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I haven't listened to the episode, so this may be off, but... our broad use of the word “addiction” can cause real harm. I would say that the opposite is (at

I haven't listened to the episode, so this may be off, but... our broad use of the word “addiction” can cause real harm. I would say that the opposite is (at least) as harmful. Quantifying and medically defining addiction narrowly has led to a lot of harm. Smoking is extremely hard to kick, with some first handers claiming that its worse than heroin. People rarely prostitute themselves (or others) for tobacco though. Which defines or quantifies addiction? Withdrawal symptoms of severe alcoholism are among the most dangerous, and deadly, much worse than cocaine. That doesn't quite capture what addiction is though. Withdrawal symptoms are short lived, and addicts of many substances are extremely likely to regress well after this part. Cannabis can be habit forming. There are no withdrawal symptoms, and motivated quitters seem to have good success rates... even returning to moderate use. OTOH, it is a very common experience that someone decides not to consume... but does, repeatedly, with impacts on other areas of life. We know that context and comorbidity is very important. I think there's no doubt that technology creates impulsive & compulsive behaviours, that people want to stop, but fail to. It's all complex. There aren't real dividing lines between procrastination, self discipline issues addiction and such. People call it addiction because it walks and quacks like addiction. I'm more inclined to say that research definitions are incorrect that layman ones. If a researcher narrows the definition to observable neurochemistry or withdrawal symptoms, excluding other addictions with similar behavioural effects... who is wrong here? That said, I haven't listened. Adding depth and nuance to our understanding of different addiction (or addiction like) experiences may be useful.

