Your fundamental theory is that Facebook and Twitter, while not actually changing brain chemistry, are so addictive they are like a dangerous drug.
Is there some way to test for this? What allows you to know this? Is there a way to “test” an online service for addictiveness? Is Twitter more or less addictive than world of warcraft? How much does possible mental degradation in Trump’s mind affect his propensity for addiction?
The biological answers I’m aware of are centered around expression of ΔFosB and related activity in the nucleus accumbens, and are seen in both substance and behavioral addictions.
From Wikipedia: “[b]ased upon the accumulated evidence, a medical review from late 2014 argued that accumbal ΔFosB expression can be used as an addiction biomarker and that the degree of accumbal ΔFosB induction by a drug is a metric for how addictive it is relative to others.”
So, I do think they actually “change brain chemistry.” (Although as mentioned above, I think just about everything “changes brain chemistry” but I would expect overtime to see Twitter and Facebook to change it following the patterns seen with other addictions).
So we could measure different kinds of social media usage in certain populations to quantify this, and I would expect to see a lower amounts in a control group and higher amounts populations that are “very online.” (90%) Would also be good to compare to a never online population, if one could be found.
Then we’d probably also want more evidence that social media is playing a causal role, and would want to make an RCT of people who have never experienced social media and pair them with something thought to be addictive (Facebook) vs. something more inert (e,g, The WELL?)… would that pass an IRB? I don’t know. Maybe something more longitudinal with people in the first group to see if their social media use increased or decreased and if that was correlated with ΔFosB.
I read studies, but have never designed one, so I’d want to talk with some who has more experience.
But, short answer: yes, my argument here is falsifiable.
As far as what’s more or less addictive, FosB may help out there as well, but I’m not as optimistic about it. I don’t study addiction professionally, but I believe there’s something like an interaction between an addiction phenotype and a particular drug or behavior. I may be reading that all wrong and talking out of my ass here, but at first glance it strikes me that way. So what’s very addictive for someone may not be as addictive for someone else.
Looking on Google Scholar, in the last 10 years or so it does seem like there’s more interest in liability to addiction (aka addiction liability) as in who’s predisposed to what. One specifically on IT here.
But forget all of that for a second and just ask yourself “What incentive does Twitter have to not make their service as addictive as possible for as many people as possible?” Ethics? Guilt? Not wanting to zombify all of their friends and family? There’s very few I can think of. The money is all in discovering how to get people more and more engaged.
In some ways Twitter is worse than cocaine because cocaine is more or less always cocaine. Cocaine doesn’t monitor you to see how you use it and change itself or the way it’s delivered to become more addictive in ways that are intentionally imperceptible to you.
Right now, you may not fit a phenotype of someone who can become addicted to Twitter, but expanding the circle of the would-be addicted to include you is likely just an engineering problem.
Then we’d probably also want more evidence that social media is playing a causal role, and would want to make an RCT of people who have never experienced social media and pair them with something thought to be addictive (Facebook) vs. something more inert (e,g, The WELL?)… would that pass an IRB?
One more ethical setup would be to use existing users and do a study of how many succeed with an intention of stopping to use a given website.
If a lot of people who decide to do a two week Facebook fast fail to follow through on the intention, that would be a sign of it being very addictive.
Your study can do that with a bunch of different behaviors and then rank how successful people are with the fast.
Ok. It’s falsifiable but requires expensive evidence you don’t have an easy way to collect. What do you propose we do? Like you said, the economics currently reward sites for being as addictive as possible. Moreover, better ai methods will allow generation of even more addictive sites. Or just optimization—compare tik tok to YouTube. Tiktok is a set of very short clips that have become super clickbait through careful winnowing. Every single clip has someone in the top 1 percent of attractiveness… maybe higher than that...or something immediately violent or dramatic or funny.
It would be like the kind of junk food you would get if you had realtime feedback to what people were eating and had millions of samples to pick from.
In the case of Donald Trump, supporting at least a temporary ban (I’m on the fence about whether a permanent ban is appropriate) is more optimally moral than continuing to allow him to use Twitter. I see two reasons for this. More explicitly than I stated in the article—first, it’s better for Donald Trump’s mental health
The second, I just re-read the reasoning behind the Twitter decision to ban him on the grounds of their glorification of violence policy, and in the context of where the country was on January 8th, it 50% makes sense (and that 50% is the part that counts in terms of the ban). The 50% good—It reads like a company that’s self-aware of how dangerous their platform can be and is trying to reduce the proximate harm. The 50% bad—it’s taking no responsibility for their hand in creating software that coaxed it to that point and profited from it all along the way.
I realize there’s plenty of other accounts saying awful things on Twitter, but if you know Wikipedia policy that sounds like a WP:OTHERSTUFFEXISTS argument. That would be an argument where the existence of something bad somewhere else is used to justify allowing something else bad to continue.
If you write a typical clickbait buzzfeed-esque article it gets shared, makes some money form ads, and then is likely forgotten… not to mention it has all of these negative externalities (e.g. using fear and outrage to get attention).
