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Comment by FumblingBear | Hacker News Reader

I'd like to think I have some level of willpower and self control, but incremental games like Kittens Game are my kryptonite. There's something so compelling to me about seeing the numbers go up and I don't even fully understand why.

If you enjoy that type of game, I highly recommend Kittens Game as the pinnacle of the genre—especially since it doesn't feature any microtransactions or dark patterns, but be warned: it can be incredibly addicting.

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The cure to the skinner box addiction is to cheat. It's kinda like that stuff that smokers use to remove the satisfied feeling.

Take all the ones you can find that aren't DRM'd. Put them on a list to open when you get the itch and open up ye olde javascript console after playing one for a day or two.

I did this but with nonogram puzzles. I built a solver to alleviate my addiction to solving them myself.

Skinners box my dude. A probabilistic reward is a greater dopamine spike than straight up cocaine use.

Very interesting idea! I think I've heard something like this before on giving reward randomly yielding to addictive behaviours, like gambling. Do you have any recommended reference on this idea?

The keywords you might be looking for are "partial/intermittent reinforcement" and "variable ratio schedule." The original descriptions are in a 1957 book by Ferster and Skinner, but any psychology textbook should have a description of them in the chapter on conditioning.

Stanford Neuroscience Lectures. Dr. Spoolansky. Free online on Youtube. Forgot which lecture covered it. The whole class is worth a watch. Including the forbidden lecture if you can find it (lets just say it ruffles some feathers by noting some commonalities between OCD and spiritual ritualistic behavior).

> Stanford professor Robert Sapolsky gave the opening lecture of the course entitled Human Behavioral Biology and explains the basic premise of the course and how he aims to avoid categorical thinking.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NNnIGh9g6fA&list=PL848F2368C...

Works much better in dog training. Pretty sure it works better for training me too.

I love that it doesn’t make me feel punished if I ignore it for a few days.

That's why I like quant trading: you get to see real $ numbers go up (hopefully).

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