codeulike 5y ago
Really interesting take. Is there a 'more' missing from second-last para?
- dalbasal 5y ago
  yep, fixed.
anotha1 5y ago
> People rarely prostitute themselves (or others) for tobacco though. Which defines or quantifies addiction? Because you can walk to an ashtray and pick out cigarette butts, which is about as dirty as the prostitution.
- scandox 5y ago
  It is not what we put into ourselves that is dirty, but what comes out of us.
louis___ 5y ago
Exactly this. The "discover who really has the power to break these supposed “addictions.” (Hint: It’s you.)" rethoric is always pushed by lobbies for industries who do not want to be considered responsible for the harm their products cause. For example, MacDonalds and other fast-food producers have been pushing that in order to fight rampant obesity, people should do more sport, rather than have limited access to deeply addictive, processed and sugary-filled foods.
- grenoire 5y ago
  Seriously, this is about the equivalent of telling somebody with a substance dependence (I think weed is likely the best analogue, with a weaker physiological dependence, that is) to just quit it. These devices are not inhaled, injected, ingested, but they are very much a tool in releasing hormones.
  - to11mtm 5y ago
    You're absolutely correct. A few years ago I went gluten free to see if it helped with some other health issues (it did, NCGS.) So, between late 2016 and the end of 2020, I avoided gluten as best as I could. Which all but eliminates most fast food and the majority of prepackaged foods/snacks/etc. Portion control became incredibly easy. I ate when I was hungry. Sometimes people would comment on how little I was eating, but I was still energetic and kicking ass at work/etc. My body also fairly quickly started to adjust to a more 'proper' weight. (As long as I wasn't drinking. There were parts of that time of my life where I sometimes did, never to where it interfered with work but definitely was hiding from my personal life circumstances.) ANNNNYWAY. Late last year I decided to try gluten again to see whether I still had a bad reaction and/or if it was moreso specific types that caused me issues (They all kinda bother me, but barley makes me ragey....) I remember the first thing I ate from McDonalds last year. It was a double cheeseburger. I then spent the next 2 weeks straight getting at least one meal a day from McD's. It was an eye-opener on how addictive some of the components in a food can be to your neurons.
    - grenoire 5y ago
scottrogowski 5y ago
I really like the duck-typing analogy for addiction. Addiction is a complex set of causes, symptoms, and consequences and every addiction is different.
amelius 5y ago
> People rarely prostitute themselves (or others) for tobacco though. Because it's easier to get tobacco. Just ask someone, or pick up left-over pieces from the streets and build a new cigarette out of it. It's what I see certain homeless people doing all the time.
TimPC 5y ago
He doesn’t argue that the behaviours aren’t harmful at all but rather often manifest as a coping mechanism for another condition. He thinks it’s a dangerous idea to treat social media addiction as something to treat directly rather than something that likely indicates another problem. I don’t think it’s perfect because actual addictions are often caused by other problems (ex. Depression). I really wish the expert was forced to answer questions like whether it’s worthwhile to treat alcohol addiction directly without treating an underlying depression. It seems like this definition may not quite work the way he wants it to. The distinction may be if you treat the depression directly the social media addiction disappears but if you treat the depression directly the alcoholism still needs to be dealt with.
- dalbasal 5y ago
  Yeah... maybe (obviously) I shouldn't have commented without listening, caveats or no. That said, this is also true of heroin addiction. It is highly related to other, often social, malaises. This has been experimentally proven in rodents. Lonely, unhappy rodents are far more addiction prone. It has been observed in people too, notably the vietnam war example. I don't even think there is a common treatment for alcoholism anymore that doesn't relate to "underlying" issues. AA, and related group therapies are all about creating a supportive community. Social isolation is a major factor in addiction. That's kind of what I meant. These hard lines don't exist, and I think many that do exist for research purposes. Hard to study something that isn't discreetly defined. Physical withdrawal symptoms were once a primary researchers' definition of addiction, even though addicts rarely think of it that way.
  - ghodith 5y ago
    “This has been experimentally proven in rodents” If you are talking about the rat park[0] series of experiments, that conclusion has hardly been “experimentally proven.” There are many replication issues and the authors themselves don’t support the popular conclusion often taken from their research. [0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rat_Park https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rat_Park
    - 5y ago
ethbr0 5y ago
Broadly speaking, I tend to think of "addiction" (rightly or wrongly) as the errosion of free will. If someone wilfully chooses to take a substance / perform an action that has subsequent negative effects (potentially including detoxing), then that seems a fair individual decision. If someone takes a substance that destroys or decreases their future ability to choose not to take that substance in the future... that's a completely different level of danger. ... I'm not sure which categories social media and mobile gaming fall into. My gut says if it's not the latter yet, then that's only because we / they haven't gotten there yet. Because the latter is obviously a more lucrative business to be in.
- dalbasal 5y ago
  Both, I suppose. Once you start seeing people locking away their smartphone, because they don't trust themselves to abstain or moderate... that's very clearly an attempt to impose their own will on themselves. Call it whatever you want, but it's a lot like a scene from trainspotting.
- approxim8ion 5y ago
  The problem is it's hard to classify decisions as willful if your judgement is impaired, don't you think? I might think I'm doing this consciously, but I could well be brainwashed/conditioned into making the choice.
- jl6 5y ago
  Feels like you are drawing a distinction between harms, and recursive harms. Harmful things can be analyzed; the risks can be quantified and weighed up against the benefits; the downside can be limited. Recursively harmful things - which not only cause harm but precipitate further rounds of harm - are harder to analyze and have potentially infinite downside.
  - ethbr0 5y ago
    That's a good, simpler way of putting it: summing over all harms, including future ones. For single act harms, future terms don't exist. And for recursive, add in a probability weighting, if one wants to be pedantic about modeling.
slibhb 5y ago
> People rarely prostitute themselves (or others) for tobacco though I'm sure they would if tobacco was as hard to get as heroin. We often find ourselves in this position where we have to choose between a broad and a narrow defintion (for addiction in this case). Maybe there is no right way to decide but I'd say we've been too often going with the broad definition. We tell ourselves "there aren't real dividing lines" and this becomes an excuse to expand definitions. One problem with this is that broad definitions are often less useful. In the worst case, expanding a definition results in meaningless (consider words like fascism and terrorism). If addiction is "impulsive & compulsive behaviours, that people want to stop, but fail to" then anything can be addiction. Is that useful? I don't think so, I think it trivializes the concept and if that definition sticks, we'll have to come up with a new word. That's fine, I guess, but do we gain anything in that process?
- dalbasal 5y ago
  There's a difference between meaningless an imprecise. Words like fascism, species, decency, beauty, and such do have meaning. They just don't have precise, F=ma like meaning. There's also no problem defining and measuring addiction using discrete definitions such as withdrawal symptom severity, rehabilitation success rates or neurochemical signature. The problem arises when researchers (or anyone) then believes that this is the definition of addiction, when in reality it is a definition contrived for the purpose os (valid and useful) research. In a different context, it might be useful to think of these as indicators of... Usefulness is contextual. Discrete language is fine. It just isn't the way we communicate normally, and it's impossible to use only discrete language to describe things we don't understand fully.
  - slibhb 5y ago
    Obviously natural language is never absolutely discrete. Let's say there's a spectrum between fairly discrete and fairly meaningless. I'm saying we should move toward the discrete side of things. If we need to invent a new word to describe something, we can, we don't need to repurpose an old word and in doing so rob it of its meaning.
bellazeus 5y ago
>> People rarely prostitute themselves (or others) for tobacco though. Not really a fair comparison of addictive qualities. If heroin were legal, regulated, and priced accordingly, no-one would prostitute themselves (or others) for it.
jrochkind1 5y ago
> Smoking is extremely hard to kick, with some first handers claiming that its worse than heroin. People rarely prostitute themselves (or others) for tobacco though. I suspect if we continue on the path of criminalizing tobacco use, this could change... That isn't a difference between the two drugs chemically, I think, but between their social contexts (specifically criminalization/expense).

