Recovering from AI addiction
internetaddictsanonymous.org
internetaddictsanonymous.org
But chatgpt for example showers the user with compliments. I'm sure this encourages user engagement, but it is eerily similar to the "love bombing" of cults from the 70s and 80s. I don't know how to reconcile the long-term risks with the huge short-term gains in productivity.
Are there any technologies or apps that are worse than others, particularly for people with obsessive/compulsive tendencies?
No, my simple and obvious statement was not "a deep and insightful point". No I am not "in the top 1% of people who can recognize this".
The other thing that drives me crazy is the constant positive re-framing with bold letters. "You aren't lazy, you are just *re-calibrating*! A wise move on your part!".
I don't find it ego stroking at all. It's obviously fake and patently stupid and that verbiage just mucks up the conversation.
It really doesn't. I don't know if I've used o4. But sticking to the facts is exactly about trying to get to the truth, not digging in to a position. New evidence can create new conclusions.
I've never had an AI respond to me with this kind of phrasing. General psychophancy, sure, but nothing that obnoxious. I haven't used ChatGPT much in the last year though, does it speak that way?
Sycophancy. I don't usually correct misspellings, but this one is pretty unique.
(Every time I write out these model names I realize, again, how absurdly confusing they must be to casual users..)
At first, I was concerned for how it'd affect performance by polluting the context window with such a long prefix. Then when one of the model's ChatGPT system prompts was leaked, and I saw it was huge by comparison. So I figured it's probably okay.
Highly encourage people to take advantage of this feature. Ask it to not do the things that annoy you about its "personality" or writing style.
> Are there any technologies or apps that are worse than others, particularly for people with obsessive/compulsive tendencies?
Social media, gambling, and "freemium game" sites/apps all qualify as worse than LLM-based offerings in the opinions of many. Not to mention the addictiveness of their use on smartphones.
However, the above are relative quantifications and in no way exonerate LLM offerings.
In other words, it doesn't matter how much poop is atop an otherwise desirable sandwich. It is still a poop sandwich.
> AI addiction is the compulsive and harmful use of AI-powered applications. It can involve AI-powered chatbots like ChatGPT, video or image generation apps, algorithm-driven social media platforms, AI-powered gaming, AI companions, AI roleplaying, AI-generated pornography, or any other
The youth is not ready. Infinite pictures of whatever you want to see. Downloaded models have _no_ restrictions.
Make of that what you want.
Nobody is ready, and ever will be. Like it or not, we thrive on the scarcity of information. But our instinct to collect it has overpowered that scarcity in a big way, and that will lead to a high degree of neurosis no matter who you are.
However, I recently when camping with some friends...nearing 40s....and the other couple kept getting sucked into watching tiktok....one showed me a "touching" video that was AI garbage.
Not necessarily
Hmm i answered almost all of them with Yes, but i'm also a developer using AI and developing AI apps. So not sure what to make out of it.
But what if the thing we do is good?
Addicted to eating vegetables, addicted to healthy living, etc.
If a developer is using AI for example and they spend a lot of time doing it, and they're feeling fulfilled and happy, then that's fine.
And that's what it has to come down to: does it have a net benefit or net detriment?
"Does my use of AI lead me to neglect my personal hygiene, nutritional needs, or physical health?"
(compare with: "Does my eating of vegetables lead me to neglect my personal hygiene, nutritional needs, or physical health?")
"Have my digital behaviors jeopardized my studies, finances, or career?"
(compare with: "Have my healthy living behaviors jeopardized my studies, finances, or career?")
All questions are about negative impact on your life. To me it doesn't matter whether you label it "addiction". If you answer yes to most of these questions, whatever the subject, it is severely affecting your life.
I have met people who are so deep into healthy living that it becomes unhealthy, and their hyper focus on what is healthy - often, these days, fed by TikTok influencers, but when I was younger, fed just as much by books - leads to obsessing over what they can eat to the point of malnourishment.
So the answer to this question very much can be "yes". Humans can get addicted to all kinds of things. Healthy eating is only a few steps away from an eating disorder, in the same way that going out for drinks with friends is only a few steps away from alcoholism. Most people will never take those few steps, but for those who do, it can become a serious problem.
Doing anything "too much" is bad for you.
