I think many of your examples are of times we failed to counter problematic tendencies as a society, gave up, and then even worse (in this case, more addictive time consuming activities) things come along. It's basically the realization of a slippery slope, where failure to stop one problematic trend is used to justify an even worse trend.

Society can survive with bad tendencies. Think about 50 years ago when American restaurants were full of cigarette smoke, and rivers would get so polluted they'd catch on fire. People still survived, even thrived. If we had ignored those problems, probably someone today would be saying "Opiates? Global warming? Just more moral panics, the way a few decades ago everyone was worried about the environment and smoking."

The dangerous thing is that once these trends become part of your society, it's hard to imagine the world without them, and hard to see why people make such a fuss about them because they can become an immutable part of your reality. You become blind to them. I'm sure, given enough time, we'll become blind to new negative trends in society just as we've become blind to previous negative trends. But that's not a good thing.

Totally agree. When I hear the argument "People always say this, they said this before with TV and videogames", it just makes me think that people are discounting some of the huge negative impacts these technologies have had (or at least contributed to).

Just look at the overall physical fitness of, say, an average 18 year old in 1950 vs today in the US. By loads of measures (obesity, muscle strength, cardiovascular fitness, diabetes, etc.) there is an enormous degradation in the physical fitness of America's youth. I'm certainly not blaming this all on TV and videogames, but at the same time I think it's a huge mistake to pretend our technological advances haven't had other, large negative side effects.

Slight tangent re: fitness. Over Christmas my dad and some similarly aged people (70’s) were reminiscing about their childhood, and pointed to the lack of Doritos as memorable. Junk food was neither the product of decades of addictiveness-enhancing R&D not cheap.

A poor person today by contrast has junk food as the cheapest option.

Cheapest by effort plus taste divided by cost maybe. It’s still much cheaper to buy a bag of rice and a bag of beans and some frozen veggies. You can eat sub $1 meals

Thank you! This line about "unhealthy food is the most affordable option" doesn't really hold up in my experience.

Some "superfoods," exotic fruits, nice cuts of meat and fish, and certain vegetables are expensive, and that's a problem, but its a problem at the margins. The basic building blocks of a healthy diet are all widely available and affordable.

Some quick googling says the avg price for a dozen eggs in the US is $1.48. A can of tuna is $0.77. A pound of bananas is $0.57. A pound of potatoes $0.75. Dried beans/lentils/rice are even cheaper.

I understand there are complicating factors. You need a place to cook, and a big mac probably generally looks more enticing than canned fish, especially if you've spent all day on your feet at a job you hate. But these are separate problems, unrelated to the food supply chain.

Another complicating factor of all this is "The Pleasure Trap" of "Supernormal Stimuli" and "The Acceleration of Addictiveness" in a society far from what humans are adapted for.

Related:

"How to escape The Pleasure Trap!" By Douglas Lisle and Alan Goldhamer https://web.archive.org/web/20150430050047/http://drfuhrman....

"Supernormal Stimuli: How Primal Urges Overran Their Evolutionary Purpose" by Deirdre Barrett https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Supernormal_Stimuli

"The Acceleration of Addictiveness" by Paul Graham http://www.paulgraham.com/addiction.html

"The Lifestyle Cure" https://tlc.ku.edu/

From the last: "We were never designed for the sedentary, indoor, sleep-deprived, socially-isolated, fast-food-laden, frenetic pace of modern life. (Stephen Ilardi, PhD)"

You struck a good balance here -- well put! :)

Except if like a great many in the U.S., your only source of nearby groceries within reasonable walking distance is a gas station. In that case a bag of Doritos is $40+ cheaper than hiring a cab to take you to the grocery store and back for a bag of beans and rice. Also saves you a couple of hours of travel and cooking.

When I was younger even though I lived on a major street downtown in a city, there were no grocery stores around. Plenty of fast food restaurants with $1 menus though. Cheap, quick, and easy, but not all that healthy. Actual grocery shopping was a once or twice a month thing - bus ride out to the store in the strip mall, cab ride back, 2+ hours total and a lot of money.

One of the things I love about my house now is that there's a full grocery store right at the end of the street (along with other stores and a restaurant a block over). But most people don't have that.

Developped countries share the same technologies, but this obesity and diabetes problem you're talking about seems largely rooted in North America.

You're a little quick to correlate screens and health metrics. I don't think that explanation holds up at all if you consider data in other countries.

> Developped countries share the same technologies, but this obesity and diabetes problem you're talking about seems largely rooted in North America.

In France ("the land of delicate and healthy food", as it is sold to you), obesity rate was multiplied by 3 since the 80s. Overweight rate raised by 50%.

Diabetes has also been on the raise: double or tripled since the 90s.

You know, in general all the crap that develops in the USA reaches other countries after a while. Depending on which specific 'crap', it is just a matter of variables delays and variable intensity, but it surely comes one day.

> France ("the land of delicate and healthy food", as it is sold to you)

Is it? I would associate that description more with Italy. With France I associate butter, cream, cheese, fatty cuts of meat ...

To many people, Italy would first evoke pizza and (the huge amount of Nonna's) pasta :-)

"Gourmet", "Chef", "Cuisine" and dozens of other terms: even in the English culinary vocabulary, the French words have a predominant role. It ruled the world of 'proper' cooking at some point. But I was more thinking about how, from the USA, the French are presented as having a balanced diet, eating a bit of everything but not eating too much of anything, cooking by themselves and not resorting to mostly ready, industrial, over-processed meals, how they would be a sort model in those matters related to food.

What was very fashionable at some point in the discourse on healthy food (10-15 years ago, maybe), was the Greek/Cretan diet; which was often extended to the whole Mediterranean, including Italy indeed, and south of France. Traditionally the butter & cream you mentioned are associated with northern France: the South was supposed to be a land of oil (olive oil in the most Mediterranean part, other oils in other parts) and the North a land of butter.

