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What’s the reasoning behind this claim?
I found a clip of Milton Friedman refuting my point:
… prohibition encouraged alcoholism rather than the opposite. To the young people in particular, it became an adventure to go out and get drunk, to go to a speakeasy. Today, with heroin illegal, it pays a heroin pusher to create an addict because, given that it’s illegal, it’s worth his while to spend some money on getting somebody else hooked. Because once hooked, he has a captive audience. If heroin were readily available everywhere, it wouldn’t pay anybody to create an addict, because the addict could then go anywhere to buy.
So if drugs were legal, sellers would have little to no incentive to turn their customers into addicts since the customers could go anywhere to get the drugs. Also, the sellers could always get new customers, so they don’t need to get customers addicted in the first place.
We can redefine ‘hard to vary’, but we’d need still a working implementation in the form of computer code.
… Demeter scores 25% and axial tilt scores 100%.
Now do this universally, for any given theory.
Rational Decision-Making
Expanding on #2112…
If an idea, as written, has no pending criticisms, it’s rational to adopt it and irrational to reject it. What reason could you have to reject it? If it has no pending criticisms, then either 1) no reasons to reject it (ie, criticisms) have been suggested or 2) all suggested reasons have been addressed already.
If an idea, as written, does have pending criticisms, it’s irrational to adopt it and rational to reject it – by reference to those criticisms. What reason could you have to ignore the pending criticisms and adopt it anyway?
Or, simplified:
It is rational to adopt only those ideas which, as written, don’t have pending criticisms, and to reject ideas that do.
If it introduces falsehood only fallibly, then it might fail sometimes, and the target idea would still be true after all. So no, it would need some infallible way – ie, a criterion of turth.
Couldn’t the mechanism introduce falsehood by other means? For example by introducing contradictions. Then it wouldn’t need a criterion of truth.
The given algorithm has a complexity, independent of [the implementation]
No, the complexity depends on the implementation.
Some people think if they’re hungry that means they’re losing fat. I think that’s wrong.
You can eat a single meal at Cheesecake Factory for 2500kcals and be hungry again an hour later.
Or you can eat low-calorie foods throughout the day and not get very hungry until it’s actually time to eat again.
Some people might have trouble reaching their maintenance calories if they ate nothing but chicken breast, boiled potatoes, and broccoli for a day. They’d feel very full throughout the day.
I don’t expect much correlation, if any, between how satiating and how calorically dense some food is.
The good news for people who enjoy volume eating is that you can eat a lot while losing fat as long as you do it right. That means foods high in fiber and/or water (again, potatoes) and lean proteins. Vegetables generally work well.
The most important thing for fat loss is a calorie deficit, not hunger. Hunger is not a reliable indicator that you’re losing fat.
Don’t go off of feelings. Count calories, macronutrients, and fiber, and weigh yourself to track progress.
Need time indicators again, for when an idea was posted, like we used to have. But shorter: something like ‘1h’
Need time indicators again, for when an idea was posted, like we used to have. But shorter: something like ‘1h’
Not if the criticism is clear and concise. That should be incentivized somehow.
Need summaries at top of discussions. Could be AI generated.
Making a Minecraft with AI:
Yes, but they’ll need to be aware of the conflict, at which point both conflicting ideas/preferences exist in both minds.
Idea: does the entrenchment not even strictly need to be between preferences that are both inside the same mind?
Could entrenchment between preferences across minds also cause addiction for at least one or both of them?
Re consciously deciding to do something: once you’ve automatized some behavior, it’s hard to undo it just by virtue of being automatized, not necessarily because of entrenchment.
I just noticed that the old TCS glossary has an entry on entrenchment and entrenched habits:
Entrenched ideas are ideas that you are unable to abandon even when they fail to survive rational criticism in your mind.
An entrenched habit is something that you can't stop doing even if you consciously decide to, or which makes you feel bad when you consciously force yourself to stop doing it.
I’ve looked at the glossary many times over the years, so maybe the seeds of my ideas about addiction came from it.
I just noticed that the old TCS glossary has an entry on entrenchment and entrenched habits:
Entrenched ideas are ideas that you are unable to abandon even when they fail to survive rational criticism in your mind.
An entrenched habit is something that you can't stop doing even if you consciously decide to, or which makes you feel bad when you consciously force yourself to stop doing it.
This is pretty cool! I think the part about entrenched habits gets pretty close, though it doesn’t say much about the nature of the entrenchment or how to solve it. Also, if you feel bad when you force yourself to stop doing something, you might feel bad because of the force, not because of the habit. My guess is they’re thinking more in terms of static memes.
Re consciously deciding to do something: once you’ve automatized some behavior, it’s hard to undo it just by virtue of being automatized, not necessarily because of entrenchment. The trouble with ‘consciously deciding’ to do something in any case is that the conscious parts of your mind may be on board but other parts may not. But that discrepancy itself need not be entrenched.
All that said, I’ve looked at the glossary many times over the years, so it’s definitely possible the seeds of my ideas about addiction came from it.
Here’s a specific example of a working cure for addiction to sugar soda. Apparently, many people struggle with that.
Picture a man who likes the taste of soda but dislikes its fattening effects. (Sugar sodas are high in calories.) And let’s say the conflict between these two preferences is entrenched because his wife doesn’t want him to drink soda (for health reasons, say), and she chastises him, so he hides it from her and can’t talk about it openly, which makes error correction harder. In addition, he was made fun of as a kid for being overweight, so he feels awful whenever he thinks about dieting and can’t deal with the problem effectively. Such conditions are a breeding ground for entrenchment.
The solution in this case is to switch from regular sugar soda to the corresponding diet-soda equivalent. Like switching from Coke to Diet Coke or Coke Zero. It tastes virtually the same and has no calories. So now both parts of him get what they want. :)
This solution is especially interesting because it solves the addiction without having to make any major changes to behavior. A small change – switching from regular Coke to Diet Coke – removes the conflictedness and thus the addiction. More or less the same behavior can continue, showing that addiction is about conflicts between ideas, not about any specific behavior.
The key is to view even a small modification to an idea as an entirely discrete, separate option. The small change can be enough to result in a common preference.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?