A micropayment royalty system would incentivize people to produce content that’s valuable rather than clickbait… sort of like if you write a good journal article, it get’s cited, quoted and has not just a long tail effect but a kind of a stacked cumulative long tail effect from not just the views on the original piece of content but from the views of everything that incorporated it. We want people to make more content like this and to get paid for doing it, but there’s not good mechanisms to pay them for this now, although people are working on it.
Then you can talk about having very cheap transaction fees, which in turn allows you to do whole new kinds of transactions in the world, and so you can talk about a world where maybe instead of playing games and going to websites and watching videos where you’re paying for [00:28:00] by watching ads, you pay for it by paying one hundredth of a penny. Does that matter? Well, guess what comes along with paying for it by watching ads? Whoever is showing you the ad, has a very strong motivation to spy on you, that’s just inherent. People have said, “You know if you’re not paying for this service, you’re not the customer, you’re the product.”
I realize there’s plenty of other accounts saying awful things on Twitter, but if you know Wikipedia policy that sounds like a WP:OTHERSTUFFEXISTS argument. That would be an argument where the existence of something bad somewhere else is used to justify allowing something else bad to continue.
When it comes to cases where a person has a duty to treat people fairly, other stuff exists is a valid argument. Black people are jailed much more for drug use then white people is a valid argument to be made against a black person being jailed for drug use.
Do you think that Twitter doesn’t have such a duty to treat people with equal standards?
A tweet by the PotUS has large effects, the same tweet by me would have none. Should the tweets be equally judged by just the actual words, or equally judged by the effects they are likely to have?
When it comes to cases where a person has a duty to treat people fairly, other stuff exists is a valid argument. Black people are jailed much more for drug use then white people is a valid argument to be made against a black person being jailed for drug use.
Agree that case is a valid argument. More (but not perfectly) analogous to this situation would be if someone was arrested for drug use and said “hey, I know this other person that’s been using drugs way longer than I have and they haven’t been arrested, why are you arresting me why you should be arresting them for being the more egregious offenders?”
Do you think that Twitter doesn’t have such a duty to treat people with equal standards?
I’m not sure if you mean this in a normative or descriptive sense. In a normative sense, yes, and I would apply this to people and corporations.
In a descriptive sense, what incentives does Twitter have to treat people with equal standards? Being morally good? Will that make their shareholders and advertisers more money? Would the board of directors suggest it? Capitalism doesn’t necessarily optimize for the moral goodness of products.
There are ways to use capitalism to improve capitalism. There’s a lot of “Metcalfe’s law determinists.” Like “there is no alternative to this network because it’s the large network.” But any network is just a spot on a much larger canvas of possible networks, any number of which could make money and make it more morally.
Clubhouse isn’t a perfect example, but it does show that people are willing to use networks operating in different paradigms. Sure, Clubhouse didn’t stick the landing after it’s growth spike, but someone else could.
Your fundamental theory is that Facebook and Twitter, while not actually changing brain chemistry, are so addictive they are like a dangerous drug.
Is there some way to test for this? What allows you to know this? Is there a way to “test” an online service for addictiveness? Is Twitter more or less addictive than world of warcraft? How much does possible mental degradation in Trump’s mind affect his propensity for addiction?
Why do you believe in dualism? (That would be required for reading something on a computer not changing brain chemistry)
Ok, externally changing it.
The biological answers I’m aware of are centered around expression of ΔFosB and related activity in the nucleus accumbens, and are seen in both substance and behavioral addictions.
From Wikipedia: “[b]ased upon the accumulated evidence, a medical review from late 2014 argued that accumbal ΔFosB expression can be used as an addiction biomarker and that the degree of accumbal ΔFosB induction by a drug is a metric for how addictive it is relative to others.”
So, I do think they actually “change brain chemistry.” (Although as mentioned above, I think just about everything “changes brain chemistry” but I would expect overtime to see Twitter and Facebook to change it following the patterns seen with other addictions).
So we could measure different kinds of social media usage in certain populations to quantify this, and I would expect to see a lower amounts in a control group and higher amounts populations that are “very online.” (90%) Would also be good to compare to a never online population, if one could be found.
Then we’d probably also want more evidence that social media is playing a causal role, and would want to make an RCT of people who have never experienced social media and pair them with something thought to be addictive (Facebook) vs. something more inert (e,g, The WELL?)… would that pass an IRB? I don’t know. Maybe something more longitudinal with people in the first group to see if their social media use increased or decreased and if that was correlated with ΔFosB.
I read studies, but have never designed one, so I’d want to talk with some who has more experience.
But, short answer: yes, my argument here is falsifiable.
As far as what’s more or less addictive, FosB may help out there as well, but I’m not as optimistic about it. I don’t study addiction professionally, but I believe there’s something like an interaction between an addiction phenotype and a particular drug or behavior. I may be reading that all wrong and talking out of my ass here, but at first glance it strikes me that way. So what’s very addictive for someone may not be as addictive for someone else.
Looking on Google Scholar, in the last 10 years or so it does seem like there’s more interest in liability to addiction (aka addiction liability) as in who’s predisposed to what. One specifically on IT here.
