Search Ideas

Another relevant quote from BoI, chapter 13:

[Conventionally, people think] of decision-making as a process of selecting from existing options according to a fixed formula …

This is like the self-described addicts in #4640 flip-flopping between blocking and unblocking certain websites: they try to select from existing options rather than create new ones. Continuing (bold emphasis mine):

But in fact that is what happens only at the end of decision-making – the phase that does not require creative thought. In terms of Edison’s metaphor, the model refers only to the perspiration phase, without realizing that decision-making is problem-solving, and that without the inspiration phase nothing is ever solved and there is nothing to choose between. At the heart of decision-making is the creation of new options and the abandonment or modification of existing ones.
   To choose an option, rationally, is to choose the associated explanation. Therefore, rational decision-making consists not of weighing evidence but of explaining it, in the course of explaining the world. One judges arguments as explanations, not justifications, and one does this creatively, using conjecture, tempered by every kind of criticism. It is in the nature of good explanations – being hard to vary – that there is only one of them. Having created it, one is no longer tempted by the alternatives. They have been not outweighed, but out-argued, refuted and abandoned. During the course of a creative process, one is not struggling to distinguish between countless different explanations of nearly equal merit; typically, one is struggling to create even one good explanation, and, having succeeded, one is glad to be rid of the rest.

I have some quibbles about explanations being hard to vary, but overall I think Deutsch is right in this quote. The addicts from #4640 are certainly tempted by their current options, they struggle to create even one good alternative, and after having created it, they’d be glad to be rid of their current options.

My Conjecture

Conjecture: addiction is the result of the entrenchment of a conflict between two or more preferences in a mind.

Picture someone who wants to give up social media but also really enjoys social media. Those preferences conflict.

If the conflict is entrenched, then both preferences get to live on indefinitely. The entrenchment will not let that person give up social media. He will become addicted.

As I write in #4624, curing addiction involves finding a common preference between the conflicting parts of the addict’s mind: something both parts prefer to their initial positions. In addition, it may involve Randian ideas around introspection and getting one’s reason and emotions in the proper order.

Limitations

I don’t know whether my explanation applies to physical addictions. For example, I understand severe alcoholics run the risk of death if they quit cold turkey, so for them, it can’t be only about preferences. There’s clearly a physical component as well. So I’m limiting my thoughts on addiction to what we might call ‘addictions of the mind.’ Note, though, that addictions could come in pairs: an alcoholic could have both a physical and a mental addiction to alcohol.

Also, I don’t claim that entrenchment always causes addiction, or that every addiction is the result of entrenchment. I claim that entrenchment is a cause – maybe a common cause – of addiction. I also claim that curing addictions of the mind is an epistemological matter, not a medical/scientific one.

Another cure for procrastination is to address the pending criticism that causes the procrastination.

Say you need a new car. But you have a pending criticism that says it’s not in your budget. So you put off buying a new car. One day, you check your bank account and some of the cars on the market and find that you can actually afford one after all. In other words, you found a way to address the criticism. So then there’s no reason to procrastinate anymore.

Put in Popperian terms, the (conventional) addict asks himself, ‘who should rule (over my mind)? The part of me that wants to use social media, or the part that doesn’t?’ For all the reasons Popper and Deutsch have pointed out, the question ‘who should rule?’ is authoritarian in nature and attracts authoritarian answers. Such answers are a recipe for further entrenchment and unhappiness.

What the addict needs instead is a way to make it as easy as possible to remove bad ideas/preferences without coercion. To cure his addiction, he needs to abandon ‘who should rule over my mind?’ as a criterion for judging preferences.

Put in Popperian terms, the (conventional) addict asks himself, ‘who should rule (over my mind)? The part of me that wants to use social media, or the part that doesn’t?’ For all the reasons Popper and Deutsch have pointed out, the question is authoritarian in nature and attracts authoritarian answers. Such answers are a recipe for further entrenchment and unhappiness.

