I am pretty sure that likewise in the 1950s many smokers did indeed decided to be the outlier who smokes occasionally, and for the right reasons, and using the “correct” method/brand of cigarettes. And that every one of them decided that they were not gonna get addicted to nicotine. I am also sure that every single one of them did indeed get addicted to nicotine, and many of them died from cancer.

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kragen 10 hours ago | parent | next [-]

It sounds like you aren't very familiar with the research on tobacco addiction.

https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/002204260203200220

https://www.tobaccoinaustralia.org.au/chapter-3-health-effec...

The majority of smokers did get addicted to nicotine, but significant percentages did not. However, it is true that even many "non-daily" smokers died from cancer as a result of their smoking.

	▲	runarberg 7 hours ago \| parent [-]
		I know that research on tobacco is full of bad science and bad actors, and experts in different fields (such as social psychology) continued to publish bad science on the topic well into the 2000s. This includes your 2002 German paper (which I can’t read because of a paywall). Your second source says nothing about addiction in the chapter you posted, however they do talk about addiction in chapter 6, and they claim that most people agree that smoking is addictive, but heavy smoking is more addictive.

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ndriscoll 6 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

A better analogy is probably TV. You could watch the Flintstones (along with smoking ads!), or e.g. Mr. Wizard.

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runarberg 5 hours ago | parent [-]

I am specifically talking about this cognitive bias of believing that the mean behavior does not apply to you. Very few people believe this about cigarettes anymore because the evidence is simply overwhelming and public health experts along with anti-smoking activists were able to (despite incredible odds) shift the common rhetoric closer to what is true.

There is a similar phenomena going on with ads. Most people believe they are unaffected by ads, but in reality they absolutely are. And the advertising industry has vested interest in the general public believing this illusion (otherwise they risk being regulated).

We are seeing the exact same phenomena with AI usage as we did with smoking in the 1950s. All the evidence is pointing towards these products being bad for you and being addictive. Yet most users of AI believe they are not addicted, and that they have found a way to use AI in a way which is less harmful for them. This is bias, these users are wrong, so are you, and so is OP. This is addictive to you, and it is bad for you.

I know research is lacking, but eventually we will have the evidence to show the case as clearly as we do today with tobacco.

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ndriscoll 25 minutes ago | parent [-]

On the other hand there's the consensus bias where you believe that everyone else is like you, when in fact they are not (which is why I said this is something I've had to learn to accept).

Sure, for most distributions, most people will be statistically normal, by definition. On the other hand, I know that e.g. state standard test scores when I was a kid said I was 99th percentile academically (and there was some kind of IQ test for the gifted program? I remember I qualified in all 3 areas they tested me), so I have some evidence to hypothesize that I might be an outlier along other psychometrics too. And I'll go ahead and guess that many people here are also not the median in many ways.

I don't think that this makes me somehow immune to lung cancer from smoking, but I might suspect that when I read about others' use of AI and how it rots their minds, they're perhaps not using it to learn Lean (the process of learning has mostly been the AI spits out crap proofs that seem way more complicated than they ought to be, and then I spend some time trying to find ways to simplify it. We have a back-and-forth about different encodings, or ideas for syntax macros, etc. Then I can compare with e.g. Mathlib's solution) or checking their understanding as they work through some notes. I don't know what most people use it for or what they get addicted to, but I believe it might be different from what I do.

With regards to ads, I live somewhere where outdoor advertising is banned, I block ads on my computer, I don't watch TV or movies or "news," and I don't install whatever apps, so there aren't a whole lot of channels for ads to reach me. I suspect again that this is not the typical experience. That said I do view ads as fraud-adjacent and damaging to markets, so fully support strongly regulating or outright banning paid advertising.

	▲	runarberg 10 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		This comes across as an athlete excusing their smoking behavior because their superior physical abilities makes them immune to the bad effects of smoking. I assure you a 99th percentile in 100 m dash may have believed that smoking did not affect them the same way it does an average person, but they would be wrong. And so are you about your AI usage.