“Because we've created a world where effort gets treated like a disease to be cured.”
That pretty much sums it up for me. Well put. I am at a point where I am trying to acquire hobbies to improve my happiness and there is a difficulty modifier now on a lot of things where it’s like “what’s the point”. It reminds me of when X-Box first offered the ability to watch other people play. I was grinding to get like five more points on a course to hit the 200 point requirement, so I downloaded the top ghost video for the course. That person and I were not even playing the same game; they were orders of magnitude better than I was and all I wound up learning was I would never be that good at it.
aidenn0 · 17h ago
> ...all I wound up learning was I would never be that good at it.
I suspect that if you had looked at a 98-percentile video instead of the top video, you would also have thought that you would never be that good at it, but in many things, being in the top 2% is attainable with effort for the top 50% or so of the population; practicing for that is just not how they choose to spend their time.
jimmydddd · 14h ago
I was a musician (drummer) during my school days and took pride in being the best drummer in my school, and (I thought), probably top 2% in the world. However, if ytube was around at that time, I would have watched videos from around the world and realized that I was mediocre at best. Maybe I would have lost interest? Maybe I would have worked harder at it? Hard to say.
Levitz · 16h ago
Your example touches on a very related phenomenon. Videogame design.
Anyone who has activated cheats on videogames enough times can attest to the fact that it takes the enjoyment away. We do have games with superficial, skinner-like rewards, probably the majority, but many still rely on the satisfaction of overcoming real challenges to reward players.
I reckon all puzzle games are like this.
Gigachad · 7h ago
This is why I hate when games make you play with the difficulty to deal with broken mechanics. The elder scrolls being one where you can just end up stuck and forced to lower the difficulty because your character is physically incapable of proceeding.
But then it’s hard to be disciplined enough to only use it when strictly required. And it just feels unsatisfying.
spacemadness · 15h ago
I think this is why I grasp on to strength training and fitness as one of my main hobbies. There is no current shortcut other than steroids but even then you still need to put in the effort. If I stop, I can feel and see my body atrophy, my stress levels rise, my energy going down, etc. You need to keep learning and adjusting to make progress. You can definitely nerd out about it if you want. And it provides the dopamine rush after a tough workout and looking back and seeing my progress. It helps me connect with my body since I’m in my head all day. It’s also a primal and human activity that has nothing to do with AI.
vouaobrasil · 16h ago
One easy-ish solution is to realize that the pseudo-anonymous mass of people doing things on the internet really doesn't matter, and crucially, spend less time on the internet. Already taking 2 days/week away from the net makes my life much better.
voxleone · 17h ago
I'm from early Generation X and was raised with the belief that AI and robotics would—finally!—liberate humanity to pursue nobler endeavors: advanced technology, great art, and, most importantly, philosophy.
But reality has turned out bleaker, and it seems to be aligning more closely with the author's darker vision.
To avoid the dopamine collapse, we must reclaim effort as meaning—design systems that enhance human creativity, not replace it; use AI to challenge and collaborate, not merely to create shortcuts; and incorporate friction into learning, art, and problem-solving—not as inefficiency, but as intentional practice.
We must also teach people not only how to use AI, but how to preserve their humanity while using it.
Philosophy is no longer a luxury—it becomes a necessity.
vouaobrasil · 16h ago
> We must also teach people not only how to use AI, but how to preserve their humanity while using it.
One of the best things you can do is just not use it. There is no way to preserve your humanity while using it, at least not in the long run. Because its nature of mechanizing creativity creates feedback loops in our brains and reduces the magic of having the unclimbed mountain...so to speak. It's like trying to teach your body to feel good after having eaten too much sugar. It is beyond our capabilities and fundamentally incompatible with us.
Gigachad · 7h ago
I’m preserving my humanity by downvoting this AI slop.
nibblenum · 16h ago
if liberated, can philosophy really be explored?
expanding fractals. the past in the present and the inverse...
darker vision and negativity bias / optimism bias
u have the freedom of being unhappy with an AI
you still have infinite value
this may be the beauty of being disposable... ;)
FollowingTheDao · 16h ago
> there is a difficulty modifier now on a lot of things where it’s like “what’s the point”.
That is becasue you are still lacking dopamine. One needs to erase all the dopamine stimulation in your life to truly recover. Go to a AA meeting and you will see everyone drinking and smoking saying they are "sober" and wonder why they relapse.
Learn to limit your rewards to slow, natural ones, like he says in the article. It will absolutely suck at first. It is not about the activity, it is about slowing down the strong dopamine pulses.
Aurornis · 16h ago
> That is becasue you are still lacking dopamine.
Dopamine doesn’t work like this. You don’t “run out” of dopamine by engaging in stimulating activities.
This is pop-science metaphor stuff, not actual dopamine science.
AndrewDucker · 17h ago
Eliminate effort in the places you don't enjoy it, concentrate effort in places you do, recognise that sometimes the places that pay aren't the ones you enjoy most, and that sometimes you don't enjoy things until you've pushed through the basics.
barrell · 15h ago
I’m not convinced eliminating effort in places you don’t enjoy it is the right course of action. A recent example: I had to rearchitect major parts of my pipeline the other week. I find working on the pipeline very dull and not enjoyable. Since I wrote it all though, and struggled through, it was really easy for me to take it apart and reassemble it in a more efficient manner. Took maybe 30 minutes.
I couldn’t have comfortably done such a substantial refactor without suffering through the process of building it.
(And this refactor was much larger and more substantial than LLMs in their current state can do)
ozgrakkurt · 16h ago
100% feel this. Also even if you are doing something you enjoy, your brain goes into redirection mode when you hit the hard parts.
Is the language I’m using bad? Should I rewrite this other thing? Is it my colleague’s bad? Is this codebase rotten?
I see a lot of people label this as “I’m creative, I don’t do grunt work”, “I’m good at greenfield projects”, “I’m a builder” etc.
vouaobrasil · 16h ago
Unfortunately, a lot of people need a sufficient mass of people who are also doing things to engage socially in the hobby. But AI is destroying that.
Aurornis · 16h ago
> But everyone else? You're voluntarily breaking yours. I need medication to feel what you could feel naturally if you stopped training your brain that effort gets you nowhere.
> I was born with this dysfunction. You're choosing it.
