Hell, I'd argue that many 40-50 year old brains clearly don't stand a chance against a trained data scientist.

I'd argue a prime-of-their-life 34 year old _data scientist_ doesn't stand a change _against their own algorithms_ if they immerse themselves. It's addiction.

We need to stop acting like it is "weak-minded" people (children is a dog-whistle for this) who are susceptible to tech addiction.

The idea of "standing a chance" is literally like saying you can consciously control your dopamine receptors to actively limit dopamine uptake in your brain.

I asked what she did... a game designer at Zynga.

If I see myself spending too much time on my phone, for instance, I'll put it away for a while.

This doesn't mean simply wishing an iron willpower on yourself, but one thing that worked wonders for me is modifying my environment to put barriers between me and bad things. I come from a family with a history of addiction and mental illness, and I think my personality can be a bit addictive along a variety of axes, but I consider my interactions with a host of addictive things (drugs, unhealthy food, screens, etc) to be pretty healthy. I know I have a sweet tooth and enjoy the occasional toke, so I don't keep junk food in the house; if I want anything unhealthier than cottage cheese, I can walk my high ass down to the store and get it. There are plenty of apps and extensions to limit screen time: zenscreen is good for mobile, feed eradicator for Facebook, blocksite for Reddit et al, YouTube has a setting to remind you to take a break after N minutes of watching, etc etc etc. I don't have any particular tricks for drugs, but I never developed the caffeine addiction most have because it was beyond crazy to me to start your day with feeding a physical and psychological addiction. [1].

I get that this pattern-matches to a hyper-individualist "external forces don't matter" take on the world, and it's not. But I think of it like defensive driving: feel free to dvocate for external changes and blame external forces, but when it comes down to it, you are the person who has the most invested in yourself and the person with the most power to change your habits. HN's historical fatalist consensus of all-powerful algorithms before which we can only cower in fear seems hugely counter-productive, and honestly a little silly.

[1] Caffeine is a particularly easy physical addiction to kick, given how brief and mild the withdrawal is. More powerfully physically addictive drugs like tobacco or heroin are in another category which I've avoided entirely, so I'm making no claims about them.

All these algorithms need to convince someone who is aware of their downsides is that the upsides are worth it. Instagram needs to convince someone that, sure Instagram isn't good for their mental health, but staying off Instagram means they will have less friends which will be worse for them. This will almost certainly work for a teenager. Other stuff may work for an adult.

And with the way social networks work, something like this can simply become a self fulfilling prophecy.

...

You just kinda ignored the whole point of the person you're replying too. This is an addiction, phone games or alcohol or lotto tickets, just because you can stop doesn't mean other people aren't addicted.

The opposite of love is not hate, it's apathy. The machines are optimized around numbers and parameters and have no idea what a person is or what a weakness is or what the concept of "weakness" means at all. They are statistical optimization algorithms designed to make one number get as close as possible to another number, by tweaking the values of a whole bunch of other numbers.

Like, a person who knew your weakness and had bad intentions would hone in on the weakness and then use it to manipulate you and take pleasure from interactions where you feel bad and they feel good. The computer is just existing at a higher level of ideas than your feelings, and will simply steam-roll your brain into mush as a minor side-effect of its effort to make that one number look like the other number.

These issues were being raised as far back as 2005-6 when debates were raging about whether likes/clicks/views and other "easy to collect" numbers were the right proxies for peoples needs and feelings. We know which camp prevailed.

What's changed is people's reaction and awareness. Hopefully we learn how to inject some love into the machine and dilute the apathy.

Look, these people are not working to protect you. They're working to create addictions and deepen existing ones. Frankly I think the medical types should lose their licenses for violation of the Hippocratic Oath: "First, do no harm" indeed. Making devices and software more ADDICTIVE, deliberately creating and encouraging mental illness (addiction) is a disgraceful violation of this oath.

This is an open secret in the video game world, to the point that some COUNTRIES are banning things like 'loot boxes' because they are naked gambling.

The problem began when users became the product being sold. Now the companies feel that they have a right to your mind and eyes, and are not above fostering or even creating clinical addiction to ensure they have access.

I lived in Russia during the time when slot machines were literally standing in the open on the streets, and yes, mentally infirm people were wasting themselves on them. Normal people did not.

