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Let me play devil's advocate for a minute. Why is this "new" addiction wrong? What does it mean to say it is bad? pg is taking great pains to distance himsel

Let me play devil's advocate for a minute. Why is this "new" addiction wrong? What does it mean to say it is bad? pg is taking great pains to distance himself from real addiction, like crystal meth. Yet he never explicitly explains anywhere why the new "addiction" is actually bad, other than trying to loosely associate it with alcohol. I don't think that the "addictiveness" of a thing alone is enough to call it bad. I'm way more addicted to air than a meth addict is addicted to his fix, and I don't consider air addiction a disability. Now perhaps he's right and it really is bad--but I think this is a fundamental assumption that needs to be discussed and argued, not swallowed whole. * Is it morally bad? * Is it dangerous? * Can the claims of loss of productivity be scientifically substantiated? To what extent? * To what extent is the comparison to alcohol valid? Is it mood-altering? Does it significantly affect decisionmaking? I think these are important questions that we have somehow skipped in this discussion. My personal take is that we simply have a lot more free time now than we did 50 or 100 years ago, where we needed to spend more time feeding and clothing ourselves, and so Farmville arises to fill the empty space. Could this be redirected into something productive? Maybe? But people also burn out and have inefficiencies, so I'm not sure you could extract much more productivity unless we returned to hand-to-mouth.

