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>Technologists building these products and writers observing the tech revolution were naïve, he said. >"We thought we could control it,” Mr. Anderson said. “An

>Technologists building these products and writers observing the tech revolution were naïve, he said. >"We thought we could control it,” Mr. Anderson said. “And this is beyond our power to control. This is going straight to the pleasure centers of the developing brain. This is beyond our capacity as regular parents to understand." A 6 year old's brain has no chance against a team of trained data scientists. We all know this. This larger issue of screen time and tech addiction will only continue to grow. At some point maybe a decade or two it will be a smaller version of the concerns about the tobacco industry. But because it's the brain and not the lungs it will play out differently. People approach mental and physical health differently. Similarly dopamine addiction and chemical dependence are also treated differently in people's minds. One is often viewed as a moral failing the other as more "uncontrollable". As much as we want it to be true, technological advancement can never be separated from social/ethical impact. It's not "just a tool" and never will be.

ravenstine 8y ago
I see two problems with how we view addiction: - Everything has a potential of being addictive, but we focus so much on drugs since they have some especially addicting properties that aren't present in other habits. - We're stuck with Enlightenment age thinking such as "tabula rasa" and we attribute too much human behavior to free will, an ill-defined term that nobody whom I ask can provide a comprehensive answer to.
- djsumdog 8y ago
  My generation grew up with TV shows like The Transformers that got kids to beg their parents for toys. McDonalds has marketed to children for the better part of a century (and it has followed many people into adulthood). The medium has changed, but the practices are the same as Edward Bernays and Anna Freud cooked up so many decades ago (Sigmund was never happy with the way his family members used his psychoanalysis research to sell products, even though they used it to help sell the English version of his book). There is more of it today, yes. Kids don't want toys, and hence we see Toys-R-Us disappear .. they do want games, and it's pretty important for people in tech to teach kids about how absolutely atrocious in-game purchases are and how you should NEVER participate in that rubbish and discourage everyone else from doing so in the hopes it eventually goes away. But it won't, because there are always people who don't know, or even with full knowledge, can't help those addictions. It's a complicated problem, but current phones/tech are just the medium. But the medium can also be the message.
  - rchaud 8y ago
    > My generation grew up with TV shows like The Transformers that got kids to beg their parents for toys. But the addiction component wasn't built-in the way it is now. Everyone remembers "Saturday morning cartoons with cereal" because there was a set time and place for that event. After the episode ended, it didn't auto-play the next episode, or recommend 5 highly similar shows based on your "viewing history". Consider that "bingeing" is a commonly accepted term when it refers to consuming an entire season of a show in one sitting and companies like Netflix churn out TV shows with a focus on this "bingeability", because that's their differentiator compared to regular TV.
    - jbattle 8y ago
      I dunno, I remember losing HOURS sitting in front of a TV. Watching whatever. Whatever they wanted to show me, I'd watch it. Commercials every X minutes.
      - huehehue 8y ago
        There have always been TV fanatics, or enthusiasts, sure. I vegged out a lot as a kid. As tech has changed, though, the game is totally different, and people are being actively coerced into binge-watching. Yesterday, we had Nielsen doing rough tracking of viewership (IIRC, installing a Nielsen box was/is totally optional!), opinion polls, and focus groups. Mostly aggregate data on a program's performance. Today, we're building elaborate user profiles and tailoring the viewing experience to the individual, using who-knows-what details (demographics, personal viewing habits, Amazon purchase history, eye-tracking data from your smart TV, you get the idea). These companies have a really good idea of what you like, and will use whatever data they can to maximize the time you spend on their platform.
      - ravenstine 8y ago
        That's how I remember it, but one difference in my experience was that it was understood by everyone that watching lots of TV was considered bad, but we all went ahead and did so anyway. Now it's considered normal to "binge" on TV, and I find it very disconcerting that people are using that word without even being tongue-in-cheek about it.
- hhjinks 8y ago
  > We're stuck with Enlightenment age thinking such as "tabula rasa" Nobody has actually believed in that for decades, and it certainly isn't present in the public consciousness.
  - mcculley 8y ago
    Lots of people believe that the human mind is a blank slate and that culture defines humans more than any inherited neural architecture. I disagree with that conclusion, but it certainly is not “nobody”. One need look no further than the angry screeds in response to evolutionary psychology.
    - amanaplanacanal 8y ago
      I suspect we will learn a lot from evolutionary psychology. Unfortunately it has a long history of "just so" stories, and being used to justify all sorts of racist and misogynist beliefs. It's hard to get rid of that kind of baggage once you've acquired it.
