Mason  🏃‍♂️ ✂️

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 …

“This has hacked my brain’s reward system” is a path around thinking about what you’re doing *at all.* It is a science-y sounding replacement for “witches did it.”

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.

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.

This simply doesn't follow. Knowing *that* something happens does not depend on knowing *why* it happens. It just can't create energy out of nowhere. Does it fail, because it dissipates energy through sound, light or heat? - I don't have to know it to say that it won't work.

As long as you don’t confuse the two — know that something happens vs. knowing why it does — that’s fine. But you can find instances of this confusion *everywhere*