| HN Mirror

Just like practicing "oral hygiene" doesn't mean treating your mouth like an enemy, nor does "dopamine hygiene" mean treating dopamine like an enemy.

It just means keeping track of the difference between empty dopamine, which rewards behaviors that don't benefit you, from dopamine which is working in its normal evolutionary context--to encourage behaviors that do, and being intentional about how often you engage in the former.

"Digital hygiene" sounds like the start of a mental framework with good intentions, and which might help somebody with their World of Warcraft problem. But that problem isn't really unique to digital things, they're just a commonly found example of it. If you have a habit of seeking out empty/fast dopamine loops, where the rewards come frequently and are otherwise useless except as a reason to continue the useless behavior, then you're likely to come off your World of Warcraft addiction and immediately find a (potentially non-digital) addiction to put in its place.

My point is that yes we need a new kind of hygiene to deal with modern kinds of manipulation, but no we shouldn't restrict its scope to computers. I watched the video, but it's pushing back against something altogether weirder than my point here. I don't see how this counts as "manipulative disinformation," or is in contradiction with established science about the function of dopamine.