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thomblake comments on Experiential Pica - Less Wrong
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Excellent post. The one problem I have with the analogy is that pica is almost completely objective; it involves eating non-food items and is (usually) caused by a mineral deficiency. Akrasia isn't quite like that. It's entirely possible that doing Z will cause you to stop doing X, but there does not appear to be an objective sense in which Z is the real thing you need and X was a misguided proxy. Plenty of people play World of Warcraft and never go outside, and they can continue to be excellent, cheerful Warcraft-players. Pica, by contrast, can be harmful itself (ice is one of the most pleasant non-food substances one could pick) and also indicates the body not functioning correctly; mineral deficiencies have both measurable effects on people and (I think) experiential effects in the sense of poor health/energy/whatever mineral deficiencies do. Akrasia seems to lack such objective referents; one could sit down and play WoW for the rest of one's life and, in theory, be perfectly happy about it.
Not according to theories I'm familiar with.
It seems like such a person would have bad character; lacking acculturation to the relevant human virtues, one would miss out on essential parts of the good life.
But then, maybe WoW is a better proxy for social interaction and such than I'm giving it credit for.
I'd be curious as to what parts of the good life are essential, what virtues are relevant, and what evidence supports said claims.
I admit that it's very unlikely that playing video games for most of one's life corresponds with the culturally-infused values many people have, but it doesn't seem that it must be fundamentally opposed to the values that one develops. It's decidedly unlikely one would develop the values necessary to enjoy gaming for one's whole life, but it certainly seems possible. Then again, if it were fully consistent with your values, it wouldn't be akratic.
And CronoDAS is right; if you're not familiar with WoW, you might not know that almost all of the people who are really addicted are also involved within the game socially. At a certain point it becomes impossible to progress without 9-24 other human players who usually coordinate via VOIP, so while players may be sitting in their parent's basement, they are actually socializing to some degree. This (combined with the random reward system) is why it's so addictive.
Some people really do manage to get a high level of social interaction out of WoW; there are a lot of actual people involved that you can interact with, and the more difficult challenges tend to require the kind of organization and teamwork you'd find in a local sports team. On the other hand, I personally am not one of them.