This used to happen on Wikipedia all the time back in the day. It was called going down a rabbit hole. Actually a cool phenomenon IMO.
With AI usage I actually find I spend less time on the internet or going down rabbit holes than I used to without it.
I still spend a lot of time reading primary sources, and AI is still frequently wrong, which makes it useless for learning unless you confirm everything with a primary source because you can't know if it's confabulating when you are learning. If you have to double check everything, it's useless, EXCEPT for vague questions, to help you generate keywords for use in traditional search.
The same can be said for individuals whom outsource their understanding of both what must be done and how to do it to a statistical text generator.
The Apple Watch is a good compromise: some ability to get calls and text messages, but not a very ‘addictive device.’
Seems to be about general IT/computing addiction (too), which seems even better than a group focusing only on "AI Addiction". Seems like a very active effort (online calendar has multiple events per day), across multiple countries and languages.
I haven't participated (or even seen this before) myself, but as far as I can tell, it's basically a fork of AA and their methodology, but I've also not participated in AA so maybe they're different in some major way? Otherwise it seems like a good approach, take something that is somewhat working, make it more specific and hopefully people into that specific thing can get the help they need.
This addition is not new or unique to ITAA, as I understand it was pioneered as the "three circles" model by Sex Addicts Anonymous and has been adopted by other recovery fellowships where the definition of clean/sober is not so binary or universal.
Generally: While suppressed memory of trauma exists, the vast majority of people are aware of trauma and there is no evidence suggesting otherwise. And there is clear evidence that lots of mentally well people get addicted as well, so just claiming "it's always some underlying condition" is probably not a great idea. It can, often even, be, sure. But that doesn't make it mandatory and especially doesn't allow the "I struggle with addiction, so there _must_ have been a problem beforehand" conclusion.
So honestly, I'd just not search any deeper to not risk inducing any false memories.
Like the comment above said, many “repressed memories” are actually false memories or, in rare cases, false stories that get constructed and encouraged by a misleading therapist who is convinced that some repressed memory exists and pushes too hard to get the patient to “remember” something. When the only way to satisfy the other party is to come up with a story, many people will eventually come up with a story and even believe it themselves.
The same thing happens with false confessions.
It is problematic, but not in the way that you think. While memories can be suggestively altered or created by questioning, the evidence for doing so for traumatic childhood sexual abuse is anecdotal and those anecdotes were pretty heavily cherry picked by the clearly biased FMSF, which was run as a support and advocacy group for parents accused of abuse.
That said, my understanding is that in general, dwelling on traumatizing experiences isn't beneficial to recovery. There are times they may need to be confronted and processed, but generally if it isn't causing a problem, don't go digging it up and spending a lot of time thinking about it unnecessarily.
I'm addicted to sugar. I have some trauma now? What trauma? My life has been relatively smooth sailing. You're right, this is just a way of creating the "need" for "therapy".
The clarity usually comes in retrospect for me.
I generally engage more in my own flavor of addictions (caffeine, social media, workaholism) when I am more overwhelmed, understanding that I do this and why… was helpful.
Don't worry about it. The trauma diagnosis has been ludicrously poor at treating addiction.
From what I've read, it performs worse than placebos, random chance, etc.
For treatment of substance abuse, therapy is literally at the bottom of the performance chart, below things like hypnotism, alternative medicines and plain old prayer.
Where is the trauma in that scenario? The brain damage from the cigs? I can hardly get over that 'trauma' since I've never known a world without it. The trauma of repeatedly getting addicted to things? I DON'T hold that against myself, I just like how they feel. Where is the trauma in that scenario?
It can get people started on therapy because it uses therapy speak and therefore feels like therapy is an obvious solution. However, it also makes the person into a victim of external trauma while minimizing their own role in the choices that led to the addiction.
It’s really appealing for people who need something external to blame, but it’s less helpful in getting at the root of behavioral issues that aren’t really external.
For the narrow slice of patients who actually have severe trauma response issues, it can be helpful. For everyone else it’s becoming a big distraction.
I guess one could argue that modern life in industrialized world is deeply understimulating, and the phones just provide an escape from that, but that's just living conditions, not a trauma.
As soon as I put my smartphone away I realise I'm confronted with challenging feelings: the fear of engaging with the people around me, worrying what they're thinking, looking stupid if I'm not doing anything, or just plain boredom. So it's "avoiding psychological difficulty" that is the fundamental factor.