This blog pushes the idea of “dopamine deficiency” as a real scientific concept, but it’s not an actual medical diagnosis (unless you have Parkinson’s disease). To be fair, the linked blog post implies that a doctor gave them this idea, which can happen when you go to a doctor who feels like they’re doing patients a favor by telling them they have a “chemical imbalance” or a deficiency of a neurotransmitter to alleviate objections for taking medication.
The other post also implies that a brain scan was used as part of the diagnosis process, so this is a good place to point out that brain scans are not diagnostic for ADHD. There have been a few notable quack doctors who tried to push fMRI misinterpretations as specialty ADHD diagnostic tools such as Dr. Amen, but these aren’t actually validated by anything nor have they even been shown to be repeatable.
As always: When someone starts talking about dopamine as the chemical that explains everything in life or makes claims to have a deficiency of it, realize that they’re talking about dopamine as a metaphor rather than actual science. Unfortunately people start taking the dopamine metaphor too literally and believe that any lack of motivation is equivalent to a physical lack of dopamine, which is not true.
FollowingTheDao · 16h ago
>This blog pushes the idea of “dopamine deficiency” as a real scientific concept, but it’s not an actual medical diagnosis (unless you have Parkinson’s disease).
This needs to be corrected. Parkinson is caused by too much dopamine which after being metabolized creates oxidative stress that kills the dopamine neuron. Which is why l-dopa fails to cure the disorder and actually makes the patent worse in the long run.
I will say one can see dopamine disorders in someone behavior and correlate them to genetics and nutrition if we cared.
Aurornis · 16h ago
> This needs to be corrected. Parkinson is caused by too much dopamine which after being metabolized creates oxidative stress that kills the dopamine neuron
This is not correct. The cause of Parkinson's is not fully understood and a simple Google search or visit to any medical website or Wikipedia could explain that.
The paper you linked is an editorial (it's in the title) commentary on another artificial experiment in mice that were genetically altered to have a hyperactive pathway for generating dopamine. This is not something found in nature nor do they claim it's something found in humans.
They're simply demonstrating that if they geneticially alter mice to overexpress dopamine and induce excess dopaminergic damage in the process, they can produce outcomes that kind of look like Parkinson's
Claiming that this editorial has explained Parkinson's disease is completely wrong.
> I will say one can see dopamine disorders in someone behavior and correlate them to genetics and nutrition if we cared.
Claiming that "if we cared" we'd see that everything is caused by dopamine, genetics, and nutrition is the current generation of pseudoscience that drives blog posts like this one. I don't know when people started reducing everything to dopamine, but it's neither accurate nor helpful. The number of people who have depression or learned behavioral problems who try to explain it away as "dopamine disorder" is becoming a problem.
FollowingTheDao · 15h ago
> The cause of Parkinson's is not fully understood and a simple Google search
Did you ask me if that is all I did? I picked that becasue it is easier for the layperson to understand. I apologize for being on the cutting edge of Parkinson's research. Maybe they have not cured it yet becasue science is so resistant to new paradigms.
Yes, low dopamine causes the symptoms of Parkinson's (PD), but what is causing the low dopamine is the oxidative stress destroying the Dopamine neurons. You could have searched more about it before you reacted so strongly, but here you go:
"Excessive dopamine in experimental models modifies proteins in the mitochondrial electron transport chain and inhibits the function. α-Synuclein and familiar Parkinson's disease-related gene products modify the expression and activity of monoamine oxidase. "
and
Does levodopa slow or hasten the rate of progression of Parkinson's disease?
Besides, if PD was caused by low Dopamine, why does l-dopa, which resolves symptoms, only work temporarily and makes the condition worse? The logical way to explain this is that Dopamine is the problem.
The clinical study failed to demonstrate any evidence of levodopa worsening early PD. However, the beta-CIT SPECT substudy indicates the opposite effect, namely that levodopa causes a more rapid decline in the integrity of the dopamine transporter located in the nigrostriatal nerve terminals in the striatum."
> Claiming that "if we cared" we'd see that everything is caused by dopamine,
I did not say that. But dopamine has a lot to do with learned behaviors so thanks.
Your response seems reactionary and filled with your own biases.
bevr1337 · 16h ago
> But everyone else? You're voluntarily breaking yours. I need medication to feel what you could feel naturally if you stopped training your brain that effort gets you nowhere.
> I was born with this dysfunction. You're choosing it.
This ending is worse than a TV show revealing a dream sequence.
We get it, you're special, we're sheep, thank you for enlightening us.
I was truly enjoying it until the author decided to throw out a middle finger.
Aurornis · 16h ago
They link to a blog post where they say they claim to have been diagnosed with “dopamine deficiency”, which is not a real diagnosis.
This is a classic example of someone misinterpreting the science and coming to believe that their state is not their fault. They believe it is entirely inflicted upon them by a medical condition, whereas other people are responsible for their actions and outcomes.
FollowingTheDao · 16h ago
I fault him only for his youth. becasue he is on the right track, just eager and still has a lot to learn.
It is quite possible he has genetics that make Dopmaine much ore of a problem for him.
Aurornis · 16h ago
Dopamine is not the catch-all, explain-everything chemical he believes it is.
He has rolled up his personality characteristics and learned behaviors and decided to blame it all on dopamine, then took it a step further and decided it must be all genetic and external to his actions.
But then he goes even a step further than that, and decides that his condition is not his fault, but everyone else who is in a similar position has done this to themselves through lifestyle choices.
> I fault him only for his youth.
From reading his post titles he’s a plus or minus 30 year old man, not a youth.
ccvannorman · 17h ago
Some things never change.
Yes, technology is the way we circumvent effort to deliver results (e.g. to live longer, healthier, and with less pain/fear.)
Yes, our civilization rewards and encourages short circuiting effort, depriving us of the basic positive feedback loop of effort to reward.
It's been like this since the invention of the wheel and fire. It's up to us to find and/or create meaningful (and effortful) lives, and it is more sustainable to focus on the path than the destination; every zen text teaches this.
This article started off strong but ended up quippy, spiteful and shallow. Still, I appreciate the effort ;-]
vouaobrasil · 16h ago
> Yes, our civilization rewards and encourages short circuiting effort, depriving us of the basic positive feedback loop of effort to reward.