What the addict needs instead is a way to make it as easy as possible to remove bad ideas/preferences without coercion. To cure his addiction, he needs to abandon ‘who should rule over my mind?’ as a criterion for judging preferences.

My Conjecture

Conjecture: addiction is the result of the entrenchment of a conflict between two or more preferences in a mind.

Picture someone who wants to give up social media but also really enjoys social media. Those preferences conflict.

If the conflict is entrenched, then both preferences get to live on indefinitely. The entrenchment will not let that person give up social media. He will become addicted.

As I write in #4624, curing addiction involves finding a common preference between the conflicting parts of the addict’s mind: something both parts prefer to their initial positions. In addition, it may involve Randian ideas around introspection and getting one’s reason and emotions in the proper order.

I don’t know whether my explanation applies to physical addictions. For example, I understand severe alcoholics run the risk of death if they quit cold turkey, so for them, it can’t be only about preferences. There’s clearly a physical component as well. So I’m limiting my thoughts on addiction to what we might call ‘addictions of the mind.’ Note, though, that addictions could come in pairs: an alcoholic could have both a physical and a mental addiction to alcohol.

Also, I don’t claim that entrenchment always causes addiction, or that every addiction is the result of entrenchment. I claim that entrenchment is a cause – maybe a common cause – of addiction.

These claims may be too sweeping. I need to be more humble. I don’t know much about addiction to physical substances, so it may be best to limit my claims to addictions of the mind (like addictions to social media, video games, etc) rather than substances like alcohol or cigarettes.

It’s only an addiction if the presumed addict agrees that it’s an addiction (if he’s being honest).

Children are often unfairly accused of being addicted to video games or electronic devices, but they’re not conflicted about it at all. It’s the opposite: they’re learning, they’re having fun, they’re unconflicted playing video games. Parents’ worries or disagreement don’t make that behavior an addiction.

However, if the parents threaten punishment, and the child has to hide his preferences from them; or if the school schedule gets in the way and threatens to override the child’s preferences, then there’s a real risk of not just conflicting preferences, but of entrenchment, and he may indeed become addicted. So it can be a self-fulfilling prophecy.

Another relevant quote from BoI, chapter 13 (bold emphasis mine):

[Conventionally, people think] of decision-making as a process of selecting from existing options according to a fixed formula …

This is like the self-described addicts in #4640 flip-flopping between blocking and unblocking certain websites: they try to select from existing options rather than create new ones. Continuing:

But in fact that is what happens only at the end of decision-making – the phase that does not require creative thought. In terms of Edison’s metaphor, the model refers only to the perspiration phase, without realizing that decision-making is problem-solving, and that without the inspiration phase nothing is ever solved and there is nothing to choose between. At the heart of decision-making is the creation of new options and the abandonment or modification of existing ones.
   To choose an option, rationally, is to choose the associated explanation. Therefore, rational decision-making consists not of weighing evidence but of explaining it, in the course of explaining the world. One judges arguments as explanations, not justifications, and one does this creatively, using conjecture, tempered by every kind of criticism. It is in the nature of good explanations – being hard to vary – that there is only one of them. Having created it, one is no longer tempted by the alternatives. They have been not outweighed, but out-argued, refuted and abandoned. During the course of a creative process, one is not struggling to distinguish between countless different explanations of nearly equal merit; typically, one is struggling to create even one good explanation, and, having succeeded, one is glad to be rid of the rest.

I have some quibbles about explanations being hard to vary, but overall I think Deutsch is right in this quote. The addicts from #4640 are certainly tempted by their current options, they struggle to create even one good alternative, and after having created it, they’d be glad to be rid of their current options.

Rand explains that each government control necessitates another, intensifying the war between pressure groups.

I think the same is true for addicts. They try to implement some control/restriction but it just makes things worse because the other part of them retaliates. So then they try to implement even stricter controls. All the while, the war between the pressure groups of the addict’s mind intensifies.

