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> I think you missed the entire point of the article? No. It is a frame challenge. The blogpost says "I’m hopelessly addicted to little dopamine bursts provid

> I think you missed the entire point of the article? No. It is a frame challenge. The blogpost says "I’m hopelessly addicted to little dopamine bursts provided by algorithmically optimized technology (in my case – Reddit, video games, phone messages, and having music or tv shows in the background)," The solution to that is not to do nothing. If you have this problem you precisely should do something. Hiking is a good idea. Or sitting down with friends and just chatting, without any of those distractions. Or working on a project where you concentrate on your tools (preferably physical tools) for days on end to achieve some results. > Camping/hiking/exploring outdoors is the exact opposite of doing nothing. Camping/hiking/exploring outdoors is also the exact opposite of being "hopelessly addicted to little dopamine bursts provided by algorithmically optimized technology".

SamBam 4y ago
Precisely. Everyone is telling you that camping wouldn't be in the rules of the challenge, but the point is that the challenge seemed like an odd solution to the problem. Obviously a person can just choose to challenge themselves with 24 hours of no stimulation, that's fine as a weird, maybe interesting experiment, and I'm glad the author wrote about it. It's just that the author seem to have a different reason in mind when he created the challenge. It's a little bit like the commonly-referenced XY problem in programming. Someone thinks that they really need to do Y in order to solve X, without having stepped back and confirm that Y really is necessary to solving x. Three days after the challenge, how is the author going up be different? Most likely they're never going to do that again. But a week-long "experiment" with getting outdoors more often might have turned into lasting change.
yCombLinks 4y ago
He didn't say he's trying to solve that. You're reading in things he did not say. You're trying to shoehorn whatever your solution is to that particular problem. (and I love camping / hiking / etc). That's a completely different question than "Can I go 24 hours without any external stimulation".
buffington 4y ago
I completely agree with you, but you quoted the blog post and left out the most important part of the author's sentence: > I wanted to see if I had the willpower to cut off all stimulation for an extended period of time. To be fair to you though, that part of the sentence was preceded with the part you quoted, making it natural to assume that the author believes the solution to his problem of being addicted to what he says he's addicted to is to have zero stimulation. That doesn't mean my assumption is correct though, and it seems even less so given the plain language I quoted above.

SamBam 4y ago

Precisely. Everyone is telling you that camping wouldn't be in the rules of the challenge, but the point is that the challenge seemed like an odd solution to the problem. Obviously a person can just choose to challenge themselves with 24 hours of no stimulation, that's fine as a weird, maybe interesting experiment, and I'm glad the author wrote about it. It's just that the author seem to have a different reason in mind when he created the challenge. It's a little bit like the commonly-referenced XY problem in programming. Someone thinks that they really need to do Y in order to solve X, without having stepped back and confirm that Y really is necessary to solving x. Three days after the challenge, how is the author going up be different? Most likely they're never going to do that again. But a week-long "experiment" with getting outdoors more often might have turned into lasting change.

yCombLinks 4y ago

He didn't say he's trying to solve that. You're reading in things he did not say. You're trying to shoehorn whatever your solution is to that particular problem. (and I love camping / hiking / etc). That's a completely different question than "Can I go 24 hours without any external stimulation".

buffington 4y ago

I completely agree with you, but you quoted the blog post and left out the most important part of the author's sentence: > I wanted to see if I had the willpower to cut off all stimulation for an extended period of time. To be fair to you though, that part of the sentence was preceded with the part you quoted, making it natural to assume that the author believes the solution to his problem of being addicted to what he says he's addicted to is to have zero stimulation. That doesn't mean my assumption is correct though, and it seems even less so given the plain language I quoted above.