I also wasted too much time, thousands of hours, reading and writing on the newsgroups and on the web.
There are similarities between these 2 things. For example, both reduce the amount of motivation and drive available in a life. But they feel very different, and in my experience, avoiding the former is extremely important whereas avoiding the latter is merely one more important thing in a life full of important considerations.
In an ideal world, there would be a word or short phrase for the second thing so that "addiction" could be reserved for the first thing. "Insufficient vigilance against superstimuli" is the shortest phrase I can think of right now. (I'm sad that I cannot use the word "vices" without provoking an immediate negative reaction: "vices" is shorter than "superstimuli".)
Its one of those "paid for your mental disorder" situations that are a lot more common than people realize.
On the one hand, it sounds preposterous - a bit like saying you're addicted to consciousness, or meditation. On the other, I can relate to how my enjoyment and pursuit of it strains my relationships with others.
It's a fascinating suggestion. I'd like to hear more about why you feel that way.
I had chronically-high cortisol. The flow state provided a profound but temporary relief from the cortisol. There are better responses to high cortisol.
DHEA (which is available over-the-counter in the US) is a better response because it allows me to dispense with the hour or 2 of intense concentration necessary to get into the flow state (freeing up the time and the mental energy for more productive uses).
Starting a friendship with a person who gets me and doesn't trigger my trauma triggers was a better response because the cortisol-lowering effect of such a friendship has lasted for years whereas the effect of being in the flow state ends as soon as the flow state ends.
The “trauma explains everything” meme has become more of a way to get people to accept therapy than a real explanation.
It transforms the problem from a personal failing (I can’t control my addiction) to a situation where the person is a victim of something external (Trauma inflicted on me has forced me to become addicted). People find it easier to accept treatment when they think they’re a victim of something external.
Gabor Mate (the trauma influencer mentioned in the comment above) uses trauma as the basis of his therapy, so he finds a “trauma” for everyone. If he can’t find something with the patient, he believes being born is their trauma, because the childbirth process is painful. Everyone was born, so he has a fallback trauma to assign to everyone.
For some it can be consuming the same psychoactive substance over and over again. For others it may be compulsion to repeat a limited set of rituals and behaviours.
The first thing they need help with is accepting that they will not be able to exercise control over everything. There are many ways to get there, but for many, labelling this pattern as "addiction" and getting help and support in this context, is easier than other options.
I've really come around to that theory though and I think he's very wise.
We need to take a close look at the way we are living our lives under capitalism, the decisions we're forced to.make, and the way we treat our children.
It’s another example of something that isn’t really correct for everyone but can be useful to get people to go to a therapist and get treatment.
I guess the upshot is that "I'd rather be doing..." is not actually very simple at all IMO.
Im not against it but it simply is not the only cure for addiction. In fact its provenly a very bad program for the 95% that cant hang.
Much better CBT and medical interventions out there and millions of people are told every year to ignore them because of 12 step evangalist.
If the west had the answer to addiction in the form of 12 step, we probably wouldnt have the highest rates of addiction in the world and is probably a sign of societal trauma that no amount of meetings is going to help.
Its the most unscientific method of treating addiction we have, one of the least effective, yet the government literally uses it as its ONLY tool (in a lot towns) to fight addiction in their communities, partly because propagandists of the 12 step methods have ingrained the idea that its the only thing that works into society (USA), when in fact, it is the opposite. My guess is, they like or don't care about recidivism also.
I think the decentralized community-based nature of 12 steps programs is cool though, and we do need more stuff like that.
I see the point you're making. But we as a society do this a lot, and it hasn't always historically been good for the people who are actually affected by the disorders.
Historically, this has been done by therapists who aren't well connected to the research world. They think they find a framework that works for their patients and promote it. Sometimes it becomes a fad despite not being backed by evidence. It's not always clear what the consequences are, but a common consequence is that many people miss out on actually figuring out what's going on with them and getting evidence-based treatment.
I'm not saying that there is no AI addiction. I'll leave that to the professionals. But I do want to gently push back on the idea that we should raise something to the level of pathology because it seems useful.
