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.