Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by dalbasal 1851 days ago
Yeah... maybe (obviously) I shouldn't have commented without listening, caveats or no.

That said, this is also true of heroin addiction. It is highly related to other, often social, malaises. This has been experimentally proven in rodents. Lonely, unhappy rodents are far more addiction prone. It has been observed in people too, notably the vietnam war example.

I don't even think there is a common treatment for alcoholism anymore that doesn't relate to "underlying" issues. AA, and related group therapies are all about creating a supportive community. Social isolation is a major factor in addiction.

That's kind of what I meant. These hard lines don't exist, and I think many that do exist for research purposes. Hard to study something that isn't discreetly defined. Physical withdrawal symptoms were once a primary researchers' definition of addiction, even though addicts rarely think of it that way.
1 comments
ghodith 1851 days ago
“This has been experimentally proven in rodents”

If you are talking about the rat park[0] series of experiments, that conclusion has hardly been “experimentally proven.” There are many replication issues and the authors themselves don’t support the popular conclusion often taken from their research.

[0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rat_Park

link
dalbasal 1851 days ago
My apologies. "Replication crisis" (or Ted Talks, really) strikes again. I should have said "demonstrated," though that's probably a cop out.

From the wiki article and its meta research source, it seems that researchers do support the general idea that housing, enrichment and social conditions affect addiction. Popular science has just overstated the results.

"While the Rat Park studies did not use methods that are reliable by current standards, enrichment has been shown to reliably reduce opioid consumption and this effect can generalise to other drugs of abuse."

https://journals.helsinki.fi/jrn/article/view/10.31885.jrn.1...

Incidentally, I don't understand why stuff like this is still ambiguous. This is a classroom experiment, resource-wise. Why hasn't it been refined, replicated and conducted at scale sufficient to be reliable?

link