And as the parent of kids, there are a lot of habits that become compulsions and where you experience withdrawal if you stop. Reading is one in my family. Exercise is something that's rewarding and you feel bad if you stop. But exercise addiction is a very specific disorder. Just some stuff to keep in mind.
America is a Puritan origin society with a temperance faction that has been everything from writing the Constitution to largely ignored, standards for alcohol, cannabis, scripts fluctuate like hemlines: a typical adulthood will see multiple incompatible regimes of acceptable use vs unacceptable abuse.
None of that is anything to do with compassionate provision of high-quality medical care to vulnerable people (a strict ethical and practical good). Compassionate provision of high quality support is both expensive and leaves no room for insider/outsider lizard brain shit, i.e. not a very American thing to do in the 21st century.
Our society needs to get its shit together on this, not further weaponize it.
I was pretty skeptical initially, but it turns out I also have a ton of fear and resentment that I never thought existed. My stubbornness strikes again! But if you're able to deal with and process your fears and resentments and then switch bad coping mechanisms to good ones—that will improve your life substantially.
A lot of it has been surprisingly eye-opening to me.
The main exercises related to my comment are writing out resentments as they occur—who/what wronged you, why that hurt and what part we may have played. Same with fears—what they are, how do they affect us.
Honestly, a lot of it is so simple, but it really forces you to think about these things.
The more they talk about it, the more it just sounds like repacked Stoicism.
To be a stoic you have to be minimalist, have intense will power, and high tolerance for pain. How many people do you know that fall into that criteria?
The issue with discussion of 12-Step programs, is that folks that are members, are explicitly enjoined from getting involved with these types of public discussions, so almost everything that you hear and read, doesn't reflect what the actual deal is.
But I guess with the virtual girlfriends and all this was bound to happen.
That was my thought as well. I think it's specific to (part of) America.
AI lets them remove even having to deal with humans over the Internet. It's a bit like the lengths we go to avoid moving our bodies, despite how much of life's joys require physical exertion.
Just the very 12 Steps themselves are enough to show you that[0]:
> We admitted we were powerless over alcohol—that our lives had become unmanageable.
> Came to believe that a power greater than ourselves could restore us to sanity.
> Made a decision to turn our will and our lives over to the care of God, as we understood Him
> Made a searching and fearless moral inventory of ourselves.
> Admitted to God, to ourselves, and to another human being the exact nature of our wrongs.
> Were entirely ready to have God remove all these defects of character.
> Humbly asked Him to remove our shortcomings.
> Made a list of all persons we had harmed, and became willing to make amends to them all.
> Made direct amends to such people wherever possible, except when to do so would injure them or others.
> Continued to take personal inventory, and when we were wrong, promptly admitted it.
> Sought through prayer and meditation to improve our conscious contact with God, praying only for knowledge of His will for us and the power to carry that out.
> Having had a spiritual awakening as the result of these steps, we tried to carry this message to alcoholics and to practice these principles in all our affairs.
All of these are available and common in the US.
12-step programs and AA are available in many countries outside of the US.
Anyway, here's a list of court cases/news articles where it wasn't:
https://www.courthousenews.com/atheist-fights-court-ordered-...
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2016/nov/08/alcoholics-ano...
https://www.prisonlegalnews.org/news/1995/jul/15/aa-probatio...
https://aaagnostica.org/2014/10/17/atheist-punished-for-reje...
I'm sure you can find 20 more easily. Glad i'm not american.
You could literally say the same about any special interest group in any country.
> Glad i'm not american.
Me too, but the difference is that you don't see me thinking I know anything about UK politics or special interest groups.
I'd even wager that you've never even set foot in a meeting in an attempt to alleviate your naivety.
I don't need to join a meeting to criticize what the organization setting up that meetings is widely publicizing as a treatment for a medical condition (addiction) when what they publicize is obvious religious nonsense.
I also don't join spirit healing conventions for cancer patients or homeopathic sales events to criticize those.
https://ru.wikipedia.org/wiki/Кодирование_от_алкоголизма
The article in Russian is much more thorough than the English one, run it through Google Translate or something.
There are various ways it's practiced in my area, all of them can be summarized as follows: a medical professional performs some procedure (sometimes just hypnosis, but it can get more physical), which either "cures" your alcoholism, or convinces you that you're going to die horribly if you have even a drop of alcohol. The process depends on who is doing it.