dman 16y ago
I disagree with the fact that people currently have more free time as compared to 50-100 years ago.
- drewcrawford 16y ago
  According to http://eh.net/encyclopedia/article/whaples.work.hours.us http://eh.net/encyclopedia/article/whaples.work.hours.us there is a clear trend in a shortening workweek each decade across industries.
  - dman 16y ago
    I stand corrected. Thanks for pointing the data out.
- GFischer 16y ago
  Definition of "free time": "time available for hobbies and other activities that you enjoy" drewcrawford's excellent stats are very clear on the point: "between 1880 and 1995 the amount of work per day fell nearly in half, allowing leisure time to more than triple."
fragmede 16y ago
The two points I can address: * Is It *dangerous*? At the extreme, yes: hikikomori - http://www.nytimes.com/2006/01/15/magazine/15japanese.html?pagewanted=all http://www.nytimes.com/2006/01/15/magazine/15japanese.html?p... * Can the claims of loss of productivity be scientifically substantiated? To what extent? If an employee spends 8 hours browsing Reddit, instead of doing work that needed to be done, the loss of productivity is quantifiable. So how about 5 minutes? 20 minutes? 40? An hour?
- drewcrawford 16y ago
  >At the extreme, yes Let me rephrase the question a bit, because at extremes everything is dangerous. Is it any more or less dangerous, on average, than other things in society considered to be bad? Are there more or less hikikomoris than DWIs? Are there more or less WoW addicts than rich old men with boats or other (presumably harmless) unproductive activities? > If an employee spends 8 hours browsing Reddit, instead of doing work that needed to be done, the loss of productivity is quantifiable Are you sure? Did they really lose 8 hours worth of work? How is "time spent" any better a metric for productivity than counting lines of code? I find, for me personally, that when I am burnt out I won't produce in any amount of time until I recharge, and when I'm fully charged I'm not interested in browsing Reddit. This is a personal anecdote, and not data; but can we get some data--any data--correlating productivity and browsing Reddit, positively or negatively? I suspect the relationship is a lot more complex than "X hours lost."
  - fragmede 16y ago
    > Are you sure? Did they really lose 8 hours worth of work? How is "time spent" any better a metric for productivity than counting lines of code? Coding is a poor example because there is no generally accepted metric for productivity. (Figure out good way of measuring programmer productivity and you'd have a mint.) However, some jobs do have a valid metric. Data entry: 300 forms take an average of X hours to do. After X hours reading Reddit and not entering forms, 0 forms have been entered. Simplistically, X hours have been 'lost'.
    - 16y ago
mattchew 16y ago
> What does it mean to say it is bad? How about this: if in advance of the behavior, you intend to partake moderately, and in the event you consistently overindulge, and after the fact you regret your excess, then something about this behavior is bad. I'm leaving aside some of the other points you bring up, but if you've got a habit that consistently leads to dissatisfaction and regret, I think it's fair to call it a problem for that reason alone.
- msg 16y ago
  You're assuming that dissatisfaction and regret mean the activity was bad. What if you overindulge in learning and regret knowing all kinds of details about Lisp? Some outside observers don't consider your time wasted, quite the contrary. But by your measurement, regretting knowing Lisp would mean that knowing Lisp is bad. My point is that you can always pick opposing activities that people will feel are time wasted or well-spent. But why? Because you have some implicit notion of ultimate value that helps you weigh time spent on one or the other. In the absence of such a theory of good and evil you might as well criticize pg for becoming addicted to hiking or addicted to insightful thinking. Cool for him, but he's wasting his life if he doesn't have all the achievements in Team Fortress 2. There is no way to create this kind of theory out of the subject's reflection on their own activities. After all, the subject might be wrong!
  - sofal 16y ago
    I don't think pg's argument relies on an objective definition of bad. The subjective one works fine. After all, the subject might be wrong! "Wrong" being subjective, of course.
    - deleted 16y ago
      [deleted]
    - msg 16y ago
      The subjective definition of bad only works if you happen to share the values. But this kind of argument does not bear examination. If we ask, "why is tech addiction bad?" or argue, "tech addiction is great because we it is a pathway to posthumanism", we immediately come to a question of this objective standard. If a subjective notion of evil is all you have, you'll start waving your hands here.
sp332 16y ago
These are things that, as pg put it, I don't want to want. I don't care what changed on HN in the last 15 seconds, so why do my fingers type this reflexively when I've opened my browser to do something else? I was just here, I've already read the stuff I'm interested in. I don't want to be here. Yeah, I know about noprocrast. It doesn't stop my fingers from typing h-a-down-enter .
amalcon 16y ago
Very interesting perspective. I would take the moral relativist approach to arguing that these things are bad. Suppose a hypothetical person who spends time on (e.g.) Facebook when there's something else they themselves would prefer to do with that time. Would the addiction be bad for this person? If so, we only need to point to the existence of a statistically significant number of such people to substantiate the argument that their Facebook addiction is a "bad" thing. Unless we have reason to believe that Facebook addiction in general (not Facebook itself, just addiction to it) has benefits, we can transfer this to Facebook addiction in general. Here's one person so identified: http://www.cnn.com/2009/HEALTH/04/23/ep.facebook.addict/index.html http://www.cnn.com/2009/HEALTH/04/23/ep.facebook.addict/inde... To my knowledge, nobody's done a study of this, but I find it more plausible than not that there exist many people who spend time on Facebook that they would prefer to use doing other things. I've picked on Facebook quite a bit here. This is not in any way meant to be a dig against the service or company; Facebook is just a convenient example.
