[notpushkin]

If we look at the effects, no, I don’t think so. I see how pinball could be optimized for addictiveness, but I don’t see a lot of people devoting all their free time to it.

Now, it is more nuanced than that. Is addiction bad for us? And at what point do we say we’re addicted to something? For me personally, when I can’t stop doing something (say, watching YouTube instead of working on a project), I won’t be happy long-term. It would be more gratifying short-term, sure, but I’d say it’s still not good.

[card_zero]

One question is, even if I unwisely stay up all night doing something (reading comics, say), how do we decide whether to blame the thing for tricking me, or whether it's my own responsibility? Another question is, do we even know our own minds and truly know when we're being unwise? I note that many binges that I would have beaten myself up over at the time were in retrospect great, and the worthy things I assumed I should have been doing instead were actually pointless. So this suggests to me that having an authority dictate to, e.g., comic publishers "you are tempting the public into unwise habits, desist" would be a bad thing because the authority doesn't actually know what's unwise much better than we do.

[notpushkin]

We can look at intent: comic publishers want to make them interesting and capture your attention for some time, but do they make them addictive? And we can also look at the scale – if a product is reliably addictive across a wide audience, it might be bad for society, not just for individuals. If both criteria are met, it’s probably reasonable to blame the “dealer” of the thing in question.

But I agree that we should be able to decide for ourselves what is good for us – delegating it to authority isn’t a great solution, it should always be our own responsibility. We should, however, be especially cautious when making decisions about things that are known to be addictive for others.