Appealing to "extreme compared to what our ancestors would think" may be unknowable in principle but I'm not the first to suggest this as a guideline.
I agree that this isn't precise. I'd have assumed that it is possible to infer from context what my intended reading of "too much" or "extreme" might be. But that is the typical mind (or knowledge ) fallacy.
Indeed as I mostly describe extremes in ''behavior'' the problem is that Behavioral Addiction is hard to define even for psychologists (or maybe the phenomenon (or its spread) is too new for them to have arrived at a consensus).
But now that you have challenged me to provide a definition I'm happy to be forced to think a bit deeper about this. I came up with this:
##Quantitative Definitions of Behavior Attachment
One could measure the economic or emotional cost to the actor of changing his behavior. The economic cost could be measured on the individual level y
"what would you pay if you could change/get rid of the behavior?"
(this assumes the society to stay constant).
Or the economic cost could be measured on the society level:
"what economic costs for the society result from this behavior?"
(this assumes the (treatment of the) behavior to stand in isolation of other behaviors/structures/memes).
To derive the latter one would probably have to measure occurrences of actual problematic cases e.g.
the number of incidences over time of
impulse control disorder
associated with the behavior in question.
If you wanted to link incidences with causes you could compare this with the development of the corresponding industries (per country).
The above prompts the question of how to classify the behaviors but I assume that should be comparatively easy.
Instead of measuring the economic effect for the individual one could try to measure emotions either overall or associated with the behavior.
I don't think it is healthy if (the same or multiple different) emotions are triggered continuously, erratically or suppressed
and outside of your control.
I do not know if there is any chance whether an imbalance induced by society leads to
Mood disorder or
Personality disorder
##Qualitative Classification of Behavior Attachment
The following mostly applies to behaviors that are neither beneficial nor pleasurable overall (by the individual subjective experience), but might also apply to multile disjunct positive behaviors.
I propose the following types of behavior lock-in:
1) A person knows that they show a behavior, but cannot get rid of the behavior on their own (e.g. because of its addictedness, or missing knowledge of techniques to do so).
2) A person knows that they need help by others, but cannot get rid of the behavior by enlisting the help of other people or institutions (either by not knowing about such an option, no such actors being present or no means to get such persons/institutions to help).
3) A person cannot notice that they show a behavior (with its consequences) and no external person or institution is taking the initiative to help the person to get rid of the behavior (by such actors be missing, actors not knowing about the person or the problem or no means to help).
4) The external persons or institutions cannot detect the problem but only its symptoms and act delayed.
5) No possibility to address this behavior at all because this problem is inherently inaddressable by human and social systems.
This rests on a sound definition of 'ability to act'. To avoid issues with 'free will' I appeal to an operative definition: An actor has the ability to change his behavior if
the actor is aware of relevant choices of behavior,
the actor selects a behavior change,
the choice is viable from the point of external actors and
the actor fails reliably at changing his behavior
In case this is applied to populations the last item has to be altered to e.g.
Where direness could be quantified as in the quantitative section above.
##Summary Definition
Given this toolset I'd propose to classify a behavior as "too extreme" if the behavior can be classified as type 3 (no societal means to help) and the behavior has objective dire consequences for the individual (at least long term emotionally scaled by the likelihood of the effects).
Examples:
Currently I think our social means to deal with gaming addiction can be classified as type 4 mostly. Same with internet addiction.
Smoking for comparison was moved by prevention and education from type 4 to type 1 or 2 mostly depending on individual abilities and social environment.
The adoration of fandom is also type 4. This is not actually seens as a bug but as a feature. But if you consider this to have long-term negative effects as I do (at least for some fans), then you might agree that some prevention or symptom classification might be helpful.
I don't want to rule out all such behaviors - I just want people to have a chance to know what they do. Consequences and awareness.
Related to: UFAI, Paperclip maximizer, Reason as memetic immune disorder
A discussion with Stefan (cheers, didn't get your email, please message me) during the European Community Weekend Berlin fleshed out an idea I had toyed around with for some time:
If a UFAI can wreak havoc by driving simple goals to extremes then so should driving human desires to extremes cause problems. And we should already see this.
Actually we do.
