Superstimuli and the Collapse of Western Civilization

An historical example of this phenomenon is drug use. We have drugs today that are much more powerful, stimulating and addictive than the relatively mild beers, wines, and herbs which people had access to historically. When distilled liquors have been introduced around the world it has been accompanied by several generations of serious abuse problems. Eventually people have become somewhat adapted to hard liquor but alcohol addiction is still a widespread problem.

The response has been to ban most of the more potent drugs (in an admittedly somewhat inconsistent way) in order to reduce the harm from these unnatural stimuli. I suspect that we will someday see similar restrictions on too-addictive video games. The record from drug prohibition suggests that we may not do a very good job on drawing the line between what is OK and what is not, unfortunately.

I also think it's a good bet that after (a) a sufficiently high-profile death (Congressperson's son) or (b) the problems scale up to where everyone knows someone who lost their job, we're going to see attempted regulation (that's a political prediction, not policy advice).

However, as we all know by now, electronic information is a lot harder to control than material objects, and material objects are hard enough to control already.

Scott Adams (Dilbert creator) said that the Star Trek Holodeck will be the end of evolution for our species, because everyone will simply spend all their time there having sex with supermodels. I'm sympathetic. This implies that the only thing intelligent to evolve will be humorless dullards who would rather replicate in real life than enjoy the pleasures of endless frat parties with nubile, funny, and eager babes.

Perhaps this is why God has so little humor in the Bible, he's the ultimate replicator.

Another approach might of course be to try to boost self-control. Self-control correlates with being able to delay gratification, long-term planning and career success. An enhancement of this would be socially and individually beneficial, probably far more than most other cognition enhancers.

There are experiments that demonstrate that glucose drinks can actually boost depleted self-control: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/entrez/query.fcgi?cmd=Retrieve&db=pubmed&dopt=Abstract&list_uids=17279852 and presumably there might be more deep methods of enhancing it. So one strategy of handling the rise in temptations is to make us better at handling them.

An interesting and rather worrying paper is this, http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/entrez/query.fcgi?itool=abstractplus&db=pubmed&cmd=Retrieve&dopt=abstractplus&list_uids=14756934 which argues that it is the flow experience of games that hooks us. Normally flow is hard to achieve through stimuli, which at most just generate happiness, but the more profound flow state seems triggerable by the right games. This goes beyond mere habit-formation to get a pleasurable stimuli since the highly motivated flow state involves using all mental resources to prolong and expand the state. So we might not just have to learn how to overcome simple pleasure temptations but also complex flow temptations.

Overall, enhancements of strategic individual thinking would be extremely useful. But there are no guarantees they will be developed at an equal pace as the games.

When people know that candy bars can be too tempting, they can prefer to work in places without candy bar machines. Similarly, people who find ice cream or cookie stands too tempting can stay away from shopping malls that allow such stands. People who find the sight of naked people too tempting can choose to work and shop in places that do not allow people to walk around naked. Economists have worked out models of many of these situations, and the keep coming back to the conclusion that giving people mechanisms of self-control is good enough, unless people are biased to to underestimate their self-control problems. And so recommendations for more self-control regulation tend to be based on claims that we are biased to underestimate our problem.

I find certain types of video games far more addictive than the average human does. This, however, reduces my demand for these video games. I have never bought or played World of Warcraft because I strongly suspect that I would become addicted to the game. If enough potential addicts are like me then games that become too addictive will suffer in the marketplace.

Games have trouble satisfying creative urges -- to the extent that they do, they're just a medium for classic creativity, rather than a time-wasting game. It's no accident that lots of programming talent is being expended on a more dynamic version of Second Life, and I can certainly see game-like (or at least hyper-competitive )features in Wikipedia -- which is a lot like a version of trivial pursuit that happens to output an encyclopedia). It's true that as games get more compelling, they'll turn into evolutionary dead ends -- but I strongly suspect that the most compelling games are the ones that take advantage of our evolutionary instincts by tricking us into doing what makes evolutionary sense.

I think the fictional evidence misses a key factor in raising kids. At least for some people the continuation of a line, that line either being blood or values. I think most soon to be parents don't look forward to the nasty sleepless evenings with newborns or such. But give the availability of abortion, we still do not see L'Dolce Vita culling all humans from the reproducing herds.

