[ExI] state of conflict technology

[Dan TheBookMan]

I'm no expert on addiction, but that sounds like a good working definition. I wonder if Bill W, having a background in psychology, might give a brief run down on other definitions. (I would Google up on it, but want to get through other stuff this morning.)

Now one problem I find with this definition is that people do seem to have conflicting desires. So, one can easily imagine a person wanting to get off X yet still wanting to be on X. This is a folk psychological account, of course. Worse, it's my folk psychological account, so YMMV.

In economics, there's the notion of revealed preference. This is basically that it's not what a person reports but what they actually do that tells us their wants. It's kind of a "talk is cheap" approach to human action. Of course, revealed preference must exist in a context where a choice between actions (or goals) is possible. So, an actual addiction would not be an example. The problem is drawing the line here. It seems the person who actually quits smoking has revealed their preference, but of the people who try and fail it seems like it'd be hard to tell whether they’re revealing a preference or not.

Revealed preference is not without its critics, but that's a longer discussion. See:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Revealed_preference

Regards,

Dan
   Sample my Kindle books at:
http://author.to/DanUst 

> On Friday, January 10, 2020, 10:12:52 AM PST, John Clark via extropy-chat <extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org> wrote:
> 
> 
> On Fri, Jan 10, 2020 at 12:33 PM William Flynn Wallace via extropy-chat <extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org> wrote:
> 
> > It all depends on who gets to define addiction
> 
> I think a good definition of addiction is wanting to stop doing something but being unable to force yourself to do so, by that definition cigarettes smoking is about as addictive as Heroin. 74% of smokers want to stop but each year only 6% actually manage to do so, do so and live that is, I'm not counting those who stopped smoking because they died.
> 
>  John K Clark
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