“Honesty” and “truth” are very different things. One does not imply the other.

Opening this defense with "Is it really that unbelievable" is the equivalent of you yelling "I know but wouldn't it be neat!?".

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This is embarrassing. Incoming "Whatever you say man, believe whatever you want to believe.

It betrays a 1st year psychology student level of understanding of neuroscience, that's for one.

The enitre view of addiction (limbic compulsion vs cortex) is 30 years out of date, and the entire fairytale of the lower lizard brain and the higher, reasoned and enlightened brain sitting atop it is 50 years out of date. Do you think this is so easy?

I find statements like this often from naive techbros who spent their career making apps for ridiculous cash ;) Any neuroscientist down there in the trenches for decades breaking their back to wrest a tiny bit of genuine understanding from a highly complex system far out in the chaotic regime with nothing but a set of ever-improving yet ever too crude tools can only offer a laugh.

Social media are habit-forming. Whoop de doo, such brain hacking. This is stuff we've known for as long as we've known drugs and gambling, which is to say: as long as we've had written word as a species, and likely longer.

What is new, is that each of us poor motherfuckers is holding an interface device in our pocket through which the habit forming behavior can be reinforced at any time, all the time. This is, of course, bad - more or less as bad as having a bottle of vodka that never runs out and taking a swig any time you want. Surely, to nobody's surprise, this would quickly turn you into a raving alcoholic. But is it some incredible feat of neural sorcery on part of the guy who gave you the perma-vodka bottle? Hardly.

Good old guy Karl Marx had a word for people who are so far up their own asses that they forget anything in society apart from their discipline even exists: Fachidioten ("professional idiots").

I would instead invite you to look at the big picture: being able to get someone hooked on an app means jack shit in the grand order of things; and in the long term, the entire data harvesting social app panopticon is a pyramid scheme, built entirely of the "greater fool" fallacy. You get data, more data, all the data, to, pretty much, brag about all the data you've got and get venture capitalists who know even less than you to give you absolute fucktons of money, under the understanding that suckers with even less brains (but yet more money) will buy in and make it worthwhile. But in the end, what good does the data do you? Ah yes, predictive algorithms. Which make you money... how exactly? That's right, by pitching them to venture capitalists... etc. etc. ad infinitum. Or, really, not. The carrying capacity of our economic system is not limitless. The ability to partake in buzzword- and hype-based economy is not limitless. The last bastion might be in the form of authoritarian governments (which is to say, most major powers) wanting this data for social control. But social control is brittle, my friend. I was here and watching it when the Eastern Bloc fell. In the 1980's nobody thought they would see it in their lifetime, the bloc was obviously an insurmountable behemoth. A few years later if immediatelly fell to pieces, and it was immediately obvious it was an impossible house of cards. This change, when ongoing, happened over months.

This is why I always laugh at tech bros who think they got everything solved and that they are, and will remain, at the top of the fucking world.

Until 2018. No more drugs, dry as fuck now. There was a huge shakedown throughout the country to eliminate drugs and gang activity . Shanghai was lit back in the day haha

i find that surprising considering you always hear about americans getting arrested for very small offenses

Thanks. I know Tencent is a huge company and has their hands in a lot of data.

That’s cool I had just never heard it many regional Colloquialism

No I have not and I’m just guessing but neither would you have done so if not given it in college which is fine but to act like this one source is just common reading is aggressive. All I said was in my experience it was not a thing I had heard not attacking anyone unlike you