As someone who values a liberal society, I hope we’d be exceedingly careful in what we label “addictive” in the same bucket as oxy or nicotine.
I also hope the reasons are obvious.
I also hope the reasons are obvious.
It should be no surprise that children can be manipulated by highly intelligent adults.
Why is this not only OK but the best way for Mark to spend every waking moment of his life?
Money thing? But often would he think about his bank account versus his products, maybe it’s pure drive?
Even his medical initiative Chan-Zuckerberg biohub is a self-congratulatory shell game. I worked in the same building as them for years, literally all they did was have parties, conferences, networking events and self-congratulatory schmooze things and never prioritized actual lab research or clinical advancements.
I mind the tolerance of society when some of these billionaires make their money on the back of negative externalities.
When "small" conflicts, like unpermissioned surveillance they use to psychological leverage against us, literally paying for content that gets eyeballs without taking any responsibility for the misinformation and hate they are financing to get produced, actively algorithmically pushing attention getting material without taking any responsibly for misinformation or hate material they are actively promoting, when they get paid for ads, but take no responsibility for taking money from scams and promoting them, and all the other seemingly "minor" but pervasive negative externalities that they hyper scale, people get hurt, and all of society gets degraded.
As everyone points out: incentives. If you don't take perverse incentives away from billionaires, or continue to give them perverse safe harbors, then those billionaires will relentlessly reinvest and innovate, in more harms, at ever greater scales. Things we still think are minor ethical issues, are not when they are hyper scaled.
This isn't some passive, life is rough sometimes situation, that people should be expected to weather. This highly financed, highly managed psychological, social and political harm, for profit. Even if the harm is distributed and seemingly low in any given incident. It adds up to a visibly degraded society.
Somehow social media gets treated with all the lack of responsibility of a neutral web site server. But they are highly active in how they operate. They should be responsible for their very active choices.
And which politician would want to vote that in? Certainly no one with any rich friends who donate to their campaigns. Which means no politician that supports this is ever going to have the budget to get elected in the first place.
And then you have the problem that you cannot just fix this in one country. Because then all these rich people will find tax loopholes to claim they’re not nationals and thus exempt from this tax. So you have to convince every rich person and every politician in every country to change.
And now that you’ve created a wealth vacuum, you need to ensure that nobody rises up to flip the system again, using their wealth to manipulate everyone into repealing these new laws.
And now we are at the stage of having to change the nature of humanity…
The problem we have is that economics is driven by scarcity and consumption; and humans are largely driven by greed (or at the very least, a desire to make life comfortable). And we can’t have a future where rich people aren’t greedy, without changing the entire way economics works. Which also requires changing human nature too.
Is it human nature to rise up once a breaking point is reached? Since I concede it is not in our nature to finish our shift at our third job and go knock on neighbors’ doors, rock the vote. (agitating to elect the least greedy capable people)
Quick, keep my hope alive!
I don’t. That presupposes that they have anything to contribute to begin with.
Their wealth beyond some millions (edit: being generous) is built on exploitation. That’s not necessarily a transferrable... skill.
So, if you want "these egomaniacal billionaires" to end world hunger then you're effectively asking them to form private militias and impose peace by force in the developing world. The new colonialism. Is that what you want?
>to end world hunger then you're effectively asking them to form private militias and impose peace by force in the developing world
Does this happen to be your space? If this comment were posted to a forum of experts, I imagine they would hotly debate whether a range of ideas would work.
I struggle to imagine the private militia concept would be suggested in that context; with that said, I know nothing.
This obviously means that tech is going to have no choice but to do "age verification". And I don't think there's much of a way to do that that wouldn't be uncomfortable for a lot of us.
I understand why they would want the opposite. They can f*ck right off.
In fact it's even in the EU Commission's official guidance on how it should be done : https://eur-lex.europa.eu/legal-content/EN/TXT/PDF/?uri=OJ:C... (point 46).
For example see the glossary in https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Substance_dependence
Substances like caffeine, sugar, and painkillers are definitely still referred to as “addictive”.
Whereas substances like sertraline (antidepressant) are referred to as a “dependence” because it’s dangerous to discontinue abruptly (as you said) but there isn’t any psychological addiction involved.
Based on the fact that many people here disagree about fundamental things, as well as the fact that “liberal” is a highly overloaded term, I think it should be obvious that it’s not obvious what you mean.
Personally, I am leery of any technical definition of “addictive” that operates outside the traditional chemical influences on physiology. So I would not describe gambling in that sense.
One might have a malady that causes gambling to take on the same physiological vibe for you, but that’s not what it means for gambling itself to be addictive.
