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Comment by superkuh | Hacker News Reader

Even beyond the dangerous legal precedent it sets, we're all cheering for a legal precedent that human persons don't have volition or free will and that multi-media can somehow bypass normal sensation pathways a act directly on want like drugs do. And that's simply not true. Believing that and setting up a legal precedent means that now the government can use violent force to regulate anything shown on a screen. This is going to cause incredible damage to our society as a whole and to individual peoples lives. Government use of force is far more dangerous than unsupported memes/old-wive tales from the 1970s.

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I too fear what governments will actually do in this area. But I think you may be underestimating the threat to personal agency.

Imagine you are trapped in a groundhog day like time loop - but you are not the person who remembers previous loops. "Z" is. He tries to convince you to do something, over and over and over, thousands or millions of times, refining his approach based on your reactions while you remember nothing. Are you really confident that your free will protects you from being taken advantage of in this situation?

Now imagine that instead of a time loop, Z has a million clones of you. He tries his persuasion on one of them at a time, refining it until it works reliably before using it on you. You are just as vulnerable.

Now suppose he has a billion people, not identical to you but drawn from the same distribution. He has a harder computational problem, mapping the high dimensional manifold of their responses to create a model of you sufficiently accurate to manipulate you. But with enough data he can approximate the results of the previous case without more than a tiny fraction of his experimentation being visible to you.

Any relationship where one party gets to surveil and monitor not only the other party, but millions or billions of like parties, has the potential to be a deeply abusive one. We should not tolerate such situations whether the surveilling party is a government or not.

There’s a few books I recommend for you, if you’re open to learning more about this subject.

The first is “Addiction by Design: Machine Gambling in Las Vegas” by Natasha Dow Schüll. The second, and arguably more direct and fascinating, is “The Age of Surveillance Capitalism” by Shoshanna Zuboff. Both are incredibly eye-opening in their treatment of technology and how it is designed to influence behavior.

And for you, to help understand the vast gulf that is the difference between drugs that directly modifify incentive salience and simple normal perceptions of multi-media screens via our senses (that don't), https://sites.lsa.umich.edu/berridge-lab/selected-review-art...

I'm not seeing where the content you linked is supporting your argument.

It's background education in the basics so you can understand what drug addiction is and the neurological differences in the active populations for wanting versus liking. I guess I can spell it out.

Addictive drugs directly increase wanting via directly activating the downstream targets of dopaminergic populations which predict the valence of stimuli and control of wanting and motivation. By taking a chemically addictive drug you don't even have to enjoy the stimuli related to it. You will still be conditioned to want it and be motivated to re-experience the stimuli surrounding it.

This is vastly different in mechanism and result than simply seeing or hearing a screen. These things cannot directly increase incentive salience regardless of actual valance of the stimuli. You have to actually enjoy the thing and the experiences to form habits.

Do you see the difference now? One thing, the chemical drugs, are addictive. The other things are enjoyable. One will addict everyone because they're addictive. The other only leads to addiction-like behaviors in the context of say, random interval operant conditioning, if you actually enjoy the thing intrinsically first and are of the fairly small subset of that subset that is predisposed to behavioral addictive behaviors.

This strikes me as a distinction without a difference.

You're right in an important sense. There's not a complete difference in outcome between direct manipulation of wanting with drugs and using enjoyable stimuli in some form of unethical non-consensual conditioning program (aka advertising). It is one of many scales of magnitude and a lot of abstraction but that's still bad.

What I am trying to get across, and what I'd hoped all the conditionals and premises I laid out in my original comment made clear, is an additional consideration:

Screens are not drugs. They are not somehow uniquely and magically addictive (like drugs actually are). The multi-media is not the problem and not the device to be regulated. The corporate structure and motivations are the problem. This issue literally applies to any possible human perception even outside of screens. Sport fishing itself is random interval operant conditioning in the same way that corporations use. And frankly, with a boat, it's just as big of a money and time sink.

We should not be making laws regulating screens themselves because we think screens are more addictive than, say, an enjoyable day out on the lake. They're not. You could condition a blind person over the radio with just audio. The radio is not the problem and radios are not uniquely addictive like drugs.

I am saying it's important not to think of screens as the problem. The problem is the corporations' behavior and scale. That's a big difference in terms of the legislation used to mitigate the problem and the people to which it will apply. The Digital Markets Act in the EU is a good template to follow with it only applying to very large incorporated entities acting as gatekeepers.

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