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Elo comments on Rational approach to finding life partners - Less Wrong Discussion
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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.