People do enjoy long term endeavors. I find the idea that my line will stretch far into the future to be a very good driver in my quest for higher education and wealth attainment. Delaying my own gratification is an integral part of that quest. I, in fact, hope to lay down a family "constitution" to instill my values on my children's children. If I am going to give them wealth they better damn build an empire with it.

Robin: would you say that the quantity of addictions -- and addictions that make people genuinely, deeply unhappy -- in the world is pretty good evidence that we in fact systematically tend to underestimate our self-control problems?

Gowder: It's pretty good evidence of something, that's for sure. Clearly the economic models that indicate that nothing ought to be going wrong are not validating against experiment.

Anders, glucose drinks are known to promote the release of neurotransmitters like serotonin one would expect to help self-control, but the problem is that the effect lasts less than an hour and is followed by a bigger effect in the opposite direction.

Paul, see my post tomorrow morning.

Drugs may be the best model for this sort of addiction, but one big difference is that software can evolve much faster. New street drugs are invented every so often, but obviously at a rate much slower than new software can be introduced. Game software might evolve not just to be more addictive, but to be safer, since killing the customer is counterproductive. Fatally-addicting games could have safety features introduced, like forcing the user to take a break every so often. And presumably such features WOULD be introduced, since it's in the interest of all parties.

The upshot of such an evolutionary path would be games that are highly addicting but not fatally so. The social problems wouldn't be so much players dropping dead as having the game world suck in so much human attention that real-world productivity suffers.

"Game software might evolve not just to be more addictive, but to be safer, since killing the customer is counteproductive." -- mtraven

Argument from group selection. Killing the customer is bad for the industry, but not for the company. If everyone plays the most fun game on the market, and 10% of its players die annually from playing it, and you come up with a new, more entertaining game that will give you the entire market but with a 15% annual death rate, you don't get rich by trying to save lives.

As a rabid game player, I find that the stimulation I get from playing some of my favorite video games is basically the same as the stimulation that I get from reading some of my favorite novels. There are some authors that I find to be more addictive than even some of the best games. (Terry Pratchett comes to mind.) Oddly enough, though, I find television oddly lacking when compared to print media and interactive media, as I keep wanting to DO something instead of watch passively. (Having another person watching along with me that I can talk with seems to satisfy that urge.)

Regarding the video game deaths, well, I've done marathon gaming sessions, and it helps to have food within easy reach. I've joked with my family about the "video game diet" - when you get hungry, ignore it and keep playing video games. ;) Once upon a time, I skipped a midterm exam in college to play Final Fantasy X - and I regret nothing! (I ended up passing the course anyway, thanks to some fast talking. The magic words are "psychiatrist" and "antidepressant.")

I suspect that many ancient forms of self-discipline and meditation are aimed at enhancing self-control, either by increasing the supply of the pool, or (especially in the case of Taoist techniques, though many others such as Feldenkrais discuss this) providing cognitive alternatives to using self control that do not deplete the pool. However, I am concerned that enhanced self-control may come with a social cost in terms of percieved degree of trustworthyness, desert of empathy etc. After all, drinking in high school correlates positively with later earnings. http://www.nber.org/papers/w12529

To me the most practically relevant question seems to be "what can we do to bias the production of addictive activities towards those which act as economic complements to productive or socially desirable activities, and as economic substitutes for destructive or socially undesirable activities". One possibility that I have been somewhat preoccupied with for some time is that of 'reputation markets'. It seems to me that these may tend to increase the degree to which life resembles a video game in so far as a person's reputation can ultimately constitute a set of dynamic visible scores that they can continually attempt to optimize under intermittant reinforcement.

On a related note, Wikinomics claims that in Star Wars Galaxies players build the 'medical' skill associated with their characters by providing diagnosis based on real medical data, thus developing real medical skills. I have long thought that games could teach foreign languages by making them practically necessary in the course of game play, but this might interfere with addictivity unless it was handled very skillfully.

Since this post seems to be a confessional, for me the only really addictive games are the Civilization series. My only 2 consecutive all-nighters ever were Alpha Centauri related, shortly after it's release.

