Search Ideas

In everyday English, we say ‘probably’ to leave room for error and communicate some uncertainty. That’s fine because everyone knows we’re not assigning actual probabilities in the sense of the probability calculus.

In math, we use the probability calculus to describe the frequency of outcomes for underlying processes that look random. Like a coin toss. That’s also fine because we know all possible outcomes and we have a measure for each.

Things go wrong when people use probability even though they don’t know the outcomes (because of the growth of knowledge, say, as you write in #4762) or they have no measure for them or the underlying phenomena don’t behave randomly (again because of the growth of knowledge). Like Elon Musk tweeting we’re 90% likely to see AGI in 2026. (Not a literal quote but he says stuff like that sometimes.)

Some people try to steal the prestige of math and hide their ignorance by using the probability calculus illegitimately.

See also https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wfzSE4Hoxbc. It’s been years since I watched it but it’s bound to have related ideas.

“What do people misunderstand most about crystal meth addiction?” https://www.quora.com/What-do-people-misunderstand-most-about-crystal-meth-addiction/answer/Notmy-Realname-133

Interesting read.

A discussion can get long even if each criticism is concise.

Someone who recently joined made a bunch of low-quality posts in a short amount of time.

Need summaries at top of discussions. Could be AI generated.

Making a Minecraft clone with AI:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WxmPfBODGuw&list=PLBGDngphGY_2ZC8eNc39yPxfc_RZDtQSN

Making a Minecraft with AI:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WxmPfBODGuw&list=PLBGDngphGY_2ZC8eNc39yPxfc_RZDtQSN

If you don’t have any counter-criticisms, how could the criticisms not be decisive?

To arrive at that conclusion, you’d first need some counter-criticism anyway.

Just how ‘tiny’ is a criticism then? By reference to what principle or measure?

To incorporate some notion of decisiveness or severity, we need to be prepared to program that into our decision-making tool. I’m not aware that anyone knows how to programmatically determine the severity or decisiveness of a criticism, and I suspect outsourcing it to the user would result in the same unintended behavior we saw with the sliders for hard to vary.

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 all involved 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.

Yes, but they’ll need to be aware of the conflict, at which point both conflicting ideas/preferences exist in both minds. So that scenario reduces to a conflict of preferences inside a single mind.

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?

Be sure to mention the title of your book so others can look it up :)

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Evidence that addiction and procrastination are related: https://www.quora.com/How-do-I-stop-procrastinating-and-addiction-to-the-internet
The person in that link asks, “How do I stop procrastinating and addiction to the internet?”

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, piecemeal 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 or unilaterally unwanted behavior.

The key is to view even a small change to an idea as an entirely discrete, separate option. The small change can be enough to result in a common preference. The original preferences may get to live on the common preference as an approximation, as Popper might put it.

What Makes a Professional Epistemologist?
https://libertythroughreason.com/what-makes-a-professional-epistemologist/