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Comment by Maxatar | Hacker News Reader

This is like saying, "I'm not addicted to smoking, I'm addicted to the happiness cigarettes give me." Addiction is a harmful dependency you pursue to achieve some desired outcome. The harmful dependency is the endless browsing, scrolling, and searching you engage in to obtain it, all the time wasted doing it and doing it in a way that consumes a significant amount of time that could be spent acquiring that same information in a more productive manner.

That's the addiction, not the information.

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I'm not sure there's always a more efficient way to find that same information. If you already have a question, sure, you can look for an answer. Sometimes you stumble across a post about something you hadn't even thought to look into, though. I think that's part of what he's talking about when he mentions finding things that changed his life.

If you are browsing, you aren't searching for any specific piece of information. You're just looking at whatever is presented to you via whatever algo in use. In this case reading a book would, IMHO, be better. You stumble across all kinds of interesting pieces of knowledge, thoughtfully written prose, facts (in some books), great stories and characters in other. Though I do now have to condition this with; books written before say 2022 to stay clear of AI slop books that are flooding the space as we speak. Those books are worse than browsing the internet.

I think he misses the old forums where he'd just drop in to see what people were talking about. Not necessarily looking for an answer to something. Actually, he didn't need a recommendation feed to find a thread worth reading. But I do agree with you: books always win.

This is like saying, "I'm not addicted to smoking, I'm addicted to the happiness cigarettes give me."

No, it's like saying you're addicted to nicotine or routine or a break with people, because that's what cigarettes give you and there are other sources of that.

It is possible to get information from other sources just as it is possible to get nicotine or a break with people from other sources. Because of this your metaphor breaks down.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dopamine

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reward_system

Also, it's not addiction to information, it's addiction to entertainment. Looking for interesting/fun things is a form of entertainment.

Moreover, the "content" isn't always information. It can be informative and it can be news you need to know about. But it's often garbage, disinformation and the information analogue of empty calories in food.

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