know families in the rural midwest that name their livestock while raising them. The important bit is that they teach the children the difference between pets and livestock early on so it doesn't come as a shock to them that their dinner was grazing out on the back 40 just the other day. It's only shocking to those who aren't acquainted with the realities of agriculture life.

My neighbors named one of their cattle "Ribeye". I bet he was delicious

> Once I know the name of a new fly, fish, or flower,

Does knowing the name of something make you an expert? I am not sure, I think perhaps the definition of "expertise" at use in this paper is more precise and demands more. I am not familiar with this area of research, it appears to me that this paper draws on a well-understood meaning of "expertise", probably one that is established in one or several of the citations (or, perhaps, it is a contested definition even today).

That said - I think your intuition is a useful one - knowing something can enhance your enjoyment more than knowing nothing. I think this paper asks, can you know too much?

I can see the truth in what you say; but I have also found that increased ecological literacy has sapped much of the joy I used to feel in nature, because it comes mixed with grief.

I only read the abstract but it seems like the dislike comes with a recognition of the buzzwords and an understanding that a good product isn't the goal, my money is. With nature, it's not trying to impress me. It's not trying to take my money. So there's no loss of wonder when I learn something. I don't pull back the curtain to find a cynical exec trying to get me to pay for something. There is no curtain, there is no sales pitche, nature just is.

That's also true in other domains - the more I learn about a sport the more interesting it is to watch because there is more to see and understand.

I can see the opportunity though for analysis to overcome emotion. You want to respond instinctively to something, but learning to be an expert in something sometime requires nurturing a dispassionate, analytical response. I can completely see how learning about wine might take away some of the joy that you might experience trying something new, because you're just cataloguing it.

Semi-related: my wife has a friend who became a "serious" coffee person over the pandemic. He firmly warns everyone that it's the worst decision he's ever made - he's become too much of a snob and now can't drink any coffee apart from that made at home. He can't even get it from a high street vendor and enjoy it.

Seems related to the reason Buddhism seeks to recreate the state of "Beginner's Mind".

I've found that the real emotional content is in going beyond your previous experience or comfort zone, regardless of skill level.

One thing I noticed after getting to the top international levels of alpine ski racing, was that listening to a novice-intermediate skier enthusiastically exclaim about a cool run or move that they had was nearly indistinguishable from the emotion and content of a fellow top racer telling of an exceptional run. The same enthusiasm, the same energy, and almost the same words, again and again.

While there were of course differences in the actual details, the common denominator was always having gone outside their comfort zone and succeeding. Of course achieving this after a decade+ of intense training requires much higher speed, energies, risks, skills, etc., but it still happens very regularly, and to some degree is what we did it for; competition is a continuous deliberate effort to push beyond your comfort zone every week.

But the article is right in that I'd have no clue how to achieve that again with wine/beer/food tasting, but then I'm no expert there...

edit: punctuation, para breaks, clarity

"Consumer experience" seems like such a strange way to frame this research, when it's just about the general flattening of pleasurable activities over time as they're repeated.

Agreed. Having admittedly only read the abstract, I find it odd that it's framed around "consumers" and not just "people."

I assumed that this is because this research is really intended for the benefit of marketers.

This is the most expensive way to say, "Familiarity breeds contempt," that I've ever heard.

This might be one of the reasons why some competitive gaming communities seem so joyless after a while.

>win

>feel nothing

>lose

>day ruined

why is "greentext" such an expressive and iconic way of communicating in online text?

win: feel nothing

lose: day ruined

communicates the same idea but feels less emotionally punchy somehow.

They're joyless because they become increasingly toxic the higher you get. At least in mainstream games. Do something outside of meta and you're enemy number one.

It's the fact that the games are geared towards sexed up number crunching. Anything that can't be quantified into a number is ignored by the developers.

I don't know why people like this stuff. Isn't real life already filled with number crunching?

When I became a full time developer, I lost any sense of adventure or accomplishment with regard to video games.

VR still has some sense of wonder or competitiveness that I used to feel playing WoW as a kid.

Just slowly embracing my inner old man yelling at clouds I suppose, a lot of kids see eSports as a viable future career now.

For WoW specifically, the appeal melted away as it increasingly pushed instanced competitive endgame (raids, M+, arenas) as the the central pillars of the game. What pulled me in back in 2005 was its world which was not only vast and beautiful, but shared with numerous other players, as well as the more tabletop adventure feel that casual play (and even entry level raiding) entailed back then. Things that are prioritized now like leaderboard chasing and increasingly convoluted boss encounters are not what I logged on for.

> I don't know why people like this stuff.

Maybe because they don't have it enough in their life? I used to enjoy MMORPGs when I was younger, nowadays I understand that it's spreadsheet-assisted grind.

