The Acceleration of Addictiveness (2010)

I worry about the acceleration of addiction in particular subgroups of the population. WoW (or Farmville), for example, is not crystal meth... but that flippant observation is a response to a core truth that some people just have a lot of trouble saying no. Maybe they're poorly educated, maybe they're genetically predisposed to addiction, maybe they're clinically depressed, for whatever the reason they've got a weakened psychic immune system. It gets dramatically easier (A/B testing! end to end analytics! using…

A recent piece taking on the topic from a different framing: http://joyousandswift.org/hyperstimulus/ It doesn't deal in addiction but overwhelming stimuli, whether or not they're repeated. Animals can be fooled by unrealistically strong experiences - you can trick a goose into 'hatching' a volleyball - and it appears that humans have somewhat similar responses. The insights in the two articles aren't vastly different, but there's one intriguing thought: there are actual selection pressures against this. When…

By my observation anger is addictive - previously normal people get angry for maybe a good reason, and subsequently they start looking for something new to be angry about. It’s a real problem because when they can’t find something worth getting worked up over they pick on a random subject and try to convince everyone their pet issue is a huge deal, and everyone who disagrees is a very bad person indeed.