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Comment by FearlessNebula | Hacker News Reader

It’s the phones. Our attention spans and ability to focus have been destroyed by constant little hits of dopamine.

It's not just the phones themselves, it's the modern social media apps (TikTok etc.). But I agree it seems to be twisting things up.

I think a closely related issue is how everyone, everywhere, all the time seems to be arguing about political ideologies, or making every issue about red vs. blue or liberal vs. conservative or racist vs. antiracist or whatever other way people want to split others up and then talk about it all day.

I get that it's an election year in the US and people have done this for a long time, but I swear it feels like it is reaching an absolute fever pitch these past years that is different than before.

Because it seems so all-consuming, I think it distracts people from work even more than in the past.

This! All of the companies kept shortening their dopamine cycle to compete with each other and now people can’t focus in real life for more than 5-10 seconds before they are mentally searching for the scroll button to find a new interaction.

"hits of dopamine" is not really how it works. Drugs like methamphetamine or cocaine directly give you "hits" of dopamine. Perceiving a stimuli through your senses does not directly manipulate the dopaminergic neuronal populations. It's just like any other stimuli where, if the stimulus is actually intrinsically rewarding, eventually the dopaminergic populations in your brain begin to associate the stimuli with potential for reward. This leads to an increased perception of the salience of that particular set of stimuli.

This is very different from cocaine which can cause humans to perceive stimuli as more important and potentially more rewarding even without any rewarding component to the stimuli at all.

Using a computer is not a drug. Stimuli on a screen are no different from stimuli from looking at something else. Using a smart phone does not give you "hits" of dopamine. Stop conflating normal environmental stimuli with drugs that act directly in the brain. It is dangerous because the way governments deal with drugs, and the very real addictions possible, is violence. Bringing violence into this non-violent non-coercive context is immoral.

I agree with your ultimate conclusion ("Using a computer is not a drug"), and that this is an important consideration, but to play with the forest-trees thing here, the stimulus I think most people perceive and/or conditioned to is the alert tone and/or vibration, which I believe has been argued to (not in their words) have some inherent salience, once the user is conditioned by carrying a phone around for a while, at least.

I believe this is one of the avenues argued for "Tech Addictive"/"Screens Bad" - that the intrinsic value of bzzzzzt could, at least hypothetically, be as high as, say, nudes or an "omw" text, or even your dealer texting he's 5min away; and that this inflated value is in turn projected, however briefly, onto every once-in-a-lifetime sale and useless 3am app notification about an icon set update or something.

There's also obviously the much-written-about addictive UI/UX features employed in various places. I vaguely recall one or two unfortunate email chains, maybe, but am assuming most product teams didn't go into meetings with nefarious intentions of getting their users psychologically addicted.

Nevertheless, addictions can be triggered by adjacent things, and however little dopamine "all the little red little circles all over the place" release in my grandmother's brain is probably very different from a chainsmoking coke user taking a swig from his bottle as he picks up his phone to see: - 32 New Facebook notifications! - Your dispensary order is ready for pickup! - sexybabe_notabot69 liked your profile! - Your bank account is overdrawn! - 18 new Twitter notifications! - ALL NEW SLOT MACHINES! NOW WITH DIFFERENT KINDS OF FRUIT AND SHAPES! - You're never gonna learn Spanish if you keep doing drugs, Carl! - DON'T MISS OUT! JIMMY BUFFET LIVE AT THE CASINO THIS WEEKEND! - Your order has shipped! - YOU'RE GONNA LOSE YOUR VIP STATUS IF YOU DON'T COME BACK HERE AND GAMBLE - Re: Hey - THIS WEEKEND ONLY!!!! ANNUAL ONCE-IN-A-LIFETIME SALE!

I think I could probably make the argument that maximizing for, say, MAUs/DAUs, is essentially an addictive cycle - a la "valueless reward" - in the business process, probably citing lots of business types who have written lots about how optimizing for the wrong metrics will leave your company broke and homeless too.

So, I guess I'm saying "Using a computer is not a drug", particularly as you used it, is nearly indisputably true, but somewhat misses the conversation being had (however dumb), and that it's worth looking at all of the links in the causal chain and examining how, for example, alarm fatigue and <sleep stuff> compare and contrast (and occur comorbidly with) actual addictive and/or depressive syndromes - for exactly the reasons you listed, like:

"We've found that homeless people using Facebook are xy.z% more likely to relapse on heroin, don't understand statistics, and therefore don't allow our clients to use the internet, except for this one from 2005 that lets them digitally sign the form we need to get reimbursed for the bed."

If you want to argue this then at least use the correct description of the proximal cause, "hits of glutamate in the shell of the nucleus accumbens and ventral tegmental area". It doesn't roll off the tongue and focusing on the neurochemistry ignores the context. So maybe it's better to just say it simply, "If you enjoy doing an enjoyable thing and you do it a lot you'll anticipate liking it more than reality provides on average."

Umm, you might want to read up on dopamine and how it works. The Huberman lab podcast has a great episode.

I tend to stick to journal articles. You should checkout the review articles at the Berridge lab, https://sites.lsa.umich.edu/berridge-lab/publications/

But why now? It seems like that would have happened sooner.

I suspect that phone usage went up substantially during the pandemic, and that had somewhat of a lag effect to show up in these reports.

+1 I find watching TikTok or YouTube Shorts to be damaging to my concentration compared to what I consider (for myself) to be healthy activities like reading a book, watching or listening to an interesting interview or educational like philosophy, etc.

I try to fight back by only having TikTok installed on a Chromebook that I don’t often use and for YouTube Shorts, I count the number I have watched.

On my cellphone, if I want to waste time, I prefer a quick game of Chess.

I strongly recommend the https://freedom.to service as well as their podcasts.

Phones were invented this year? Or why did they have an effect only just now?

Phonebad isn't just a city in India.

Actually, this seems correct to me.

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