Rather than default to adding more controls, the addict should ask whether his life was already subject to too many controls at the beginning of his addiction, and whether that caused the addiction in the first place. He should consider removing controls to lessen the entrenchment.

Many problems related to addiction and procrastination stem from people’s overoptimism about their willpower, their simultaneous pessimism about the solubility of problems, and their ignorance as to the unintended consequences of self-coercion.

More evidence that addiction is about conflicting preferences:

Like the simple food addiction. Fat people don’t like being fat, but they like food

From: https://addictionmentalhealthrecovery.quora.com/Is-addiction-actually-a-choice-or-is-that-just-what-people-tell-themselves-21

@moritz-wallawitsch In our space just now, you asked what entrenchment means. The idea above (#760) has some examples.

Recording of a space on X about addiction and procrastination with @dirk-meulenbelt, @moritz-wallawitsch, @zelalem-mekonnen, and others: https://x.com/dchackethal/status/2034440126915346625

Idea: communities.
Communities group or maybe even replace discussions.
Could live at /v/community-name.
There could be a community around nutrition, another for software engineering, a meta community for Veritula, etc.
@davies could have his own community to build his Wikipedia competitor.

Unintended consequences also apply to minds and economies.

You can’t just outlaw certain kinds of trade and expect nothing bad to happen. You certainly can’t expect people to get wealthier.

Likewise, you can’t just force yourself or others to do something and expect nothing bad to happen.

This cure also works for procrastination. https://www.youtube.com/shorts/NeSnPFlp9dk

How to stop procrastinating: https://www.youtube.com/shorts/NeSnPFlp9dk

Coercion in the economy is when a trade happens even though the price would otherwise be too high for at least one of the parties involved.

But coercion is also when a trade is forced NOT to happen even though it otherwise would have happened. Like outlawing certain types of trade through minimum-wage laws.

Coercion in the economy is when a trade happens even though the price would otherwise be too high for at least one of the parties involved.

If emotions are price signals in the mind, maybe bad emotions signal a high price. Coercing yourself to do something you don’t want to do then means to disregard that high price and do the thing anyway. You pay a high price you wouldn’t otherwise pay. Similar to coercion in the economy.

Is there a universal evil at work in both coercive economies and coercive minds? A kind of socialism of the mind?

Maybe traditional/coercive parenting enables this kind of behavior. It’s like he’s his own strict parent, punishing himself for unwanted behavior.

Maybe traditional/coercive parenting enables this kind of behavior. It’s like he’s his own strict parent, punishing himself.

Addiction, responsibility, and choice

Somebody asked, “Is addiction actually a choice or is that just what people tell themselves?” While my response is awaiting approval, I am pasting it below, lightly edited.

Judging by some of the other answers, most people who claim that addicts have no choice mention genes or neuroscience. In my opinion, your genes and your brain are limited factors in your decision making.

Genes are relatively easy to override (think bungee jumping vs inborn fear of heights, hunger strikes, etc). Culture is far harder to resist (eg peer pressure). But still, even if someone’s alcoholism started because they were pressured into drinking, they still made the choice to cave in. Once someone is addicted, it may be hard to stop, but it was still their choice to start whatever behavior became the addiction. I think that would be different only in cases where somebody physically jammed a heroin needle into your arm against your will, say, and got you hooked that way.

Ultimately, people are moral agents with ideas, preferences, and, most importantly, free will. Those are the important concepts when it comes to addiction. People cannot be reduced to their genes or their brains; they’re not ‘brain machines’ or ‘gene machines’, mindlessly enacting their brains’ or genes’ bidding. You can make a choice that limits your free will down the line, but that’s still your choice. And it’s free will that enables addicts to break the cycle. Taking that away from them by telling them it’s just their brains, they can’t help it, may actually make it harder to solve the addiction.

Your question brings up the issue of responsibility and guilt. Morality and responsibility require choice.