It's basically just placebo and is pretty useless in practice (most alcoholics I know haven't stopped drinking for more than a couple of months), which doesn't prevent it from being widely used.
So in general the system is well equipped to not allow patients die from abstaining.
bravo
One of my old friends was a staunch atheist since middle school. He joined AA after some struggles.
He said it was no problem at all. They told him his “higher power” could be anything he chose, such as nature or the universe. The prayer part was just meditation. Nobody tried to push religion on anyone.
I don’t know if his experience was typical or not, but he didn’t think it was a problem at all.
I haven’t kept up with him for a while but last we talked he was still doing well, many years later.
Turns out in the last few centuries a lot of unanswerable questions have found answers rooted in scientific progress and the new answers conflict with the previous answers, which by their very function as placeholders could not have been correct.
His experience is typical. I know have someone very close to me in AA+12-step. There is no pressure to have your higher power named "God". It could be anything; the point is to have a power higher than the one over you (the addiction).
The rejection of any "higher power" is precisely what being an atheist is for a lot of us. Accepting that we are just the result of random thermodynamic processes in a cold and uncaring universe that provides no evidence that there is any form of "higher power" than uncaring entropy could very well be the definition of modern atheism.
The person I am talking about chose their child's well-being and safety as their "higher power".
The higher power has nothing at all to do with religion unless you want it to.
Sources:
https://www.britannica.com/dictionary/higher-power https://www.dictionary.com/browse/higher-power https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/higher%20power
And it's beside the point anyways because again, look at the 12 Steps, quoted directly from their website, as a canonical source [0]:
> 5. Admitted to God, to ourselves, and to another human being the exact nature of our wrongs.
> 6. Were entirely ready to have God remove all these defects of character.
> 7. Humbly asked Him [God] to remove our shortcomings.
> 11. Sought through prayer and meditation to improve our conscious contact with God as we understood Him, praying only for knowledge of His will for us and the power to carry that out.
If your argument is that to stop alcohol addiction you need to stop using alcohol and most of the 12 Step Program is irrelevant nonsense, than we are in agreement. But they don't talk about "higher power" they literally talk about God (And they obviously don't mean Xenu here) in the majority of their steps. [0]https://www.aa.org/the-twelve-steps
Meaning has context. If you're searching dictionaries for multi-word phrases that are specific to a certain context, you're not going to find the right answer.
Why?
There's lot's of places around the world that do evidence based addiction counseling and unsurprisingly none of them require you to believe in any made up entities and spiritual nonsense.
"Prayer" has no universally accepted procedure, and can just be your own calm reflective contemplation. "Spiritual awakening" can be that moment when you as an atheist accept your non-central role in the universe, when you come to peace with the fact that there is a higher power than yourself, and you aren't the central character in its unfolding.
There are only "made up entities" when you demand that everything be understood in literally minded cartoonish definitions, rather than a more nuanced understanding of the world around us, and our place in it.
As I pointed out in a previous comment, those places have successfully rated worse than random chance. Placebos beat them on succes rates.
The highest succes rates is with AA and the 12 step. Plenty of peer reviewed articles going back 30 years back this up.
Therapy has worse rates than anything else, including placebos.
https://internetaddictsanonymous.org/for-atheists-and-agnost...
Absolute premium pedantry, I rate it 10/10, 5/7 with rice
Switching out the addiction for a different "higher power" is the point.
Just because you don't know how how things work doesn't mean you should quote the dictionary inaccurately at people. What you are doing is lower-cognitive effort than a stochastic parrot.
FWIW, I've been atheist all my life, mentioned it multiple times on HN, and am constantly annoyed by militant atheists like you making the rest of us in this group of logical people look bad.
At the very least, at least pretend to have put some thought into your worldview. Or at least pretend that there is some logic behind this argument you want to have on the internet for worthless internet points.
I'm simply telling you what the reality is. Your complaint that reality is wrong and you are right is a common but frankly stupid PoV.
and then your further rejection of the response:
> The person I am talking about chose their child's well-being and safety as their "higher power".
i understand you see the universe as uncaring, but there is care right in front of you. i hope the sunshine breaks through and you find it, too.