To some extent, but so far before AI it has been at a speed and magnitude most people could handle. With AI, they can't.
> It's been like this since the invention of the wheel and fire. It's up to us to find and/or create meaningful (and effortful) lives, and it is more sustainable to focus on the path than the destination; every zen text teaches this.
You are ignoring again the magnitude of the effect of AI, which is much worse than previous technologies. One can always focus on "the path" but Zen teachers also teach practicality: why make your life complicated? AI makes things complicated unecessarily.
barrell · 17h ago
The progress from throwing sticks to fishing rods is very different from fishing rods to ordering fish at a restaurant — and not really comparable imo
GuB-42 · 16h ago
"Least effort" is the way of life, it is not just how the brain works, it is how the universe works. From the principle of least action that is maybe the most fundamental law of physics, to chemistry, to biology, to human activity. It is all some form of minimization.
Humanity developed agriculture because it requires less effort than hunting and gathering for feeding a given population. We developed machines because it is less effort than doing things by hand, etc... If your dopamine system rewards doing things with less effort, it is working properly.
The caveat is that doing something with less effort does not mean doing less, it can also mean doing more with the same amount of effort, including personal development. It doesn't mean you should AI everything or be sloppy, just not glorify effort as some intrinsic quality, the result is what matters.
uxhacker · 17h ago
Does using AI kill the dopamine loop?
I don’t think so.
I still spend the hours — because it needs to sound original. It needs to feel authentic. I have to add my own personal parts to the story.
I still struggle writing it.
The AI helps, but it doesn’t replace the work.
The dopamine’s still there — because I’m still in the loop.
bravesoul2 · 17h ago
AI kills the fun here for me. Writing is fun. Writing using AI to help is horrible. Same with coding to some extent.
conductr · 17h ago
Same, kills the fun. It’s actually made it harder to get started on anything because I know the starting point and most of the work is just prompts which I don’t find fun at all. Handcrafting feels more tedious knowing that prompts could do it so much faster. So I end up just disengaging from the activity all together. This is the second year since about 1995 that my side projects folder has practically nothing new (I’ve built a few things with AI, but I lose interest very fast - like a day or two).
FWIW my context is coding as a hobby/entrepreneur. It’s not my job.
jacquesm · 17h ago
I think that generalizes to 'creation is fun, using AI to help is horrible'.
barrell · 17h ago
I think that generalized to ‘AI killed the dopamine loop’ XD
jxntb73 · 17h ago
AT is an amazing tool that can boost productivity and help with creative inspiration. If an app is making you feel sad stop using the app.
vouaobrasil · 16h ago
Can it really help with creative inspiration in the long term? I'd say the answer is no for most people.
And some people need a certain number of others who are also doing the same thing for the love of it. We are a social species after all. AI is taking that away.
uxhacker · 17h ago
I’m very dyslexic, so having AI in the loop is incredibly useful — especially for feedback.
But I have to guide it: “just list the changes,” “use English English,” and so on.
The fun’s still there — because the thinking is still mine.
mrintegrity · 17h ago
I wrote a "funny" email to a colleague who asked for a formal request to do a task I asked him for. I took it seriously and wrote extremely formal ("Dearest Steven... " Etc). He laughed and said "did chatgpt write that?".
It made me irrationally angry, no, I spent two minutes of my own brain power to come up with those five sentences. This kind of thing happens constantly now, everyone assumes everyone else uses gpt's for everything and I find it a bit depressing to be honest.
No comments yet
tucnak · 16h ago
The mainstream writing assistants are dog-shite, but so is everything else! If your idea of writing with AI is ChatGPT and no harness, you're only making a statement about the largest common denominator of AI tooling—from a position of ignorance. I'd previously helped multiple pen-pals of mine to properly harness the AI tooling with low-code platforms such as Dify. I'm sure there's plenty more out there, but re: Dify specifically, they took to it rather well. When carefully prompted, some models excel in "editing" moreso than writing from scratch. Not having to rely on professional editors is a huge advantage for aspiring authors that would otherwise struggle with keeping on-form. In my experience, progressively refining ideas, maintaining notes on development of characters in long-winded stories, and soon enough, persistent agents with proactivity, interruptible work capabilities—would vastly reduce the cognitive load that has very little to do with "creativity," that writers have to deal with all the time.
You cannot blame "AI" for your own lack of trying...
vouaobrasil · 16h ago
Actually, the fact of the matter is that a lot of people derive joy of being the "sole creator" of what they do, or if they collaborate, to enrich human relationships when they do it. So, AI fundamentally takes away that joy because its outside the parameters of normal creation.
tucnak · 9h ago
What you allude to is not so much "fact," as the "heart" of the matter. The availability of AI tooling takes away nothing; you elect to either use it, or not. I personally hate having to deal with human editors! Most of them typically fit in two broad categories: guns-for-hire and genuine collaborators. The "fact" of the matter is such that AI does not prevent me from collaborating with any of my peers, however, it does allow me to pseudo-collaborate with the writers long-dead! In fact, I happen to maintaib a collection of theatrical play-journals, riddled with conversations I've had at the time with various historical figures vis-à-vis AI. This is the single most valuable source of inspiration enabling my writing in ways that my peers never could. AI-assisted writing is a misnomer—it's not about writing as much as reading, and moreso playing, which is how we get creative.
Wittgenstein would absolutely love it!
It doesn't surprise me that those of us to have failed in keeping up with the constantly-evolving AI tooling, would also make it part of their newly-refined, all-human identity. IMHO, similarly to how hating popular things does not make you cool, not using AI does not make you a joyous independent creator to bravely hold post in the treacherous world of AI slop! It sounds more like a fantasy than coherent creative position. We're still in the early days when it comes to creative writing comprehension in AI. You may or may not be surprised that there's very little to show for in terms of evals when it comes to that. Unlike coding and maths, fiction is yet to be recognised as verifiable domain. (Probably due to probability distribution in fictional outputs not necessarily converging the way of related objective rewards!) However, some labs are working it! There's a huge market for creative writing aids, as it'a necessary to everything from education (as story-telling is what makes studying worthwhile) to political work.
rr808 · 17h ago
It also reduces the enjoyment of a finished product. You used to write a story or report and be proud of the work. Now your neighbors have done the same with AI and feels like it isn't worth it.
vouaobrasil · 16h ago
This has been the effect of technology for a while, at least mass communications technology. It exposes you to a pseudo-anoymous world of millions of people doing things but for which you have no context for their creation, only their output.