      - mcculley 8y ago
        Not all of evolutionary psychology is what people call the "just so" stories. Any understanding that we are born with more than a blank slate that shapes our thinking is "evolutionary psychology". That is an unpleasant conclusion for those who want to believe that all undesirable human behavior is the fault of culture.
  - mmirate 8y ago
    On the contrary, tabula rasa is one of the most sacred axioms of modern Progressivism.
wlesieutre 8y ago
I see this playing out right now with Apple's phones, which get continuously bigger and shinier and brighter with every new generation. Then they give us "Screen Time" and Tim Cook talks about giving people the tools to be aware of how much they're using their phones and to make their own decisions about it. If drug companies said "We're discontinuing Advil for your headaches and replacing all painkillers with small dosage opiates, but we'll give you an app to count how much you're taking and you can make your own decisions" we'd immediately jump down their throats. Apple discontinues the iPhone SE, standardizes on a comparatively gigantic 6.1 inch screen size for their mainstream phone model, and tells us "It's fine. We gave people a new app so they won't get addicted to their phones." I don't think it's fine. Apple's just in denial about it because the design team likes big shiny things, premium phones print money, and users keep on buying them because we collectively don't have a grip on the downsides. Just give me a damn phone that I can call a car or text friends on, I don't want to or need to spend hours consuming media on a giant shiny screen. But if I get a giant shiny screen foisted on me, I know it's going to happen. But like you said, if someone's living on their phone too much, we treat it like their own moral failing. The manufacturers that made the phones this way and the software companies that deliberately A/B tested their engagement stats to death to rope you in as hard as possible and sell more ads? Nah, not their fault. It's these irresponsible phone users not owning up to their own faults.
- bamboozled 8y ago
  I think you’re being an alarmist. My iPhone adds incredible value to my life and I find screen time very useful in helping me control my own urges to over consume enjoyable content. I don’t think people at Apple are intentionally selling you cigarettes or opiate like products. If parents can’t understsnd spending too much time on phones or infront of TV is potentially harmful then it’s common sense we’ve lost. Nothing else. Take it easy.
  - wlesieutre 8y ago
    I'm not just talking about kids, I'm talking about adults too. Smartphones absolutely add a lot of convenience and value. But, in my opinion, most of that value doesn't come from having deliberately addictive media consumption available at your fingertips at half a second's notice. Yet that's what phones are being optimized for. Does calling an Uber need a 6" screen? Or voice navigation instructions in my car? Shooting photos and videos? GPS tracking my runs? Most of the things that bigger screens enable are things that I'm trying to minimize, so making these big inviting smartphone screens is no longer adding value to my life. But that's the only phone Apple will sell me. No, it's probably not as bad as opiates. But "not as bad as opiates" is a pretty low bar to set for "should I be OK with this?" The new Palm small phone thing is a nice idea, except that it's a companion accessory to go with a bigger phone. So close: https://www.theverge.com/circuitbreaker/2018/10/25/18022382/palm-phone-november-2-release-date-verizon https://www.theverge.com/circuitbreaker/2018/10/25/18022382/... What I really want is a small phone like that to go with an iPad. With a full size tablet, carrying it and sitting down to use it two handed are enough of a barrier that I can't absentmindedly find myself sucked into a reddit hole. Maybe that's Apple's plan to sort this out. Make next year's iPhone Max Plus so big that you have to carry it around in your backpack and can't make a habit of staring at it all the time.
danesparza 8y ago
"A 6 year old's brain has no chance against a team of trained data scientists. We all know this." Hell, I'd argue that many 40-50 year old brains clearly don't stand a chance against a trained data scientist.
- jackhack 8y ago
  That's correct -- it's adults too. And the odds are against the average person. But I must point out it's not just data scientists we are up against -- it's psychologists, psychiatrists and medical doctors, addiction experts, experts in gaming theory, etc. All are employed in order to help make software and devices more "compelling". Remember when they used to ask how "sticky" is the app? Careful timing of rewards, the use of color and sound, a/b testing on phrasing, email&text reminders, alerts, etc all work to keep you clicking like a trained circus animal. Look, these people are not working to protect you. They're working to create addictions and deepen existing ones. Frankly I think the medical types should lose their licenses for violation of the Hippocratic Oath: "First, do no harm" indeed. Making devices and software more ADDICTIVE, deliberately creating and encouraging mental illness (addiction) is a disgraceful violation of this oath. This is an open secret in the video game world, to the point that some COUNTRIES are banning things like 'loot boxes' because they are naked gambling. The problem began when users became the product being sold. Now the companies feel that they have a right to your mind and eyes, and are not above fostering or even creating clinical addiction to ensure they have access.