I’m somewhere between atheist and agnostic. My mental model is a bit different. While I don’t believe there is a god or some “divine entity”, I do see “the stuff of primordial existence” as some kind of “higher power” to the extent that I’m a product of it, and its laws — discovered and yet to be discovered — govern my existence. Not some anthropomorphic entity.
Put another way, those thermodynamic processes and whatever factors of existence that enable/govern them are the “higher power”, and I don’t think that is incompatible with atheism.
Sounds like you're both. They're complimentary labels. It's also possible to be an agnostic theist.
A higher power isn't a man in the sky building the world in 7 days. A higher power is admitting that you do not know reality, that we are barely more intelligent than a monkey, and that the universe is much vaster and more mystical than what can be defined in a physics textbook.
How do you rationalize the high power coming to being? How do you rationalize there being a higher power at all in the first place?
Why does it need to be rationalized at all? I don't need a rationalization for existing - beings arise, exist, change, and then they cease. The world's current existence isn't something that requires external justification, it just simply is.
I guess you could say the higher power to me would just be the continuous process that leads to existence and ceasing to exist - but to me it has no meaning, and no "power" other than simply being the way things are as I experience them.
EDIT: one more thought: you can even think of a higher power as emergent behavior of individual parts.
So then if you were to consider a higher power in that case it could be the set of all permutations of stochastic possibilities in the universe, or something like that. The system itself is powerful, and is "higher" than the individual.
"Why are you doing this?" Give it the old 5-whys.
Your thermodynamic gubbins know how to enjoy the entropy while they're temporarily in this configuration without booze too.
Or just die in pain when your liver gives in, all good options.
If you do, you wouldn't be addicted, now would you?
Plenty of atheists have succeeded with AA after failing with everything else.
if you're in treatment or AA for alcoholism - just as a single example - you're recovering. If you're merely "not drinking" then you're not recovering, you're just "not drinking."
i don't even understand why this is an issue, there are a lot of people where a 12 step program helps them recover; there are in-patient and outpatient care facilities that also can facilitate recovery.
and yes, some small segment of the population can be a "dry drunk" for the rest of their lives, but thinking you can overcome addiction by yourself is one of the reasons that addiction is prevalent.
This is complete BS, the majority of addicts overcome addiction without any specific treatment.
https://psmag.com/social-justice/people-addiction-simply-gro...
https://aeon.co/essays/most-drug-users-stop-without-help-so-...
Several "hard" drugs interfere with the brain, especially if the drug use begins when the brain is still plastic. Another thing, why does Louisiana have more opioid prescriptions than citizens? I guess these "addicts" don't count.
Do you have some kind of angle, here? "complete BS" is a bit combative, for this forum.
I would suggest that an "addict" is someone who can't "just quit" because they "want to."
someone who can stop under their own willpower doesn’t need help to stop. they don’t need AA, right…?
so why should AA etc change things to cater for people who don’t need their help?
You are taking the “no control” thing too literally.
/thread
Literally wasn’t the right word. Maybe control just needs more context, like “control of your usage”?
Seems like the first step should be understanding that you CAN have control over it, even if you don't currently; and that you have the agency and strength to do that without appeal to some higher power.
The admitting you have no control sounds fatalistic to me and robs you of agency/responsibility. Then you're reliant on some externality or higher power instead of finding it within yourself.
Even those who go for the higher power are ultimately doing it themselves, they've just kidded themselves something else is involved, and if that helps you find that you can have some control over it, then great, I guess?
It's the difference between someone who can just drink a beer once in a while and an alcoholic that must abstain completly.
With how my brain works, I find it insulting to be told to pray the weakness away figure of speech..
That all being said, our brains, as wonderfully capable and complex as they are, are also pretty stupid and simple in other ways. Willpower and inner strength are a trained skills and mental states combined with chemical states. If the goal is to free yourself from addiction, the means of getting there don't really matter as long as they work and don't cause direct harm to yourself or others. The placebo effect is real, so if one gets strength from believing that there's a "god" or "higher power" giving them a high 5 and believes in them, then go for it. Whether I believe thats a delusion or not is much less important than the person breaking their addiction. Its a whole other fight of its own. I do think there should be as much available support for people that isn't based on feeding you religion if thats not your thing, regardless of the fact that one can attend AA+12step and not be religious and get value out of it too.