We know that just following our instincts on eating (sugar, fat) is unhealthy. We know that stimulating our pleasure centers more or less directly (drugs) is dangerous. We know that playing certain games can lead to comparable addiction. And the recognition of this has led to a large number of more or less fine-tuned anti-memes e.g. dieting, early drug prevention, helplines. These memes steering us away from such behaviors were selected for because they provided aggregate benefits to the (members of) social (sub) systems they are present in.
Many of these memes have become so self-evident we don't recognize them as such. Some are essential parts of highly complex social systems. What is the general pattern? Did we catch all the critical cases? Are the existing memes well-suited for the task?How are they related. Many are probably deeply woven into our culture and traditions.
Did we miss any anti-memes?
This last question really is at the core of this post. I think we lack some necessary memes keeping new exploitations of our desires in check. Some new ones result from our society a) having developed the capacity to exploit them and b) the scientific knowledge to know how to do this.
To structure our desires and their exploitation I started with a list which I'd now like to present and ask for discussion and addition to. This list basically takes our complexity of value and looks what happens if one factor is singled out and optimized for too much (where what too much means remains to be discussed).
The list:
And before going in detail you might ask yourself how each of these might be driven to extremes - at least compared to what our ancestors would think as described in the Eutopia post.
Extreme Status
"power corrupts - absolute power corrupts absolutely"
The craving for power and the reward felt when achieving power must be one of the oldest and has brought about the most complex social structures (we developed from feudal system to democracy after all) and memes to keep it in check. This effectively results in a very high power ladder. The Peter Principle can easily lead to permanent disappointment because the craving is never satisfied despite continuous effort. Nonetheless it appears that there is not much risk here from further exploitation by advancing technology. Or?
Homework question: How can social power systems ensure the feeling of achieving power?
Extreme Consumption
Bringing something into ones possession is rewarding in itself independent of the usefulness of the owned stuff. This can be most easily be seen in the different types of collecting hobbies, messy people and shopping addiction. There is a whole branch of science devoted to the satisfaction of the pleasure from consumption: Neuromarketing. But consumption is well-integrated into our society. Controlling consumption is part of market economy. Fine here it seems.
Extreme Food Consumption
Our evolutionary mostly unchecked desires for sugar and fat and probably a lot of other historically scarce substances has got us - after getting out of starvation - straight into collective obesity. This is well-known. There are lots of anti-memes circulating. E.g. diets. Have a look at Lifestyle interventions for rather helpful memes.
Extreme Satisfaction of Desire for Shelter
This is probably the least of our troubles. Luxury houses probably lead to problems in conjunction with status only.
Extreme Curiosity
I will split this into scientific curiosity, games and other.
Science
Curiosity, despite not feeling like an emotion, is nonetheless a strong emotion once basic desires are satisfied. It is what gave us science. Curiosity drives lots of smart people into the sciences. But curiosity alone has no inherent direction. You may arrive at not very useful topics. And then there is a very high knowledge ladder like in the power/status case potentially denying you satisfaction during school and university (and later). But at least this has structured itself in a way to be mostly beneficial to society.
Games
This is another thing. I know game addicts. I don't mean the ones in gambling joints (though this obviously also falls into the category of exploiting desires). I mean WoW and the like. Games are optimized to extract as much pleasure and by extension money out of you as possible. They do so to a large degree by appealing to curiosity, but also status (semi-virtual), ownership (virtual) and probably a lot more. Probably requires a separate post to take this fully apart.
Generic Information
If you are a curios person you can quickly burn lots of time in the knowledge depth of the WWW. This can be in the wake of procrastination but also start out as free time of study. See also this xkcd or this.
Extreme Empathy
This was actually one key point I discussed on the Berlin event. Empathy is an emotion which lets you empathize with beings that are important to you.
"Being-like + important"
That is the pattern your brain locks on (oversimplification; but I hope you basically agree). It doesn't care what kind of being. That's the job of your higher faculties to decide. It doesn't care why that being is important. That's for other emotions to establish.
It's mostly other dear human beings. It can be lifestock. It can be animals. Pets. I could tell you a story of a fly that was the important being in question. For some people even things can become being-like.