SapphireSun 16y ago
Actually, I'll call you on that. I think our collective addiction to air is HORRIBLE. Air oxidizes our tissues, causing aging, shortages prevent us from getting the most physical exertion, etc. If we didn't need air, we'd be much more capable. If someone could figure out a way to free us from this burden, we'd be better off running farther, staying young longer, and much much more.
- jacquesm 16y ago
  The chemical reactions that drive your body are best compared to a very slow burn. Oxidisation (burning) needs oxygen, and oxygen needs to be somehow added to keep the 'fire' (your continued existence as an entity) going. Those that no longer consume oxygen (at least, those that are animals) are usually labelled as 'deceased'. Aging and all the other things you list as a burden are definitely affected by our use of 'air', but without that air you wouldn't live long enough to experience these effects. The positives seem to clearly outweigh the negatives.
pg 16y ago
I defined bad as things you don't want to want. E.g. because while they give you initial pleasure, they might give you net less pleasure in the long run. Though that isn't the only reason you might not want to want something. For example, you might dislike the environmental cost, or the thing might conflict with some principle you held. I don't think there's a sharp distinction between "real" addiction and other types. I think there's a smooth continuum. Even among things at the extreme, like addictive drugs, there's a continuum.
- deleted 16y ago
  [deleted]
- drewcrawford 16y ago
  I don't think the phrase "don't want to want" has any semantic meaning if you try to break it down. Here's a silly contrived example: I am addicted to air. A suffocating person has no air. They are very well aware of their addiction. They wish they did not need air. They "don't want to want" air. The whole of NASA probably wishes humans could get along fine without air. But none of this means that dependance on air is "bad" or should be avoided in the normative case. I agree with you 100% that there is a smooth continuum of addiction. Where we disagree (and where, I would say, you've forgotten to argue something) is that you believe addiction and badness are inherently correlated.
  - pg 16y ago
    I think the reason it seems meaningless not to want to want air is that we're influenced the apparent impossibility of doing without it. But imagine if it actually were possible. E.g. if in some advanced future technology the blood could be oxygenated directly, or our brain states were transferred to some form of computer. Then it's reasonable to imagine someone not wanting to be tied to tedious, corporeal respiration. I wouldn't call it bad to want air. It doesn't bother me to have to breathe, though to be honest I hadn't thought about it any more than a medieval peasant would have thought about the possibility of flying across the Atlantic. But I'd be annoyed if I were no longer able to fly across the Atlantic, and it's not inconceivable that someone in x years might be annoyed at having to breathe.
fleaflicker 16y ago
Dr Drew always says the hallmark of addiction is progressive use in the face of adverse consequence (effects on school or work, health, finance, legal, relationships).
- godDLL 16y ago
  Who's Dr. Drew?
  - lotharbot 16y ago
    http://lmgtfy.com/?q=Dr.+Drew http://lmgtfy.com/?q=Dr.+Drew
dan00 16y ago
"Could this be redirected into something productive? Maybe? But people also burn out and have inefficiencies, so I'm not sure you could extract much more productivity unless we returned to hand-to-mouth." That's not the point. If you're addicted, then it isn't pleasurable anymore. You're "forced" by the addiction to do something that you don't enjoy anymore. It has nothing to do with productive/unproductive work. I think that today it's harder to stay conscious, because there's more and more addictive stuff. What's better for a producer in a capitalist society then an addicted consumer?
flatulent1 16y ago
Aside from direct damage which varies from negligible to substantial, the indirect costs should be taken into account. They're not always easy to guage. Something that takes a lot of time certainly has an opportunity cost. The time it takes could have been spent doing something else. Someone addicted to a game may spend less time getting exercise, learning what it takes to get a ham license, learning to program, working on real personal relationships.... the list goes on and on. Generally things that give instant gratification tend to be addictive. Has our society suffered from not living within its means? Have we fostered an environment that actually encourages addiction to spending? Look at the nature of what's on commercial tv, and the ads. The programs are designed to keep us hooked. (they don't sell programs to us, they sell us to advertisers) And look at the nature of the ads and what we consume. To some, our purpose in life is to CONSUME. Just who is that good for? Next time you play a game or pick something to watch, ask yourself what you're gaining, what it costs, and will you better of later or be a better person as a result? Maybe the skills learned in those games aren't useful enough to be worth the price. Of course if we measure lifetimes in man-hours and look at the numbers a different way can get some disturbing stats. It's probably a leap to equate the cumulative hours lost to gaming to death. Perhaps it would be easier to accept if we measured the hours spent with updates and fighting malware? (That would make a catchy story... measure the lives lost due to Windows bugs LOL) We don't have to be productive all the time, but shouldn't we find pleasure in ways that help our minds and bodies?

