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Alicorn comments on Fighting Akrasia: Finding the Source - Less Wrong
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Although starting to smoke is a total moron thing to do, there may be less irrationality present in pursuing an existing addiction than commonly believed. Someone who craves nicotine has the choice of attempting to ignore the craving, which has all kinds of bad, immediate consequences (irritability, distraction, twitchiness, insomnia, flu symptoms, sore mouth, sore throat, cough, headache, intestinal protestations, etc.) until you keep it up for a good long time, or giving into it, which has (per cigarette) very small and distant negative consequences (tiny increase in risk of assorted diseases which might kill you or not).
It's possible I'm only defending this because I have the exact same problem with chocolate. (I can resist my chocolate cravings, but only if I'm not doing anything else, and so far I don't have a few weeks where I can be afford to be totally out of commission to detox from delicious chocolatey goodness in the hopes that this would make the cravings go away forever.)
I could probably brainstorm several things that might be able to kill chocolate cravings permanently (for example, animals quickly learn to avoid foods that make them sick), but most of them, if they worked, would probably have the side effect of causing you to no longer be able to enjoy "delicious chocolatey goodness" at all.
If I can go a month without eating any chocolate, I stop craving chocolate. So I think it's addictive, but not permanently/physically.
I've read that self-described chocolate addicts don't get any craving relief from flavorless pills with chocolate on the inside, while "white chocolate" that contains no cocoa does have an effect. So whatever makes chocolate addictive doesn't have all that much to do with what happens after it's swallowed.
Theobromine, an analogue of caffeine not found in white chocolate, is definitely psycho-active, though I think it's unclear if it's addictive. I wouldn't be surprised if you got similar results with other drugs. I've certainly heard anecdotes of people switching to decaf by accident and experiencing the morning coffee as the usual "hit" but then feeling withdrawal later in the day or in later days. It's probably just that directly experienced "cravings" are high-level effects not highly tied to the chemical effects of addiction.
I tend to think of it as placebo addiction.
And yes, I drink decaf sometimes for exactly that reason. Interestingly, being conscious of it doesn't seem to reduce the strength of the "ah, I needed that coffee" feeling by much.
At least ostensibly, white chocolate contains cocoa butter.
White chocolate doesn't always contain cocoa butter, and the FDA, like most chocolate connoisseurs, doesn't consider it chocolate because it doesn't contain chocolate liquor.