But forget all of that for a second and just ask yourself “What incentive does Twitter have to not make their service as addictive as possible for as many people as possible?” Ethics? Guilt? Not wanting to zombify all of their friends and family? There’s very few I can think of. The money is all in discovering how to get people more and more engaged.
In some ways Twitter is worse than cocaine because cocaine is more or less always cocaine. Cocaine doesn’t monitor you to see how you use it and change itself or the way it’s delivered to become more addictive in ways that are intentionally imperceptible to you.
Right now, you may not fit a phenotype of someone who can become addicted to Twitter, but expanding the circle of the would-be addicted to include you is likely just an engineering problem.
One more ethical setup would be to use existing users and do a study of how many succeed with an intention of stopping to use a given website.
If a lot of people who decide to do a two week Facebook fast fail to follow through on the intention, that would be a sign of it being very addictive.
Your study can do that with a bunch of different behaviors and then rank how successful people are with the fast.
Ok. It’s falsifiable but requires expensive evidence you don’t have an easy way to collect. What do you propose we do? Like you said, the economics currently reward sites for being as addictive as possible. Moreover, better ai methods will allow generation of even more addictive sites. Or just optimization—compare tik tok to YouTube. Tiktok is a set of very short clips that have become super clickbait through careful winnowing. Every single clip has someone in the top 1 percent of attractiveness… maybe higher than that...or something immediately violent or dramatic or funny.
It would be like the kind of junk food you would get if you had realtime feedback to what people were eating and had millions of samples to pick from.
In the case of Donald Trump, supporting at least a temporary ban (I’m on the fence about whether a permanent ban is appropriate) is more optimally moral than continuing to allow him to use Twitter. I see two reasons for this. More explicitly than I stated in the article—first, it’s better for Donald Trump’s mental health
The second, I just re-read the reasoning behind the Twitter decision to ban him on the grounds of their glorification of violence policy, and in the context of where the country was on January 8th, it 50% makes sense (and that 50% is the part that counts in terms of the ban). The 50% good—It reads like a company that’s self-aware of how dangerous their platform can be and is trying to reduce the proximate harm. The 50% bad—it’s taking no responsibility for their hand in creating software that coaxed it to that point and profited from it all along the way.
I realize there’s plenty of other accounts saying awful things on Twitter, but if you know Wikipedia policy that sounds like a WP:OTHERSTUFFEXISTS argument. That would be an argument where the existence of something bad somewhere else is used to justify allowing something else bad to continue.
In the case of social media at large… I share the view that Ted Nelson is perhaps the worst project manager in the history of software development, but his ideas for building a network that allowed users to generate wealth through micropayment royalties is one of the best yet unimplemented ideas.
If you write a typical clickbait buzzfeed-esque article it gets shared, makes some money form ads, and then is likely forgotten… not to mention it has all of these negative externalities (e.g. using fear and outrage to get attention).
A micropayment royalty system would incentivize people to produce content that’s valuable rather than clickbait… sort of like if you write a good journal article, it get’s cited, quoted and has not just a long tail effect but a kind of a stacked cumulative long tail effect from not just the views on the original piece of content but from the views of everything that incorporated it. We want people to make more content like this and to get paid for doing it, but there’s not good mechanisms to pay them for this now, although people are working on it.
Of people working on this now, Leemon Baird seems to get this.
When it comes to cases where a person has a duty to treat people fairly, other stuff exists is a valid argument. Black people are jailed much more for drug use then white people is a valid argument to be made against a black person being jailed for drug use.
Do you think that Twitter doesn’t have such a duty to treat people with equal standards?
A tweet by the PotUS has large effects, the same tweet by me would have none. Should the tweets be equally judged by just the actual words, or equally judged by the effects they are likely to have?
What has that to do with what I wrote and whether WP:OTHERSTUFFEXISTS applies here?
It was a response to your final question about treating people with equal standards, drawing attention to the ambiguity of the concept.
Agree that case is a valid argument. More (but not perfectly) analogous to this situation would be if someone was arrested for drug use and said “hey, I know this other person that’s been using drugs way longer than I have and they haven’t been arrested, why are you arresting me why you should be arresting them for being the more egregious offenders?”
I’m not sure if you mean this in a normative or descriptive sense. In a normative sense, yes, and I would apply this to people and corporations.
In a descriptive sense, what incentives does Twitter have to treat people with equal standards? Being morally good? Will that make their shareholders and advertisers more money? Would the board of directors suggest it? Capitalism doesn’t necessarily optimize for the moral goodness of products.
There are ways to use capitalism to improve capitalism. There’s a lot of “Metcalfe’s law determinists.” Like “there is no alternative to this network because it’s the large network.” But any network is just a spot on a much larger canvas of possible networks, any number of which could make money and make it more morally.
Clubhouse isn’t a perfect example, but it does show that people are willing to use networks operating in different paradigms. Sure, Clubhouse didn’t stick the landing after it’s growth spike, but someone else could.
How is facebook not external?