It requires one to completely lack logic reasoning to not to understand that the the purpose of a slot machine is to waste his or her time and money.

The same way, it requires a particular lack of basic logical reasoning to not to understand that the the purpose of a smartphone app throwing 20 bling bling popups per second on you isn't different.

You don't need to be a genius to understand that clickfarming app must be removed, and to do so.

My former high school classmate who did not manage to leave Russia is running a typical "smartphone fixer" kiosk. He said few years ago that the most common request he gets from people is to "remove Google nagware and lock, block or delete Google Pay" so their child will never ever buy anything "in that Internet thing"

At least Chinese and Russian parents understood long ago that Google's business is all about "pocket slot machines (this is how people really call smartphones there)." Why wouldn't American parents do that too?

Casino — a business specifically mathematically engineered to make sure that nobody wins against a casino, to maximize your losses, and to make money from it. By the very definition, nobody "wins" against it. Yet, some people still come and play.

Same thing with google pocket slot machine — the very reason they link the game to your bank account is to milk money from you, or god forbid, your children.

Technology will always be "just a tool." By its nature, it is morally neutral. The use of technology for good or for evil reflects the morality of the people deploying it.

Explosives, baseball bats, water, radios, software. All have been used for noble purposes and for evil. That does not impart morality to the technology.

I think you've got it precisely the wrong way round: it is not the morality of the times that is reflected by the use of technology, but morality that reflects current technology.

The French and American revolutions that began the current age of modern democracy are, for example, unthinkable without the printing press. No newspaper, no democracy. It needed the equalising force of mass-copied text to abolish the sacred order of monarchy in people's heads. Similarly, it is hard to imagine fascism without the preceding inventions of radio and cinema. Or J.F.K. without television.

Culture, society, customs, morality - everything that has to do with what we call 'evil' or 'good' - is fundamentally a reflection of their surrounding media. Morals under the conditions of television will be different from morals under the condition of the world wide web.

One can see that we are currently struggling to adapt our morality to a new media reality by the invention of new words ("fake news", "filter bubble", "clickbait", "post-truth") to describe it; the old ones are insufficient.

I propose that rules and guidelines that emerged under the conditions of offline media will leave us vulnerable to the dark and dangerous sides of online media. We should develop new ones.

Before written systems, a message could only be spread by word. The message could be stopped by disappearing the person speaking.

Before print media, messages could only be written down by a scribe or learned person, and the message could only be read by another scribe or learned person. Or messages could only be passed in the form of images. Those messages could be stopped simply by burning/destroying the written/etched copy that existed.

Before the telegraph, messages could only be delivered in person, on foot or on horseback or by ship, limiting its rate of spread to those transportation speeds. Those messages could be stopped by intercepting the delivery, or controlling the territorial borders.

Before radio and telephone communications, transmitted messages could only be read by telegraphists. The messages could be stopped as long as there was no telegraphist at the time of message transmission, or if the telegraphist lied about the message.

Before televised media, only messages in the form of voice or text could be transmitted far distances, so only voice or text was consumed. The information bandwidth was extremely small, although fast.

Before internet media, only audio, video, or text could be transmitted. The information bandwidth increased with video, but these high information channels were only controlled by media elites and governments.

With internet media, internet isn't a message you consume, internet is something you participate in. The instant participation of the global population in a single activity is something altogether new that is a step-change in what has been available, and no prior medium could have prepared us for this age. The old media elites still want to control what messages are dispersed, but the new medium doesn't cede that control easily.

By that narrow definition, phones contain more than technology: they contain policy. A phone loaded with addictive games embodies a policy of maximizing screen time. A phone with clickbait on its lock screen is designed to take up your time and bathe your retinas in bullshit. While the transistors are neutral, the policy is harmful.

As it happens, these policies are often set by people that mostly work on technology, so they get lumped together. From outside, people see the technology industry being responsible for all of it.

- Everything has a potential of being addictive, but we focus so much on drugs since they have some especially addicting properties that aren't present in other habits.

- We're stuck with Enlightenment age thinking such as "tabula rasa" and we attribute too much human behavior to free will, an ill-defined term that nobody whom I ask can provide a comprehensive answer to.