Thank you for the latest release of gradewrecker. My GPA just went in the corner and shot itself. -- USENET posting, author unknown

My solution to the problem was to own a really slow computer. It took so long to load up the game I had been playing that it always seemed preferrable to log on to forums and complain about games not matching up to ye olden days than actually playing any. Eventually I found even that was taking up too much of my time and now games are just a thing of the past. The question of whether I put too much time into reading blogs is still open though.

Richard Hollerith pointed out that the glucose drinks only last for about an hour, which is true. It is less certain that they are followed by a dip in self-control or that their effect is by affecting the neurotransmittors. Even if it is, it is a start for some serious neuropharmacological hacking. The serotonin system is already of interest in this respect: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/entrez/query.fcgi?tmpl=NoSidebarfile&db=PubMed&cmd=Retrieve&list_uids=17360806&dopt=Abstract

A real willpower enhancement is likely something much more complex. Ideally we would like to strengthen our second order desires (at least some of them, some of the time). That might involve finding some pretty disperse neural nets, or more likely having a close symbiosis with software acting as an artificial superego. Design and implementation is left as an exercise :-)

It seems that one could trap this kind of desires too by games fulfilling them. If I have creative desires, spending a lot of time creating in Second Life would meet them. Maybe one could create "games" that help the third world in some way, trapping people with an altruist motivation (my favorite example is the spiders in the comic http://www.e-sheep.com/spiders/ ). The worrying thing is when the game shapes or constrains the activity into something less useful than it would otherwise have been. First order desire games trap us by providing simple stimulation, second order games by providing complex stimulation and meaning. But just as the stimulation in Tetris is fairly scripted the meaning and interaction in WoW is limited. Perhaps the healthiest aspect of the online games is how many players deliberately set out to expand their scope and circumvent their limitations. Maybe that is the solution of game addiction: try to ensure that the games are expandable and could in principle become arbitrarily complex. But that will still not help the people content with fulfilling first order desires.

Riley, a 15% death rate pa with total market saturation isn't an evolutionarily stable strategy.

Re: michael's suggestion about using reputation markets to make real life resemble a video game, I am reminded of Cory Doctorow's Down and out in the Magic Kingdom, where the main currency is "whuffie", a reputation measure that others use to determine whether or not they should do you favors.

I like the description of a superstimulus. I detect a hint of behaviorism.

Persons interested in the concept of super-stimuli should note the work of music scientist Phillip Dorrell, who argues that music is a super-stimulus for language:

http://whatismusic.info/

He also speculates that software developers will soon be able to construct algorithms to produce "strong" music, that is, music which is better than any thusfar created by humans. This will bring about obvious addiction problems similar to those mentioned above relating to video games.

Porn, too, is a superstimulant. A user can see more nubile young females (or whatever gets him going) in an afternoon than his hunter gatherer forbears would have seen in a lifetime. Porn makers "lace" their products with domination, violence, risky and forbidden acts precisely to enhance their addictiveness.

People often have no idea they're hooked until they try to stop using, and suffer intense withdrawal symptoms (shakes, anxiety, depression, insomnia, overwhelming horniness that is far greater than their pre-porn libido, etc.). See "Three Myths about Porn."

in my experience the social factor plays a huge part in these addictive cycles

im part of a community with a lot of awareness of this overstimulation-addiction cycle. we do a lot of unglamorous things together (chop wood, butcher animals, cook together, ceremony) that make us feel alive and rich.

although when im on the spot (after all night of watching movies, stuffing myself with junk food, zoning out on the internet, ect.) and im feeling poor and wanting (oftentimes more chocolate, movies, hyperstimuli...) what i do with that socially makes or breaks it.

one).i can find someone who is susceptible to the same desires, or who feels bad for me, and we can play off each other. during the process I feel like I have some marginal power (after all, im manipulting the situation) but in the end im left with the same unsatisfied emptiness and painful mis-health (if not physical then at least social).

two).i can hide my behavior, and sneak away - ashamed because i know and i know others know that i can do better. oftentimes this is accompanied by anger, defensiveness and critical self-talk. i usually reach the worst states of physical mis-health this way, as i have nobody else to lord my self control over and act without inhibition and yet with the added stressor of shame.