AI however brings it to a horrific next level, and really emphasizes the mass production of art.
vouaobrasil · 16h ago
> The AI helps, but it doesn’t replace the work. The dopamine’s still there — because I’m still in the loop.
The problem is that most people need to feel that they are doing something original, and AI takes that away. AI doesn't help anything, except in the short term and maybe for some people who can compartamentalize it. But those people are few and far between indeed.
binary132 · 16h ago
this reads like it was written by AI.
idiotsecant · 16h ago
You've either let AI help you with the 'struggle' of this post or you've spent so much time with chatgpt that you've internalized it's cadence and patterns. This is straight chatGPT.
pacifika · 17h ago
This is why people pick up hobbies, I think. And why hustling kills them.
jxntb73 · 17h ago
Goals, however small, give life meaning.
vouaobrasil · 16h ago
Only if they are truly meaningful. Going to work just to further the system never really felt meaningful to me, even if it was a goal.
dysoco · 17h ago
I think the key is that you are supposed to automate whatever feels boring for you, and that should leave you more time to engage in activities that you actually feel joy for.
If your hobby is programming by all means disable AI assistance and spend hours coding, but for some people it might feel like a chore sometimes or just be their day job. Allowing them to automate that process further so that they can have more free time reading a book or doing woodworking doesn't feel that bad.
vouaobrasil · 16h ago
> I think the key is that you are supposed to automate whatever feels boring for you
I disagree with that. The problem is, if you really think about it, even some of the initially boring tasks can be interesting if understood in a certain light, and the fact that we couldn't automate them before meant that we had the opportunity to stumble upon them.
Also, there is also satisfaction for many people to finally finish a task that they really slaved over.
Automating wasn't a problem when computers did only truly rote tasks. But AI spilled over into the creative domain and people should not automate even the boring parts of that because there are hidden rewards to sticking through those, because they are not truly as rote as they seem to be.
jdiff · 16h ago
Automating what's boring to spend more time on what brings you joy is a great idea. But using AI for that end seems counterproductive, as it seems to be reducing productivity rather than enhancing it.
A similar narrative, that we can automate tedium and focus on joy as a society are also kneecapped by the fact that these tools are being used to automate people out of jobs. Those people are not being supported by the tools that are eliminating their paid positions, leaving them with actually 0 time to enjoy their lives. It also further empowers the employers in the employer-employee relationship which was already being abused to hell and back.
theusus · 17h ago
Well, more output means money. AI is getting cheap, and thus we are forced to produce more in less time.
And I need money to survive.
vouaobrasil · 16h ago
But don't you see, that's the prisoner's dilemma? But instead of playing that game, you should find new ways to rise above the AI mass production slop, such as emphasizing the hand-craftedness of your work. Sometimes, sticking to what's right is a better path, especially since you can at least feel pride in doing so.
jahsome · 17h ago
The edgy and adversarial tone didn't really make sense until the end of the article. Then it was pretty clear what this is.
ada1981 · 17h ago
What is it?
Aurornis · 15h ago
There's a trend of people diagnosing themselves with medical conditions that explain away their shortcomings. In this case, the author wrote a long rant about how he believes other people are causing themselves harm through their choices of actions, but throws in an exemption for himself at the very end.
He believes he's different, as his condition is the result of genetics or something, which means he does not deserve any blame for his situation, unlike everyone else.
ada1981 · 9h ago
Thank you.
jahsome · 14h ago
Self-righteousness.
paulcole · 17h ago
The real dopamine hit comes from posting your own substack on HN.
bravesoul2 · 17h ago
At least its a well earned one. Usually.
gonzalohm · 17h ago
One could argue that this is a flaw of evolution. There is a system that gives you a reward after you accomplish something and hence you associate the final result with the reward.
If I offer you a shortcut, your brain is going to take it, easier reward, right?
And yet this has probably been a problem for ages. Nomad hunters probably had a huge dopamine rush after hunting. Then agriculture was invented and for some people getting food was just spending hard earned money at the market. And I don't think they fucked their dopamine system
What I mean by all this is that evolution and our brains will find a way to evolve and change our reward system. We will find other things that feel rewarding
thejohnconway · 17h ago
Evolution is not operating at the speed necessary on population to the change of circumstances we have generated over the last 15,000 years. Especially in the modern world, where it is hardly clear that the reproduction rates of the people happiest in it are higher. Probably the opposite is true.
So yes, it is totally possible that we have been fucking it up with respect to our biology for thousands of years. In fact there is a pretty substantial body of work and evidence that hunter-gatherers are happier than than people living the post agricultural/industrial lifestyle.
vouaobrasil · 16h ago
> What I mean by all this is that evolution and our brains will find a way to evolve and change our reward system.
I don't see how, because making your brain feel better these days is not tied to survival. There is no differential in survival probability to change the short-term reward system. In fact, the current capitalistic technological system rewards it.
ndepoel · 16h ago
I had this epiphany last year when I went through some old holiday pictures and saw a photo of a monument in a location that I had no memory of. So I spent some time retracing our steps on that day, based on other pictures from around the same time, and places that I knew we visited. It took a while, but eventually I managed to zero in on the place and felt pretty satisfied as I starred the location on Google Maps.
Since the monument in question was somewhat relevant to my work, I shared the picture in my company chat and asked if anyone had seen it and knew from the top of their head where this was. Almost immediately one colleague threw the picture into an AI reverse image search and instantly came up with the answer where it was and what the monument represented. I was incredibly annoyed at that; not because someone was able to come up with the answer much faster than I did on my own, but because it took the FUN out of the whole thing.
