Amanojack comments on Pain and gain motivation - Less Wrong

45 Post author: Kaj_Sotala 07 April 2010 06:48PM

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Comment author: Amanojack 08 April 2010 01:32:33AM 1 point [-]

investigate

You mean RMI?

Comment author: pjeby 08 April 2010 01:45:11AM 2 points [-]

Yes.

Comment author: Amanojack 08 April 2010 12:10:20PM 0 points [-]

All right, I asked myself what it would be like if I hardly ever used the Internet. I got a feeling of "missing out." Perhaps that points to loneliness, which is ironic because my net use hampers my offline social life, but it could be case nonetheless.

Comment author: pjeby 08 April 2010 03:59:57PM 3 points [-]

Emotional-brain answers don't "point to" things. They just are what they are. Ask what, specifically, you're "missing out" on, as the "pointing to" bit is just a logical-brain speculation.

At the moment, the evidence still supports a most-parsimonious hypothesis of dopamine addiction as an avoidance strategy for getting away from something else... that you haven't actually asked yourself about. What is it that you want (or think you want) to be doing instead of being internet addicted? That's the thing you should be asking questions about.

90% of the time, our initial ideas about what problem we need to solve are overly-narrow, because the unconscious mind almost always hands the conscious mind a problem specification that doesn't involve questioning any of your basic assumptions. ;-)