cogsci folk and good random human psychologists would have predicted no change in my internet news reading behavior.
Your model of human psychologists needs updating, then. Books on hypnotism that I read when I was 11 discuss needs substitution, secondary gain, etc. that would be relevant to making such a prediction. Any good human psychologist knows to look for what gains a behavior produces.
Of course, maybe you meant “good (random human) psychologists”, not “good, random (human psychologists)”—i.e., psychologists who study the behavior of random humans, rather than people who help individual humans… in which case, that’s a really low bar for CT to leap over.
Also:
it would have failed if I had kept reading internet news sites.
This is also a really low bar, unless you specify how long you would stay away from them. In this case, three years is pretty good, but just getting somebody to stop for a few days or even a couple months is still a relatively low bar.
Your model of human psychologists needs updating, then. Books on hypnotism that I read when I was 11 discuss needs substitution, secondary gain, etc. that would be relevant to making such a prediction. Any good human psychologist knows to look for what gains a behavior produces.
Of course, maybe you meant “good (random human) psychologists”, not “good, random (human psychologists)”—i.e., psychologists who study the behavior of random humans, rather than people who help individual humans… in which case, that’s a really low bar for CT to leap over.
Also:
This is also a really low bar, unless you specify how long you would stay away from them. In this case, three years is pretty good, but just getting somebody to stop for a few days or even a couple months is still a relatively low bar.