Having been there personally and spent time with others in by same place: it probably can't be anything but "impulsive" for most people. It really is a "hang on til it hurts too much", reasons for/against tend to come and go, and the decision can be made/unmade all the time.
This is human behaviour, and causality is really not as simple as wanking some stats around and making a bunch of super tenuous inference. 'fuck outta here with that reductionist bullshit.
That's really not how choice seems to work in real life.
Anecdotes about recovered junkies are meaningless until you talk to those, which in my experience are the majority, who a) haven't recovered and b) repeatedly choose to try and c) fail to recover because humans just don't have the infinite willpower and rationality that this freedom of choice dogma always assumes. I mean people often don't even have enough information to make rational/good decisions in the first place. Until you stop looking at only success stories, and really have a look at the rest of the iceberg that is human failure, you're just chewing on ideological preconceptions.
> I am addicted to caffeine
Apples and oranges. Caffeine doesn't have much in the way of negatives, and if you experience one of the negatives then the positives most likely aren't strong enough to keep you coming back. So sure, Mormon judgements would then in the 'eye of beholder'.
Maybe talk about alcohol, there's some pretty objective negatives - not only for the person 'choosing' to do it but almost anyone around them - and I know plenty of alcoholics who wouldn't be alcoholics if they were capable of making that choice.
> The world would be a much better place if free heroin were available in unlimited quantity on every streetcorner.
Well now I really can't tell if I'm just feeding the trolls...
Still doesn't seem like you've given it any thought...
If I go round giving people the 'choice' of free samples of heroin, with full knowledge that they're highly likely to become addicted and will no longer be able to choose not to parttake, and even with the intention that they do, and then I make bank, that's pure exploitation. And detriment there is definitely not subjective. Maybe there's a little more nuance to the equivalent in social media but it's not all that different, and negative effects on mental health are even more scary because they're not as blindingly obvious as the results of a physiological addiction.
Maybe you should try understand the limits of rationality in human decision making, especially with immediate vs. delayed rewards, then you might get some idea that choice is often more a function of the options in front of you than whatever might have the best outcome. Reality is just a little more nuanced than this oversimplified ECON101 libertarian ideal of absolute freedom of choice.
A much less dishonest (or maybe just less naive) way to frame it is to ask whether we're okay with someone exploit systemic weaknesses in human nature en masse for personal gain and to the long-term detriment of those exploited.
This watered down idealized absolute interpretation of 'freedom of choice' is just so goddamn naive, and ignores pretty much everything we know about systemic flaws in human behavior and decision making. We can do so much fucking better than that.
Given a quick read of both articles, maybe that author should have said that computational technology maybe reduces cognitive load so we can focus on other stuff. No shit…
The implication of all this (partly from the shitty phrasing on the part of the authors) is that we’re better off not being forced to think about the things that technology trivializes. A bunch of research on physiological and cognitive or neurological adaptation (or whatever happens in the absence of a stimulus to adapt to ) would raise some proper questions about that implication.
I mean the title of the nature article is pretty much a summary of a null result, but it’s phrased in a way that is very easy to interpret as positive (or at least non-negative) wrt the effect of technology on cognition. Where I really doubt the popular interpretation of ‘cognition’ matches the scientific one. It probably ends up closer to ‘smartness’ or ‘effectiveness’ or just ‘good’.
“We didn’t find anything significant, here’s tasty phrasing that you can misinterpret and make sensational headline”
If you write a scientific publication you should really really aim to avoid stuff which can easily be misinterpreted by laypeople and opportunistic journalists/influencers. The audience for scientific material is now way closer to the average human with no reference for how to interpret this kind of shit.
> ... easier to regulate one giant company than a myriad of smaller ones
This sounds... incorrect.
Small players are much more vulnerable to fines and other penalties which range from 'cost of doing business' to 'slap on the wrist' for the big guys. And small ones don't seem to have much in the way of lobbying power or other direct influence over regulators.
Maybe more accurate to say that it's a bit harder to police lots of small players, but also that it's only the small players who produce good behaviour under regulation.
This is human behaviour, and causality is really not as simple as wanking some stats around and making a bunch of super tenuous inference. 'fuck outta here with that reductionist bullshit.