(three). i can stuff it and do the "good thing," some ideal activity that makes me feel proud of myself (stimulated in another way?) usually this is done more by passively avoiding choosing to act on the impulse or not and something else coming up (someone asking a favor, for example) i feel big again - for a while - but once my self-esteem takes a hit from some setback im usually back to square one - craving -, and oftentimes the resentment i have about my passive going along fuels the above #2 choice.

(four). and this is the one that seems so hard: i can just be up front about it with the people around me. and i can use discernment about who i talk to, choosing based on who has an understanding of these situations, and who would be empathetic (relate as someone who has similar predicaments, not "above it all") and at the same time recognize that I do have a choice and am not a victim to the cravings. usually, when i do this - the dissipation of shame around the cravings and my "me, my, mine" feelings around others sort of go up in a poof, and the acceptance i find with my sharing partner gives me actual satisfaction and health. i feel belonging and can rest easy, not needing to do a "good thing" to make my "bad" cravings go away

when i live in a community that is even marginally-individualistic (private living quarters, individualized meals, private computers, nuclear couples, ect.) the temptation to isolate myself becomes waay more than when i've lived much more like our ancestors in tight knit clans (yes, i've had the privelage of living this way) where we all make our living together and someone disappearing/preoccupied would not just be noticed intellectually but noticed because there is one less person to butcher the animals, gather greens/rice, cook, gather wood, listen, share stories, ect.

my tendency to feel shameful about this overstimulation cycle feeds on any ambiguity in the people around me re: my acceptability. when the people are constantly looking to me as an able part of the group, theres a lot less worst-case stuff to imagine than when people are secluded from me, doing their own thing and there's no clear route for how i'm included in that.

watch some porn, eat too much junk food...and walla - "Of course they don't want me as part of their group...but I don't owe them anything! How can they expect that from me!"

in my experience the social factor plays a huge part in these addictive cycles

im part of a community with a lot of awareness of this overstimulation-addiction cycle. we do a lot of unglamorous things together (chop wood, butcher animals, cook together, ceremony) that make us feel alive and rich.

although when im on the spot (after all night of watching movies, stuffing myself with junk food, zoning out on the internet, ect.) and im feeling poor and wanting (oftentimes more chocolate, movies, hyperstimuli...) what i do with that socially makes or breaks it.

1.i can find someone who is susceptible to the same desires, or who feels bad for me, and we can play off each other. during the process I feel like I have some marginal power (after all, im manipulting the situation) but in the end im left with the same unsatisfied emptiness and painful mis-health (if not physical then at least social).

2.i can hide my behavior, and sneak away - ashamed because i know and i know others know that i can do better. oftentimes this is accompanied by anger, defensiveness and critical self-talk. i usually reach the worst states of physical mis-health this way, as i have nobody else to lord my self control over and act without inhibition and yet with the added stressor of shame.

1. i can stuff it and do the "good thing," some ideal activity that makes me feel proud of myself (stimulated in another way?) usually this is done more by passively avoiding choosing to act on the impulse or not and something else coming up (someone asking a favor, for example) i feel big again - for a while - but once my self-esteem takes a hit from some setback im usually back to square one - craving -, and oftentimes the resentment i have about my passive going along fuels the above #2 choice.

2. and this is the one that seems so hard: i can just be up front about it with the people around me. and i can use discernment about who i talk to, choosing based on who has an understanding of these situations, and who would be empathetic (relate as someone who has similar predicaments, not "above it all") and at the same time recognize that I do have a choice and am not a victim to the cravings. usually, when i do this - the dissipation of shame around the cravings and my "me, my, mine" feelings around others sort of go up in a poof, and the acceptance i find with my sharing partner gives me actual satisfaction and health. i feel belonging and can rest easy, not needing to do a "good thing" to make my "bad" cravings go away

when i live in a community that is even marginally-individualistic (private living quarters, individualized meals, private computers, nuclear couples, ect.) the temptation to isolate myself becomes waay more than when i've lived much more like our ancestors in tight knit clans (yes, i've had the privelage of living this way) where we all make our living together and someone disappearing/preoccupied would not just be noticed intellectually but noticed because there is one less person to butcher the animals, gather greens/rice, cook, gather wood, listen, share stories, ect.