I feel like having faith in a higher power is almost like a part of your brain never grew up, in the sense that you're allowing yourself to believe in magic, like a kid. When you were a kid, that made you excited, dreamy, which puts you in a certain state. If you believe and that allows you to put yourself in a mental state where you think the end result will work out positively, whether thats because you felt empowered, you found strength to persevere, or whether you think god's got his quantum digits up your ** and is going to partially puppet you, thus relieving you of some of the pressure, strain, and allows you to get to the same end point, then good for you...
If this was a discussion about whether religions and faith in higher powers should be the guiding philosophies for humans going forward, my answer would be capital F no.. But if we're talking about current crisis response/management and addiction support, you can't rewire everyone's brains before you can start helping them out..
“after this one i definitely need to stop”
“i can handle another”
“i’m fine, i can go for a bit longer”
“i can stop after this one”
“the next one will make me feel better”
^ the illusion/delusion of being in control. even when all evidence points to the opposite conclusion — that one more i had yesterday, and all the previous days, was never the last one.
when your in this shit it’s basically impossible to think your way out of it because most thoughts become “a drink will solve this” or some such. that right there is the core problem. the thinking process has become completely twisted and warped into “more is the solution”.
the powerlessness is over the compulsion, obsession and delusions in our own minds around <insert X here>.
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i appreciate HN is often a more technical / scientific / rational / whatever audience who can maybe sometimes value their own thinking as paramount (coding etc. takes a lot of thinking after all). that’s not a bad thing. it just means it’ll be quite an understandably large leap for some folks to understand what it’s like at the bottom of a bottle.
-
edit - i’m not into the whole jeebus thing FYI
But at that point, why is The Twelve Steps as an institution still pedaling belief in the supernatural, when it’s ostensibly just as effective with the Christian mythology removed?
Why not make the atheist version the baseline, and allow members to mix in religion if they find it to be useful - as opposed to making religious belief the default, and allowing users to substitute other things for religion if they find that to be useful?
I think the thing that most atheists are objecting to, with ‘religion as default’ situations like this, is the way religious belief is treated as the norm. I remember growing up and going to church, hearing about how “everyone had a god-shaped hole in their heart” - and each person would inevitably find a way to fill that hole, but nothing would ever quite fit, because that hole was god-shaped and could only properly be filled by god.
So when you run up against this kind of language in a system that’s supposed to be helping people free themselves from addiction, it’s off-putting to run into language that coerces them into making themselves beholden to magical thinking and supernatural beliefs, in gods and higher powers. “It can be whatever you want” feels like a cop out - it’s merely a softened stance on what I described above - “everyone has a god-shaped hole in their heart, and it’s okay if you fill that hole with love for your daughter or pride in your work.”
It’s still a turn-off for people like me, for better or for worse - maybe it’s a filter, maybe I’m not the kind of person who would need or would do well in that kind of program.
All that groveling, the idea of putting your life in the hands of this entity, humbly improving my connection with them etc. There's no way I will do that.
I'm more than atheist, I'm anti-religious. I don't care what other people do, if it makes them happy that's cool for them, but I don't want any of that stuff in my life.
They are seen as disabled, i.e., lacking the moral core. An atheist, the thinking goes, can't be a moral person. The US political (if not cultural) mainstream has been anti-secular for quite some time. Remember George Bush Sr? He had a memorable exchange with a reporter during his presidential campaign, where he made his views clear[1]. He was only mildly exceptional in being very direct, not in the way of thinking.
[1] https://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php/George_H.W._Bush_and_t...
This is especially egregious because "under god" was only added to the pledge of allegiance in 1954, when H.W. was 30 years old.
Also, many of these staps make no sense.
I don't believe in higher powers and I don't want to humbly beg them to remove my character flaws. If I want those removed I have to do it myself.
Some of the steps make some sense but there's way too much senseless groveling in there.
AA being used by the justice system puts it at odds with anarchy, as anarchy is whatever you and your group want it to be, which is somewhat incompatible with state-mandated fill-in-the-blank.
Bill W. wanted to introduce LSD to AA in order to help folks understand what he meant by higher power, but the centering of Judeo-Christian ideology by other early AA members almost pushed Bill W. out of his own group.
AA was subverted long ago from within by the status quo it attempted to break free from. Whether or not it functions as an alcoholic support group is a separate issue.