  - baybal2 8y ago
    A repost from half year ago: I lived in Russia during the time when slot machines were literally standing in the open on the streets, and yes, mentally infirm people were wasting themselves on them. Normal people did not. It requires one to completely lack logic reasoning to not to understand that the the purpose of a slot machine is to waste his or her time and money. The same way, it requires a particular lack of basic logical reasoning to not to understand that the the purpose of a smartphone app throwing 20 bling bling popups per second on you isn't different. You don't need to be a genius to understand that clickfarming app must be removed, and to do so. My former high school classmate who did not manage to leave Russia is running a typical "smartphone fixer" kiosk. He said few years ago that the most common request he gets from people is to "remove Google nagware and lock, block or delete Google Pay" so their child will never ever buy anything "in that Internet thing" At least Chinese and Russian parents understood long ago that Google's business is all about "pocket slot machines (this is how people really call smartphones there)." Why wouldn't American parents do that too?
andrewla 8y ago
> A 6 year old's brain has no chance against a team of trained data scientists. We all know this. This is ridiculous. I mean, utterly and completely ridiculous and you should be ashamed of yourself. This all happened by chance, not by some miracle of data science. For every product that captured 6 year old brains, there are millions of failed products that did not capture any brains at all. For every claim of "hey, I just tried to stimulate dopamine addiction in my successful table game" there are a million people who tried to do the same thing and failed. This is just a ridiculous narrative that uses post hoc reasoning and ignores survivorship bias to try to justify some parochial view of what makes children become "productive" adults. No human is going to be able to predict what will be good and bad for child development except in very narrow cases around health and nutrition (and even there we're wrong 92% of the time when we stray out of those narrow bands). The world of tomorrow is not the same as the world of today and each generation will adapt and thrive in their own way. We'll keep stumbling through trying different crazy approaches, each with drawbacks and advantages, and occasionally pushing for the "one true" approach that will be discredited before we ever get to figure out if it works. > As much as we want it to be true, technological advancement can never be separated from social/ethical impact Yeah, sure, of course. But responsibility for social/ethical impact is almost zero in all cases except as a retrospective tool, and trying to predict social/ethical impact is a suckers game because this is simply not possible. This idea that we can somehow have a simplified model of how humans behave and that such a model has any validity at all is a common one in marketing and social science research, but is clearly fallacious.
- jobigoud 8y ago
  He never said these data scientists predicted the 6 year old brain and created the program accordingly. Just A/B testing and measuring what works best and what doesn't and progressively refining the product to match these findings is data science.
  - andrewla 8y ago
    I'm already being downvoted, hopefully mostly for my tone rather than content, so by all rational means I should abandon this and go complain another day, but this really gets my goat. A/B testing and measuring -- are you kidding me? That's how you go from 35% conversion to 36% conversion, not from 2 daily active users to 1e7 daily active users. Refinement only works if you're exploring a space that has productive alternatives in low dimensions, which is almost never the case. No amount of "progressive refinement" is going to turn Farmville into Candy Crush or Candy Crush into Fortnite. You have to look no further than those examples to see what I mean -- "Oh, look, Zygna has figured out a formula to hook users" followed by "Zygna can't repeat its success".
baybal2 8y ago
I remember myself struggling with Quake 3. It really felt to some extend hypnotic. Only after giving myself a proverbial slap on the face at around 2014 when I was 13 or so, and getting conscious of that being a problem, was I able vent Q3 out of my head.
- mrhappyunhappy 8y ago
  I was addicted to video games into my 20s. Even now I have urges to fire up some MMO. It was only when I started working in UX design and researched human behavior that I understood how incredibly addictive video games are. Well designed video games go above and beyond to make you keep playing them. Even as a professional designer I frequently look to games to get ideas about how to hook visitors to spend more time in sites and apps. It's very ironic that the system that gamed me (pun intended) is now something I'm actively part of.
  - int_19h 8y ago