That's when I realized that my instinctive dislike for AI is because it takes the fun out of everything for me. The process of figuring out where this photo was taken was much more rewarding than the eventual answer. Similarly, when programming I take pleasure out of figuring out difficult problems and coming up with elegant solutions for then. Writing the actual code isn't the interesting or difficult part, and I don't need an AI to do that for me. AI is being hyped up by people who are not interested in the process of learning and understanding and who just want a quick shortcut to the answer, completely missing the point in my opinion.
artofpongfu · 15h ago
You should try GeoGuessr if you haven't already. But there as well there are things that ruin the fun: "meta" knowledge, like if you see this tear in the sky, or this or that Google car then it's this country. I purposefully avoid learning any meta because that's not what makes GeoGuessr fun. The fun part is integrating several vague clues and arriving at the right conclusion.
vouaobrasil · 16h ago
Excellent realization. AI is fundamentally destructive, and is one reason I never use it, ever. Automation was never meant to infringe upon the creative domain, only the truly mechanical.
ada1981 · 17h ago
Why does the author use a computer and the Internet to write and distribute his thoughts?
Certainly it would be more rewarding to create paper from scratch and walk the earth handing his ideas to people? He could even create his own written language from scratch!
The way to get the most out of AI is not to simply automate away things you love; it’s to go bigger and try to solve bigger actual problems while using AI.
I teach an advanced university level course in how to write books with AI. It’s amazing to watch students (some traditional published authors) unlock new levels of flow and creativity.
It’s not the tool. You’re just using it wrong.
klabb3 · 17h ago
> It’s not the tool. You’re just using it wrong.
Famous techno-optimist trope.
What if the ”tool” is marketed as something that can replace not just labor, but taste, decision making, and craft? Another recent tech development: Whose fault is it that social media is full of engagement bait and influencer social posturing? Is social media a tool? Are the recommendation systems, which promote thin perfect bodies to teenagers with low self esteem, just a tool? After all, they just ”help” you find content you’re likely to engage with.
Note I both agree and disagree with you here. I use AI too but I am very cautious to not let it ”take over”. It’s even hard to define what that means exactly. And that’s for someone who grew up without it. Imagine school today, with all the pressures of being a teenager from peers and teachers, and having access to free AI from companies who plan to rent it back to you later once they turn the value extraction knob.
newAccount2025 · 16h ago
> I use AI too but I am very cautious to not let it ”take over”
I think this is the key. Who’s driving?
If you are deliberate about what you want to own, focus on, and create yourself, you can consciously decide how AI help you bootstrap, scaffold, and critique your work to help you go farther.
If you aren’t, and you just tell AI to do it for you, you’re just ordering that Biryani. And heck, maybe that can be OK too. Sometimes you just need a meal you aren’t wanting to work at.
ada1981 · 9h ago
If someone markets a hammer as a spaceship, that’s bad marketing. Not a bad tool.
Social media can be a tool.
The recommendation systems are not tools to help you as much as they are a tool to increase shareholder value - occasionally those goals align, often they diverge.
loloquwowndueo · 17h ago
> It’s not the tool. You’re just using it wrong
No.
Some people get great results with AI, others don’t.
But it doesn’t follow that for those for whom it doesn’t work “they’re using it wrong”. Maybe it’s the wrong tool for the job, while it’s the right tool for another job (like the one you described).
Stop pretending AI is universally useful for every use case and it must be the user’s fault if it doesn’t actually help.
ada1981 · 9h ago
The wrong tool for the job is a classic case of “using it wrong”.
65 · 17h ago
> I teach an advanced university level course in how to write books with AI.
Ah yes, a slop teacher. Teacher of how to make slop. Can I buy your online course on how to make money from my slop?
ada1981 · 9h ago
Re: “slop”, can’t help you there. But if you’d like to join 6 figure advanced / published authors who have come to me for 1:1 coaching and support in how to integrate AI tools into their workflows, sure you are welcome to apply.
FollowingTheDao · 16h ago
He is almost right.
We are being given dopamine faster and easier on purpose. The dopamine you get from painting something yourself is no different than the dopamine you get from letting AI do it. The whole point of the modern, technological world is to get us more dopamine and faster. Our dopamine pathway is a profit center.
This is the same story with sex, drugs, alcohol, gambling, social media and...
Stress.
Stress triggers dopamine release via cortisol. In acute stress this is no problem, but with chronic stress the dopamine receptors get down regulated. Yes, you see, you actually can get addicted to stress. Any adrenaline junkies out there? You are actually looking for dopamine.) This is where I feel news addiction can come in for some people. 24x7 stress from anywhere around the globe.
This is how the modern world makes money,
He thinks, and states, "I was born with this dysfunction. You're choosing it." Nah brother, 99% of people are driven by impulses they have no control over, and technology/modern life is just making it worse. Just go to any Starbucks in the morning. You think people are there for the taste of the coffee? Nope, they are there for the drug. Now it is possible his nutrition and genetics make this more of a problem form him, but no one chooses addiction.
He also says in an older article "After a few therapy sessions, doctor appointments, and even a brain scan, I found my answer—dopamine deficiency. There’s no cure, but there’s treatment."
I have been working in nutritional genetics and with my own Asperger's, OCD and Schizoaffcetive Disorder for the last 20 years. I can assure you here is no way to be diagnosed with a dopamine deficiency (and no brain scan for it either). I could see if he had gene testing that found mutations in DDC or somewhere else that inhibited Dopamine production, but he is just a kid, grasping at straws. I know this because I was him at 33. I do not fault him for it, I praise him. Because at least he is thinking about it
It turns out I have a mutation in my CBS gene which limits the rate P5P (B6) binds to the enzyme (https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/snp/rs773734233) which. creates a functional B6 deficiency with several down stream effects. I made several assumption that were wrong in the past, but they all led me to my treatment, and saved my mind and also my life.
he is blaming the individuals for their addiction, this is immoral. Blame the dealers of dopamine who know exactly what they are doing and public health for doing nothing about it.
Pigalowda · 16h ago
I sort of get it I guess.
Struggle builds character or whatever.
The things I enjoy aren’t because I’m the best at them. I don’t care that software could crush me at reading or playing games. Or a robot can lift more weight than I can or hike a trail faster than me. A robot could surely crush me at laying out on the beach and snorkeling.
Comparison is the thief of joy. Enjoy what you want without thinking about how much worse you are than someone or something else.
Cook because you like it or have to do it for financial reasons. Write because you enjoy it (or have to for financial reasons). You get the point.
justlikereddit · 16h ago
Edgy take by young adult with same problem as everyone else, except everyone else suffering from it due to lazyness and asthenic personality whereas he suffers uniquely due to external reasons outside his own control.