As well as the almighty Baguette.

With Southern France and maybe Paris being the exceptions, the eating habits of the average Frenchman are closer to those of the English and the American than to those of the Southern European.

Said that, obesity is largely a problem of the Anglo-sphere, it has many causes, including a severe lack of food culture (eg adults who think it’s proper to eat candy bars or to eat at McDonald’s). It is not inevitable that the horrid American food habits will become the norm everywhere, the US is not the teleos history is moving towards.

Physical strength has declined according to simple metrics (grip strength) in Northern Europe:

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S235282731...

In Japan the same trend appears but it's delayed by two decades:

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1728869X1...

Obesity and diabetes have also trended upwards outside North America but this has been mitigated by better regulation of the food industry.

The U.S. was economically recovering from World War 2, the Great Depression, and other things. Most working class Americans had a hard time affording food because of that. So, it was not like they could easily get away from being skinny, anorexic, etc. during that time. They were too busy saving or investing money for their bills, children's futures, and careers to improve the U.S. economically before younger generations got spoiled rotten by America's improved economy. Now, the younger generations of America today are barely affording food because of increasing wealth inequality, increasing cost of living, and decaying infrastructure decades ago. So, working class Americans are economically screwed again, but it is to benefit antisocially greedy oligarchs only. So, you better expect skinny people, anorexic people, and starving people to become a bigger population in the U.S. The ruling class in America are kind of doing what Nazis did to Jews in concentration camps by starving them to death. Except America is the concentration camp for working class slaves with the illusion of freedom disguised as the democratic party, republican party, human rights, etc. Overall, the ruling class has exclusively cut-throat power that lets rich men live in luxury during this pandemic while working class Americans suffer more with each new year rather than suffering less with each new year.

Technology does not respect biology. There is a mechanical view of man, that is similar to what hydroponics is to gardening. You look what are the required nutrients etc, and provide just that in a very sterile environment. Of course, the results are quite garbage. The fruits are tasteless, and the problems it brings (e.g. insect infestations) require a lot of pesticides. The technological vision is to solve these problems with new technological solutions. If modern life has become unbearable, it's not a worry because there are pills, wondrous cannabinoids, etc, to fix defective individuals. Quite a society!

Well put. In addition, biology can't really be patched. CRIPSR nonwithstanding. We are stuck with the bugs that developed many thousands of years ago. Our bugs will continue to be exploited.

But all of those things increase the GDP, so they are automatically an improvement.

Someone posted "The bicycle is the slow death of the planet" not so long ago. It's not meant to be taken literally, but this is not very far from some people's line of thinking.

There is no path but mastering ourselves eventually, idiosyncracies included.

"it's hard to imagine the world without them"

There is soviet sci-fi novel that features a distopian society where people a killed before they become frail and become a burdain, and its considered an honour. They can't imagine the world otherwise.

Sounds similar to Logan's Run

For the curious, it's "The Hour of the Bull" by Ivan Yefremov.

(It should be noted that this particular feature is not the central premise of the book, but merely one of the facets of said dystopian society.)

"Carrousel" from Logan's Run, is the western equivalent.

I think that was also a storyline in a Twilight Zone episode.

Respectfully, these examples- radio and TV aren't even in the same league as the manipulation and engagement that comes from the algorithmic feedback loop that backs these services. The comparison is dangerously dismissive.

As far as I've read, based on research around attention and focus behaviors, the context switching element of it is the most dangerous part in terms of developing ADHD type behaviors, and I agree that TV and radio doesn't even scratch the amount of switching that happens with modern social media. TikTok, Instagram, Facebook, Reddit, etc. All of them make you switch context every 30 seconds or less, often for hours on end. I think we're making the mistake of looking at these older technologies like TV and radio, thinking "we survived that, we'll survive this" and that is incredibly dangerous.

Dr Andrew Huberman, professor of neurobiology and ophthalmology at Stanford, does some excellent lecture-like podcasts on the subject that are well worth a listen.

Conventional broadcast media such as TV or radio can't get real-time feedback on the user's attention/preferences/behavior nor can it deliver uniquely-personalized content to each individual user. The "best" it could do is provide an average form of content that is likely to be appealing to the majority of their user base and would be subject to scrutiny as everyone can see what is broadcast.

In contrast, modern media not only knows much more about the user and their behavior but can fine-tune each individual expereince in real-time to maximize view time and "engagement" per-user without any oversight as it is impossible for a watchdog to see what each individual user is presented with. This is much more dangerous as the content can be fine-tuned based on each user's individual profile and weaknesses/addictions.

Documents, radio, television, internet, social media. Baby steps.

Towards what? The loss of individual agency and the creation of some kind of collective organism?

Maybe there will be a time for that, but I'm thinking that if we let it happen now, that organism will be an idiot.

And TV was already considered a problem as it took up more and more of people's day.

The modern web is the fentanyl version of TV in terms of addictiveness.

Surely TV and radio also have algorithms behind them determining how to increase viewership. Facebook and Instagram do the same but in realtime with more knobs to turn. I personally don't quite understand how somebody can get addicted to social media but I understand video games and I would support some kind of government bureau that determines the addictiveness of a game and puts a label on it. For example games that are story driven, you play them for 15h and then you're done and there is no cliffhanger should get a very low addiction rating. You play them, you finish them, you liked it and then you can stop with no problem.

Then the addiction rating should get higher if there is more endless endgame content, more multiplayer content, boxes to purchase, etc.

You get the idea, if the industry is so determined to find the bliss point of a game/food item then the governments need to evolve with that challenge.