I view addiction as an entrenched conflict between an addict’s preferences. That’s why addicts flip flop between behaviors and become their own adversaries. Reading some of the accounts of addiction here on Quora (eg here), it seems as though addicts end up behaving like split people. They try to curb their addiction by putting up obstacles for themselves; after some time passes, they remove those obstacles and ‘indulge’. Then they go back and try more difficult obstacles, which they later remove anyway, and so on. This constant back and forth frustrates both parts and worsens the addiction over time.

If addiction really is caused by an entrenched conflict between preferences, the addict should be able to solve it by creating what’s known as a common preference. It’s a concept usually reserved to solve conflicts between people, but I think it applies just the same to conflicts within a single person. If the addict can create a new option that both sides of him prefer to their initial position, then his addiction should vanish fairly quickly because neither side has a reason to continue holding its original preference. So the conflict, and with it, the addiction, should just… go away.

For example, an addict from Quora complains about his inability to stay off certain websites. One preference of his is to return to those websites repeatedly, while another is to avoid them (and do something else instead). So he blocks the sites, then unblocks them, and so on. If he can come up with a third option both sides of him prefer, such as reading or writing a book, or analyzing movies, or going hunting, or whatever it may be, then he will solve his addiction. But is has to be something both parts of him prefer. It can’t just be more self-coercion – then it won’t work.

Somebody may make a choice that leads to addiction, realize his mistake, and try to correct it. If he makes a reasonable effort – or, as may be required for severe addictions, a near-exhaustive effort – to correct that mistake by coming up with new options both sides of him may prefer, then I think he is morally in the clear, even if he fails. People are fallible; they make mistakes all the time, even bad ones, but they can learn from their mistakes.

However, if he doesn’t even try, or if he evades the issue and pretends nothing is wrong, then he is morally guilty.

It’s wild and sad how self-abusive some people are:

When I was in my second year of studying for me degree, I got heavily into political debate forums, even more so than I am now, and along with playing a lot of computer games and watching a dozen tv shows, I fell really far behind on my studies.

As I realized that I had a problem, I made myself a solution. At the first meeting of the semester for my fraternity, I announced to my brothers that I needed their help kicking my computer addiction. I told them to be on the lookout for any time they saw me doing anything non-school related on my computer. I told them if they did, they were to tell me to stand up and take off my glasses and then slap me as hard as they could in the face. They were very enthusiastic and motivated to “help” me on this problem.

Force stems from pessimism. These people don’t think their problem is soluble.

Curing addiction

If I’m right that the cause of addiction is an entrenched conflict between preferences (#3040), then there’s a simple cure for addiction:¹ common-preference finding with yourself.

Common-preference finding is a concept I am borrowing from a parenting philosophy called Taking Children Seriously (TCS), cofounded by David Deutsch:

A common preference is a solution to a problem, or resolution of a disagreement, that all parties prefer to their prima facie positions, and to all other candidate solutions they can think of. It is the solution that pleases everyone involved in the disagreement.

I think common-preference finding is not only the solution to conflicts between people, but also to conflicts between preferences inside a single person. When such conflicts inside a single mind are entrenched, we are dealing with addiction. Since addiction is a special kind of conflict, the solution to addiction is the same as the solution to conflicts generally: common-preference finding.

Take an alcoholic. The two entrenched preferences, in the simplest possible terms, are: to drink, and to stop drinking. In this context, I think it helps to view this single alcoholic as two people. In other words, we can view each preference as a person, or an autonomous actor of sorts. Not because the alcoholic necessarily has a split personality in the clinical sense – although we’ll soon see that the addict acts as his own adversary – but because it helps illustrate the logic behind common-preference finding: it’s fundamentally no different within a single person than across people.

So again, let’s view an alcoholic as two people, just as a thought experiment. They’re forced to be roommates and combine their finances. One of them wants to drink and spend their money on alcohol, whereas the other does not want that. Moving out – choosing not to associate – is not an option because there’s no freedom of association inside a single mind. Although we may choose not to be roommates with an alcoholic, the alcoholic has no choice but to be roommates with himself.