    The interesting thing about both your examples (Q3 and MMOs) is that both are games with no finish point. I think that's not a coincidence, and it's not just about games. If you think about it, all forms of entertainment boil down to giving our mind a different world to inhabit for a while. It's pretty obvious with books and movies and theater etc, and with "traditional" games. But in a sense, the gaming board of something like Bejeweled is also a world, just a very simplified one. And stuff like social networks are also a world, the one that's built out of real people, but with its own set of relationships and problems and drama etc. All of this lets your brain "go elsewhere". But here's the big difference. Some forms of entertainment engage in such world building to tell a story. But a story has its finale - once it is done, you leave the world it inhabits, and come back to reality. You can go back for another take, but the thing about stories is that the second time is not like the first. It's diminishing returns. With modern - problematic - forms of entertainment, like MMOs and addictive mobile games and social media - the world is intentionally designed to be inhabited permanently. Worse yet, it's designed to be painful to withdraw from, even temporarily. There is no final line - there's no "game over, you won" in a MMO, or a happy (or sad, or any) ending of the Facebook drama. The people who make those things want it that way, because every minute you spend in their world, they can extract rent from you. With stories, you pay per story; here, you pay per hour. Basically, social media and addictive games are the equivalent of a never-ending soap opera that's on 24/7. Imagine if something like this existed 50 years ago; do you think the effects would have been different? It's just that back then, it was not economically feasible. And now it is; and here we are.
clarkmoody 8y ago
I disagree with your last point. Technology will always be "just a tool." By its nature, it is morally neutral. The use of technology for good or for evil reflects the morality of the people deploying it. Explosives, baseball bats, water, radios, software. All have been used for noble purposes and for evil. That does not impart morality to the technology.
- coleifer 8y ago
  I hear you, its like saying alcohol is just a chemical. Which is true of course. But I think it's naive and idealistic. Taken to an extreme, you could say people are just chemicals and electrical impulses, right? But that's crazy.
  - 2snakes 8y ago
    Yeah we are definitely more than our material selves.
- jacobwilliamroy 8y ago
  There's a saying "When you let the camel's nose into the tent, the rest of him follows." If a technology has so many awful capabilities, then there ought to be a good reason to tolerate its existence.
- tlb 8y ago
  Maybe, if you define 'technology' to be just things like instruction sets and transistor geometry. By that narrow definition, phones contain more than technology: they contain policy. A phone loaded with addictive games embodies a policy of maximizing screen time. A phone with clickbait on its lock screen is designed to take up your time and bathe your retinas in bullshit. While the transistors are neutral, the policy is harmful. As it happens, these policies are often set by people that mostly work on technology, so they get lumped together. From outside, people see the technology industry being responsible for all of it.
- JHer 8y ago
  Whenever I see someone saying something like "just a tool" with regard to technology, I always want to recommend a thorough read of Marshall McLuhan's "Understanding Media" ("The Medium is the Message" and other adages). I think you've got it precisely the wrong way round: it is not the morality of the times that is reflected by the use of technology, but morality that reflects current technology. The French and American revolutions that began the current age of modern democracy are, for example, unthinkable without the printing press. No newspaper, no democracy. It needed the equalising force of mass-copied text to abolish the sacred order of monarchy in people's heads. Similarly, it is hard to imagine fascism without the preceding inventions of radio and cinema. Or J.F.K. without television. Culture, society, customs, morality - everything that has to do with what we call 'evil' or 'good' - is fundamentally a reflection of their surrounding media. Morals under the conditions of television will be different from morals under the condition of the world wide web. One can see that we are currently struggling to adapt our morality to a new media reality by the invention of new words ("fake news", "filter bubble", "clickbait", "post-truth") to describe it; the old ones are insufficient. I propose that rules and guidelines that emerged under the conditions of offline media will leave us vulnerable to the dark and dangerous sides of online media. We should develop new ones.
Balgair 8y ago
> At some point maybe a decade or two it will be a smaller version of the concerns about the tobacco industry. To be fair, the comparison is applicable, but not the best. I think it's more akin to slot-machines and other forms of gambling, themselves heavily regulated (though maybe not for much longer [0]). [0] https://www.cnn.com/2018/05/14/politics/sports-betting-ncaa-supreme-court/index.html https://www.cnn.com/2018/05/14/politics/sports-betting-ncaa-...
eikenberry 8y ago
> A 6 year old's brain has no chance against a team of trained data scientists. We all know this. A team of data scientists stand no chance against millions of years of adaptive evolution. Humans are an incredibly adaptive species who inculcates nearly anything into their lives with ease. Technology is no different.
fromMars 8y ago
"A 6 year old's brain has no chance against a team of trained data scientists. We all know this." What a glib statement. Although, a meme here on Hacker News, it doesn't take a data scientist to make addictive games and video content.