> Surely TV and radio also have algorithms behind them determining how to increase viewership

What do you mean by this? Until very recently, TVs and radios never had the ability to report feedback on what people were consuming or whether people were watching ads. There were some surveys like Nielsen ratings that involved a small sample of people installing special hardware. TVs and radios have never served personalized results to individuals, even if there were “algorithms” involved — the targeting was toward the entire population at once, not to each an every person viewing. For most of TV & radio history, the “algorithms” were people and not computers, people manually sifting through data for weeks just to see if a show was popular.

It’s pretty odd to suggest that TV & radio was historically similar to what’s going on with today’s social media. Serving personalized results and gathering instant personalized viewing habits (“engagement”) is what’s fundamentally different than TV & radio, the feedback cycle fundamentally changed from a slow group feedback to a fast individual feedback, and that’s precisely why social media is more engaging and more dangerous.

Yes absolutely TV and radio use algorithms to boost engagement. These are still dangerous, just less. The difference is the speed at which these sources collect and use information and the volume of data collected. It isn't just that these new mediums have more control, but that they can exercise the control in real-time.

With your video game idea, what's the difference between this and other software? Some social media seems like the game that never ends.

Chess is very addictive, and certainly endless. Same with cardgames. I'm sure your government bureau would quite grow fast, coming up with ever more warning labels.

Do we have an epidemic of chess?

You're getting downvoted for a perfectly reasonable question.

No we don't - because chess is a super-minority niche interest. The danger of social media is that it's social mass media - designed to be as addictive as possible to as many people as possible in as many different ways as possible using as many different techniques as possible.

And that's before getting into the dangers of targeted micro-niche ads used for political ends and/or individual belief and behaviour modification.

Without regulation it's an absolutely toxic medium.

But isn't chess one subset within that network, which would indeed be covered by any law regulating addictiveness of social media? Or will you allow people to be caught up on their own "otaku" like obsession with whatever niche area, but it is simply verboten to notify them of the existence of a different niche?

I also don't see how people can separate "optimizing addictiveness" (e.g. making your junk food too yummy or whatever) versus simply trying to make a better product that gives your customers what they want. The main criteria for who gets described in this way seems to be the corporate structure of the seller.

In the late 18-hundreds Chess was considered a bit of an undesirable epidenic.

Check out this gizmodo article:

https://gizmodo.com/chess-was-once-deemed-a-menace-to-societ...

A century ago in the USSR there was a comedic film about chess addiction.

https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0015673/?ref_=ttls_li_tt

Novels and bicycling were as well, particularly with women.

People are weird.

God forbid we find pastimes we _like_ and stick with 'em, amiright?

Novel reading, it was 'the womenfolk are spending their time with ~frivolous~ novels instead of caring for their children and reading the BIBLE as God intended', and bicycling was 'the womenfolk are wearing pants to cycle and traveling without a male escort! I say!'

No liking things. The Protestant work ethic demands no fun. Only anger and work. Play is of SATAN.

This is a fascinating argument. I like the perspective of a game like poker having greater similarity to true war than traditional war games like chess or go due to ever-increasing information. This adds another dimension to the game.

Ahh yes Chess, well known for destroying concentration .. /s

On the other hand, TV, radio, the printing press, and rock-and-roll music have all been called a "monumental change", "unlike anything before it", in the past.

An "unprecedented new thing" comes around every generation, and every time, there are fancy arguments touted about why this unprecedented new thing is unlike all the other "unprecedented new things" in the past.

For what it's worth, I'll say this: when I watch TV or a movie, it appears that the producers, writers, and set designers work hard to make sure that my attention is captured during every moment of the theatrical event. Movie studios perform A/B testing to see what kind of cinematic techniques are more engaging to audiences. Music studios use computer software to mathematically model what kind of music the masses will enjoy. Newspapers engage in yellow journalism.

All I am pleading for is a higher standard of proof and some contrarianism when people claim that whatever modern thing nowadays is unprecedented even among all the other unprecedented things of the past.

All this talk about "algorithmic feedback loops" is overselling the quality of said algos (eg. I get more interesting suggestions when I open YT incognito then I do when I'm signed in, I have to scroll through a bunch of stuff I have 0 interest on FB when I open it, etc.) and their importance.

It's completely missing the actual attention grabbing factor here - there's a huge amount of content for consumption on demand in those networks. Unlike TV or radio where at most you could have 100s of channels simultaneously available, there's billions of articles/videos/posts/songs/articles/etc. available with a few clicks.

At best algos get you there faster.

I am not sure. This is just a data point of 1.

I used to browse Instagram casually. Like, once is a blue moon. I would see updates from my network and spend a few mins here and there. This was probably like over year or two back. (not 100% sure)

And then a few months back I just could not take my eyes off of Instagram reels. This feature wasn't there before I think. I was just completely hooked. It was pretty interesting. I had to delete my instagram off of my phone.

They definitely are figuring out the formula to retain people's attention.

Again, this is just a data point of one.

I go on Facebook about once a month. I’ve noticed that Facebook’s friend recommendation engine now sprinkles in some beautiful women, with whom I have no friends in common. I don’t know if someone tuned the algorithm this way, or if it tuned itself. It feels like the desperate move of a platform that realizes it’s losing control of someone.

Perhaps you just got lucky. Mine suggests tons of people from India and the middle east who I couldn't possibly know. I also check it very rarely. Presumably the algorithm must be picking the (very-slightly) best from many many low-probability guesses.

Did you see that movie about Facebook? According to that movie, what you described is literally what they do.

>And then a few months back I just could not take my eyes off of Instagram reels. This feature wasn't there before I think. I was just completely hooked. It was pretty interesting. I had to delete my instagram off of my phone.

Sounds like they started showing you different kind of content. I never got into Instagram because I'm just not into the kind of content that gets published there. Not arguing that content presentation isn't a factor here, but I would argue it's the content that's addicting and even if you remove the suggestion algorithms and just did social sharing/recommendations you'd still end up with similar results - viral stuff got shared in chats/groups/mail chains/etc. now it gets served up to your feed directly.