How are these two ‘people’ to live together in harmony? As long as they’re in conflict, they will try to undermine each other. One will put the liquor in the top cabinet to make it harder to reach – the other will get it anyway. One will ask a friend to hold on to his credit card, the other will convince that same friend to give it back.

We can see the same self-adversarial dynamic in addictions to various things. For example, somebody asked (emphasis mine):

What can I do against my addiction to certain websites? I'm addicted to some sites, and I already tried to block them, but I always go back to unblock. I always waste a lot of time on them, and I'm annoyed by myself tha[t] I can[’t] stay away from them.

Do you see the dynamic? He’s like two people: person A blocks the website, until the urge to visit it gets too strong and person B unblocks it. Then person A gets annoyed at person B – who was presumably annoyed at person A for blocking the site in the first place. And the only way to get (temporary) relief from this conflict is to indulge and visit the site again – or so it seems.

This person’s frustration makes it easier to see that, again, knowledge inside a single mind does not act fundamentally differently from knowledge across minds. When you’re in conflict with somebody else, you may feel hopeless at times, like there’s no way to reach that person. If only they’d listen to reason! But that situation is not fundamentally different when that other person is yourself. People sometimes think you should be able to just ‘will away’ those conflicting preferences inside you, but that isn’t always easier to do with yourself than it is with someone else.

Somebody responded to the tortured soul above. Again we see the same self-adversarial dynamic at play:

I have the same problem.

The only solution I have is to remove your accounts completely, or make it so that you can never login again.

A good way for this is to implement a 2-way verification on your account with an Authentication app, then you logout, remove your TOKENS in the Authentication app, and then clear the web browser. You can also reset the backup codes for the 2 way authentication before log out the final time and don't save them.

Now you are out for good.

Except you’re not. Remember, the addict is his own creative adversary. He’ll find ways to get what he wants, at his own expense. So the same respondent immediately contradicts himself (emphasis mine):

I did this, but I managed to get back in by talking to the owner of the site. Why did I do this? 😔

The key is to never give yourself the permission to never under any circumstances look at the site again. … If you look at the site again, I will guarantee you that you will find a way to get back in.

In other words, this person suggests that the ‘solution’ to this conflict between preferences is to entrench it even further by having one run roughshod over the other. That’s not a solution. On the contrary, I suspect it would just frustrate that other part of him, which would then want to visit the site even more, and find even more creative ways to visit it. If somebody else disregarded your preferences, wouldn’t you feel justified in disregarding theirs? Yes. Why should that be any different when that somebody else is yourself? It isn’t.

This respondent continues:

Find something else to do. Because you can not [sic] remove a habbit [sic], you [c]an only replace it by something else. This is the secret [to] habbit building. Maybe every time you feel the urge to look at the website, take a book from your bookshelf and start reading that instead.

Now, whether reading is an actual solution to this conflict depends on the person. Given this respondent’s previous statements, I suspect he’s merely suggesting another form of self-coercion: read whether you like it or not. Again, that will not work; it may well worsen the addiction. But if reading is something both parts of him prefer to their respective initial position, then the addiction should disappear quickly because there’s no reason for either part to continue holding its initial position.

The logic would be the same for the alcoholic from our thought experiment: if part A of his mind wants to spend money on alcohol, while part B wants to spend that money on movie tickets instead, but then they find they both prefer to spend the money on a new book, then they will be in harmony again.

In short, the cure to addiction is common-preference finding with yourself. Unfortunately, there’s no predetermined recipe that you could follow. What you can do, though, is best described by the quote from The Beginning of Infinity from #760:

[W]hat is necessary for progress is to exclude ideas that fail to survive criticism, and to prevent their entrenchment, and to promote the creation of new ideas.

By definition, once you’re addicted, it’s too late to prevent entrenchment. But that still leaves two possible actions: discarding ideas that fail to survive criticism and promoting the creation of new ideas. In essence, using Veritula.

The cure for addiction is to create new ideas until you find at least one that you are completely unconflicted about.