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Comment by callc | Hacker News Reader

Wow this is a bad take and a half.

Apply the argument to abusing drugs now, and see how this argument throws all nuance out the window.

Well, addictive drugs cause punishment to a quitting user by chemical means.

By the way, I'm interested in answers. I don't appreciate this being shot down as a bad take. Give me explanations, not disapproval.

There’s physical dependence and there’s psychological dependence. Most drugs can cause both, but hallucinogens in particular are usually thought to cause only psychological dependence. Whether that makes them less dangerous is debatable, but the fact is, they can still cause addiction if used carelessly.

Now to your main point... dopamine hits aren’t inherently good or bad. They can, however, also make things addictive, and drug abuse is indeed a good parallel here.

What do you think about pinball? Is it bad for us, should we sue?

You can plot all activities on a spectrum of dopamine 'cheapness'. On one side of the spectrum is slot machines, various drugs, and doomscrolling. These generally involve little effort, and involve 'variable ratio reinforcement' which is where you get rewards at unpredictable intervals in such a way that you get addicted. Generally, after a long session of one of these activities, you feel like crap.

On the other side of the spectrum is more wholesome long-horizon activities like a challenging side project, career progression, or fitness goals. There's certainly an element of variable ratio reinforcement in all of these, but because the rewards are so much more tangible, and you get to exercise more of your agency, these activities generally feel quite meaningful on reflection.

Playing pinball is somewhere in the middle, probably on the cheaper side of the spectrum. Introspective people can generally reflect on a session and decide whether it was a good use of their time or not.

I really think that 'how do you feel after a long session of this' is a good measuring stick. Very few people will tell you that they feel good after a long session of social media scrolling or short-form content.

Another good measuring stick is 'do you want to want to be doing this?'. I want to want to go to the gym and gain 10kg of muscle. I do not want to want to spend hours on tiktok every day.

> Playing pinball is somewhere in the middle, probably on the cheaper side of the spectrum.

It could be a nice segue to tinkering with pinball machines though :)

If we look at the effects, no, I don’t think so. I see how pinball could be optimized for addictiveness, but I don’t see a lot of people devoting all their free time to it.

Now, it is more nuanced than that. Is addiction bad for us? And at what point do we say we’re addicted to something? For me personally, when I can’t stop doing something (say, watching YouTube instead of working on a project), I won’t be happy long-term. It would be more gratifying short-term, sure, but I’d say it’s still not good.

One question is, even if I unwisely stay up all night doing something (reading comics, say), how do we decide whether to blame the thing for tricking me, or whether it's my own responsibility? Another question is, do we even know our own minds and truly know when we're being unwise? I note that many binges that I would have beaten myself up over at the time were in retrospect great, and the worthy things I assumed I should have been doing instead were actually pointless. So this suggests to me that having an authority dictate to, e.g., comic publishers "you are tempting the public into unwise habits, desist" would be a bad thing because the authority doesn't actually know what's unwise much better than we do.

We can look at intent: comic publishers want to make them interesting and capture your attention for some time, but do they make them addictive? And we can also look at the scale – if a product is reliably addictive across a wide audience, it might be bad for society, not just for individuals. If both criteria are met, it’s probably reasonable to blame the “dealer” of the thing in question.

But I agree that we should be able to decide for ourselves what is good for us – delegating it to authority isn’t a great solution, it should always be our own responsibility. We should, however, be especially cautious when making decisions about things that are known to be addictive for others.

Christ, this is like a textbook definition of sealioning. You've hijacked multiple threads here persistently asking for more and more evidence of their claims. If you don't agree with an argument, provide your own counter evidence. Stop harassing people and do your own work, or stop reading the threads with people you don't think have valid opinions or have no evidence.

At this point, I'd almost think you were a bot yourself, as your oblivious to the social standards of online forums and/or manipulating them intentionally.

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