ravenstine 8y ago

I see two problems with how we view addiction: - Everything has a potential of being addictive, but we focus so much on drugs since they have some especially addicting properties that aren't present in other habits. - We're stuck with Enlightenment age thinking such as "tabula rasa" and we attribute too much human behavior to free will, an ill-defined term that nobody whom I ask can provide a comprehensive answer to.

djsumdog 8y ago
My generation grew up with TV shows like The Transformers that got kids to beg their parents for toys. McDonalds has marketed to children for the better part of a century (and it has followed many people into adulthood). The medium has changed, but the practices are the same as Edward Bernays and Anna Freud cooked up so many decades ago (Sigmund was never happy with the way his family members used his psychoanalysis research to sell products, even though they used it to help sell the English version of his book). There is more of it today, yes. Kids don't want toys, and hence we see Toys-R-Us disappear .. they do want games, and it's pretty important for people in tech to teach kids about how absolutely atrocious in-game purchases are and how you should NEVER participate in that rubbish and discourage everyone else from doing so in the hopes it eventually goes away. But it won't, because there are always people who don't know, or even with full knowledge, can't help those addictions. It's a complicated problem, but current phones/tech are just the medium. But the medium can also be the message.
- rchaud 8y ago
  > My generation grew up with TV shows like The Transformers that got kids to beg their parents for toys. But the addiction component wasn't built-in the way it is now. Everyone remembers "Saturday morning cartoons with cereal" because there was a set time and place for that event. After the episode ended, it didn't auto-play the next episode, or recommend 5 highly similar shows based on your "viewing history". Consider that "bingeing" is a commonly accepted term when it refers to consuming an entire season of a show in one sitting and companies like Netflix churn out TV shows with a focus on this "bingeability", because that's their differentiator compared to regular TV.
  - jbattle 8y ago
    I dunno, I remember losing HOURS sitting in front of a TV. Watching whatever. Whatever they wanted to show me, I'd watch it. Commercials every X minutes.
    - huehehue 8y ago
      There have always been TV fanatics, or enthusiasts, sure. I vegged out a lot as a kid. As tech has changed, though, the game is totally different, and people are being actively coerced into binge-watching. Yesterday, we had Nielsen doing rough tracking of viewership (IIRC, installing a Nielsen box was/is totally optional!), opinion polls, and focus groups. Mostly aggregate data on a program's performance. Today, we're building elaborate user profiles and tailoring the viewing experience to the individual, using who-knows-what details (demographics, personal viewing habits, Amazon purchase history, eye-tracking data from your smart TV, you get the idea). These companies have a really good idea of what you like, and will use whatever data they can to maximize the time you spend on their platform.
    - ravenstine 8y ago
      That's how I remember it, but one difference in my experience was that it was understood by everyone that watching lots of TV was considered bad, but we all went ahead and did so anyway. Now it's considered normal to "binge" on TV, and I find it very disconcerting that people are using that word without even being tongue-in-cheek about it.
hhjinks 8y ago
> We're stuck with Enlightenment age thinking such as "tabula rasa" Nobody has actually believed in that for decades, and it certainly isn't present in the public consciousness.
- mcculley 8y ago
  Lots of people believe that the human mind is a blank slate and that culture defines humans more than any inherited neural architecture. I disagree with that conclusion, but it certainly is not “nobody”. One need look no further than the angry screeds in response to evolutionary psychology.
  - amanaplanacanal 8y ago
    I suspect we will learn a lot from evolutionary psychology. Unfortunately it has a long history of "just so" stories, and being used to justify all sorts of racist and misogynist beliefs. It's hard to get rid of that kind of baggage once you've acquired it.
    - mcculley 8y ago
      Not all of evolutionary psychology is what people call the "just so" stories. Any understanding that we are born with more than a blank slate that shapes our thinking is "evolutionary psychology". That is an unpleasant conclusion for those who want to believe that all undesirable human behavior is the fault of culture.
- mmirate 8y ago
  On the contrary, tabula rasa is one of the most sacred axioms of modern Progressivism.