I was driving today and realized something.

Driving. It's a superstimuli because the part of me that plans where I'm going to go next, thinks about what I'm going to do there, and negotiates anything that gets in my way is on go-go-go. Think of the times you or someone else has gone all over the place in a car (or plane or train or bike) and didn't really do much, didn't really enjoy the ride, but were go-focused.

I think it's just like superstimulating food or porn or whatever. Driving amps up our go-brain, but everything else is left in the dust. Compare a drive to the store to a short walk along your neighborhood. You have social interactions, you notice sensations of walking, wind, smell, sounds...In a car, or eating a candy bar, or watching porn it's the same. The hyper-amplified experience of transportation, sweet-fattiness, and physical-mental arousal is turned up so loud its near impossible to stay present in the moment.

Which makes sense. I find when I get stuck in a self-feeding loop of these activities it's because I'm starving for presence. Yet with so much inertia in the driving/candy-bar/porn presence-obliterating mode, it can take a lot of awareness and even willpower to stop and tap into the fulfilling (yet comparably dull and unfocused) reality of the moment.

It's a relief to see this recognized as a problem by someone who isn't a cheerleader for a solution. I think the only solutions are going to have to be mental ones, related to the raising of children (or possibly something more biological/electronic); building better brains just might work, but protecting bad brains from temptation is like carrying water in a sieve.

Immigrant values are the best existing inoculation I've seen against superstimuli. I think I'm going to have to (re)create my own immigrant values to get work done -- shouldn't be hard, given the typical population of science departments. But there's no reason to think we can't improve on the past. There are techniques to improve delayed gratification skills. (See the marshmallow experiment.) Conceivably we could develop drugs or computer add-ons that make us better planners.

I think we need to be more alert to the vulnerability of what we think of as the "will." It can be hacked, by mental illness, by poverty (income and delayed gratification correlate very strongly from young ages), by bad habits of mind, by the internet, even by sugar.

It won't do to say, cheerfully, that "people are responsible for their actions " because circumstances can make them less responsible. On the other hand, it also won't do to be unconcerned with the real harm that comes from people lacking willpower. If it can be hacked in the opposite direction, we need to be working on that, NOW.

off-topic: Chapter 18 of After Life also happens to contain some surprisingly clear answers to some "wrong questions" about physical versus virtual reality, personal identity, and free will.

The important parts of this conversation are in the first half of chapter 18. The second half of the chapter probably won't make much sense unless you've already read the first 17 chapters.

Eliezer -

I discovered the OB archives this morning and have been working my way through them all day rather than actually doing my job, which I guess just goes to show that there are all kinds of superstimuli in the world.

That said, engaging as you are, I suspect I will soon decide to suspend you in favor of eating dinner and making it to rehearsal, which is reassuring. ("See? I can quit any time I want. I just don't want to, is all.")

I'm sort of hoping that by the time I reach the more current articles I will actually have something useful, or at least entertaining, to contribute to the conversation.

As a stand-in for that kind of usefulness, though, I will point out that the link to http://very.net/~nikolai/nasty/games.html is broken. (I don't know if you care, but I figure you can't make that decision until you know.)

Is money a super-stimulus?

I posit that these sequences and indeed any deliberation of abstract nature is super-stimulus. It was probably fairly stimulating for some ancestral man to connect the pain of having a rock fall on him to throwing a rock at a gazelle. But reading through hundreds of pages of information describing "the way" seem unlikely to improve my genetic fitness.

For a brilliant literary treatment of addiction, Western civilization, marketing, and technology (and the relationships among them), read David Foster Wallace's Infinite Jest. The book's action hinges upon a superstimulus to end all superstimuli--an obscure film (called Infinite Jest) so addictive that anyone who watches it inevitably becomes addicted and dies, passing up food, sleep, and sex in order to watch the film over and over again. Who knows--maybe the film's addictiveness was just an order of magnitude or two greater than that of WoW.

It's one of those books that is frequently mentioned in conversation but few read. But it's one of a small number of life-altering books that I think about every single day, without fail.