McDonalds has marketed to children for the better part of a century (and it has followed many people into adulthood).

The medium has changed, but the practices are the same as Edward Bernays and Anna Freud cooked up so many decades ago (Sigmund was never happy with the way his family members used his psychoanalysis research to sell products, even though they used it to help sell the English version of his book).

There is more of it today, yes. Kids don't want toys, and hence we see Toys-R-Us disappear .. they do want games, and it's pretty important for people in tech to teach kids about how absolutely atrocious in-game purchases are and how you should NEVER participate in that rubbish and discourage everyone else from doing so in the hopes it eventually goes away.

But it won't, because there are always people who don't know, or even with full knowledge, can't help those addictions.

It's a complicated problem, but current phones/tech are just the medium.

But the medium can also be the message.

But the addiction component wasn't built-in the way it is now. Everyone remembers "Saturday morning cartoons with cereal" because there was a set time and place for that event. After the episode ended, it didn't auto-play the next episode, or recommend 5 highly similar shows based on your "viewing history".

Consider that "bingeing" is a commonly accepted term when it refers to consuming an entire season of a show in one sitting and companies like Netflix churn out TV shows with a focus on this "bingeability", because that's their differentiator compared to regular TV.

Yesterday, we had Nielsen doing rough tracking of viewership (IIRC, installing a Nielsen box was/is totally optional!), opinion polls, and focus groups. Mostly aggregate data on a program's performance.

Today, we're building elaborate user profiles and tailoring the viewing experience to the individual, using who-knows-what details (demographics, personal viewing habits, Amazon purchase history, eye-tracking data from your smart TV, you get the idea). These companies have a really good idea of what you like, and will use whatever data they can to maximize the time you spend on their platform.

Toys-R-Us died because the founder left, his successors couldn't keep innovating, they sold out to Bain and KKR, and then it was driven into the ground for margins.

It's not because "Kids don't want toys." You thinking kids don't want toys almost seems more like brainwashing than if kids actually didn't want toys anymore.

It's a difference only of efficiency, but it is large enough to create completely different kinds of problems.

Nobody has actually believed in that for decades, and it certainly isn't present in the public consciousness.

Then they give us "Screen Time" and Tim Cook talks about giving people the tools to be aware of how much they're using their phones and to make their own decisions about it.

If drug companies said "We're discontinuing Advil for your headaches and replacing all painkillers with small dosage opiates, but we'll give you an app to count how much you're taking and you can make your own decisions" we'd immediately jump down their throats.

Apple discontinues the iPhone SE, standardizes on a comparatively gigantic 6.1 inch screen size for their mainstream phone model, and tells us "It's fine. We gave people a new app so they won't get addicted to their phones."

I don't think it's fine. Apple's just in denial about it because the design team likes big shiny things, premium phones print money, and users keep on buying them because we collectively don't have a grip on the downsides.

Just give me a damn phone that I can call a car or text friends on, I don't want to or need to spend hours consuming media on a giant shiny screen. But if I get a giant shiny screen foisted on me, I know it's going to happen.

But like you said, if someone's living on their phone too much, we treat it like their own moral failing. The manufacturers that made the phones this way and the software companies that deliberately A/B tested their engagement stats to death to rope you in as hard as possible and sell more ads? Nah, not their fault. It's these irresponsible phone users not owning up to their own faults.

I’ve felt withdrawal symptoms for caffeine, and I can only imagine it is worse for stronger drugs. Maybe this addiction is of the same sort but the withdrawal is so slight that I don’t notice?

The really short version is that there's some science that suggests that periods of boredom increase creativity. By constantly keeping active with your phone, we're losing this "boredom time".

Personally, I've made a habit of occasionally just doing nothing every now and then. Put the phone away; don't listen to anything. It's actually great for my commute home (I take a bus). I can just sit/stand and not do anything and just relax for a few minutes on the way home.

Personally, I think the biggest problem here isn't that kids are spending a lot of time looking at their screens. It's that parents _aren't_ spending a lot of time engaging with their kids about the content.

When a screen is used to distract a child - or anyone,really - instead of engage them, that's where the problem arises.