> Isn't real life already filled with number crunching?

Precisely, the moment I entered "real life" I lost all drive for any online games, because I "saw through" their gameplay.

Even in more casual online games these days, not adhering to the meta will bring trouble. Maximum optimization is the default expectation, and if you play to unwind rather than to compete or have a playstyle that’s more driven by whim or enjoyment you’ll be labeled a bad player.

This has driven me away from online games, even though they were one of my primary hobbies back in the 2000s. The ambient attitude has changed so much since then.

I suspect that another reason might be that the mechanics of competitive gaming focus on maximizing players' control over whether they win rather than on maximizing joy.

It's like the difference between backyard football and professional football. In backyard football most people play with house rules that make the game more fun but less competitive. On the other hand, in professional football the rules are designed to help ensure that the better team wins.

Often the game mechanics themselves aren't actually fun (at least after the novelty wears off) but players keep playing because they enjoy the sensation of winning. The player can't have fun unless they win because the game is not intrinsically fun.

You know it's a good game when you can reflect back on a match you lost and think "yeah that was worth it, I had fun."

Treating "losing is fun" as an explicit design goal and not merely an observation about some games is something I haven't seen, but it makes a lot of sense.

Or because all of those popular games are manipulative and their goal is not to make you happy or fulfilled, but to frustrate you so you play more.

Those games are frustrating on purpose.

Perhaps this holds true more to fields that stem from hedonic experiences themselves like the arts, sports, games etc. I felt this way about music after graduating from music school. I became bored and jaded to music and had to spend several years not consuming music at all. Eventually I regained my love of it.

Conversely I don’t think this applies as much to sciences. After I pivoted away from music to become a software engineer, I discovered a world that never ceases to captivate me and elicit curiosity no matter how much I grow. In fact the more expertise I’ve developed, the more intense my interest becomes.

I work in tech and the arts and my experience is that some of the most emotionally disengaged people are in STEM, not everyone of course, but comparing the two, it’s not even close. It’s actually pretty rare to find anyone serious in the arts emotionally dimmed, a large part of the job there is dialing into emotion. That said, seems people at the top in STEM (shaping the field) and on the fringes (doing experimental, cutting edge work) are usually experts and highly emotionally engaged. Take it all with a grain of salt, I guess.

Dabbling in gamedev as a teenager definitely numbed my enjoyment of video games as an adult.

And I'm really thankful for that, because I spent way too much time on video games growing up, before I saw behind the curtain.

Interesting that they take a consumer angle, I see the same when I reflect on my career in the professional services business. Initially I enjoyed the process and feedback of becoming an 'expert' in a specific area, and now it's just mundane.

People crave change has been my main lesson learned.

In other news, novelty wears off with time.

Is it novelty or truly understanding how something works?

That's not exactly what the paper says:

(From Study 5 discussion) These results are consistent with the idea that, while those with low expertise engage with the domain hedonically as a default approach, this is not experts’ default. Second, rather than experts being inevitably numb, these results suggest that it is not the acquisition of knowledge that leads to numbness, but the application of that knowledge. Indeed, when expert’s attention is redirected toward the hedonic aspects of a stimulus they can regain their feelings.

So, as I understand it: beginners focus on enjoying the experience by default, and experts engage intellectually by default. And experts who were told to just relax and enjoy the experience had the same emotional experience as beginners.

I have noticed that if I learn how to play a song I really really like I don't feel the same about the song afterward - some of the magic is lost.

It would be far more interesting to see whether this emotional numbness is caused by actual expertise, or if it's just the result of significant amounts of time spent doing a particular activity. I didn't see them differentiate between these two anywhere in the paper, but I only skimmed it.

This makes sense to me. Watch a movie with someone who took film, especially film production, classes and have them explain it to you afterwards.

Or take writing classes. In every writing class that I've taken, part of the curriculum is to dissect the writing of great authors.

You quickly learn to never dissect books that you love, because after you do, you'll never be able to enjoy reading that book again.

Taking up photography as a hobby made me notice and appreciate good shots and colours in films much more. So the opposite effect.

Another one from the Center for the study of the Blindingly Obvious.

spoken by an expert on consumer reports

And yet, you could have told me the exact opposite was true - that increasing knowledge and experience created increased joy in experiences like wine instead of less, and a large segment of people would have also said it was obvious.

This article makes sense and explains a great deal. Learning and training trigger dopamine release. Both "learning how" and "learning that." The photography example they use (tool mastery) is a great example. Amateur photographers will regularly change their tools and subject matter to maintain the "sense of wonder." Meanwhile, wedding photographers will be bored with their professions.

We can see this with software engineers routinely trying out new languages and tools and hobby projects.

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