That pretty much sums it up for me. Well put. I am at a point where I am trying to acquire hobbies to improve my happiness and there is a difficulty modifier now on a lot of things where it’s like “what’s the point”. It reminds me of when X-Box first offered the ability to watch other people play. I was grinding to get like five more points on a course to hit the 200 point requirement, so I downloaded the top ghost video for the course. That person and I were not even playing the same game; they were orders of magnitude better than I was and all I wound up learning was I would never be that good at it.
I suspect that if you had looked at a 98-percentile video instead of the top video, you would also have thought that you would never be that good at it, but in many things, being in the top 2% is attainable with effort for the top 50% or so of the population; practicing for that is just not how they choose to spend their time.
Anyone who has activated cheats on videogames enough times can attest to the fact that it takes the enjoyment away. We do have games with superficial, skinner-like rewards, probably the majority, but many still rely on the satisfaction of overcoming real challenges to reward players.
I reckon all puzzle games are like this.
But then it’s hard to be disciplined enough to only use it when strictly required. And it just feels unsatisfying.
But reality has turned out bleaker, and it seems to be aligning more closely with the author's darker vision.
To avoid the dopamine collapse, we must reclaim effort as meaning—design systems that enhance human creativity, not replace it; use AI to challenge and collaborate, not merely to create shortcuts; and incorporate friction into learning, art, and problem-solving—not as inefficiency, but as intentional practice.
We must also teach people not only how to use AI, but how to preserve their humanity while using it.
Philosophy is no longer a luxury—it becomes a necessity.
One of the best things you can do is just not use it. There is no way to preserve your humanity while using it, at least not in the long run. Because its nature of mechanizing creativity creates feedback loops in our brains and reduces the magic of having the unclimbed mountain...so to speak. It's like trying to teach your body to feel good after having eaten too much sugar. It is beyond our capabilities and fundamentally incompatible with us.
expanding fractals. the past in the present and the inverse...
darker vision and negativity bias / optimism bias
u have the freedom of being unhappy with an AI
you still have infinite value
this may be the beauty of being disposable... ;)
That is becasue you are still lacking dopamine. One needs to erase all the dopamine stimulation in your life to truly recover. Go to a AA meeting and you will see everyone drinking and smoking saying they are "sober" and wonder why they relapse.
Learn to limit your rewards to slow, natural ones, like he says in the article. It will absolutely suck at first. It is not about the activity, it is about slowing down the strong dopamine pulses.
Dopamine doesn’t work like this. You don’t “run out” of dopamine by engaging in stimulating activities.
This is pop-science metaphor stuff, not actual dopamine science.
I couldn’t have comfortably done such a substantial refactor without suffering through the process of building it.
(And this refactor was much larger and more substantial than LLMs in their current state can do)
Is the language I’m using bad? Should I rewrite this other thing? Is it my colleague’s bad? Is this codebase rotten?
I see a lot of people label this as “I’m creative, I don’t do grunt work”, “I’m good at greenfield projects”, “I’m a builder” etc.
> I was born with this dysfunction. You're choosing it.
This blog pushes the idea of “dopamine deficiency” as a real scientific concept, but it’s not an actual medical diagnosis (unless you have Parkinson’s disease). To be fair, the linked blog post implies that a doctor gave them this idea, which can happen when you go to a doctor who feels like they’re doing patients a favor by telling them they have a “chemical imbalance” or a deficiency of a neurotransmitter to alleviate objections for taking medication.
The other post also implies that a brain scan was used as part of the diagnosis process, so this is a good place to point out that brain scans are not diagnostic for ADHD. There have been a few notable quack doctors who tried to push fMRI misinterpretations as specialty ADHD diagnostic tools such as Dr. Amen, but these aren’t actually validated by anything nor have they even been shown to be repeatable.
As always: When someone starts talking about dopamine as the chemical that explains everything in life or makes claims to have a deficiency of it, realize that they’re talking about dopamine as a metaphor rather than actual science. Unfortunately people start taking the dopamine metaphor too literally and believe that any lack of motivation is equivalent to a physical lack of dopamine, which is not true.
This needs to be corrected. Parkinson is caused by too much dopamine which after being metabolized creates oxidative stress that kills the dopamine neuron. Which is why l-dopa fails to cure the disorder and actually makes the patent worse in the long run.
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/34184261/
I will say one can see dopamine disorders in someone behavior and correlate them to genetics and nutrition if we cared.
This is not correct. The cause of Parkinson's is not fully understood and a simple Google search or visit to any medical website or Wikipedia could explain that.
The paper you linked is an editorial (it's in the title) commentary on another artificial experiment in mice that were genetically altered to have a hyperactive pathway for generating dopamine. This is not something found in nature nor do they claim it's something found in humans.
They're simply demonstrating that if they geneticially alter mice to overexpress dopamine and induce excess dopaminergic damage in the process, they can produce outcomes that kind of look like Parkinson's
Claiming that this editorial has explained Parkinson's disease is completely wrong.
> I will say one can see dopamine disorders in someone behavior and correlate them to genetics and nutrition if we cared.
Claiming that "if we cared" we'd see that everything is caused by dopamine, genetics, and nutrition is the current generation of pseudoscience that drives blog posts like this one. I don't know when people started reducing everything to dopamine, but it's neither accurate nor helpful. The number of people who have depression or learned behavioral problems who try to explain it away as "dopamine disorder" is becoming a problem.
Did you ask me if that is all I did? I picked that becasue it is easier for the layperson to understand. I apologize for being on the cutting edge of Parkinson's research. Maybe they have not cured it yet becasue science is so resistant to new paradigms.
Yes, low dopamine causes the symptoms of Parkinson's (PD), but what is causing the low dopamine is the oxidative stress destroying the Dopamine neurons. You could have searched more about it before you reacted so strongly, but here you go:
Rethinking Parkinson's disease: could dopamine reduction therapy have clinical utility? https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC11319508/
and
Toxic interactions between dopamine, α-synuclein, monoamine oxidase, and genes in mitochondria of Parkinson's disease
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/38196001/
"Excessive dopamine in experimental models modifies proteins in the mitochondrial electron transport chain and inhibits the function. α-Synuclein and familiar Parkinson's disease-related gene products modify the expression and activity of monoamine oxidase. "
and
Does levodopa slow or hasten the rate of progression of Parkinson's disease?
