> different values compared to the old American companies (oil, cigarettes, defense).
To play devil's advocate a bit, I think those old industries started out just as idealistic as the tech sector. The oil companies pursued amazing feats of science and engineering to power the new industrial economy. The defense companies made remarkable technological advances to help deter Soviet aggression and win the space race. And before the link to lung cancer was discovered, tobacco was like coffee: it gave people a nice cognitive boost, as well as possibly helping them stay thin.
> And before the link to lung cancer was discovered, tobacco was like coffee: it gave people a nice cognitive boost
Now you can just buy nicotine products for that boost with a substantially reduced risk profile (it's not a carcinogen). Some writeup on it: https://gwern.net/nicotine
Same question applies perfectly to caffeine. I might just be justifying my addiction, but it’s possible this is still worthwhile as it allows one to manually select when they want to expend their mental energy, overriding the normally semirandom fluctuations brought on by exhaustion, mood, etc.
A big difference is that caffeine isn't addictive. It may seem like it, and you do get a few headaches when you quit cold turkey, but you just don't get the intense graving you get with addictions.
> Numerous controlled laboratory investigations reviewed in this article show that caffeine produces behavioral and physiological effects similar to other drugs of dependence. Moreover, several recent clinical studies indicate that caffeine dependence is a clinically meaningful disorder that affects a nontrivial proportion of caffeine users.
> A big difference is that caffeine isn't addictive. It may seem like it, and you do get a few headaches when you quit cold turkey, but you just don't get the intense graving you get with addictions.
I'm curious what definition of "addiction" you're using to arrive at the conclusion that caffeine isn't addictive.
> Isn’t the standard definition that you continue to use the drug despite it causing serious negative problems in your life?
There's no one standard definition of "addiction", and most concise definitions (one or two lines) are extremely fragile and break down when you try to apply them in any meaningful context.
By this definition you're putting forth, caffeine certainly could be addictive, as could any substance - and in fact, nearly any behavior, which is why professionals generally frown upon using this measure definitionally, because it leads to pseudoscientific terms like "X addiction", for absurd values of X.
I think you’d be surprised. When i quit coffee cold turkey, I was basically out of commission for a week. Mentally I felt and functioned as though I was running a heavy fever, I could never feel full, and I felt exhausted and ready to sleep the moment I woke up. The headaches were constant and agonizing for about a whole week, easily worse than a migraine, and I had weird mood swings where I’d suddenly feel very anxious or sad out of nowhere. The difference is I was probably drinking 300mg a day or so.
There is fairly good evidence that nicotine causes some mild cognitive benefits beyond the baseline. Of course there are also downsides even separate from the effects of smoking.
I think nicotine is one of the very few components that can enhance some brain functions very slightly. It does however have far more negative side effects as its role in nature would suggest it would have.
This is an exception and other common drugs like caffeine that do not have any positive effects at all. Or any other drug for that matter.
They aren't defending smoking. They're referring to the industry and its ethos when it originally grew. While smoking was established as being bad for health in the mid-20th century, this wasn't as clear in the late 19th and early 20th, when the tobacco industry boomed and brought many jobs to the southern US economy.
No, that was honestly how I interpreted your comment. That may have been the wrong interpretation, but your two word reply didn't leave me with much. I possibly misinterpreted your first comment also, but I wasn't really sure how you were leaning there, whether it be just an absurdity or a question honestly pondered.
Personally I would argue that the addiction simply shifted for most Americans. It was cigarettes, now it is food, particularly ultra-processed food.
There's a large subset of people, the majority in my opinion, who are somewhat prone to addiction. Most are just a wee bit prone. They certainly won't peruse the streets for drugs. But, if something is readily available and socially accepted, they'll do it.
Before this was smoking, now its ultra-processed foods. Fast food, junk food, sweets type stuff.
It's probably still a boon, I'd say. I mean, I think being obese is probably healthier than smoking. But we didn't really "solve" anything, we just moved the problem.
The connection is even closer. Tobacco company extensively invested in the highly processed food industry and brought their advertisement experts in. The obesity crisis (and addiction to sugary and fatty processed foods) is not an accident, it's the result of a sophisticated advertisement campaign directed by the brains behind tobacco and alcohol campaigns.
I mean, of course I have no evidence because nobody is really looking into it. In my opinion, despite the fact we have many tens if not hundreds of millions of people eating themselves to death, we (socially) are incredibly hesitant to consider overconsumption an addiction.
But when people are dying slowly, and painfully, by their own hand and they can't stop, I personally consider that an addiction. In addition, we know ultra-processed foods are designed to invoke as much pleasure in the user as possible. In many ways, they suffer the same hyper-optimization that modern cigarettes do.
There's also some* evidence that part of the Tobacco industry shifted to food as Tobacco in the US died off. This is more circumstantial evidence. I think the "hard" evidence is that everyone smoked and was thin, now nobody smokes, and everyone is obese.
Regardless, I think we need harder and more proven solutions to the obesity epidemic. I think "willpower!" isn't working out for us, on a large scale. I'm rooting for Ozempic. And, fun fact, Ozempic also curbs nicotine and alcohol addiction.
Not very surprising, considering it’s the same companies using the same playbook. I’m not so sure that being obese is healthier than smoking, being obese might not give you cancer but it will certainly mess with your heart, and I would not be surprised if someone who smoked for the same amount of time someone else was obese ends up having a better prognosis after quitting.
To play devil's advocate a bit, I think those old industries started out just as idealistic as the tech sector. The oil companies pursued amazing feats of science and engineering to power the new industrial economy. The defense companies made remarkable technological advances to help deter Soviet aggression and win the space race. And before the link to lung cancer was discovered, tobacco was like coffee: it gave people a nice cognitive boost, as well as possibly helping them stay thin.