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Comment by justonenote | Hacker News Reader

Agree with most everything and will check our that interview, that attitude is how I try and live, but the last sentence is obviously not true. Taking heroin is a habit, going to a gym is a habit, and obviously one is much easier to stop whether either willfully or not.

I'd say the ease which you can pick up habits or drop them is extremely variable across the specific habit and person. (as a different example, someone with less social awareness will find it harder to pick up the habit of being a hospitable host than someone it comes naturally to, but once learned its probably fairly easy to maintain)

One of my favorite quotes is, "first the man makes the habit, then the habit makes the man" , and it works both ways, good and bad. I really think this is something that should be taught much more explicitly in school to everyone, rather than leaving it only in places like sports and the military.

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Taking heroin may be called “a habit” but it’s not a habit. It’s an addiction with physical and neurological elements.

it absolutely is a habit, the fact that it affects you physiologically via pharma does not make it not a habit. a habit is something you do habitually, that is the exact definition of the word, and the reasons people do them vary wildly. I used heroin as an an extreme example.

Going for a 5k jog every morning is also a habit that affects your brain chemistry, through different mechanisms, and can also be addictive. It's obviously much healthier, but its still a habit, that is reinforced via brain chemistry rewards etc (addictive in some people). It's not as widely seen or known but there is a small cohort of people who exercise becomes a problematic habit and ends up being detrimental to their health.

I suggest you check the definition of the words. I specifically wasn't talking about addiction because that is just one axis of what can make up a habit. Drinking water is a habit that is not addictive but pretty hard to quit. If you take a wider view there are tons of habits that are either harmful or positive, but have no addictive component, and have no chemical component, and are either hard or easy to pickup / drop.

Merriam-Webster does of course have addiction as a habit, but it singles it out as being different than other definitions https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/habit

perhaps this is one of those definitions that are in flux and we are moving from taking drugs as a habit, to first having a drug habit, and soon, no longer a habit but an addiction.

I would have to say that in light of the other definitions of habit it does seem reasonable to separate them.

this is a willful misreading of the dictionary. you are pointing to habit being used colloquially as a short hand for addiction , which of course it is, as demonstrated through this thread, and is plainly obviously used that way to anyone who has lived in the last 50 years.

if you want to play pedant paddle, explain the relationship between the words habitual and habit, write an essay, and submit to webster, to oxford and any of your favorite dictionary and try and get them to change the the top definition of habit to be a synonym for addiction.

In the meantime I'll get on with my life because I know what I said was perfectly clear and accurate.

> habit is something you do habitually, that is the exact definition of the word

That definition is too broad to be useful is absolutely not a definition used in the given context (psychology).

Same goes for the examples, you can generalize statements to to get common denominators (affects the brain), but it's not useful to do so, it's misleading.

the examples I used were not generalized in any way at all. They were specifically picked examples that were at or approaching the limit of the definition, which is is a well known way of examining things in order to model them better.

if you want a more specific and narrow definition for certain classes of XYZ, you can do that, I wasn't trying to do that here.

No need to come up with your own definition, professionals have settled on what those terms should mean to be useful and it's not what your describe.

> it absolutely is a habit

You can follow the definition that you like, but the typical habit is something you just do without thinking. Taking drugs is mostly something you do to get the kick and in later stages because you don't want the withdrawal symptoms. Some addictions are quite habitual too (smoking is not just for the nicotin but also having the habit of taking a break for 10 minutes out on the balcony), but arguably there is more to an addiction than the habit component which is only a minor contributor if at all.

Taking a drug is absolutely a habit, it's a habit of soothing an emotion or seeking an emotion. "My body feels this, therefore I will do that"

This is "bad, bored, tired" or anything else. "That" is the drug administration, experience, etc.

Much of addiction therapy is understanding that cycle and finding a different course of action between "my body feels this" and "doing other things instead of that drug"

> a habit is something you do habitually

That soounds a tiny bit circular. Doesn't "habitually" mean to do something out of habit?

I'd suggest "habit" is something we often do, but don't really need to do, If it's something we have to do, like eating we don't call it a habit.

It's not circular, its just basic grammar, smooth, smoothly, spice, spicy.

I actually agree. I should have said “just a habit.”

Calling heroin a “habit” is putting it in a class which includes doodling, tapping your foot, talking a particular route to work, or putting your jacket on the same way every time.

In other words, it is technically a member of a class but very different than the median member of that class. This is why naive use of centroid clustering to reduce dimensionality and distance quantization leads to bad results.

I think Johnny Thunders would agree.

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