Fortunately it also has minimal to no value to society, so even if we overreacted and banned it completely it’d be fine
You can still smoke, drink, get high, and gamble. We ask that you limit these to places that minimize the damage you do to other people.
If that is the (heavily simplified) case, is there a distinction for you between a chemically-induced dopamine release from smoking and, say, and a button you can press that magically releases dopamine in your brain?
I don’t smoke, but if I did, I’m also fairly certain I would find it hard to stop.
If you don’t want to call that addiction, fine, but you can’t deny that it happens.
One is physical addiction and the other is psychological.
But I'm also feeling a parallel here to people who think that mental health issues aren't real medical problems and that people can just "get better" whenever they want. And that's concerning. We shouldn't be more lenient on things that are "only" psychologically addictive.
There is a particular hard drug that I could be easily addicted to if it were cheaper and more accessible. Nothing else like it gives me irresistible craving for more. Not nicotine, ADHD meds or speed, benzos, and not even opioids have the same effect. So after I discovered this about myself, I went on a little journey to self test myself other possible addictions.
Social media? Nope. Video games and tv? yes. Gambling, hoarding, shopping: No. Sex: yes. Exercise: yes
I can’t rationalize any of it.
It not at all certain that you would find it hard to stop if you suddenly decided to try smoking. There would naturally be a risk, but how high that risk is is a debated subject if you have none of the risk factors for addictions.
In the US, regardless of what type of addiction you have, it is considered mental health. Open market insurance like ACA does not cover mental health, so there is no addiction treatment available. Sure, you can be addicted to a substance where your body needs a fix, but it is still treated as mental care. This seems to go directly against what your thoughts are on addiction, but that doesn't say much as you're just some rando on the interweb expressing their untrained opinions. So am I, but I'm not the spouting differing opinions with nothing more to back them up than how you feel.
Indeed, and if we want those behaviours to remain as things considered to be choices rather than the nearly inescapable negative life-destroying feedback loops (activities with high addiction potential, for lack of a more concise term), they should be treated with special reverence and highly restricted from outside influence. Put another way, if we want liberal societies to be sustainable, I'd argue all forms of overtly addictive behaviour should—in many cases—be banned from public advertisement and restricted from surreptitious advertisement in entertainment, and we should have definitions for those.
For ages we've not had cigarette ads on public broadcasts, and yet people still "choose" to smoke, meanwhile there's been a increasing presence of cigarettes among Oscar winning movies in the last 10 years.
If you are addicted to smoking and trying to avoid being reminded of it, you'd realistically have to stop watching movies and participating in that aspect of culture in order to regain control of that part of your life. Likewise, with gambling, you don't only have to stop going to the casino, you have to stop engaging with sports entertainment wholesale.
It's one thing if an adult smokes and gambles, it's another thing if a child does. It seems to me that stuff you do in youth tends to stick around for life.
Can we definitely say gambling addiction is less serious than alcohol addiction when there's individuals who find the former harder to quit than the latter?
The problem is that this runs directly into the evidence that is mounting from GLP-1 agonists.
A lot more things are tied to the pathways we associate with "addiction" than we thought.
Not careful enough apparently: Nicotine isn't that addictive on its own, tobacco is.
Intuitively, why would you chew nicontine gum to stop smoking if it was just as addictive as cigarettes?
That is a very strong claim to make when the current scientific consensus strongly disagrees.
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC4536896/
>However, nicotine can also act non-associatively. Nicotine directly enhances the reinforcing efficacy of other reinforcing stimuli in the environment, an effect that does not require a temporal or predictive relationship between nicotine and either the stimulus or the behavior. Hence, the reinforcing actions of nicotine stem both from the primary reinforcing actions of the drug (and the subsequent associative learning effects) as well as the reinforcement enhancement action of nicotine which is non-associative in nature.
You can find other studies about the addictiveness differences between cigarettes, vapes, chew, patches, pouches, etc. Basically, the methods with the most ceremony and additional stimulus are more addictive.
* I'd even change this to say modern nicotine salts in vapes are likely to lead to dependency faster than tobacco. A 5% nicotine salt pod will contain as much nicotine as a full pack of cigarettes, and so vapers tend to consume far more nicotine in a single sitting than they ever could with a cigarette. That combined withe constant availability means users of nicotine vapes & pouches (aka, no tobacco) are likey to have a more difficult time quitting than cigarette smokers.
Bottom line, its still dangerous to dismiss nicotine's addictive potential with or without tobacco as a delivery method.
I wish we'd delete that word from the English language.
To be sure. But still an obviously dumb thing for a CEO to say though.
This just comes off as poorly obfuscated self selection. You own a bunch of Meta, Alphabet and other media stocks?