Don't many companies do similar things to hook kids? Would candy companies be liable for making their products appealing to kids, knowing sugar is an addictive substance? The same argument applies to breakfast cereal companies as well.
Not any different from me guilt tripping my parents into buying me an expensive pair of Jnco jeans back in the day.
Without them I wouldn't be cool and other kids would make fun of me! Or maybe they'd make fun of me for wearing those instead of something else the next year, who knows. Social pressure evolves pretty quickly.
a) It's an excellent lead-gen machine for predators b) Kids trivially trip into (rigged) casinos
My kids have an emulator running N64 classics and more next to the tv, no need for them to burn hundreds of dollars on gambling tokens.
Edit for clarity: certainly candy companies have general demographic data and market research, but advertising companies have profiles down to the individual. Lawyers seem to have settled on COPPA allowing them to do this for 13 year olds, but I would imagine most parents would prefer minors be excluded from any tracking, profiling, inclusion in multivariate testing or targeted advertising.
That's just because candy/cereal companies don't need it. Slap a superhero or Elsa on the cereal box and you'll have 50% of kids under 5 crying until their parent buys the cereal.
It seems really hard to define a firm line between making an addictive product and making a product that people really use a lot because it's well-made.
For instance, I play a lot of video games. If their developers got punished for getting me so hooked, that would be a real slap in the face to everyone involved.
Which is why there’s been a long history of formal regulation and explicit industry self-policing for both of those examples. Engagement-optimized social media is now big enough and seemingly permanent enough to be invited to the club, and seems to be very reluctant to do the self-policing thing so far.
Terrible for my mental health.
Nope - it's exactly the opposite. The kinds of people with the pure autism needed to get good at Factorio, Rimworld, Dwarf Fortress end up as world-class developers. Some of the best historians are going to be minted by expert paradox game players.
The games we should regulate are the garbage, zero-thought zero-gain games. Even fortnight and roblox are highly educational compared to the legalized child gambeling I see with those stupid ticket machines at places like Dave and Busters.
Also, shooters are unfortunately a national security thing. I can show you videos from the US military, especially US tank trainers and rifle trainers about how shockingly familiar that these systems are even to people who have no experience with them due to realistic portrayals in their video games. This is why "Americas Army" existed at all.
Society steps in to regulate harmful/predatory behaviors all the time, even between consenting adults (let alone children, even if their parents play along). Libertarianism just doesn't work for kids. (I think it doesn't even work for adults, personally)
“… a broad scientific consensus has emerged that there are no metabolic or endocrine response differences between HFCS and sucrose related to obesity or any other adverse health outcome. This equivalence is not surprising given that both of these sugars contain approximately equal amounts of fructose and glucose, contain the same number of calories, possess the same level of sweetness, and are absorbed identically through the gastrointestinal tract.”
HFCS is used because it’s cheaper. Not because it’s addictive.
A quick search through clinical literature reveals the following points:
1. Brain Chemistry and Sugar: Sugar activates the brain's reward system by releasing opioids and dopamine, similar to addictive substances.
2. Behavioral Similarities to Addiction: High sugar intake can lead to addictive-like behaviors, such as cravings, tolerance, and withdrawal symptoms.
3. Contrasting Views in Research: While sugar affects behavior similarly to addictive substances, it's debated whether this is due to physiological addiction or other factors like emotional dependencies.
4. Physical Effects and Overconsumption: Excessive sugar consumption is linked to health issues and may create a dependency cycle, but this is not universally accepted as clinical addiction.
5. Human vs. Animal Studies: Evidence for sugar addiction largely comes from animal studies, and translating these findings to human behavior is complex due to multifaceted influences on eating habits.
The real answer here is: You don't know. You don't know because clinicians and researchers don't know, so if they don't know, you damn sure don't.
And this is why “disinformation” is a bullshit term. Hes not spreading lies nor objective falsehoods. Hes not even making the claims you’re rebutting (physical addiction to sugar). He makes a perfectly valid point that we can all discuss as we see fit without maligning it as disinformation.
Did you not read his post? I'll quote it for you.
> Would candy companies be liable for making their products appealing to kids, knowing sugar is an addictive substance?
That's not the only form of addiction recognized. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Addiction#Behavioral_addiction
Food addiction (particular sugary/fatty foods) isn't that insane of a concept. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yale_Food_Addiction_Scale
Sexual addiction: Not in the DSMV or even the updated DSM-5-TR. Not in the ICD-10 or ICD-11 (pre-release).