Not only personal time, but work time as well. How many of us see work colleagues on their phones or random websites during work time? If that moment of boredom had been spent thinking about new products, the details of a customer problem, or something else work-related, that could have produced something tangible, rather than being wasted. When "slack time" is automatically used for indulging in phone apps or web surfing, that's displacing activity which pre-phone-apps and pre-internet, would be much more likely to have involved alternative productive activity, from future planning to work-related talk with co-workers, to designing and prototyping experimental stuff. Now it's self-indulgent skinner boxes compelling us to fairly fruitless time wasting.

Some people are so focussed on this stuff that it takes priority over actual face to face conversations, which I personally find intensely rude, and I don't think I'm wrong in saying this is going to directly affect the productivity and effectiveness of them as an individual and the team as a whole. Their focus isn't on the company's business, but on themselves. I don't find this degree of self-absorption healthy; it's like working with zombies. In some ways, I preferred my original programming job where we only had a shelf full of books and dial-up internet, and you actually worked with your co-workers, talked to your customers on the phone, rather than merely existing in the same space while their minds are somewhere else. Not that I'm a Luddite, it's the social changes I abhor, not the technical.

It's weird, and worrying, just how addicted people have become at the expense of real life in the here and now, and a pushback against it is long overdue.

It's not the end of the world, if I end up having problems with it on my next bigger phone I'm more than capable of deleting the problematic apps. I've already done that with Facebook on my SE.

Even so, I'm also not excited about the ever climbing costs for new "upgrades" that I don't want. SE was a great size and had the top of the line camera from the 6s. Now if I want the smallest screen and the best camera, the price went from $400 to $1000. Welp.

My iPhone adds incredible value to my life and I find screen time very useful in helping me control my own urges to over consume enjoyable content. I don’t think people at Apple are intentionally selling you cigarettes or opiate like products.

If parents can’t understsnd spending too much time on phones or infront of TV is potentially harmful then it’s common sense we’ve lost. Nothing else.

Take it easy.

Smartphones absolutely add a lot of convenience and value. But, in my opinion, most of that value doesn't come from having deliberately addictive media consumption available at your fingertips at half a second's notice. Yet that's what phones are being optimized for.

Does calling an Uber need a 6" screen? Or voice navigation instructions in my car? Shooting photos and videos? GPS tracking my runs?

Most of the things that bigger screens enable are things that I'm trying to minimize, so making these big inviting smartphone screens is no longer adding value to my life. But that's the only phone Apple will sell me. No, it's probably not as bad as opiates. But "not as bad as opiates" is a pretty low bar to set for "should I be OK with this?"

The new Palm small phone thing is a nice idea, except that it's a companion accessory to go with a bigger phone. So close: https://www.theverge.com/circuitbreaker/2018/10/25/18022382/...

What I really want is a small phone like that to go with an iPad. With a full size tablet, carrying it and sitting down to use it two handed are enough of a barrier that I can't absentmindedly find myself sucked into a reddit hole.

Maybe that's Apple's plan to sort this out. Make next year's iPhone Max Plus so big that you have to carry it around in your backpack and can't make a habit of staring at it all the time.

Giant screens aren't being foisted on you, you go to the store and pay for them. You could buy a featurephone if you wanted.

Having the screen be smaller makes those software products suck enough that I don't like using them for extended periods, it's a defense mechanism against hyper optimized advertising engagement apps.

Personally I think that's a feature.

My other problem with Apple that they're only interested in the high end $750+ for their phones. The SE was comparatively a steal at $400, and nothing about the new ones is $250 more impressive. Can't be securely held one handed and adds a big screen that I don't want, so I'm not excited about paying more for it.

It was just one person, and entirely subjective, but seems worth a look.

If I understand you correctly, it’s the phone fault people are addicted to bad content? The phone is just too easy to use, too high quality that unwitting victims are just defenseless? If we are talking kids, that’s a parent problem, but if we are talking adults, then it’s a problem of self-responsibility. Grocery stores have plenty of ice cream for sale: it’s up to you to not buy and eat it all the time. Grown ups ought to act like it instead of blaming shiny objects of their own obsessions. Adults aren’t victims of their phones.

Also both those phones have e-ink displays.