codeulike 5y ago

Really interesting take. Is there a 'more' missing from second-last para?

dalbasal 5y ago
yep, fixed.

anotha1 5y ago

> People rarely prostitute themselves (or others) for tobacco though. Which defines or quantifies addiction? Because you can walk to an ashtray and pick out cigarette butts, which is about as dirty as the prostitution.

scandox 5y ago
It is not what we put into ourselves that is dirty, but what comes out of us.

louis___ 5y ago

Exactly this. The "discover who really has the power to break these supposed “addictions.” (Hint: It’s you.)" rethoric is always pushed by lobbies for industries who do not want to be considered responsible for the harm their products cause. For example, MacDonalds and other fast-food producers have been pushing that in order to fight rampant obesity, people should do more sport, rather than have limited access to deeply addictive, processed and sugary-filled foods.

grenoire 5y ago
Seriously, this is about the equivalent of telling somebody with a substance dependence (I think weed is likely the best analogue, with a weaker physiological dependence, that is) to just quit it. These devices are not inhaled, injected, ingested, but they are very much a tool in releasing hormones.
- to11mtm 5y ago
  You're absolutely correct. A few years ago I went gluten free to see if it helped with some other health issues (it did, NCGS.) So, between late 2016 and the end of 2020, I avoided gluten as best as I could. Which all but eliminates most fast food and the majority of prepackaged foods/snacks/etc. Portion control became incredibly easy. I ate when I was hungry. Sometimes people would comment on how little I was eating, but I was still energetic and kicking ass at work/etc. My body also fairly quickly started to adjust to a more 'proper' weight. (As long as I wasn't drinking. There were parts of that time of my life where I sometimes did, never to where it interfered with work but definitely was hiding from my personal life circumstances.) ANNNNYWAY. Late last year I decided to try gluten again to see whether I still had a bad reaction and/or if it was moreso specific types that caused me issues (They all kinda bother me, but barley makes me ragey....) I remember the first thing I ate from McDonalds last year. It was a double cheeseburger. I then spent the next 2 weeks straight getting at least one meal a day from McD's. It was an eye-opener on how addictive some of the components in a food can be to your neurons.
  - grenoire 5y ago

scottrogowski 5y ago

I really like the duck-typing analogy for addiction. Addiction is a complex set of causes, symptoms, and consequences and every addiction is different.

amelius 5y ago

> People rarely prostitute themselves (or others) for tobacco though. Because it's easier to get tobacco. Just ask someone, or pick up left-over pieces from the streets and build a new cigarette out of it. It's what I see certain homeless people doing all the time.

TimPC 5y ago

He doesn’t argue that the behaviours aren’t harmful at all but rather often manifest as a coping mechanism for another condition. He thinks it’s a dangerous idea to treat social media addiction as something to treat directly rather than something that likely indicates another problem. I don’t think it’s perfect because actual addictions are often caused by other problems (ex. Depression). I really wish the expert was forced to answer questions like whether it’s worthwhile to treat alcohol addiction directly without treating an underlying depression. It seems like this definition may not quite work the way he wants it to. The distinction may be if you treat the depression directly the social media addiction disappears but if you treat the depression directly the alcoholism still needs to be dealt with.

