Don't stop there...

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.

Bingo (anecdata)... a few years ago I spent the last 15min of a flight into SFO talking to a lady (who had been playing Bejeweled for 4 hours straight) about using touchscreens so long (it's my job). She mentioned how shaky she gets when she has to stop playing...

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

More anecdata: we're all here, right?

Painful but accurate.

Can confirm... I am a 31 year old _data scientist_ who worked on these kind of algorithms, saw the metrics, and tweaked the algorithms to increase these metrics. I got addicted and it is harder to develop a healthy relationship with my phone/social media/youtube than it is with caffeine (I quit it!) or alcohol (I take a 1-2 month long break every year and rarely have more than 1 drink).

You can't control your dopamine uptake, but you can certainly control your actions. Especially when you recognize what is happening.

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

Right, I'm not fully convinced either way, but it seems to me that if you're capable of understanding the arguments against something, you're capable of starting to take steps against it.

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.

This is not sufficient. I know that eating out every day isn't as good for me as cooking at home would probably be, but the benefits still outweigh the downsides for me, so I eat out more often than I cook at home. No one is gonna hold that against me.

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.

Well sure; if the tradeoff is worth it for them, then they _shouldn't_ be doing it less. I'm pretty happy with the amount of junk food I eat and drugs that I do and screen time I have, because IMO the benefits outweigh the costs. It's possible for people to be bad at calculating these costs, but that doesn't require a motivated third party and is not what we're discussing here. This thread is about algorithms exploiting weakness to make you do things you think are bad.

My approach to this has been to retreat to books whenever I find myself too immersed into any digital activity that doesn't yield any tangible results at the end of it (i.e. it's just a time filler). Books can be very engaging, to the point of "one more page" syndrome - but they're still finite, and much easier to put away, all in all. Plus, it is very rare to find a book that doesn't have even the smallest nugget of genuine contribution to one's experience and knowledge. And there's so many good books, you could fill many lifetimes with them.

And if the alcoholic sees themselves drinking too much they'll stop.

...

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.

Yuval Harari keeps saying this, that we live in a time where the systems know our weaknesses better then we know them ourselves.

It's so much worse than this. The systems aren't "evil." They don't "know our weaknesses."

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.

Good point and well put.

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.

I'm a prime-of-my-life data scientist, and I disabled all my social media, because I realize I have no hope in fighting instagrams feed. I love the parts of those products where I can meaningfully engage with my friends and family, but over time that part grew smaller and smaller, and the addictive parts grew larger.

That's correct -- it's adults too. And the odds are against the average person. But I must point out it's not just data scientists we are up against -- it's psychologists, psychiatrists and medical doctors, addiction experts, experts in gaming theory, etc. All are employed in order to help make software and devices more "compelling". Remember when they used to ask how "sticky" is the app? Careful timing of rewards, the use of color and sound, a/b testing on phrasing, email&text reminders, alerts, etc all work to keep you clicking like a trained circus animal.

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.

A repost from half year ago:

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?

The problem is that it's not the "clickfarming" apps that are the real danger for the majority of people, I'd argue it's the endless algorithmically tailored content and social media streams most of us consume. The ones that fill our every - otherwise - idle moment with something to distract us with.

I spend at least as much time on HN as Facebook these days. (My relationship with HN is fine but my relationship with my phone is not as healthy as I feel it should be.) I think the problem is related to the fleeting mental rewards of surprising information, not any particular application. Perhaps the product of all available applications.

Isn't it the same thing in nature? That is also a part of the same click/impression economy.

In your own words: lack of logical reasoning?

People going to casino with a genuine belief that they will win.

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.

As a person who wants to move from analyst to data scientist, this makes me aware I should probably take some techno ethics as well as learning stuff like R and analytics