I drew from my own experience to make the same point in this comment. I broke it down into:
push and pull motivations driving desires
*compulsive desire* in context appearing to mean something like a pull-driven behaviour. The distinction between pull and push motivations here is fuzzy, but “compulsive desire” strikes me more as more like “addiction”, which is chasing something and pull it toward you, which I expect can also exist in OCD, but some obsessive compulsions in OCD and my own have been driven by push motivations; the urge to *push* something away to get away from it, usually an intrusive thought.
In the words you’re using, what we colloquially call “addictions” are in psychiatry or other technical fields known as “dependencies”, and “addiction” as a word being reserved for especially severe cases. So it seems my experience is of ego-dystonic push motivations, dependency is typically an experience of ego-syntonic pull motivations, but drug addiction may typically be experienced as an ego-dystonic *pull* motivation. I think this reinforces your point about how we’re talking about a difference between minds, as the experiences of severe drug/alcohol addiction appear beyond what I’ve experienced, and from appearances, others participating in this thread.
(Bonus point: because I’m replying to you, Kaj, and I thought you’d get this, I’ll explain the rationale behind the distinction between dependency and addiction in rationalist terms.) A “global catastrophic risk” (GCR) is to dependency (i.e., psychological addiction) what an “existential risk” (x-risk) is to addiction (i.e,. dependency+physical addiction). Just as x-risk reducers want to reserve the term “existential risk” for those GCRs which will have a terminal and trans-generational impact, so people can distinguish between the risk of misaligned AI from self-driving cars vs. a singleton. A drug dependency can be thought of as a *personal* catastrophic risk, while a drug addiction can be thought of as an *existential* personal risk. A marijuana dependency can be catastrophically debilitating, but nobody overdoses on marijuana. People can overdose on heroin. Thus in this framework one could say someone has a marijuana *dependency* or a heroin addiction, but it’d be erroneous to speak of a marijuana *addiction*. The distinction is addictions often kill people, while dependencies most often don’t, and how we use these words has serious consequences for public health policy.
I drew from my own experience to make the same point in this comment. I broke it down into:
push and pull motivations driving desires
*compulsive desire* in context appearing to mean something like a pull-driven behaviour. The distinction between pull and push motivations here is fuzzy, but “compulsive desire” strikes me more as more like “addiction”, which is chasing something and pull it toward you, which I expect can also exist in OCD, but some obsessive compulsions in OCD and my own have been driven by push motivations; the urge to *push* something away to get away from it, usually an intrusive thought.
In the words you’re using, what we colloquially call “addictions” are in psychiatry or other technical fields known as “dependencies”, and “addiction” as a word being reserved for especially severe cases. So it seems my experience is of ego-dystonic push motivations, dependency is typically an experience of ego-syntonic pull motivations, but drug addiction may typically be experienced as an ego-dystonic *pull* motivation. I think this reinforces your point about how we’re talking about a difference between minds, as the experiences of severe drug/alcohol addiction appear beyond what I’ve experienced, and from appearances, others participating in this thread.
(Bonus point: because I’m replying to you, Kaj, and I thought you’d get this, I’ll explain the rationale behind the distinction between dependency and addiction in rationalist terms.) A “global catastrophic risk” (GCR) is to dependency (i.e., psychological addiction) what an “existential risk” (x-risk) is to addiction (i.e,. dependency+physical addiction). Just as x-risk reducers want to reserve the term “existential risk” for those GCRs which will have a terminal and trans-generational impact, so people can distinguish between the risk of misaligned AI from self-driving cars vs. a singleton. A drug dependency can be thought of as a *personal* catastrophic risk, while a drug addiction can be thought of as an *existential* personal risk. A marijuana dependency can be catastrophically debilitating, but nobody overdoses on marijuana. People can overdose on heroin. Thus in this framework one could say someone has a marijuana *dependency* or a heroin addiction, but it’d be erroneous to speak of a marijuana *addiction*. The distinction is addictions often kill people, while dependencies most often don’t, and how we use these words has serious consequences for public health policy.