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/16222436/
and
Damage to dopaminergic neurons by oxidative stress in Parkinson's disease (Review) https://www.spandidos-publications.com/10.3892/ijmm.2018.340...
Besides, if PD was caused by low Dopamine, why does l-dopa, which resolves symptoms, only work temporarily and makes the condition worse? The logical way to explain this is that Dopamine is the problem. The clinical study failed to demonstrate any evidence of levodopa worsening early PD. However, the beta-CIT SPECT substudy indicates the opposite effect, namely that levodopa causes a more rapid decline in the integrity of the dopamine transporter located in the nigrostriatal nerve terminals in the striatum."
> Claiming that "if we cared" we'd see that everything is caused by dopamine,
I did not say that. But dopamine has a lot to do with learned behaviors so thanks.
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S235215462...
Your response seems reactionary and filled with your own biases.
> I was born with this dysfunction. You're choosing it.
This ending is worse than a TV show revealing a dream sequence.
We get it, you're special, we're sheep, thank you for enlightening us.
I was truly enjoying it until the author decided to throw out a middle finger.
This is a classic example of someone misinterpreting the science and coming to believe that their state is not their fault. They believe it is entirely inflicted upon them by a medical condition, whereas other people are responsible for their actions and outcomes.
It is quite possible he has genetics that make Dopmaine much ore of a problem for him.
He has rolled up his personality characteristics and learned behaviors and decided to blame it all on dopamine, then took it a step further and decided it must be all genetic and external to his actions.
But then he goes even a step further than that, and decides that his condition is not his fault, but everyone else who is in a similar position has done this to themselves through lifestyle choices.
> I fault him only for his youth.
From reading his post titles he’s a plus or minus 30 year old man, not a youth.
Yes, technology is the way we circumvent effort to deliver results (e.g. to live longer, healthier, and with less pain/fear.)
Yes, our civilization rewards and encourages short circuiting effort, depriving us of the basic positive feedback loop of effort to reward.
It's been like this since the invention of the wheel and fire. It's up to us to find and/or create meaningful (and effortful) lives, and it is more sustainable to focus on the path than the destination; every zen text teaches this.
This article started off strong but ended up quippy, spiteful and shallow. Still, I appreciate the effort ;-]
To some extent, but so far before AI it has been at a speed and magnitude most people could handle. With AI, they can't.
> It's been like this since the invention of the wheel and fire. It's up to us to find and/or create meaningful (and effortful) lives, and it is more sustainable to focus on the path than the destination; every zen text teaches this.
You are ignoring again the magnitude of the effect of AI, which is much worse than previous technologies. One can always focus on "the path" but Zen teachers also teach practicality: why make your life complicated? AI makes things complicated unecessarily.
Humanity developed agriculture because it requires less effort than hunting and gathering for feeding a given population. We developed machines because it is less effort than doing things by hand, etc... If your dopamine system rewards doing things with less effort, it is working properly.
The caveat is that doing something with less effort does not mean doing less, it can also mean doing more with the same amount of effort, including personal development. It doesn't mean you should AI everything or be sloppy, just not glorify effort as some intrinsic quality, the result is what matters.
I don’t think so.
I still spend the hours — because it needs to sound original. It needs to feel authentic. I have to add my own personal parts to the story.
I still struggle writing it.
The AI helps, but it doesn’t replace the work. The dopamine’s still there — because I’m still in the loop.
FWIW my context is coding as a hobby/entrepreneur. It’s not my job.
And some people need a certain number of others who are also doing the same thing for the love of it. We are a social species after all. AI is taking that away.
But I have to guide it: “just list the changes,” “use English English,” and so on.
The fun’s still there — because the thinking is still mine.
It made me irrationally angry, no, I spent two minutes of my own brain power to come up with those five sentences. This kind of thing happens constantly now, everyone assumes everyone else uses gpt's for everything and I find it a bit depressing to be honest.
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You cannot blame "AI" for your own lack of trying...
Wittgenstein would absolutely love it!
It doesn't surprise me that those of us to have failed in keeping up with the constantly-evolving AI tooling, would also make it part of their newly-refined, all-human identity. IMHO, similarly to how hating popular things does not make you cool, not using AI does not make you a joyous independent creator to bravely hold post in the treacherous world of AI slop! It sounds more like a fantasy than coherent creative position. We're still in the early days when it comes to creative writing comprehension in AI. You may or may not be surprised that there's very little to show for in terms of evals when it comes to that. Unlike coding and maths, fiction is yet to be recognised as verifiable domain. (Probably due to probability distribution in fictional outputs not necessarily converging the way of related objective rewards!) However, some labs are working it! There's a huge market for creative writing aids, as it'a necessary to everything from education (as story-telling is what makes studying worthwhile) to political work.
AI however brings it to a horrific next level, and really emphasizes the mass production of art.
The problem is that most people need to feel that they are doing something original, and AI takes that away. AI doesn't help anything, except in the short term and maybe for some people who can compartamentalize it. But those people are few and far between indeed.
If your hobby is programming by all means disable AI assistance and spend hours coding, but for some people it might feel like a chore sometimes or just be their day job. Allowing them to automate that process further so that they can have more free time reading a book or doing woodworking doesn't feel that bad.
I disagree with that. The problem is, if you really think about it, even some of the initially boring tasks can be interesting if understood in a certain light, and the fact that we couldn't automate them before meant that we had the opportunity to stumble upon them.
Also, there is also satisfaction for many people to finally finish a task that they really slaved over.
Automating wasn't a problem when computers did only truly rote tasks. But AI spilled over into the creative domain and people should not automate even the boring parts of that because there are hidden rewards to sticking through those, because they are not truly as rote as they seem to be.
A similar narrative, that we can automate tedium and focus on joy as a society are also kneecapped by the fact that these tools are being used to automate people out of jobs. Those people are not being supported by the tools that are eliminating their paid positions, leaving them with actually 0 time to enjoy their lives. It also further empowers the employers in the employer-employee relationship which was already being abused to hell and back.