Not saying suggestion algorithms don't improve the experience if they work, but I wouldn't really attribute that much value to them, ultimately we have an industry of influencers trying to create content that will grab your attention.

I had the same experience - they’re incredibly addictive, far more than your standard Instagram.

I think this media is different because of the short duration of each item and the endless novelty. You say to yourself you you will just watch another YouTube video - it’s just a few minutes long and before you know it you’ve wasted half an hour. Where as with a TV programme you have to commit to 30-60 minutes.

Inconsistent reward is more addictive than consistent reward. This has been known for a long time. That's how they make it addictive.

It has the opposite effect on me, I barely open facebook anymore because of how irrelevant it is and I skip the landing page on YT and just search what I'm interested in.

I'm not sure how that's relevant. I'm sure it's a giant Bell curve

This doesn't require algorithmic feedback loops. People simply would seek out (and create) content which provides inconsistent rewards. A slot machine simply needs a random number generator with a certain small chance of jackpot. The null model here is what can be achieved without individualization.

That doesn't mean it can't be optimized with algorithms. Obviously that's what they think they're measuring and doing, otherwise it would be random.

I'm not sure "randomness" is the general property, but rather unexpectedness. The content-provider may well be following a "formula" like with fiction plots, that give the protagonist setbacks and victories. Facebook uses approaches which try to profit within the constraints of a relatively small group of programmers trying to make money off billions of users. It doesn't mean these approaches are the best overall at serving the most desirable content to any given niche of users. Or even the best at making money qwithin those constraints. If are to believe in "network effects" (the other popular basis for calling for a breakup of Facebook) Facebook is simply succeeding because it is there first. Rather independent of this claim that they are winning by being the most competant.

Dono what's with your strawmen arguments here or what your point is besides being argumentative, but I didn't say anything about best. I'm gonna just assume they all see some value in it and you don't have any inside knowledge.

The point of the thread is that these algorithms are not a special new threat, but it's the availability of content itself, targetted or not.

Since we're analyzing each other's psychology now, I do think that insecure and defensive behavior like your post is a real problem with social media. I am not trying to bully or hurt you personally, but simply share some thoughts on a topic.

"All this talk about "algorithmic feedback loops" is overselling the quality of said algos"

So it's you agree that the villains are evil, but your defence for them is that they are inept?

So they will destroy attention even further once the bugs in the algos are tuned out?

Have you tried TikTok? In my experience their algorithm is phenomenal, strikinga good balance between delivering extremely relevant content and trying new content you might like

Right, I think addiction is probably the bigger story rather than attention.

I'm not sure how much that actually changes about the discussion, for the better.

If this is an addiction, then it will be one that's gonna be very difficult to break for most people.

In most places it's nowadays near impossible to go about your day without some kind of online activity or interaction. Especially as during this pandemic a lot of "in person" alternatives for it have been phased out of use.

So in practice the addicts are regularly forced to interact with their source of addiction. How are we supposed to fix that?

More transparency around algorithmically prioritized newsfeeds seem like an obvious place to start. According to what little insight we have they’re mostly prioritized for “engagement” which in some cases has intentionally come at the cost of people’s moods (according facebook’s own internal reporting).

Large companies have psychology/sociology experts working on this stuff in favor of the respective companies, but any consumer advocacy on the same level is hampered by lack of access and lack of funding.

More liability is the answer.

Social media went from a communications platform where people could post content and subscribe to receive other people's content (in a chronological feed) into something where the social platform decides what content you receive (via the algorithmic feed) in order to benefit the platform by maximizing engagement and ad views.

Conventional newspapers did the same for decades and have been bound by some laws and regulations as a publisher. Social media should be bound by the same laws since they've long ago switched from a "neutral communications platform" model.

> Conventional newspapers did the same for decades and have been bound by some laws and regulations as a publisher

Oh yes, the notorious No Law, made by Congress — as directed in the First Amendment.

Yes, though these are linked. Attention is the goal while addiction is the means.

Video games are immensely addictive. The burst of adrenaline some of the recent online FPS' give me doesn't compare to any other feeling or experience I've had as a human being. They didn't just happen to be this way. They have been designed to be so thrilling that normal life cannot compete.

> They have been designed to be so thrilling that normal life cannot compete.

Maybe today's normal life, at least for us in the developed world. But I'd wager that spear hunting a wild animal in the woods with your fellow tribe-mates is far more thrilling and rewarding than any video game.

That could be the issue, our brains don't differ from our ancestors who did things like those, regular life today lacks life-threatening thrill which could be the reason of growing addictions.

I know of a phenomenon present among some peoples in Siberia, the part of the tribe that lives out in the wilderness following reindeer live a tough life but depression among those tribe-members is non-existent. While those living in the towns have substance abuse problems and high suicide rates.

I’ve never gone spear hunting but I did play paintball once. It was thrilling, and when I woke up the next day I was more sore that I’d ever been in my life (including playing varsity sports). I realized that’s because it was the closest I’d ever come to ‘running for my life’.

FPS mimic the pleasure of this experience, but without the physical engagement. It’s like the refined carbs version of hunting.

Really wish CQB paintball was more popular in the US. I’d love to play the equivalent of SWAT or Rainbow Six with paintball, but most of it these days seems to be “spray thousands of balls at large inflatable barriers on a tennis court hoping to mark a bit of your opponent’s elbow”. The CTF events seem fun, but I want something more like a Battlefield round if it’s going to be like that.

Try playing with one hopper of ammo a round. You can't create Lanes of fire and denial without an obscene amount of paint.

Try rock climbing, snowboarding, kite surfing, mountain biking, etc…all quite popular among my friends and colleagues in the tech industry and all quite thrilling.

Luckily, there are still tons of accessible activities with choose-your-own levels of risk and excitement that involve physical effort instead of focusing on a screen.