It reminds me of the Colonel Sanders scene in So I Married an Ax Murderer: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=TPMS6tGOACo

You imply that this is obviously a bad idea, but why? I wouldn't eliminate the idea out of hand. If cars were slightly less comfortable, maybe people would drive slightly less and walk/bike slightly more. Maybe removing temptation by having a phone that doesn't make it as easy to play games is simply a healthier choice.

As a parallel, the Amish are a societal group that isn't being overwhelmed by technology. Contrary to popular belief, the Amish don't shun technology, rather they develop rules as a community to try to figure out how to take advantage of the benefits of technology while avoiding the downsides.

In most Amish communities, the current rule is that using telephones is fine, but they are not allowed to be in the house. They tried it when they first came out, and decided it wasn't working. The current approach is to put community phones in outside sheds so they aren't too tempting, but can be used when needed: http://amishamerica.com/got-a-quarter/

Unfortunately Apple has decided that's the only car they're going to make.

1: https://www.nsc.org/road-safety/safety-topics/distracted-dri...

A lot of those behaviors, I currently have trouble with at full-size computers. I can absentmindedly browse cat pictures on reddit for a couple of hours. But I have to sit down at my computer to do that, I can't do it comfortably on a 4" phone screen. And I like it that way.

Put that comfortable time-wasting computer in my pocket where it follows me everywhere and I'm about 99% certain that I'm have a problem.

I'd love to know if someone's studied this more rigorously.

I think that's not a coincidence, and it's not just about games. If you think about it, all forms of entertainment boil down to giving our mind a different world to inhabit for a while. It's pretty obvious with books and movies and theater etc, and with "traditional" games. But in a sense, the gaming board of something like Bejeweled is also a world, just a very simplified one. And stuff like social networks are also a world, the one that's built out of real people, but with its own set of relationships and problems and drama etc. All of this lets your brain "go elsewhere".

But here's the big difference. Some forms of entertainment engage in such world building to tell a story. But a story has its finale - once it is done, you leave the world it inhabits, and come back to reality. You can go back for another take, but the thing about stories is that the second time is not like the first. It's diminishing returns.

With modern - problematic - forms of entertainment, like MMOs and addictive mobile games and social media - the world is intentionally designed to be inhabited permanently. Worse yet, it's designed to be painful to withdraw from, even temporarily. There is no final line - there's no "game over, you won" in a MMO, or a happy (or sad, or any) ending of the Facebook drama. The people who make those things want it that way, because every minute you spend in their world, they can extract rent from you. With stories, you pay per story; here, you pay per hour.

Basically, social media and addictive games are the equivalent of a never-ending soap opera that's on 24/7. Imagine if something like this existed 50 years ago; do you think the effects would have been different? It's just that back then, it was not economically feasible. And now it is; and here we are.

To be fair, the comparison is applicable, but not the best. I think it's more akin to slot-machines and other forms of gambling, themselves heavily regulated (though maybe not for much longer [0]).

[0] https://www.cnn.com/2018/05/14/politics/sports-betting-ncaa-...

A team of data scientists stand no chance against millions of years of adaptive evolution. Humans are an incredibly adaptive species who inculcates nearly anything into their lives with ease. Technology is no different.

What a glib statement.

Although, a meme here on Hacker News, it doesn't take a data scientist to make addictive games and video content.

This is ridiculous. I mean, utterly and completely ridiculous and you should be ashamed of yourself. This all happened by chance, not by some miracle of data science. For every product that captured 6 year old brains, there are millions of failed products that did not capture any brains at all. For every claim of "hey, I just tried to stimulate dopamine addiction in my successful table game" there are a million people who tried to do the same thing and failed. This is just a ridiculous narrative that uses post hoc reasoning and ignores survivorship bias to try to justify some parochial view of what makes children become "productive" adults.

No human is going to be able to predict what will be good and bad for child development except in very narrow cases around health and nutrition (and even there we're wrong 92% of the time when we stray out of those narrow bands). The world of tomorrow is not the same as the world of today and each generation will adapt and thrive in their own way. We'll keep stumbling through trying different crazy approaches, each with drawbacks and advantages, and occasionally pushing for the "one true" approach that will be discredited before we ever get to figure out if it works.