He believes he's different, as his condition is the result of genetics or something, which means he does not deserve any blame for his situation, unlike everyone else.
If I offer you a shortcut, your brain is going to take it, easier reward, right?
And yet this has probably been a problem for ages. Nomad hunters probably had a huge dopamine rush after hunting. Then agriculture was invented and for some people getting food was just spending hard earned money at the market. And I don't think they fucked their dopamine system
What I mean by all this is that evolution and our brains will find a way to evolve and change our reward system. We will find other things that feel rewarding
So yes, it is totally possible that we have been fucking it up with respect to our biology for thousands of years. In fact there is a pretty substantial body of work and evidence that hunter-gatherers are happier than than people living the post agricultural/industrial lifestyle.
I don't see how, because making your brain feel better these days is not tied to survival. There is no differential in survival probability to change the short-term reward system. In fact, the current capitalistic technological system rewards it.
Since the monument in question was somewhat relevant to my work, I shared the picture in my company chat and asked if anyone had seen it and knew from the top of their head where this was. Almost immediately one colleague threw the picture into an AI reverse image search and instantly came up with the answer where it was and what the monument represented. I was incredibly annoyed at that; not because someone was able to come up with the answer much faster than I did on my own, but because it took the FUN out of the whole thing.
That's when I realized that my instinctive dislike for AI is because it takes the fun out of everything for me. The process of figuring out where this photo was taken was much more rewarding than the eventual answer. Similarly, when programming I take pleasure out of figuring out difficult problems and coming up with elegant solutions for then. Writing the actual code isn't the interesting or difficult part, and I don't need an AI to do that for me. AI is being hyped up by people who are not interested in the process of learning and understanding and who just want a quick shortcut to the answer, completely missing the point in my opinion.
Certainly it would be more rewarding to create paper from scratch and walk the earth handing his ideas to people? He could even create his own written language from scratch!
The way to get the most out of AI is not to simply automate away things you love; it’s to go bigger and try to solve bigger actual problems while using AI.
I teach an advanced university level course in how to write books with AI. It’s amazing to watch students (some traditional published authors) unlock new levels of flow and creativity.
It’s not the tool. You’re just using it wrong.
Famous techno-optimist trope.
What if the ”tool” is marketed as something that can replace not just labor, but taste, decision making, and craft? Another recent tech development: Whose fault is it that social media is full of engagement bait and influencer social posturing? Is social media a tool? Are the recommendation systems, which promote thin perfect bodies to teenagers with low self esteem, just a tool? After all, they just ”help” you find content you’re likely to engage with.
Note I both agree and disagree with you here. I use AI too but I am very cautious to not let it ”take over”. It’s even hard to define what that means exactly. And that’s for someone who grew up without it. Imagine school today, with all the pressures of being a teenager from peers and teachers, and having access to free AI from companies who plan to rent it back to you later once they turn the value extraction knob.
I think this is the key. Who’s driving?
If you are deliberate about what you want to own, focus on, and create yourself, you can consciously decide how AI help you bootstrap, scaffold, and critique your work to help you go farther.
If you aren’t, and you just tell AI to do it for you, you’re just ordering that Biryani. And heck, maybe that can be OK too. Sometimes you just need a meal you aren’t wanting to work at.
Social media can be a tool.
The recommendation systems are not tools to help you as much as they are a tool to increase shareholder value - occasionally those goals align, often they diverge.
No.
Some people get great results with AI, others don’t.
But it doesn’t follow that for those for whom it doesn’t work “they’re using it wrong”. Maybe it’s the wrong tool for the job, while it’s the right tool for another job (like the one you described).
Stop pretending AI is universally useful for every use case and it must be the user’s fault if it doesn’t actually help.
Ah yes, a slop teacher. Teacher of how to make slop. Can I buy your online course on how to make money from my slop?
We are being given dopamine faster and easier on purpose. The dopamine you get from painting something yourself is no different than the dopamine you get from letting AI do it. The whole point of the modern, technological world is to get us more dopamine and faster. Our dopamine pathway is a profit center.
This is the same story with sex, drugs, alcohol, gambling, social media and...
Stress.
Stress triggers dopamine release via cortisol. In acute stress this is no problem, but with chronic stress the dopamine receptors get down regulated. Yes, you see, you actually can get addicted to stress. Any adrenaline junkies out there? You are actually looking for dopamine.) This is where I feel news addiction can come in for some people. 24x7 stress from anywhere around the globe.
This is how the modern world makes money,
He thinks, and states, "I was born with this dysfunction. You're choosing it." Nah brother, 99% of people are driven by impulses they have no control over, and technology/modern life is just making it worse. Just go to any Starbucks in the morning. You think people are there for the taste of the coffee? Nope, they are there for the drug. Now it is possible his nutrition and genetics make this more of a problem form him, but no one chooses addiction.
He also says in an older article "After a few therapy sessions, doctor appointments, and even a brain scan, I found my answer—dopamine deficiency. There’s no cure, but there’s treatment."
I have been working in nutritional genetics and with my own Asperger's, OCD and Schizoaffcetive Disorder for the last 20 years. I can assure you here is no way to be diagnosed with a dopamine deficiency (and no brain scan for it either). I could see if he had gene testing that found mutations in DDC or somewhere else that inhibited Dopamine production, but he is just a kid, grasping at straws. I know this because I was him at 33. I do not fault him for it, I praise him. Because at least he is thinking about it
It turns out I have a mutation in my CBS gene which limits the rate P5P (B6) binds to the enzyme (https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/snp/rs773734233) which. creates a functional B6 deficiency with several down stream effects. I made several assumption that were wrong in the past, but they all led me to my treatment, and saved my mind and also my life.
he is blaming the individuals for their addiction, this is immoral. Blame the dealers of dopamine who know exactly what they are doing and public health for doing nothing about it.
Struggle builds character or whatever.
The things I enjoy aren’t because I’m the best at them. I don’t care that software could crush me at reading or playing games. Or a robot can lift more weight than I can or hike a trail faster than me. A robot could surely crush me at laying out on the beach and snorkeling.
Comparison is the thief of joy. Enjoy what you want without thinking about how much worse you are than someone or something else.
Cook because you like it or have to do it for financial reasons. Write because you enjoy it (or have to for financial reasons). You get the point.
Lol.