"regular life today lacks life-threatening thrill"

The problem is not that surfing isn't exciting or life threatening, the problem is that most jobs in accounting, HR, etc. Are soul crushing.

I have friends who dropped out of college to play video games all day and that was years ago. The games today are even more addictive. They eventually learned that was a dead end and got their lives back on track but the addiction did active harm to their lives in the short run and cost them/their parents thousands of dollars for sure.

Edit: TBF this is a chicken/egg problem, people have been dropping out of school forever and maybe the video games were the outlet for their stress, but I don't think we can simply act like all is fine while making games targeting adolescents as addictive as possible.

Once, after a particularly intense fight in EVE Online I found my hands shaking.

The only other occasion I surpassed that level of adrenaline was in Iraq in 2007.

EVE is a very special game. I’d attribute the rush more to all interactions being unscripted, fights to occur relatively rare and having pretty tangible value on the line.

It definitely doesn’t compete very well for attention.

Personally, it was quite effective at garnering my attention - so much so that I cancelled my subscription when I returned to college.

While I've enjoyed many FPS' over the years the rush just doesn't compare with my own physical experiences. I cited EVE because - in my personal experience - it did manage to very briefly simulate that sense of danger.

Is adrenaline really involved significantly in addiction, other than in specific people who enjoy that sort of thrill? As far as my own experience goes, adrenaline is uncomfortable and something I avoid all else equal.

Isn't for a game to be thrilling usually the ultimate goal? I'm not concerned about games being fun to play, that's what they are for. I'm more concerned about the dopamine exploiting patterns implemented in modern games, especially those targeted at younger gamers.

I think it depends on the person. I am an avid gamer (have all consoles and a high end Pc) but despise all multiplayer games! I love RPG and strategy games… the less frenetic the gameplay the better! For me it’s all about the story, the immersion in a new world and the mental challenge! I don’t understand how people can waste time shooting around at random people!

I find the online games very addictive but for a lot of the time they aren't very enjoyable and then for a brief period they are very exciting (the adrenaline I'm speaking about). The game that resonated with me most emotionally was The Last of Us: Part 2 but I couldn't play it regularly or I think it would lose its charm. I generally feel quite conflicted about gaming because of this: there are games (like TLOU) that I'm glad to have experienced, but the ones that I spend the most time playing are only enjoyable some of the time (usually when I win). I think this is what I define as my own addiction: continuing to do something that doesn't bring me pleasure.

I think you actually pointed out the true reason of the addiction! It’s the victory… the need to feel like you achieved something… the satisfaction of winning… it doesn’t matter if to get there it was a chore as long as you feel accomplishment! When I play I don’t look for victory… I look for entertainment (a good story, nice lore, good characters) and a challenge with myself! If the game is not fun all the time I just abandon it! My time is precious… and since I am content with my level of accomplishment in life I don’t seek validation in games! (Mind I do not imply you are not accomplished… it’s about self perception)

> The burst of adrenaline some of the recent online FPS' give me doesn't compare to any other feeling or experience I've had as a human being.

Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu matches up. Various forms of racing will also hit the same pathways in the brain.

Hard to achieve for sure.

One thing that happened to be though, is that once I got really skilled at physical things, going back and playing games was a lot more boring. It is like the artificial reward loop didn't work anymore once I'd tasted the real thing.

(Either that or I got old enough that my reaction times dropped sufficiently so I wasn't one of the top bad asses playing FPSs so I wasn't having as much fun! ;) )

This isn't anything new. Degrees have been lost to the temptations of something as plain as a MUD.

> Video games are immensely addictive.

No they aren't, and the suggestion that people could be "addicted" to video games makes a mockery of the concept of addiction.

> Reading a book, reading a paper, etc -- these activities take discipline that most people don't develop or don't often apply.

Except some of the past moral panics were about reading books, they worried that kids were reading the wrong books, voraciously!

Reading popular fiction didn't used to be considered something that took discipline, it used to be considered escapist entertainment, people did it because it was entertaining.

Millions read books and newspapers (not sure if that's what you meant by 'papers'), only a couple decades ago. On the subway in NYC for instance, you would be surrounded by people reading both paperbacks and newspapers. Not very long-ago, in the adulthood of people currently middle-aged! It's not true at all that this was a rare thing undertaken only by people applying discipline.

It might be no big deal that this attention has shifted to social media, just another shift in the particular mediums used for cultural production and consumption. Without even getting into that debate -- just the fact that you believe that reading things on paper is something that takes discipline that few have ever developed -- is astonishing to me. It has definitely not always been that way. It was not that way literally only 20 years ago, not very long ago at all -- it is remarkable that things have shifted so quickly you now believe reading books has always been a thing only for those with discipline, to be done distastefully like eating your veggies.

(It could just be a shift in mediums, but the essay tries to illustrate the deleterious effects on our lives of the new mediums, which I recognize from personal experience and observation, myself).

Anecdotal evidence etc. I have been having a feeling that my attention span is generally lower than before. I don't have a smartphone, no TV since more than 10 years ago, but there's the internet. Unfortunately working as a programmer requires constant connection (at least to be available to colleagues on chat, even non-remote). We've been experimenting with cutting off internet entirely for some days (e.g. yesterday), and I feel much better already. It's really magical how the nagging compulsion to check notifications disappears. No need to do any complex software setup, you go to the router and turn it off. So I think that quite clearly even with some mental fortitude and knowledge of the issue, you cannot really be immune to the attention-lowering effect.

Another possibility: the moral panic about comic books / rap music / low brow culture was justified and its ubiquity has done active harm to our society.

Certainly without comic books, comic book movies wouldn’t have eaten Hollywood

I don't necessarily mean a problem as a matter of taste, more a destruction of shared cultural values, in particular those that are good for "society" like a belief in the value of work, family unit, deeper concerns than material wealth (e.g. god/spirituality) etc at least in the west / America.