dalbasal 5y ago
Yeah... maybe (obviously) I shouldn't have commented without listening, caveats or no. That said, this is also true of heroin addiction. It is highly related to other, often social, malaises. This has been experimentally proven in rodents. Lonely, unhappy rodents are far more addiction prone. It has been observed in people too, notably the vietnam war example. I don't even think there is a common treatment for alcoholism anymore that doesn't relate to "underlying" issues. AA, and related group therapies are all about creating a supportive community. Social isolation is a major factor in addiction. That's kind of what I meant. These hard lines don't exist, and I think many that do exist for research purposes. Hard to study something that isn't discreetly defined. Physical withdrawal symptoms were once a primary researchers' definition of addiction, even though addicts rarely think of it that way.
- ghodith 5y ago
  “This has been experimentally proven in rodents” If you are talking about the rat park[0] series of experiments, that conclusion has hardly been “experimentally proven.” There are many replication issues and the authors themselves don’t support the popular conclusion often taken from their research. [0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rat_Park https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rat_Park
  - 5y ago

ethbr0 5y ago

Broadly speaking, I tend to think of "addiction" (rightly or wrongly) as the errosion of free will. If someone wilfully chooses to take a substance / perform an action that has subsequent negative effects (potentially including detoxing), then that seems a fair individual decision. If someone takes a substance that destroys or decreases their future ability to choose not to take that substance in the future... that's a completely different level of danger. ... I'm not sure which categories social media and mobile gaming fall into. My gut says if it's not the latter yet, then that's only because we / they haven't gotten there yet. Because the latter is obviously a more lucrative business to be in.

dalbasal 5y ago
Both, I suppose. Once you start seeing people locking away their smartphone, because they don't trust themselves to abstain or moderate... that's very clearly an attempt to impose their own will on themselves. Call it whatever you want, but it's a lot like a scene from trainspotting.
approxim8ion 5y ago
The problem is it's hard to classify decisions as willful if your judgement is impaired, don't you think? I might think I'm doing this consciously, but I could well be brainwashed/conditioned into making the choice.
jl6 5y ago
Feels like you are drawing a distinction between harms, and recursive harms. Harmful things can be analyzed; the risks can be quantified and weighed up against the benefits; the downside can be limited. Recursively harmful things - which not only cause harm but precipitate further rounds of harm - are harder to analyze and have potentially infinite downside.
- ethbr0 5y ago
  That's a good, simpler way of putting it: summing over all harms, including future ones. For single act harms, future terms don't exist. And for recursive, add in a probability weighting, if one wants to be pedantic about modeling.

slibhb 5y ago

> People rarely prostitute themselves (or others) for tobacco though I'm sure they would if tobacco was as hard to get as heroin. We often find ourselves in this position where we have to choose between a broad and a narrow defintion (for addiction in this case). Maybe there is no right way to decide but I'd say we've been too often going with the broad definition. We tell ourselves "there aren't real dividing lines" and this becomes an excuse to expand definitions. One problem with this is that broad definitions are often less useful. In the worst case, expanding a definition results in meaningless (consider words like fascism and terrorism). If addiction is "impulsive & compulsive behaviours, that people want to stop, but fail to" then anything can be addiction. Is that useful? I don't think so, I think it trivializes the concept and if that definition sticks, we'll have to come up with a new word. That's fine, I guess, but do we gain anything in that process?

dalbasal 5y ago
There's a difference between meaningless an imprecise. Words like fascism, species, decency, beauty, and such do have meaning. They just don't have precise, F=ma like meaning. There's also no problem defining and measuring addiction using discrete definitions such as withdrawal symptom severity, rehabilitation success rates or neurochemical signature. The problem arises when researchers (or anyone) then believes that this is the definition of addiction, when in reality it is a definition contrived for the purpose os (valid and useful) research. In a different context, it might be useful to think of these as indicators of... Usefulness is contextual. Discrete language is fine. It just isn't the way we communicate normally, and it's impossible to use only discrete language to describe things we don't understand fully.
- slibhb 5y ago
  Obviously natural language is never absolutely discrete. Let's say there's a spectrum between fairly discrete and fairly meaningless. I'm saying we should move toward the discrete side of things. If we need to invent a new word to describe something, we can, we don't need to repurpose an old word and in doing so rob it of its meaning.

bellazeus 5y ago

>> People rarely prostitute themselves (or others) for tobacco though. Not really a fair comparison of addictive qualities. If heroin were legal, regulated, and priced accordingly, no-one would prostitute themselves (or others) for it.

jrochkind1 5y ago

> Smoking is extremely hard to kick, with some first handers claiming that its worse than heroin. People rarely prostitute themselves (or others) for tobacco though. I suspect if we continue on the path of criminalizing tobacco use, this could change... That isn't a difference between the two drugs chemically, I think, but between their social contexts (specifically criminalization/expense).