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Lumifer comments on Outside the Laboratory - Less Wrong
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All true, but if you look at it from a different side: if you want to regulate or ban something, would you rather call it an addiction or an unfortunate exercise of the freedom choice? :-)
Well, the latter characterization would certainly not aid me in my attempts to get it banned, but if calling it an addiction were likely to result in semantic squabbling, I'd probably just call it a public health risk.
If you're liberal enough about what people are allowed to do, should you call anything an addiction? I'm not sure if politics connotatively hijacking scientific terminology is a good reason to change the terminology. Would you suggest something like that?
Sure. I would call things which change your personal biochemistry in the medium term (e.g. opiates) addictive. I think it's a reasonable use of the term.
There are opiate receptors in the brain because your brain produces transmitters that bind to those receptors. You should expect certain behaviours you engage to change your personal biochemistry in various time spans as well.
A fair point. I should add probably the necessity of a positive feedback loop to the definition.