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VoiceOfRa comments on Rational approach to finding life partners - Less Wrong
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Has this happened with any other technologically supplied superstimulus?
"Technologically applied superstimulus" is a pretty narrow category, but here are a couple of things that come close enough that I think they're relevant.
My impression is that gourmet food has become more interesting as the need for it also to be filling has decreased (because industrial-scale food production has made adequate food really cheap, much as sexbots might hypothetically make adequate sex really easy to get; "perfect" seems too much to hope for).
There is some evidence that violent video games reduce their users' tendency to engage in actual physical violence.
Um, gourmet food is almost by definition food that is skilled labor-intensive to produce. For an example of technological superstimulus applied to food think mass-produced food that is sweeter/more satisfying then anything in the ancestral environment, a.k.a., fast/junk food.
See here for the standard examples of superstimuli as applied to food and video games.
I'm not suggesting that gourmet food is a technologically applied superstimulus, I'm suggesting that cheap mass-produced food is a bit like one and that maybe its availability has enabled the flourishing of cuisine-as-quasi-artform.
This is not exactly what you asked for but I think it's still relevant -- it's not so very different from what Viliam suggested could conceivably happen with sexbots. Hence my first paragraph.
[EDITED to fix a ridiculous typo.]
I don't think so. Gourmet food nowadays is:
That requires creativity and a sense of style much more than it requires a lot of skilled labour. In a way it's like fashion -- fashionable clothes could require complex production, but they don't have to. Neither fashion nor gourmet cooking is about being "skilled-labour intensive".
In other words it requires skilled labor where the relevant skills are creativity and a sense of style.
Skilled labour, yes. Labour-intensive, no.
It seems like the relevance would be if the technologically supplied superstimulus replaced a function previously supplied solely through partner relationships. The following chain of examples involving video games doesn't seem directly relevant, unless before the advent of video games, people played board games exclusively with their romantic partners.
technology stimulus examples:
In all of these cases, technology has found its place among the various options to fulfilling the need. Yes some people get addicted to videogames; but people also get addicted to alcohol.
So? Alcohol is (or was) also a superstimulus. It's just that some human populations have been exposed to it long enough to become adapted to it. Specifically adapting to it by finding it less stimulating.
An example of something not a technology that people get addicted to.
Alcohol is not inherently bad - like say cyanide (or a bomb) might be considered bad because it's primary purpose causes death; it's the nature of people to use it badly. And principally - many people use alcohol (and videogames) without getting addicted to it, and lead a fully functional life while partaking in a bit of alcohol (or videogames).
You have a very weird definition of "technology" if alcohol is not a technology.
Only because (Western) humans have had several millennia to develop adaptations to it. Go to, say, an Indian (Native American) reservation to see what affect alcohol has on humans not adapted to it. It's not pretty.
Wait until the market for videogame addictiveness saturates.
But more to the point, are you going to argue that video games have actually improved social iterations?
I was going to start with - they didn't destroy the world. (because they didn't)
And advance into; some video games have been beneficial.
That's not what I asked.
I asked whether they in general have been beneficial.
Videogames are hard to say. There is a net complex situation.
Take the food example. Technology has enabled food to improve. Easy to say.
And has the presence of food based superstimuli, a.k.a., junk food, improved to worsened our diets?
Technology has improved our food and our diets.
Thanks to advancements we now have sustainable food, security of food availability. Heck! People have enough substitutes to meat to not need to eat it ever!
Yes the availability of junk food has caused some people to eat unhealthily; but the availability of vegetables has helped many more people to eat healthily and have fulfilling eating lives.
Technology frequently improves some things while making other things worse. But sooner or later people find a way to improve both the some things and the other things. In this particular case, maybe they haven't found it yet.