Too many bad takes built on reductive ideas about why people do what they do, especially online — less, I think, because they have useful explanatory power, and more because they allow people to skip entirely the layer containing desires they don’t endorse or fully understandhttps://twitter.com/primalpoly/status/1092064394920349697 …
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Mm, I don't know. For me the experience itself does feel (mildly) addictive. The urge to keep refreshing to see what's new, to click my notifications, to keep scrolling even if I'm not that engaged... I think it's fair to describe those as "hacking my brain's reward system"
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IMO this can be consistent w the above; just that "hacking my brain's reward system" lacks explanatory power for anything interesting & people don't seem to notice. "I feel a daily compulsion to hug my boyfriend first thing when I get home. He's hacked my brain's reward system."
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The content is arbitrary, the system has been designed to optimize attention capturing. Also, skipping concrete explanations is completely acceptable. I don't have to explain why *this particular* perpetual motion machine doesn't work - it just violates laws of thermodynamics.
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If you don’t understand why this particular perpetual motion machine doesn’t work, you don’t understand why it violates the laws of thermodynamics, and thus you don’t know that it’s a perpetual motion machine. And you haven’t even noticed how little you know. This is the danger.
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Yes, but the assumption that “an optimization process running on billions of brains to get them to come back and spend more time” doesn’t result in a better product — indeed, a worse one! — is *really* impressive spin
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Reductionism has got to go. What an overly constraining view it is, too - so many true explanations are off the table!
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"there exists a description of my behavior at a bio-chemical level" acting as an explanation for behavior of an individual. The individual doesn't exist at the bio-chemical level!
Thanks. Twitter will use this to make your timeline better. UndoUndo
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Removal of personal agency is such a growing trend across all problems involving politics and technology these days
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Yet there seems to be a spectrum from sitting alone in a dark room and heroin (or is it fentanyl now?)
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