Hofstadter proposed levels of consciousness (an illustration of the concept is online here. Sorry can't find a better link) and suggested that you empathize with everything above a certain level. But I disagree. There is no level. It's just your being+important pattern.
Why do I tell you this? Because empathy drives us to form ethical systems. We form ethical systems that (seem to) match our empathy. And then we apply the ethical system. And if the ethical system derives some (unexpected) result we don't question it (very strongly) because after all empathy can't be wrong or can't it? But it should be checked whether empathy can be led astray as easily as any other emotion.
So if you start from a notion that all humans are important beings (because via positive reinforcement you learned that no human beings in your environment are enemies) then you can empathise will all of those and you arrive at an ethical system that treats all humans as equal (even those far away, even in other universes, just because you never encountered negatives).
Please please note that this is descriptive not normative. I'm unclear myself what this exactly means for my ethical system.
If you additionally learn that all animals are important beings because you are exposed to environmentalism, own a personal pet, never experience the historic normality of butchering animals (but e.g. only perceive pictures of this in the mental frame of violence against animals by persons pictured as brutal) than you might arrive at the point where all (higher) animals are important.
This can be raised as needed to include insects and roots (e.g. Jainism) or even plants.
This of course is in contrast to the other end of the spectrum where only members of the same tribe are 'important beings'.
Interestingly this kind of empathy satisfaction exists since many centuries - but mostly in the context of religious systems. The resulting food restrictions could be aligned with food availability. The key point here is that today where the overall system of memes may not (yet) be as balanced as the system at that time (though one might wonder what dynamics existed before e.g. the Jainism stabilized).
Extreme Hate
I don't really have a good model for this, but I guess that terrorism falls into this area. This is kept mostly in check by existing structures obviously. In reason as memetic immune disorder this is actually given as an example.
Extreme Fear
Here examples are also harder to come up with, but all cases of over-protection or loss-aversion probably qualify.
This is especially strong regarding children. See this article for a meme trying to counter that and allow a bit of danger for a lot of other utility. For a lot of our fears there exist a whole market of therapy on the one hand and protection devices and services on the other hand.
The fear of death if let run free leads to exploitation by life insurance (which looks beneficial) on the one end to after-life memes (where I'd include cryonics) on the other end.
Extreme Love/Romance
Now we slowly come to some obvious points. Your desire for relationships and company should be easily exploitable. Especially nowadays as people don't any longer run across each other but are mostly distracted by all the other exploitations of their attention. After all attention is a scarce resource. Now that you are robbed of this natural satisfaction it can again be satisfied with specific services by the dating industry in the form of dating sites and speed dating and so on.
As this is already structuring itself anew and as this is no new problem (in earlier times people probably didn't have much time for dating for other reasons) there should be enough structures to resolve this. Whether this process makes people overall happier is another question.
Extreme Sex Drive
Not much to say here. This desire has been exploited the longest and just because we now have contraceptives, free online porn (which doesn't seem to have detrimental effects), casual sex sites, legalized prostitution (again) and lots of sex toys this probably doesn't alter things a lot. Because it is intimately related to reproduction it migh cause surprising selection pressures though (a separate post suggests itself).
Extreme Awe
Awe is an emotion. Thus it should be exploitable albeit I'd guess less so than the other. Nonetheless a few areas quick come to mind:
Extreme pleasure from other Aspects
These randomly come to mind:
Homework: Name two examples occurring in the wake of the internet.
This closes the list of exploitable desires for now.
In this way (scientific) reason is a memetic immune disorder. Coming up with new doable/marketable/organizable ideas dealing with desired in an environment of quick production and communication cycles leads to inhuman structures. Those will mendel themselves out - but maybe we'd like not to wait for that.
We are already living it a Siren World.
The market economy cannot other than make use of this with e.g. Neuromarketing (see also the Forbes article). And the mean thing is: This may only make you want it but not gain pleasure from it. Fact is: There are markets in everything so also in every desire we have.
Markets in this way are worse than an FAI so I have to wonder whether we actually need an FAI to solve the problems we are currently running into...
To avoid a fatalistic end I suggest that knowing about these memes provides you with a toolkit to build your own counter-memes and open the discussion for this.