I will never understand how people can suggest a specific musical genre or a medium is responsible for ruining society or "destroying values like the value of work" with a straight face. When I ask for empirical proof of such things, there never is any, just anecdotal statements.

As if country music never touched upon these sorts of topics. Or books. Or ...

Moral panics come from old people who don't like anything that's different from their youth. "Kids these days!" And in America, especially so if that thing happens to be dominated by black people.

Moral panics also come from normal people who have felt the effect on their and their families' lives. For instance I am neither a prude nor a tea-totaler but I can see how many hours or my own life porn and alcohol have taken, hours that I sure enjoyed but that would have been better and as pleasantly invested in other activities. I know people that have sunk into porn addictions and lost their lives, including any ability to enjoy normal sex. And we all know what an alcoholic looks like. So is the ubiquitous availability of porn a good thing or a bad thing or something with nuance?

If you had a loved one disappear in world of Warcraft or a porn spiral you will start to question whether those are normal things that should remain so openly available without limits.

That has nothing to do with people erroneously blaming the "decay of society" or the "loss of traditional values" on things like rap music or videogames.

We can talk about how the internet has made things like porn ubiquitous, and how certain games are intensely addicting. But that is a wholly separate discussion.

How do I provide empirical proof? Survey data or something over a 30 year time span? Gallup has some interesting confidence in institutions data you can parse but doesn't really strengthen my point IRC in case you are interested.

https://news.gallup.com/poll/1597/confidence-institutions.as...

I didn't get into porn even which I thought of after the fact, the lowest brow culture possible and it seems likely its pervasiveness and how future adolescents will learn about sex through consuming it will have profound impacts no?

The spread of low brow culture might potentially come at the expense of traditional local cultures, but any cultural expansion means the creation of a new shared culture, no? In which case the issue then becomes what the values does this culture valorize.

Yeah and it's not all bad for sure, I think the general acceptance of homosexuality has been a good thing and large cultural shifts certainly made it happen. I do wonder if these shifts are universally good or a mix of positive and negative developments, and the people warning us years ago had some good points.

I don't know about "low brow culture" but comic books and rap have some fantastic material in them. Consider works like Promethea from Alan Moore or In Her Magic Box by Atmosphere.

Or in pop culture, all the Marvel movies.

How?

To take an example - one of the most popular songs of my childhood glamorized smoking weed (literally had the lyrics “smoke weed everyday”!).

Stripping away all the justified opposition to prohibition, it’s really not good for most people to smoke weed everyday. Pointing out any potential harms became deeply uncool. It’s not difficult to imagine people probably smoke weed regularly as a result.

I expound in a conversation with Apocryphon attached to that post

> more a destruction of shared cultural values, in particular those that are good for "society" like a belief in the value of work, family unit, deeper concerns than material wealth (e.g. god/spirituality) etc at least in the west / America.

This is what conservatives have been crowing about since the 40/50's when black music started dominating the airwaves. It's a really old argument that is literally moral panic with no proof. I thought maybe you had some new thoughts to add, but you don't.

If you think only 50s Conservatives find some parts of rap questionable I propose an experiment. Show some NWA lyrics without attribution to a young, progressive audience, there's some interesting takes in there about homosexuals, jews and women.

Of course we don't even play 90% of that stuff any more because any radio station would be cancelled within five minutes and not by conservatives.

Thanks for adding a subtle accusation of racism or at least guilt by association to the discussion.

> One reason so many people think they have ADHD is because they make that mistake.

Speaking of which: has anyone had the experience where they sought to be evaluated for ADHD and the professional they went to said "nope, this doesn't look like ADHD"?

I'm wondering if there are criteria people use to exclude ADHD as a diagnosis, or if the assumption is that if people are seeking diagnosis/treatment that they're experiencing something enough like it and should be given ADHD interventions (and of course, the incentive under fee-for-service would be to provide the intervention for a fee).

Yeah, usually people who lack the executive function navigate the healthcare system. It’s like they have a lack of focus pathology, so they can’t get an ADHD diagnoses.

https://theunitofcaring.tumblr.com/post/168201153351/have-yo...

Can confirm. Lost every single object I could lose, dropped out of school, forgot I had prescriptions to pick up for a year, constant messy room, spent an entire year literally doing nothing and still feeling nervous every day, failed jobs where I couldn't cherry pick interesting things out of JIRA and then spent 2 hours in hyperfocus, followed by 6 hours of faking being busy because I simply couldn't focus anymore (but in practice, nobody minded, and I was considered to be overperforming. getting paid based on hours sucks for me).

My job turned from amazing with coding every day to maintaining broken things last year (mostly black boxes others left behind). It got substantially worse. I can't remember the last time I managed to enter hyperfocus.

So I've made a new-years resolution and made an appointment online (thanks, low friction tech) this week. It'll only be... 9 months until I figure out which side of the ADHD battle this doctor is on. (I've had bad experiences getting trans healthcare, and only got treatment through a lucky incident, so my expectations are rather low). I've known for years that this is likely what it is, but only doing it when absolutely neccessary is on brand for it too I guess.

> My job turned from amazing with coding every day to maintaining broken things last year (mostly black boxes others left behind).

You generally have more control over your job description than anyone will acknowledge to your face. If you’re miserable maintaining broken black boxes, then stop doing that. Figure out what you’d be more productive doing, tell your boss, and start doing it.

You may have some uncomfortable conversations. Stand up for yourself. There’s a huge gap between what your boss will complain about vs what they’ll fire you for. In most cases it’s incredibly difficult to fire someone who is doing something (almost anything) valuable.

Another thing you might consider is to pick one of those black boxes and dive into it. Tell people this thing is broken and you need to fix it and they need to cover the rest while you do so. If the company doesn’t have the resources to do so, that’s the company’s problem. Then focus on it until it’s not broken and not a black box (at least to you) anymore. Now you have job security as the person who understands the thing, and it’s a nice job to have because you made the thing nice.

