this post was submitted on 31 Oct 2023
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Initial thought:
Everyone is nudged slightly closer to what they need to live comfortable lives
For people with very low quality of life, their life gets slightly better For people with very high quality of life, their life gets imperceptibly worse (but then also slightly better as the world around them has improved, since they make up such a tiny fraction of people)
"more realistic" thought: The human brain is slightly less prone to addiction - however slight this adjustment needs to be to be considered a small thing.
Less social media addiction, less harmful substance addiction, less sugar addiction, less gambling addiction.
Hmm, is there any positive side to addiction? Most human emotions were at least adaptive once upon a time. I guess some very talented people are said to have an addiction-like focus on their trades.
I don't know if any positive effects of how addiction-prone our brains are remains - I can imagine it being good for survival when resources are scarce but we don't live in a world where that's really the case anymore
I'm like my air addiction.
Habits can be adaptive, but addictions are more about external drugs hacking the brain. And highly refined and addictive drugs didn't really exist in the ancestral environment. (Alcohol was first refined ~9000 years ago, which isn't enough time to evolve an anti-addiction mechanism.)
That's true. There would have been things like khat they could have chewed on, but khat isn't very addictive. In the new world there was coca leaves, but we haven't been in the new world nearly as long and I'm not sure how addictive they even are without being concentrated.