"Perhaps the demographic collapse of advanced societies happens because the market supplies ever-more-tempting alternatives to having children, while the attractiveness of changing diapers remains constant over time."

The attractiveness of changing diapers does not remain constant over time. Modern diapers have little sticky tape on, and can be thrown out after a single use. Much better than washing cloth diapers and pricking yourself (or the baby!) attaching them.

For now, diapers remain a stinky mess. But we may yet invent a baby-washing, diaper-changing machine, without a sense of smell.

I have a vague memory of reading somewhere that willpower is only an exhaustible resource if you think of it that way. That being said, in my own life I've found my willpower very exhaustible...and this is annoying, since a lot of things that other people seem to do for pleasure or relaxation, I find very exhausting. If I go to a party on the weekend, the effort of socializing uses up my willpower to study or exercise.

Simon Funk's online novel After Life depicts (among other plot points) the planned extermination of biological Homo sapiens - not by marching robot armies, but by artificial children that are much cuter and sweeter and more fun to raise than real children.

That is certainly one vision - though it seems likely that artificial sex, love, companionship and orgasms - rather than just artificial maternity - may also have a pretty major impact.

Global societal collapse by superstimuli. Now that's an existential risk that would have put even the ancient Romans in their place. This is indeed a development that is quite worrisome to me as well, and I think it truly deserves to be perceived as a risk. I'm not sure if it's an existential risk in the truest sense of the word, but our hedonism may become really nasty and have far-reaching consequences that could interfere with addressing actual existential risks. Fully immersive glasses for virtual realities are just around the corner and they are just the beginning...

I found World of Warcraft's addictiveness pretty overrated myself. The quests are repetitive, the dialogue is narmy, the community in general seemed mostly unpleasant (I didn't really communicate much with anyone I didn't know from somewhere else but a few minutes in a city reveal this...)

The only real fun I had with it was playing with some people I knew. Still, a lot of games (especially western games) these days seem more interested in getting money through addiction tricks (online RPGs) and pandering to the masses (Call of Duty?) than by being really fun and interesting...and it seems to work too.

What really causes me to lose sleep is reading, writing RPG-like statistics just for fun and listening to music. I have spent hours in the early morning going from listening to a song to wanting to listen to another to wanting to listen to either of them again or a different one...I truly end up mentally begging myself for "one more song".

It is 1:46 AM right now too...and I am caught in it again...though at least it doesn't hurt me as much as it normally would since I do get all my sleep through getting up later.

The culture could be taken down by superstimuli, but I think the process will be slow enough for memetic resistance to evolve.

And likewise, a video game can be so much more engaging than mere reality,

If we can make a game that way, shouldn't we be able to add bells and whistles to reality to make it more engaging? Maybe we should be making our lives into video games.

I'm a sucker for superstimuli. Can you give me some heuristics for overcoming both the consumption and production of harmful superstimuli? Consumption for obvious reason, production because if it becomes a socially normative ethical injunction, I can be much more trusting and feel more safe.

Here's one I feel might work for producers: if you're pitch to customers differs from your pitch to investors, you're deceiving some combination of either, both and/or yourself. For instance, Jaspers Great Cafe might market to investors that their selling a particularly caffeinated product which is addictive, so it'll get repeat business, but market to consumers as it's got a particular kick to wake you up more than usual. Both are true properties of caffeine, but unless you have strong reason to believe that the profile of your investors and customers differs significantly enough that you have can communicate to them better by communicating differently, you're probably behaving a little fraudulently.

We can taste healthiness, you're just restricting the problem domain to food science and pharmacology. If you open it up to psychology, consider the following: If you want to want to eat healthier, you could try to think of disgusting healthy food as medicine to modify your expectations and motivate yourself to consume it.

what's good for your lips can be good for your hips

Something you don't mention here is the ability for people to avoid temptation through careful mental programming.

Resisting any temptation takes conscious expenditure of an exhaustible supply of mental energy

Absolutely. However what if someone convinces themselves not to be tempted? For example, McDonalds hamburger commercials are not a source of temptation because of the association with slaughterhouses. Chocolate bars are not a temptation because of the association with sugar, cancer and lethargy following consumption.

Jeez, „Collapse of Western Civilisation“, that‘s some serious clickbait.