I may have simplified a bit.

The black box is GitHub Actions Self-Hosted runners. Recently a very large blast radius Keycloak got added (we're a go team, we have zero experience running anything Java/JBoss).

GitHub Actions was used to sell GitHub somewhere way above me, a Microsoft enterprise contract might've been involved too. GitLab wasn't even considered. Rejecting GHA outright as a team is something we all agree would be right, but not politically feasible.

Keycloak is another team running off. The entire tribe is massively understaffed because limitations to salaries (also from higher up) are slowly eating away at all the performers.

I like my team and the tribe in general, but even if we could hire more people, we've become the least desirable team with all the broken shit and hiring is always for all teams, so long term I'll probably ask to do something else.

I don’t know about adults, but parents are often told their children don’t have ADHD. Various estimates place prevalence at around 4% which is common, but not that common.

Quality of the estimations is extremely shitty. I've heard everything from 1% to 5%. And for persistence into adulthood, anything from 40% to 15%.

This is mostly because diagnostic criteria are extremely up for interpretation, and it usually comes down to the doctor if you get a diagnosis or not. I read one particular study that attempted to correlate location with ADHD incidence, and then it turned out that it came down to how the local specialists felt about it.

Reminds me of the reason the DSM comittee rejected cPTSD from inclusion into their officially-opinionated manual. "If we add this, too many people would be affected, we simply can't pathologize this many people at once".

Never… I have always been capable of extreme focus! Even now at work I regularly zone out for hours on a daily basis ignoring my phone and the company chat (people learned that of I don’t answer is because I am focusing and filtering out all distractions so just wait for me to answer when I can). Even most of my ho bows are about continuous focus on one single activity they leads me to ignore all the distractions!

The ease of access of today's distractions leads me to disagree.

It's so easy to take out your phone to check a social media app, or open a tab on your laptop to a social media website like Reddit, versus turning on a radio or getting up to turn on the TV.

A comic book doesn't fit in your front pocket, but a phone does; there's just so much less friction for distraction today.

And still, very few people read social media till they sleep deprived themselves. Very few people end up yelling at everyone around when something does not work out in game. Both of these are fairly common for gamers, but computer games are always defended here.

So yeah, it is pure moral panic, except about something average HN commenter does not think he do.

Tiktok is the most accessed web resource in 2022, with only a small number of people using it. Worst of all, it is the teenagers that lose their lives there. A grandma playing candy crush - sad but not a societal problem. Teenagers that miss out on school, or young moms that don't anymore look at their kids, or young workers that can't focus - enormous societal problem.

> Very few people end up yelling at everyone around when something does not work out in game.

I remember growing up many people's parents getting mad for weeks over football game outcomes they had no control over.

Computer games have had a counter-backlash for the past few decades against moral panics such as they cause violence. But with the advent of loot boxes and the like, the new angle of addiction and games might turn that tide. The old inapplicable moral panic has come and gone, and one based on more easily-quantifiable reality will give way to a more broadly acceptable moral panic.

As for your point on social media, the past year’s spate of articles on revenge sleep procrastination would seem to refute that suggestion.

It's less about entertaining, and more about interesting, which is how I know you completely misunderstood ADHD. Discipline can only compensate shitty neurotransmitter levels for so long, eventually it becomes painful to even start trying to focus and it'll even cut into your productivity with things where you'd usually get hyperfocus without issues.

I really hate how contentious and polarizing ADHD is. Reminds me of being trans. There are people who benefit greatly from being medicated, much more than the risk they take. That should really be the end of it.

whenever the power goes off in my house for long periods, its as if some super power hits and i can read books with a new found attention span

That wouldn't work with ADHD. You'd probably sit down and think about all the things you could do with that time without actually doing them while continuously scolding yourself for not doing them, and then get up 5 hours later, 3 of which you felt hungry and 2 of which you felt like going to the toilet.

Yeah, when we are lucky to have a several days long Internet breakage at home (we don't use cellular Internet), all of a sudden things which had been 'not possible' or 'so hard' or 'so tiring' for months or years suddenly become possible or normal or even obvious. We even manage to do things together with family members. Imagine!

Is that really so? Because I do find myself at situations when I don't turn on internet and none of that happens.

Books are as boring as with internet, I just don't like them anymore. I don't end up doing something all that great as a result.

TheN you are probably reading the wrong books!

Both of these things can be true.

What if this is a moral panic like prohibition or the red scare more than like comic books. Was American drinking culture in the early 1900s insane and were there soviet spies in the 1950s? Actually yes, and that doesn't justify McCarthy or make Prohibition a good idea.

And this is the challenge. How do we respond proportionately without going "OMG THINK OF THE CHILDREN" or blending the actual problems with our other phobias?

> Those anxieties were right and wrong.

This opinion is respectful of nuance. Multiple social changes are converging, it is not just one the scapegoat of screen proliferation among toddlers, it is a re-examination of existential pillars unlike anything I've seen in my 50+ years (e.g., what is work? what is authority? what is worthy of protecting? what should one believe? how does one believe?).

I wonder if the new Satanic Panic of ADHD/OCD/Screens/Internet is a reflection of how children (hell, and adults) are internalizing the shakiness of what we had been taking for granted for so long. This proposal fits the reams of anecdotal reports from parents and teachers about kids becoming more difficult than they were in the past decades (and it also fits the past decade of bizarre social and political shifts across the globe).

Ironically, we won't be around for the historical analysis of WTF is actually going on because it'll take generations to parse it, distill it, and make a narrative out of it. Voltaire, Diderot, and Rousseau all saw the French revolution coming. In hindsight that is survivor-bias because we don't read the works of people who were wrong about the political state of France in the 18th century! So we can't even look around today and say: who's right? It has to happen before we can judge it.

