Vox (Ezra Klein) - Is Big Tech addictive? A debate with Nir Eyal Flashcards
Nir Eyal: I think you can teach people how to build the kind of products that build healthy habits while also having the insight or knowledge to help people understand how to avoid distraction at the hands of some of these products as well. That’s what “Indistractable” is about.
We as a species are not designed for satisfaction. The self-help and the personal development industry tells us that if we are not happy, we are not normal. Nothing could be further from the truth — evolution designed us to never be satisfied.
Hedonic adaptation and negativity bias keep us perpetually perturbed, and that keeps us wanting more.
Hedonic adaptation is the idea that as soon as we have any improvement in our life, we tend to go back down to baseline. We see this with people who have won the lottery and those who experience traumatic events. They experience a decline [or increase] in happiness for a while but then return to their baseline happiness. So hedonic adaptation keeps us at this base level of happiness, and causes us to perpetually want more and more.
I agree that the world is bifurcating into two types of people: people who allow their attention to be manipulated and controlled by others and those who stand up and say, “No, I am indistractable. I live with intent.”
One of those “others” is certainly the technology we use. But another is the people in our lives — our bosses telling us what to do, our significant others, our kids. So we can either take the prohibition approach or we can [focus on] increasing people’s ability to get the best out of technology without letting it get the best of us.
One of the clear certainties of human existence is that technological innovation improves living standards over time. We want this to continue. I believe we should look at these technologies and ask ourselves, “Is this something that is serving me, or am I serving it?” But we don’t want that skepticism to turn into cynicism. I think that cynicism can be quite toxic.
In my research, I spoke with Richard M. Ryan — the founder of self-determination theory — who believes that what’s going on has to do with what he calls “needs displacement hypothesis”: the idea that kids go online to fulfil the psychological nutrients that they’re not getting offline.
So when we just blame the service, it is harmful because we don’t look for the deeper reason why our kids are behaving this way.
I started the book with the question: Why do we get distracted? It turns out, this is an age-old problem — even Socrates and Plato talked about it 2,500 years ago. The problem for most folks isn’t a knowledge gap. We know that if we want to be healthy, we have to eat right and you have to exercise. We don’t have to buy a diet book for that. If we want to have healthy relationships, we have to be fully present with the people we care about. If we want to do well at our jobs, we have to do the hard work. We know this stuff. What fascinated me is why don’t we do what we know we should do?
To answer that question, I had to start with, why do we do anything? What’s the nature of human motivation? Turns out that psychologically speaking and neurologically speaking, the source of all human motivation is pain. This creates what is called the homeostatic response.
We feel this physiologically all the time. If you feel cold, you put on a jacket. If you’re hot, you take it off. If you’re hungry, you eat. Physiological discomfort spurs us to action. The same thing applies to psychological discomfort. When we feel lonely, we check Facebook. When we are uncertain, we Google something. If we’re bored in the car, we’ll check the news or look at sports scores.
If all behaviour is spurred by a desire to escape discomfort, this means that time management is pain management. That’s something I’d never realized before. We talk about all these life hacks and productivity tricks, but fundamentally, if we don’t control the discomfort we’re trying to escape, we will always get distracted by something, as people have always been. So, that has to be the first step.
“The antidote to impulsiveness is forethought.”
By planning ahead, we utilize a unique gift of our species — that we can see the future better than any other animal. So what we have to do is to plan ahead. No matter what the algorithms these companies have, we have the power to plan ahead. In the moment, it’s too late.
Ezra Klein: I agree with this. I still love the book Predictably Irrational by Dan Ariely. The whole idea is that if you understand when you are going to be irrational, you can predict it, and if can predict it, you can plan ahead for it. But one of the reasons I pushed you on having a society-level critique is that your assumption is that you have freedom and resources to plan ahead.
I agree that the world is bifurcating into two types of people: people who allow their attention to be manipulated and controlled by others and those who stand up and say, “No, I am indistractable. I live with intent.”
One of those “others” is certainly the technology we use. But another is the people in our lives — our bosses telling us what to do, our significant others, our kids. So we can either take the prohibition approach or we can [focus on] increasing people’s ability to get the best out of technology without letting it get the best of us.
One of the clear certainties of human existence is that technological innovation improves living standards over time. We want this to continue. I believe we should look at these technologies and ask ourselves, “Is this something that is serving me, or am I serving it?” But we don’t want that skepticism to turn into cynicism. I think that cynicism can be quite toxic.