wlesieutre 8y ago

I see this playing out right now with Apple's phones, which get continuously bigger and shinier and brighter with every new generation. Then they give us "Screen Time" and Tim Cook talks about giving people the tools to be aware of how much they're using their phones and to make their own decisions about it. If drug companies said "We're discontinuing Advil for your headaches and replacing all painkillers with small dosage opiates, but we'll give you an app to count how much you're taking and you can make your own decisions" we'd immediately jump down their throats. Apple discontinues the iPhone SE, standardizes on a comparatively gigantic 6.1 inch screen size for their mainstream phone model, and tells us "It's fine. We gave people a new app so they won't get addicted to their phones." I don't think it's fine. Apple's just in denial about it because the design team likes big shiny things, premium phones print money, and users keep on buying them because we collectively don't have a grip on the downsides. Just give me a damn phone that I can call a car or text friends on, I don't want to or need to spend hours consuming media on a giant shiny screen. But if I get a giant shiny screen foisted on me, I know it's going to happen. But like you said, if someone's living on their phone too much, we treat it like their own moral failing. The manufacturers that made the phones this way and the software companies that deliberately A/B tested their engagement stats to death to rope you in as hard as possible and sell more ads? Nah, not their fault. It's these irresponsible phone users not owning up to their own faults.

bamboozled 8y ago
I think you’re being an alarmist. My iPhone adds incredible value to my life and I find screen time very useful in helping me control my own urges to over consume enjoyable content. I don’t think people at Apple are intentionally selling you cigarettes or opiate like products. If parents can’t understsnd spending too much time on phones or infront of TV is potentially harmful then it’s common sense we’ve lost. Nothing else. Take it easy.
- wlesieutre 8y ago
  I'm not just talking about kids, I'm talking about adults too. Smartphones absolutely add a lot of convenience and value. But, in my opinion, most of that value doesn't come from having deliberately addictive media consumption available at your fingertips at half a second's notice. Yet that's what phones are being optimized for. Does calling an Uber need a 6" screen? Or voice navigation instructions in my car? Shooting photos and videos? GPS tracking my runs? Most of the things that bigger screens enable are things that I'm trying to minimize, so making these big inviting smartphone screens is no longer adding value to my life. But that's the only phone Apple will sell me. No, it's probably not as bad as opiates. But "not as bad as opiates" is a pretty low bar to set for "should I be OK with this?" The new Palm small phone thing is a nice idea, except that it's a companion accessory to go with a bigger phone. So close: https://www.theverge.com/circuitbreaker/2018/10/25/18022382/palm-phone-november-2-release-date-verizon https://www.theverge.com/circuitbreaker/2018/10/25/18022382/... What I really want is a small phone like that to go with an iPad. With a full size tablet, carrying it and sitting down to use it two handed are enough of a barrier that I can't absentmindedly find myself sucked into a reddit hole. Maybe that's Apple's plan to sort this out. Make next year's iPhone Max Plus so big that you have to carry it around in your backpack and can't make a habit of staring at it all the time.

danesparza 8y ago

"A 6 year old's brain has no chance against a team of trained data scientists. We all know this." Hell, I'd argue that many 40-50 year old brains clearly don't stand a chance against a trained data scientist.