Of course, that's not to say we should throw moderation and discipline to the wind when it comes to child-rearing. Seems like the age-old cure of moderation is all we have: if you only do something occasionally, how can it cause long-term negative consequences (barring meth, of course)? Any better ideas?

Except every UX decision in every big social media app is research backed attention harvesting.

Interactivity changes the equation. Limitless options change the equation.

Radio and TV couldn't tailor themselves to an audience of one, your ML powered social media feed can.

> but it's always the same story.

This is the reverse slippery slope fallacy.

There is no threshold, no effect size where this tuns net negative, etc. We took these 10 steps, were worried and nothing happened, we can do more steps.

Thank you. Some perspective is warranted. If society can cope with crack and meth without completely falling apart it can survive Facebook. What I do think is that this is covering up for more fundamental problems, like people being worked to death and have no time to form meaningful bonds with people in healthier ways than Facebook. It's like fast food for the soul. People are not eating Taco Bell rather filet minion because they like Taco Bell better. It's because they don't have any money and need something quick that they can eat in the car on their way to their second job. People are extremely isolated. Social media is the shit alternative to being completely alone.

Does this fallacy have a name? The rough incline fallacy?

The "there is no cliff" fallacy?

Fair point, it may turn negative at some point but we're not there yet. It's a moral panic. We're not talking about war or genocide, we're talking about the young people staring at their phones too much.

That's another type of fallacy. If there is no obviously horrific consequences, there is nothing. Either/Or Reasoning.

My position is that we don't know yet. Some harms may be transitory and people adult. Making arguments for or against without good data and reasoning is not helping.

Making your mind up prematurely makes it harder to change the opinion when the evidence comes in.

What drives me nuts personally is how nobody is asking the adults that ALREADY grew up online as kids what impact it has.

This is hardly the first time we've had a panic about kids on the internet; the first one I remember is the freak out that led to COPPA in the late 90s. At the time, perhaps people could be forgiven for not asking us since we were the first generation of kids who had unrestricted Internet access and we were still kids (nobody wants children's opinions), but now there are plenty of formerly Too Online Children that are adults.

If having unrestricted information/internet access at an early age does change your brain, why aren't we comparing people in their 30s who grew up online with people in their 30s who didn't? That would be super interesting, and there are many aspects of growing up online that definitely did change my experience. (E.G. being able to pretend to be an adult and be addressed as an equal based on my ideas online made it very hard to function in the real world where acting like an adult's equal was inappropriate, I had access to information that many adults did not and that caused problems, I had access to information that my local culture considered 'inappropriate' but was acceptable online [information about female puberty is one], etc.)

Lots of people deciding what our experiences did to us without asking us.

The author of this article (and you) think one thing. I think another. Calling my thought a "fallacy" because I've made up my mind prematurely makes no sense. You (and the author) have made up your mind too. We can't endlessly defer our opinions, that's epistemic nihilism.

To me, this seems like just another old vs. new turf war and I predict it will turn out like the previous ones. "Everything must change for everything to remain the same".

I'm not saying "it couldn't possibly" be a problem, I'm describing what I see, like you, and like the article.

> Calling my thought a "fallacy" because I've made up my mind prematurely makes no sense.

Fallacy can be determined by your argument alone.

> You (and the author) have made up your mind too.

In fact, I'm more inclined to side on you on the issue. One should not accept bad or fallacious arguments just because one has inclination to agree with the result.

I’m pasting the last lines of that exact same paragraph for the people who will not read the article before commenting, as so many have admitted before in other similar discussions about attention:

> If the people warning about the effects on our attention turn out to be wrong, and we still do what they suggest, what will be the cost? We will spend less time being harassed by our bosses, and we’ll be tracked and manipulated less by technology – along with lots of other improvements in our lives that are desirable in any case. But if they turn out to be right, and we don’t do what they say, what’s the cost? We will have – as the former Google engineer Tristan Harris told me – downgraded humanity, stripping us of our attention at the very time when we face big collective crises that require it more than ever.

Please take with a grain of salt because I am no expert here: IIRC, ADHD is caused by brains that have too many dopamine transporters, resulting in dopamine being transported faster than normal, causing increased anxiety and impulsivity.

But then there's addiction, which can hijack one of your brain systems like your dopamine or endorphine systems. In the case of internet addiction disorder, reading endless feeds must be related to dopamine for sure.

I agree and I’d add that until 20-30 years ago having an attention disorder wouldn’t prevent somebody from having a normal life, so, I think, many cases went undiagnosed.

Today, almost everywhere in the West, you need a professional job to have a decent lifestyle, and these jobs require some minimal capacity to concentrate that the average man doesn’t have and never had.

This is basically echoing the "you just need to be more disciplined" argument from the article.

The ability to make yourself do something that you consider good but yields no immediate pleasure is real, useful, and can be cultivated.

No one denies that. The article argues that current "attention economy" tech is actively making this harder or even impossible.

Saying it's impossible is denying it...

No, he is saying, it's becoming impossible - and he goes on to argue why this is the case. That's pretty much the main point of the article.

What's your counter-argument?

I find this incredible unless the Evil Social Media Companies reach into my brain and remove my capacity for practical free will.

Tv and radio couldn't provide you with a constant stream of curated likes and messages. By social factor alone, this on a whole different level.

BS. Billions of pounds are pumped into light and dark methods of taking our attention. Or do you think those billions are for charity?

Yep, agree. And as an example, things shift (i.e. transfer attention from one "account" to another another "account") such as TV consumption: https://www.statista.com/statistics/186833/average-televisio...

tldr: It's down. But why? Did everyone wise up and decide watching as much television was not good for them so they started to do more productive things? No, of course not. Time was simply shifted to other entertainment mediums, like Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, Youtube, and so on.

In another 10 or 20 years, it wills surely shift several more times, too. And so it goes...