dman 16y ago

I disagree with the fact that people currently have more free time as compared to 50-100 years ago.

drewcrawford 16y ago
According to http://eh.net/encyclopedia/article/whaples.work.hours.us http://eh.net/encyclopedia/article/whaples.work.hours.us there is a clear trend in a shortening workweek each decade across industries.
- dman 16y ago
  I stand corrected. Thanks for pointing the data out.
GFischer 16y ago
Definition of "free time": "time available for hobbies and other activities that you enjoy" drewcrawford's excellent stats are very clear on the point: "between 1880 and 1995 the amount of work per day fell nearly in half, allowing leisure time to more than triple."

fragmede 16y ago

The two points I can address: * Is It *dangerous*? At the extreme, yes: hikikomori - http://www.nytimes.com/2006/01/15/magazine/15japanese.html?pagewanted=all http://www.nytimes.com/2006/01/15/magazine/15japanese.html?p... * Can the claims of loss of productivity be scientifically substantiated? To what extent? If an employee spends 8 hours browsing Reddit, instead of doing work that needed to be done, the loss of productivity is quantifiable. So how about 5 minutes? 20 minutes? 40? An hour?

drewcrawford 16y ago
>At the extreme, yes Let me rephrase the question a bit, because at extremes everything is dangerous. Is it any more or less dangerous, on average, than other things in society considered to be bad? Are there more or less hikikomoris than DWIs? Are there more or less WoW addicts than rich old men with boats or other (presumably harmless) unproductive activities? > If an employee spends 8 hours browsing Reddit, instead of doing work that needed to be done, the loss of productivity is quantifiable Are you sure? Did they really lose 8 hours worth of work? How is "time spent" any better a metric for productivity than counting lines of code? I find, for me personally, that when I am burnt out I won't produce in any amount of time until I recharge, and when I'm fully charged I'm not interested in browsing Reddit. This is a personal anecdote, and not data; but can we get some data--any data--correlating productivity and browsing Reddit, positively or negatively? I suspect the relationship is a lot more complex than "X hours lost."
- fragmede 16y ago
  > Are you sure? Did they really lose 8 hours worth of work? How is "time spent" any better a metric for productivity than counting lines of code? Coding is a poor example because there is no generally accepted metric for productivity. (Figure out good way of measuring programmer productivity and you'd have a mint.) However, some jobs do have a valid metric. Data entry: 300 forms take an average of X hours to do. After X hours reading Reddit and not entering forms, 0 forms have been entered. Simplistically, X hours have been 'lost'.
  - 16y ago

mattchew 16y ago

> What does it mean to say it is bad? How about this: if in advance of the behavior, you intend to partake moderately, and in the event you consistently overindulge, and after the fact you regret your excess, then something about this behavior is bad. I'm leaving aside some of the other points you bring up, but if you've got a habit that consistently leads to dissatisfaction and regret, I think it's fair to call it a problem for that reason alone.

msg 16y ago
You're assuming that dissatisfaction and regret mean the activity was bad. What if you overindulge in learning and regret knowing all kinds of details about Lisp? Some outside observers don't consider your time wasted, quite the contrary. But by your measurement, regretting knowing Lisp would mean that knowing Lisp is bad. My point is that you can always pick opposing activities that people will feel are time wasted or well-spent. But why? Because you have some implicit notion of ultimate value that helps you weigh time spent on one or the other. In the absence of such a theory of good and evil you might as well criticize pg for becoming addicted to hiking or addicted to insightful thinking. Cool for him, but he's wasting his life if he doesn't have all the achievements in Team Fortress 2. There is no way to create this kind of theory out of the subject's reflection on their own activities. After all, the subject might be wrong!
- sofal 16y ago
  I don't think pg's argument relies on an objective definition of bad. The subjective one works fine. After all, the subject might be wrong! "Wrong" being subjective, of course.
  - deleted 16y ago
    [deleted]
  - msg 16y ago
    The subjective definition of bad only works if you happen to share the values. But this kind of argument does not bear examination. If we ask, "why is tech addiction bad?" or argue, "tech addiction is great because we it is a pathway to posthumanism", we immediately come to a question of this objective standard. If a subjective notion of evil is all you have, you'll start waving your hands here.

sp332 16y ago

These are things that, as pg put it, I don't want to want. I don't care what changed on HN in the last 15 seconds, so why do my fingers type this reflexively when I've opened my browser to do something else? I was just here, I've already read the stuff I'm interested in. I don't want to be here. Yeah, I know about noprocrast. It doesn't stop my fingers from typing h-a-down-enter .

amalcon 16y ago

Very interesting perspective. I would take the moral relativist approach to arguing that these things are bad. Suppose a hypothetical person who spends time on (e.g.) Facebook when there's something else they themselves would prefer to do with that time. Would the addiction be bad for this person? If so, we only need to point to the existence of a statistically significant number of such people to substantiate the argument that their Facebook addiction is a "bad" thing. Unless we have reason to believe that Facebook addiction in general (not Facebook itself, just addiction to it) has benefits, we can transfer this to Facebook addiction in general. Here's one person so identified: http://www.cnn.com/2009/HEALTH/04/23/ep.facebook.addict/index.html http://www.cnn.com/2009/HEALTH/04/23/ep.facebook.addict/inde... To my knowledge, nobody's done a study of this, but I find it more plausible than not that there exist many people who spend time on Facebook that they would prefer to use doing other things. I've picked on Facebook quite a bit here. This is not in any way meant to be a dig against the service or company; Facebook is just a convenient example.