I’ve written more about this before on HN:
But an official program using illegal drugs is of course a bit of an issue. Though I'm not sure if LSD was illegal in the 50s?
In the 50s, LSD was being used in many clinical counseling settings. Time magazine was writing about it positively. LSD wasn't scheduled in the US until 1968.
> In one study in the late 1950s, Humphry Osmond gave LSD to alcoholics in Alcoholics Anonymous who had failed to quit drinking.[25] After one year, around 50% of the study group had not had a drink—a success rate that has never been duplicated by any other means.[26][27][28] Bill Wilson, the founder of Alcoholics Anonymous, participated in medically supervised experiments on the effects of LSD on alcoholism and believed LSD could be used to cure alcoholics.[29]
It can be extremely christian, it can be not substantially christian.
That’s why it has been recognized as religious or “based on religious principles“ in court several times. For example, in the court case Inouye vs Kemna it was ruled that NA/AA “has such substantial religious components that governmentally compelled participation in it violated the Establishment Clause“
It does not help anyone to pretend that the universe is some sort of pure logic and reasoning machine and that a human can operate that way, because we are governed by and a slave to our emotions.
Religion and God exist for a reason, and that reason is that the world is inconceivably complicated and if you dont create a mental and emotional reasoning system that helps see beyond the complexity then you are going to have a really tough time.
Now, churches and cults and all that preying on vulnerable people is a whole other subject. But God and religion is a powerful tool humans have turned to for millennia.
I’m with you for sure, but the truth is systems like religion, art, design, etc all serve a functional purpose to trick the mind, calm the mind, etc.
It's really, really fascinating and there's tons of resources out there how they get started, how they function and why. Once you understand the functional purpose of them, you'll never look at other religions the same.
Principles shared with most religions and most non-religious people are hardly a mrk of Buddhism.
Buddhism is not a theistic religion, but it still requires a lot of religious beliefs (reincarnation, enlightenment, nirvana) and a lot of concepts such as detachment.
There is a BIG difference between "not monotheistic" and "not religious".
There are plenty of us who do not believe in those things. In particular, we see rebirth as a way of framing what Rawls called the Veil of Ignorance
There are no "requirements" in buddhism. there is no hell for you to go to if you do it "wrong". take from it what you want and leave the rest behind.
My understanding is that the present life and the cycle of reincarnation is what Buddhists seek release from in nirvana. There is a hell, we are just in it.
I hardly need say that "going" to hell is misleading as its not a place, and many other religions do not believe in it (.e.g. Christian universalists).
> take from it what you want and leave the rest behind.
At some point you take so little its not the same religion anymore.
sure but the point is to take what works to stop drinking, not to able to accurately call yourself a buddhist
"There is high quality evidence that manualized AA/TSF interventions are more effective than other established treatments, such as CBT, for increasing abstinence. Non-manualized AA/TSF may perform as well as these other established treatments. AA/TSF interventions, both manualized and non-manualized, may be at least as effective as other treatments for other alcohol-related outcomes. AA/TSF probably produces substantial healthcare cost savings among people with alcohol use disorder."[0]
Reread the 12 Steps.
Its Christianity with the serial numbers filed off. Pass.
My sobriety has its roots in not drinking. Not some higher power.
Practicing religion yields a lot of net-positive effects, particularly mental anguish and internal turmoil. Otherwise, people wouldn't practice them. With moderate practice, you can easily achieve a state of 100% internal peace.
True, being religious would cause me a lot of anguish and turmoil. Just the idea that I'm not in control of my life. I don't consider that a positive of any kind. That scene from the Matrix really speaks to me and always has :)
I think for people that like it it could have positive effects. Just like team sports would have negative effects for me but positive ones for others (I'm totally not a "team player")
I don’t think that follows. Plenty of people practice religion because they’re terrified of the consequences of not doing it, because they’re have been indoctrinated from a young age to believe that to turn away from God is to be tortured in hell for all eternity. (Or in the case of some religions, you can be straight-up executed for leaving.)
This is both wrong and deeply harmful. As others in this thread have pointed out, you can choose any higher power you want, whether it's a tree or the inevitable increase in universal entropy. Don't throw away the whole thing because you might have to talk to a Christian.
Free, accessible addiction help is hard to come by so it's terrible to discourage people based on misinformation and culture war bullshit.