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I felt like the stuff about Kaczynski, while interesting, was a diversion. The meat is the beginning and the end: Skinner, how conditioning led to gamification

by api 2y ago

I felt like the stuff about Kaczynski, while interesting, was a diversion. The meat is the beginning and the end: Skinner, how conditioning led to gamification which led to the addiction economy, and then strategies for turning the tables and take charge by choosing what games to play and how to play them. An evolved and condensed version of the closing with practical examples and practice exercises should be taught in schools.

ta8645 2y ago
> which led to the addiction economy... If people had fulfilling lives, consumed by work, family, community, and culture, there'd be little room for such addiction. The real story is a loss of meaning; it's a crisis of nihilism, more than gamification.
- api 2y ago
  All these attention traps aren’t the only cause but they don’t help. They suck up a lot of time and time is precious. At the very least once people get into them it makes it less likely that they will do… anything else. Some of the stories I hear about younger peoples’ addiction to Instagram and TikTok are incredible. We’re talking many hours per day. It’s easily worse than TV especially since the latter is frequently a social experience. People like to watch shows together. Social media, ironically, is usually consumed alone, making it possibly less social than TV.
- pixl97 2y ago
  Where do you come up with stuff like this? Humanity is a history of addiction. Most often when you see parts of history that were not, it's because humans spending there energy in staying alive. Whenever humans start having excess capability to live you start seeing all forms of addition return. And yes, building your church 10 feet taller than the other one in town is a form of addiction that feeds egos and the sense of self. There was no great meaning behind doing it.
j_bum 2y ago
I agree. I stopped at the Kaczynski worship. I don’t understand why people are so fascinated with talking about the ideals of insane serial killers. There are plenty of other highly intelligent individuals with the same ideologies to discuss. Why glorify a murderer?
- api 2y ago
  I read Kaczynski long ago and saw a huge hole immediately. So surrogate activities replace the authentic struggle for survival. I can get that. But why is the struggle for survival better? Isn’t it just another game? Kaczynski like many other romantics rails against the system, but isn’t nature just another system? It’s an older one that we didn’t design, but didn’t we learn in the end that the matrix was inside an even older matrix which was inside an even older one…? What would it even mean to escape the “system?” How can you do that except death? If you are breathing you are playing some kind of game. Instead the question is: can we exercise some choice over what systems we give our energy to and can we influence these systems? I do think we give our energy to a lot of dumb pointless or even evil systems today, so how do we turn our attention elsewhere? For the natural system of subsistence hunting and gathering or farming the answers to these questions are “no” (little choice, play or die) and “no” (the system is billions of years old and isn’t even ours). We have more choice today in our complicated mesh of systems, or at least we have the potential of choice. This is ultimately a big part of why I am not a primitivist, reactionary, or traditionalist. Sure what we have sucks sometimes. Are we sure it was better back then? Or was it just different? I always want to ask “trads” of various types if they are sure they would be happy in the traditional state they imagine. Maybe the people who railed against nature and sought to command it with science to escape its constraints were malcontents not entirely different from Kaczynski in their emotional and personality structure. Send Ted back to 1400 and you might have an enlightenment radical materialist.
  - bm3719 2y ago
    It's been many years since I last read it, but I seem to recall Kaczynski defined surrogate activities as those beyond what one would feel substantively deprived should they be without. He gives the example of pursuit of social fulfillment like romantic affection to be not a surrogate activity, since we're programmed to feel deprived without any at all, but being a sex addict to be one. If you combine this with his notion of the power process, surrogate activities ultimately unsatisfying in the context of that. Modern man lacks the ability to fulfill the power process, and surrogate activities is the result. Kaczynski draws arrows from the fact that that man lacks autonomy and fulfillment of the power process, to surrogate activities, then to various societal problems (of which he enumerates many). So, the point isn't that surrogate activities is the terrible end state to be avoided at all costs, it's what results when they're load-bearing at a societal level.

by api 2y ago

ta8645 2y ago

> which led to the addiction economy... If people had fulfilling lives, consumed by work, family, community, and culture, there'd be little room for such addiction. The real story is a loss of meaning; it's a crisis of nihilism, more than gamification.

api 2y ago
All these attention traps aren’t the only cause but they don’t help. They suck up a lot of time and time is precious. At the very least once people get into them it makes it less likely that they will do… anything else. Some of the stories I hear about younger peoples’ addiction to Instagram and TikTok are incredible. We’re talking many hours per day. It’s easily worse than TV especially since the latter is frequently a social experience. People like to watch shows together. Social media, ironically, is usually consumed alone, making it possibly less social than TV.
pixl97 2y ago
Where do you come up with stuff like this? Humanity is a history of addiction. Most often when you see parts of history that were not, it's because humans spending there energy in staying alive. Whenever humans start having excess capability to live you start seeing all forms of addition return. And yes, building your church 10 feet taller than the other one in town is a form of addiction that feeds egos and the sense of self. There was no great meaning behind doing it.

j_bum 2y ago

I agree. I stopped at the Kaczynski worship. I don’t understand why people are so fascinated with talking about the ideals of insane serial killers. There are plenty of other highly intelligent individuals with the same ideologies to discuss. Why glorify a murderer?

api 2y ago
I read Kaczynski long ago and saw a huge hole immediately. So surrogate activities replace the authentic struggle for survival. I can get that. But why is the struggle for survival better? Isn’t it just another game? Kaczynski like many other romantics rails against the system, but isn’t nature just another system? It’s an older one that we didn’t design, but didn’t we learn in the end that the matrix was inside an even older matrix which was inside an even older one…? What would it even mean to escape the “system?” How can you do that except death? If you are breathing you are playing some kind of game. Instead the question is: can we exercise some choice over what systems we give our energy to and can we influence these systems? I do think we give our energy to a lot of dumb pointless or even evil systems today, so how do we turn our attention elsewhere? For the natural system of subsistence hunting and gathering or farming the answers to these questions are “no” (little choice, play or die) and “no” (the system is billions of years old and isn’t even ours). We have more choice today in our complicated mesh of systems, or at least we have the potential of choice. This is ultimately a big part of why I am not a primitivist, reactionary, or traditionalist. Sure what we have sucks sometimes. Are we sure it was better back then? Or was it just different? I always want to ask “trads” of various types if they are sure they would be happy in the traditional state they imagine. Maybe the people who railed against nature and sought to command it with science to escape its constraints were malcontents not entirely different from Kaczynski in their emotional and personality structure. Send Ted back to 1400 and you might have an enlightenment radical materialist.
- bm3719 2y ago
  It's been many years since I last read it, but I seem to recall Kaczynski defined surrogate activities as those beyond what one would feel substantively deprived should they be without. He gives the example of pursuit of social fulfillment like romantic affection to be not a surrogate activity, since we're programmed to feel deprived without any at all, but being a sex addict to be one. If you combine this with his notion of the power process, surrogate activities ultimately unsatisfying in the context of that. Modern man lacks the ability to fulfill the power process, and surrogate activities is the result. Kaczynski draws arrows from the fact that that man lacks autonomy and fulfillment of the power process, to surrogate activities, then to various societal problems (of which he enumerates many). So, the point isn't that surrogate activities is the terrible end state to be avoided at all costs, it's what results when they're load-bearing at a societal level.