> As much as we want it to be true, technological advancement can never be separated from social/ethical impact

Yeah, sure, of course. But responsibility for social/ethical impact is almost zero in all cases except as a retrospective tool, and trying to predict social/ethical impact is a suckers game because this is simply not possible. This idea that we can somehow have a simplified model of how humans behave and that such a model has any validity at all is a common one in marketing and social science research, but is clearly fallacious.

A/B testing and measuring -- are you kidding me? That's how you go from 35% conversion to 36% conversion, not from 2 daily active users to 1e7 daily active users. Refinement only works if you're exploring a space that has productive alternatives in low dimensions, which is almost never the case. No amount of "progressive refinement" is going to turn Farmville into Candy Crush or Candy Crush into Fortnite. You have to look no further than those examples to see what I mean -- "Oh, look, Zygna has figured out a formula to hook users" followed by "Zygna can't repeat its success".

A developer of traditional games might think, "How can I make this game better in an aesthetic, or an educational sense?" Or, "How can I make this game a better FPS than the ones before?"

A developer of another game might think, "I want to make money, let me survey existing games and read psych literature and create the next billion dollar game. I don't care what form the game takes, or what players get out of it."

The claim is not that game developers for each game are creating an addictive game from scratch by A-B testing, but rather exactly what you said, that they're AB testing for smaller improvements in eyeball-retention, spending, and addictiveness, because all they care about are those metrics which drive profits (or valuation which can be converted into profits).

That a set of conscious design choices, on its own, isn't sufficient for extreme addictiveness doesn't change the fact that those conscious design choices are necessary, and those choices are being examined, analyzed, and documented by other game devs and by psychologists. So, of course you can take all the known lessons and apply them to a brand new game concept and fail horribly, but if your game is a success on other grounds and you mined other games and the literature for addictive ideas, you are much more likely to have a billion dollar super-addictive game than you would have been 20 or 30 years ago.

Zynga had repeated success, untill market saturated and other developers caught up. That does not make these tactics not working, that just makes them so common that they are not such a huge advantage anymore.

I'd say, until people got bored with the same single local optimum game that all Zynga games converged to despite differnt skins.

It's also how you go from unique and successful entertainment product to something completely unusable and boring is just few hundred A/B iterations.

Enjoyment is not the space where gradient descent works particularily well.

Amazon is absolutely horrible expeirience for me. It's hard for me to point e-commerece site I used that's worse than amazon.

The notion that human behavior can be manipulated and shaped by careful modulation of input is not remotely new, and it's developed considerably over many decades.

If you don't agree with or understand this, and would like sources, please say so and I'll gladly offer them when I'm at a keyboard.

Nobody fell down the stairs and discovered that the tumble accidentally linked their KPIs to engagement metrics.

And a thousand of those .1%'ers will try a second time, and the .1% that succeed that time will be hailed as geniuses and people will set about copying their open plan offices and terrible management styles in the hopes of replicating their success.

But I've played some games. I am 137% confident that some form of "level up" (roguelikes, MMOs, MOBAs, FTL) is an extremely strong addiction factor. League of Legends, that free game whose net worth is among the highest of all time.

In real life, you study->grades->job->promote->takeoverworld. Or liftweights->liftmoreweights->liftmoreweights. Or climbmountain->climbhighermountain...

In games, you do that in 1/100 the time and effort. Tap a few buttons and "you win!!!!"

A sweeping statement to the effect of "people don't understand addiction" is basically malicious and I accuse you of being the inventor of gamification or one of their PR folk.

Try playing more unsuccessful games. You'll find that most boring, unaddictive, terrible games that you'll never play more than once have the same leveling up mechanic.

Nothing is binary; I'm not going to say "either leveling helps a game all the time or it doesn't". Sometimes leveling-up mechanics help a game, sometimes it doesn't, sometimes it alienates one set of users and attracts another, and there's no magic formula for when it helps and when it doesn't, and the nature of the leveling-up mechanic itself and how fun that is can vary in effectiveness dramatically. It's like having the user's avatar wear a funny hat.

There is just something about the "Skinner box"-style of frequent microrewards in games that scratches an itch in the human psyche.

Well before then players of the original Diablo were obsessively clicking cows because of rumors and belief that there had to be something to the cow.