Others complain that the existence of an easy medical solution prevents people from learning personal responsibility. But here we see the status-quo bias at work, and so can apply a preference reversal test. If people really believe learning personal responsibility is more important than being not addicted to heroin, we would expect these people to support deliberately addicting schoolchildren to heroin so they can develop personal responsibility by coming off of it. Anyone who disagrees with this somewhat shocking proposal must believe, on some level, that having people who are not addicted to heroin is more important than having people develop whatever measure of personal responsibility comes from kicking their heroin habit the old-fashioned way.
I remember being in a similar argument myself. I was talking with someone about how I had (long ago!) deliberately started smoking to see if quitting would be hard [1], and I found that, though there were periods where I’d had cravings, it wasn’t hard to distract myself, and eventually they went away and I was able to easily quit.
The other person (who was not a smoker and so probably didn’t take anything personally) said, “Well, sure, in that case it’s easy to quit smoking, because you went in with the intent to prove it’s easy to quit. Anyone would find it easy to stay away from cigarettes in that case!”
So I said, “Then shouldn’t that be the anti-smoking tactic that schools use? Make all students take up smoking, just to prove they can quit. Then, everyone will grow up with the ability to quit smoking without much effort.”
[1] and many, many people have told me this is insane, so no need to remind me
Eh, I don’t claim to be immune from addiction and addiction-like cravings. It’s just that, AFAICT, I can only get addicted (in the broader sense of the term) to legal stuff. See this blog post for further information. I still struggle with e.g. diet and excessive internet/computer usage.
And, in fairness, maybe I needed to smoke more to make it a meaningful test, though I did get to the point where I had cravings.
Your experiment seems to me to prove less than you’d hope about people in general—afaik there’s metabolic variation in how people react to nicotine withdrawal.
I’m afraid I don’t have anywhere near as awesome a personal story as that; I can say that my family seems to have a tradition of making kids drink some beer or alcohol a few times, though, and it seems to work.
Right, because no one actually likes the taste of alcohol, nor the inhalation of smoke; and then eventually they decide to take up drinking, or smoking, because of the psychoactive effects such as relaxation, loss of inhibitions, or getting high.
Just kidding, I’m not starting that debate again! ;-)
I don’t think that’s a good example. For the status-quo bias to be at work we need to have the case that we think it’s worse for people to have both less personal responsibility and more personal responsibility (i.e., the status-quo is a local optimum). I’m not sure anyone would argue that having more personal responsibility is bad, so the status-quo bias wouldn’t be in play and the preference reversal test wouldn’t apply. (A similar argument works for the current rate of heroin addiction not being a local optimum.)
I think the problem in the example is that it mixes the axes for our preferences for people to have personal responsibility and our preferences for people not to be addicted to heroin. So we have a space with at least these two dimensions. But I’ll claim that personal responsibility and heroin use are not orthagonal.
I think the real argument is in the coupling between personal responsibility and heroin addiction. Should we have more coupling or less coupling? The drug in this example would make for less coupling. So let’s do a preference reversal test and see if we had a drug that made your chances of heroin addiction more coupled to your personal responsiblity, would you take that? I think that would be a valid preference reversal test in this case if you think the current coupling is a local optimum.
Now that’s a good use of the reversal test!
I remember being in a similar argument myself. I was talking with someone about how I had (long ago!) deliberately started smoking to see if quitting would be hard [1], and I found that, though there were periods where I’d had cravings, it wasn’t hard to distract myself, and eventually they went away and I was able to easily quit.
The other person (who was not a smoker and so probably didn’t take anything personally) said, “Well, sure, in that case it’s easy to quit smoking, because you went in with the intent to prove it’s easy to quit. Anyone would find it easy to stay away from cigarettes in that case!”
So I said, “Then shouldn’t that be the anti-smoking tactic that schools use? Make all students take up smoking, just to prove they can quit. Then, everyone will grow up with the ability to quit smoking without much effort.”
[1] and many, many people have told me this is insane, so no need to remind me
I met someone who started smoking for the same reason you did once and is still addicted, so you couldn’t have been at that much of an advantage.
I am torn between telling you you’re insane and suggesting you take up crack on a sort of least convenient possible world principle.
Eh, I don’t claim to be immune from addiction and addiction-like cravings. It’s just that, AFAICT, I can only get addicted (in the broader sense of the term) to legal stuff. See this blog post for further information. I still struggle with e.g. diet and excessive internet/computer usage.
And, in fairness, maybe I needed to smoke more to make it a meaningful test, though I did get to the point where I had cravings.
Your experiment seems to me to prove less than you’d hope about people in general—afaik there’s metabolic variation in how people react to nicotine withdrawal.
I’m afraid I don’t have anywhere near as awesome a personal story as that; I can say that my family seems to have a tradition of making kids drink some beer or alcohol a few times, though, and it seems to work.
Right, because no one actually likes the taste of alcohol, nor the inhalation of smoke; and then eventually they decide to take up drinking, or smoking, because of the psychoactive effects such as relaxation, loss of inhibitions, or getting high.
Just kidding, I’m not starting that debate again! ;-)
I don’t think that’s a good example. For the status-quo bias to be at work we need to have the case that we think it’s worse for people to have both less personal responsibility and more personal responsibility (i.e., the status-quo is a local optimum). I’m not sure anyone would argue that having more personal responsibility is bad, so the status-quo bias wouldn’t be in play and the preference reversal test wouldn’t apply. (A similar argument works for the current rate of heroin addiction not being a local optimum.)
I think the problem in the example is that it mixes the axes for our preferences for people to have personal responsibility and our preferences for people not to be addicted to heroin. So we have a space with at least these two dimensions. But I’ll claim that personal responsibility and heroin use are not orthagonal.
I think the real argument is in the coupling between personal responsibility and heroin addiction. Should we have more coupling or less coupling? The drug in this example would make for less coupling. So let’s do a preference reversal test and see if we had a drug that made your chances of heroin addiction more coupled to your personal responsiblity, would you take that? I think that would be a valid preference reversal test in this case if you think the current coupling is a local optimum.