SapphireSun 16y ago

Actually, I'll call you on that. I think our collective addiction to air is HORRIBLE. Air oxidizes our tissues, causing aging, shortages prevent us from getting the most physical exertion, etc. If we didn't need air, we'd be much more capable. If someone could figure out a way to free us from this burden, we'd be better off running farther, staying young longer, and much much more.

jacquesm 16y ago
The chemical reactions that drive your body are best compared to a very slow burn. Oxidisation (burning) needs oxygen, and oxygen needs to be somehow added to keep the 'fire' (your continued existence as an entity) going. Those that no longer consume oxygen (at least, those that are animals) are usually labelled as 'deceased'. Aging and all the other things you list as a burden are definitely affected by our use of 'air', but without that air you wouldn't live long enough to experience these effects. The positives seem to clearly outweigh the negatives.

pg 16y ago

I defined bad as things you don't want to want. E.g. because while they give you initial pleasure, they might give you net less pleasure in the long run. Though that isn't the only reason you might not want to want something. For example, you might dislike the environmental cost, or the thing might conflict with some principle you held. I don't think there's a sharp distinction between "real" addiction and other types. I think there's a smooth continuum. Even among things at the extreme, like addictive drugs, there's a continuum.

deleted 16y ago
[deleted]
drewcrawford 16y ago
I don't think the phrase "don't want to want" has any semantic meaning if you try to break it down. Here's a silly contrived example: I am addicted to air. A suffocating person has no air. They are very well aware of their addiction. They wish they did not need air. They "don't want to want" air. The whole of NASA probably wishes humans could get along fine without air. But none of this means that dependance on air is "bad" or should be avoided in the normative case. I agree with you 100% that there is a smooth continuum of addiction. Where we disagree (and where, I would say, you've forgotten to argue something) is that you believe addiction and badness are inherently correlated.
- pg 16y ago
  I think the reason it seems meaningless not to want to want air is that we're influenced the apparent impossibility of doing without it. But imagine if it actually were possible. E.g. if in some advanced future technology the blood could be oxygenated directly, or our brain states were transferred to some form of computer. Then it's reasonable to imagine someone not wanting to be tied to tedious, corporeal respiration. I wouldn't call it bad to want air. It doesn't bother me to have to breathe, though to be honest I hadn't thought about it any more than a medieval peasant would have thought about the possibility of flying across the Atlantic. But I'd be annoyed if I were no longer able to fly across the Atlantic, and it's not inconceivable that someone in x years might be annoyed at having to breathe.

fleaflicker 16y ago

Dr Drew always says the hallmark of addiction is progressive use in the face of adverse consequence (effects on school or work, health, finance, legal, relationships).

godDLL 16y ago
Who's Dr. Drew?
- lotharbot 16y ago
  http://lmgtfy.com/?q=Dr.+Drew http://lmgtfy.com/?q=Dr.+Drew

dan00 16y ago

"Could this be redirected into something productive? Maybe? But people also burn out and have inefficiencies, so I'm not sure you could extract much more productivity unless we returned to hand-to-mouth." That's not the point. If you're addicted, then it isn't pleasurable anymore. You're "forced" by the addiction to do something that you don't enjoy anymore. It has nothing to do with productive/unproductive work. I think that today it's harder to stay conscious, because there's more and more addictive stuff. What's better for a producer in a capitalist society then an addicted consumer?

flatulent1 16y ago

Aside from direct damage which varies from negligible to substantial, the indirect costs should be taken into account. They're not always easy to guage. Something that takes a lot of time certainly has an opportunity cost. The time it takes could have been spent doing something else. Someone addicted to a game may spend less time getting exercise, learning what it takes to get a ham license, learning to program, working on real personal relationships.... the list goes on and on. Generally things that give instant gratification tend to be addictive. Has our society suffered from not living within its means? Have we fostered an environment that actually encourages addiction to spending? Look at the nature of what's on commercial tv, and the ads. The programs are designed to keep us hooked. (they don't sell programs to us, they sell us to advertisers) And look at the nature of the ads and what we consume. To some, our purpose in life is to CONSUME. Just who is that good for? Next time you play a game or pick something to watch, ask yourself what you're gaining, what it costs, and will you better of later or be a better person as a result? Maybe the skills learned in those games aren't useful enough to be worth the price. Of course if we measure lifetimes in man-hours and look at the numbers a different way can get some disturbing stats. It's probably a leap to equate the cumulative hours lost to gaming to death. Perhaps it would be easier to accept if we measured the hours spent with updates and fighting malware? (That would make a catchy story... measure the lives lost due to Windows bugs LOL) We don't have to be productive all the time, but shouldn't we find pleasure in ways that help our minds and bodies?