Gambling addiction: The only one grandfathered in to the DSM. It's in DSMV. Probably to be removed in later versions "The DSM-V has since reclassified pathological gambling as gambling disorder..." ref: https://doi.org/10.1007%2Fs10899-014-9449-2 . Also not in ICD-10 or ICD-11.
Internet addiction: "Excessive Internet use has not been recognized as a disorder by the World Health Organization, the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM-5) or the International Classification of Diseases (ICD-11)." "The American Psychiatric Association (APA), while stating there is insufficient evidence for the inclusion of Internet gaming disorder in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders in 2013, considered it worthy of further study."
And now lets go back to sugar and accepting your moving the goalposts to "food addiction" (another unsupported concept): You say that it is a purely psychological "addiction" with no physiological aspect and I agree. It's not an addiction. Those are called habits. Read more at: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4179181/ "Food Addiction in the Light of DSM-5" to understand how this societal fear meme fails to fulfill the requirements of an actual addition disorder.
Where they don't succeed, or get taken for suckers too many times, they take to reclassifying disorders to pave over their failures. You don't need to have corrected multiple personality disorder or Munchausen syndrome when you can quietly rename them and obfuscate just how often you get it catastrophically wrong. When your failures end up committing suicide, they won't be testifying against you later.
That they're denying excessive internet use outs them as either incompetent-- or complicit. FAANG hires psychologists to help in algorithm design to engineer these specific ends. You can't identify gambling addiction is a problem while your own people are the ones consulting on development of gambling algorithms. That would be unethical, and look very bad for you. #mentalhealthawareness! We won't acknowledge sex addiction as real, but we're totally qualified to treat it!
Notice how doctors quietly stopped advocating for circumcision of all male infants. When we look at what they've been recommending for generations--and their rationalizations--it makes them look like savages ("They don't feel the pain! They don't remember the pain! Women prefer it! It prevents HIV, maybe! You don't speak English? No problem, just sign here."). They have no skin in the game (and now, neither do you) beyond adding an additional line item to mom's invoice.
(I'm not anti-medicine, just disillusioned in how little these institutions ever acknowledge wrongdoing or complicity.)
Sugar is addictive, in the sense that people understand the term: "It hacks your brain and makes you want more, despite it being real bad for you". That's millions of years of evolution at work. OP never claimed any of what you're straw-manning.
Btw, the APA colluded to torture people [0]. That's not something a credible or reputable organization does. I know, they fired four people and said sorry - it's not enough. I don't care about their view on what addiction is in the slightest, and nor should any of us.
0 - https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/almost-addicted/2015...
I understand dependence as requiring something to feel "normal" for whatever definition of "normal" an individual has. By this definition, I am addicted to and dependent on food, sleep, caffeine, medication, socializing, novelty, and reading. I find that I have a hard time doing less of these things, and sometimes these things get in the way of my ability to do other, healthier, more productive things. For some of these things, doing less of them would directly harm my physical health.
With this in mind, I have met many for whom sugar is an addictive substance far more deleterious to their health than even cocaine is, for example, to others I know. They've struggled with problems like diabetes and obesity, and they've even lost jobs because of their relationship with sugar. Moreover, some of them respond aggressively and defensively, much like any other addict, when friends and family try to raise the issue with them, and some of them have tried and failed to give up sugar countless times, again like anyone else struggling with addiction.
Earlier this year, I lost my mom to diabetic coma, in part, because she couldn't stop herself from eating candy and cookies all the time. She tried to stop, but she couldn't kick the habit of having a "dessert" before bed followed by the insulin necessary to control her blood sugar. It was her way of calming herself down enough to fall asleep at night. Eventually, she accidentally took too much, and no one found her until morning, long after hypoglycemia had destroyed most of her brain. She died of overdose like any other addict, although the thing she overdosed on, exogenous insulin, was a sort of secondary dependency caused by her primary dependency on sugar. The medical staff at the hospital insisted on steering me away from this terminology when discussing what happened, but their reasons were politics and marketing, not anything truly descriptive or scientific. Their fear was similar to yours in that they worried that patients might refuse insulin treatment if it was at all associated with the labels of "addiction" and "dependence." I can't help but think that she might still be around if her physician had treated her relationship with sugar more seriously or if they had more thoroughly warned her about the dangers of exogenous insulin in the context of addiction and dependence. After all, the use of exogenous insulin leads to the downregulation of insulin receptors causing "true" physiological dependence by way of a mechanism very similar to that of benzodiazepines, opioids, and alcohol. The same could be said for sugar in its role as a causal factor of diabetes itself.