jackhack 8y ago
That's correct -- it's adults too. And the odds are against the average person. But I must point out it's not just data scientists we are up against -- it's psychologists, psychiatrists and medical doctors, addiction experts, experts in gaming theory, etc. All are employed in order to help make software and devices more "compelling". Remember when they used to ask how "sticky" is the app? Careful timing of rewards, the use of color and sound, a/b testing on phrasing, email&text reminders, alerts, etc all work to keep you clicking like a trained circus animal. Look, these people are not working to protect you. They're working to create addictions and deepen existing ones. Frankly I think the medical types should lose their licenses for violation of the Hippocratic Oath: "First, do no harm" indeed. Making devices and software more ADDICTIVE, deliberately creating and encouraging mental illness (addiction) is a disgraceful violation of this oath. This is an open secret in the video game world, to the point that some COUNTRIES are banning things like 'loot boxes' because they are naked gambling. The problem began when users became the product being sold. Now the companies feel that they have a right to your mind and eyes, and are not above fostering or even creating clinical addiction to ensure they have access.
- baybal2 8y ago
  A repost from half year ago: I lived in Russia during the time when slot machines were literally standing in the open on the streets, and yes, mentally infirm people were wasting themselves on them. Normal people did not. It requires one to completely lack logic reasoning to not to understand that the the purpose of a slot machine is to waste his or her time and money. The same way, it requires a particular lack of basic logical reasoning to not to understand that the the purpose of a smartphone app throwing 20 bling bling popups per second on you isn't different. You don't need to be a genius to understand that clickfarming app must be removed, and to do so. My former high school classmate who did not manage to leave Russia is running a typical "smartphone fixer" kiosk. He said few years ago that the most common request he gets from people is to "remove Google nagware and lock, block or delete Google Pay" so their child will never ever buy anything "in that Internet thing" At least Chinese and Russian parents understood long ago that Google's business is all about "pocket slot machines (this is how people really call smartphones there)." Why wouldn't American parents do that too?

andrewla 8y ago

> A 6 year old's brain has no chance against a team of trained data scientists. We all know this. This is ridiculous. I mean, utterly and completely ridiculous and you should be ashamed of yourself. This all happened by chance, not by some miracle of data science. For every product that captured 6 year old brains, there are millions of failed products that did not capture any brains at all. For every claim of "hey, I just tried to stimulate dopamine addiction in my successful table game" there are a million people who tried to do the same thing and failed. This is just a ridiculous narrative that uses post hoc reasoning and ignores survivorship bias to try to justify some parochial view of what makes children become "productive" adults. No human is going to be able to predict what will be good and bad for child development except in very narrow cases around health and nutrition (and even there we're wrong 92% of the time when we stray out of those narrow bands). The world of tomorrow is not the same as the world of today and each generation will adapt and thrive in their own way. We'll keep stumbling through trying different crazy approaches, each with drawbacks and advantages, and occasionally pushing for the "one true" approach that will be discredited before we ever get to figure out if it works. > As much as we want it to be true, technological advancement can never be separated from social/ethical impact Yeah, sure, of course. But responsibility for social/ethical impact is almost zero in all cases except as a retrospective tool, and trying to predict social/ethical impact is a suckers game because this is simply not possible. This idea that we can somehow have a simplified model of how humans behave and that such a model has any validity at all is a common one in marketing and social science research, but is clearly fallacious.

jobigoud 8y ago
He never said these data scientists predicted the 6 year old brain and created the program accordingly. Just A/B testing and measuring what works best and what doesn't and progressively refining the product to match these findings is data science.
- andrewla 8y ago
  I'm already being downvoted, hopefully mostly for my tone rather than content, so by all rational means I should abandon this and go complain another day, but this really gets my goat. A/B testing and measuring -- are you kidding me? That's how you go from 35% conversion to 36% conversion, not from 2 daily active users to 1e7 daily active users. Refinement only works if you're exploring a space that has productive alternatives in low dimensions, which is almost never the case. No amount of "progressive refinement" is going to turn Farmville into Candy Crush or Candy Crush into Fortnite. You have to look no further than those examples to see what I mean -- "Oh, look, Zygna has figured out a formula to hook users" followed by "Zygna can't repeat its success".

baybal2 8y ago

I remember myself struggling with Quake 3. It really felt to some extend hypnotic. Only after giving myself a proverbial slap on the face at around 2014 when I was 13 or so, and getting conscious of that being a problem, was I able vent Q3 out of my head.

mrhappyunhappy 8y ago
I was addicted to video games into my 20s. Even now I have urges to fire up some MMO. It was only when I started working in UX design and researched human behavior that I understood how incredibly addictive video games are. Well designed video games go above and beyond to make you keep playing them. Even as a professional designer I frequently look to games to get ideas about how to hook visitors to spend more time in sites and apps. It's very ironic that the system that gamed me (pun intended) is now something I'm actively part of.
- int_19h 8y ago
  The interesting thing about both your examples (Q3 and MMOs) is that both are games with no finish point. I think that's not a coincidence, and it's not just about games. If you think about it, all forms of entertainment boil down to giving our mind a different world to inhabit for a while. It's pretty obvious with books and movies and theater etc, and with "traditional" games. But in a sense, the gaming board of something like Bejeweled is also a world, just a very simplified one. And stuff like social networks are also a world, the one that's built out of real people, but with its own set of relationships and problems and drama etc. All of this lets your brain "go elsewhere". But here's the big difference. Some forms of entertainment engage in such world building to tell a story. But a story has its finale - once it is done, you leave the world it inhabits, and come back to reality. You can go back for another take, but the thing about stories is that the second time is not like the first. It's diminishing returns. With modern - problematic - forms of entertainment, like MMOs and addictive mobile games and social media - the world is intentionally designed to be inhabited permanently. Worse yet, it's designed to be painful to withdraw from, even temporarily. There is no final line - there's no "game over, you won" in a MMO, or a happy (or sad, or any) ending of the Facebook drama. The people who make those things want it that way, because every minute you spend in their world, they can extract rent from you. With stories, you pay per story; here, you pay per hour. Basically, social media and addictive games are the equivalent of a never-ending soap opera that's on 24/7. Imagine if something like this existed 50 years ago; do you think the effects would have been different? It's just that back then, it was not economically feasible. And now it is; and here we are.

clarkmoody 8y ago

I disagree with your last point. Technology will always be "just a tool." By its nature, it is morally neutral. The use of technology for good or for evil reflects the morality of the people deploying it. Explosives, baseball bats, water, radios, software. All have been used for noble purposes and for evil. That does not impart morality to the technology.

coleifer 8y ago
I hear you, its like saying alcohol is just a chemical. Which is true of course. But I think it's naive and idealistic. Taken to an extreme, you could say people are just chemicals and electrical impulses, right? But that's crazy.
- 2snakes 8y ago
  Yeah we are definitely more than our material selves.
jacobwilliamroy 8y ago
There's a saying "When you let the camel's nose into the tent, the rest of him follows." If a technology has so many awful capabilities, then there ought to be a good reason to tolerate its existence.
tlb 8y ago
Maybe, if you define 'technology' to be just things like instruction sets and transistor geometry. By that narrow definition, phones contain more than technology: they contain policy. A phone loaded with addictive games embodies a policy of maximizing screen time. A phone with clickbait on its lock screen is designed to take up your time and bathe your retinas in bullshit. While the transistors are neutral, the policy is harmful. As it happens, these policies are often set by people that mostly work on technology, so they get lumped together. From outside, people see the technology industry being responsible for all of it.
JHer 8y ago
Whenever I see someone saying something like "just a tool" with regard to technology, I always want to recommend a thorough read of Marshall McLuhan's "Understanding Media" ("The Medium is the Message" and other adages). I think you've got it precisely the wrong way round: it is not the morality of the times that is reflected by the use of technology, but morality that reflects current technology. The French and American revolutions that began the current age of modern democracy are, for example, unthinkable without the printing press. No newspaper, no democracy. It needed the equalising force of mass-copied text to abolish the sacred order of monarchy in people's heads. Similarly, it is hard to imagine fascism without the preceding inventions of radio and cinema. Or J.F.K. without television. Culture, society, customs, morality - everything that has to do with what we call 'evil' or 'good' - is fundamentally a reflection of their surrounding media. Morals under the conditions of television will be different from morals under the condition of the world wide web. One can see that we are currently struggling to adapt our morality to a new media reality by the invention of new words ("fake news", "filter bubble", "clickbait", "post-truth") to describe it; the old ones are insufficient. I propose that rules and guidelines that emerged under the conditions of offline media will leave us vulnerable to the dark and dangerous sides of online media. We should develop new ones.

Balgair 8y ago

> At some point maybe a decade or two it will be a smaller version of the concerns about the tobacco industry. To be fair, the comparison is applicable, but not the best. I think it's more akin to slot-machines and other forms of gambling, themselves heavily regulated (though maybe not for much longer [0]). [0] https://www.cnn.com/2018/05/14/politics/sports-betting-ncaa-supreme-court/index.html https://www.cnn.com/2018/05/14/politics/sports-betting-ncaa-...

eikenberry 8y ago

> A 6 year old's brain has no chance against a team of trained data scientists. We all know this. A team of data scientists stand no chance against millions of years of adaptive evolution. Humans are an incredibly adaptive species who inculcates nearly anything into their lives with ease. Technology is no different.

fromMars 8y ago

"A 6 year old's brain has no chance against a team of trained data scientists. We all know this." What a glib statement. Although, a meme here on Hacker News, it doesn't take a data scientist to make addictive games and video content.