Novistopheles

6:44AM

Okay, publishing blog posts is kind of messing with my morning routine a little. I slept in until 6:01 a.m. My wife is a very snuggly person, and there are some mornings where I think, you know what? I really don’t have anything better to do than lie in bed and hold her. It’s quiet, cool, and the birds are singing outside. This really is heaven. Few things are more deeply satisfying and rewarding than holding someone you love and knowing they love you back.

The day can definitely wait… until it can’t.

Posting a long article like yesterday takes some time. These are rather raw and somewhat full of mistakes (I’m not proofreading them, and I don’t trust AI not to change my peculiar wording when it proofreads). But it’s the pictures that take the longest. I write in Obsidian - my digital second brain. I have set up Templater macros to help handle the complexity of creating Zettelkasten-style linked notes. Templater is a community plugin that is extremely powerful. This, for me, is what makes Obsidian insanely powerful: the community plugins. I write the name of the next note in my thought chain on the line that says Next Card, then I select that text and the Ctrl+T.

A menu pops up listing all my templates, and I select Next Note in Chain - TMPLTR. And bang, it creates a new note, generates the ZID (Zettelkasten identifier, which is unique), then populates the new notes with a structure and fills in some useful data like the Created date, and backlinks in the Prev Card field, as well as the heading and aliases (which make the note easier to link to).

My Most Used Obsidian Plugins

• Obsidian Sync - keeps my vaults synced across all my devices.
• Daily Note - essential for creating daily notes. Works with Templater.
• Templater - Template engine with javascript support for super smart macros.
• Calendar - Useful for creating weekly notes, and Daily Notes on future dates.
• Tasks - for task management.
• Dataview - awesome for treating my vault (or notebase as I like to think of it) like a database.
• QuickAdd - Automates capturing certain kinds of information.
• Copilot - awesome ChatGPT / AI Integration
• Share Note - for publishing notes to the web and sharing directly. (I also have Obsidian Publish - which is okay, but Share Note is just easier and faster)
• Excalidraw - best vector drawing package ever, and it’s a plugin!

Those are the big dogs. There are a few others, like Emoji Short Codes, and LangTool and Meta Edit, but if you just had to pick like four it would be Templater, Dataview, Calendar and Excalidraw. I use Excalidraw to create most of the diagrams you see in the book. I think I could even create most of my cartoons using Excalidraw if I wanted to - but I enjoy playing with markers and paper way too much.

The Hook Loop

Yesterday I talked a little about the Hook Loop. I first learned about this from the book The Anxious Generation. According to Professor Jonathan Haidt, he first called it The Hooked Model and it appeared in Nir Eyal’s 2014 book Hooked: How to Build Habit-Forming Products. Nir Eyal is an Israeli-born American author, educator, and entrepreneur renowned for his expertise in behavioral design and habit formation. It was Nir Eyal who said:

“If you want to change someone’s behavior, give them a better tool.”

But Eyal was not the only one teaching the idea that computers and software could change behaviors. In 2002, Professor B.J. Fogg at Stanford wrote a book titled, Persuasive Technology: Using Computers to Change What We Think and Do. Fogg taught students how behaviorist techniques used for training animals could be applied to humans. Awesome. What could go wrong? Many of his former students went on to found or work at social media companies. In that group was Mike Krieger, a cofounder of Instagram.

Yeah. You read that correctly. A cofounder of Instagram was educated in using software to change people’s behavior. Remember when I said I was not sure about the ethics of a major public university teaching engineers and entrepreneurs how to create addiction?

So back to the Hooked Model, or what I have called the Hooked Loop. A dozen years after Fogg was teaching his class, Eyal created this nifty design principle:

The Hooked Loop

(or Aka the Hooked Model)

The key to the Hooked Loop is that there is some kind of external trigger, which leads to an action (a behavior), and this action generates a Variable Reward. As I can tell, Eyal’s brilliant but devastating addition to this model was the fourth step, the Investment. Only humans can do this last part.

So let’s break it down.

The Trigger

The trigger is a kind of cue, a prompt, or a notification. Have you ever noticed that every single app you install on your phone asks you to turn on notifications? Of course, they do. It is the beginning of the loop! If they can’t cue you, it’s harder to hook you. This is why I only allow about 4-5 apps on my phone to generate any kind of notification. I want to be in control of when I check, not the app, but also, notifications are the gateway to addictive behavior. They might sound innocent, but they are not.

The Action

This can be virtually anything, but it involves the user taking an action. It can be as trivial as a swipe, or pressing a button, or feeding a Tamagotchi, or scrolling through a list of updates. But the cue must lead to the user interacting with the application - not simply reading. Get the fingers moving, and you’ve got step two of the model in motion.

The Variable Reward

This is the element that hacks our unconscious mind. The reward can be social, such as likes or views. But the key point is that you will never know for sure what will happen. Other humans provide absolutely the most effective kinds of variable rewards because we are, well, fickle. So this connects to our ancient social emotional intelligence and desires to be liked. Despite a lot of the culture war focusing on “dominance” and “power struggles”, humans do not naturally or innately value the most powerful (and neither do chimpanzees). We value prestige. And Prestige is a form of social currency derived from providing the most good. As a species, humans won the Social Goods Game, often called the Prisoner’s Dilemma. Therefore, we are disproportionately sensitive to the approval of others, because we are primed to believe this approval bestows the much coveted prestige. There could hardly be a more effective variable reward than public approval.

Note: The Prisoner’s Dilemma Explained If you recall, that is the game where if every prisoner looks out for each other, they all only suffer a little. But if one prisoner rats out the others, he goes free but the others go to jail for a long time. It is easy to “win” the prisoners' game if you are self-centered, selfish, and can cast yourself as a victim. You just throw everyone else under the bus. However, you will need to find another tribe or community to abuse because the people you just screwed over will never forget what you did and you just burned trust. The real way to the group to win is for everyone to look out for each other. And in highly interdependent groups, that is just what they do.

According to Wharton Negotiation Professor Stuart Diamond in his book Getting More, Trust is the degree to which you will look out for someone else’s interests. Let me make it more personal and clear. You will trust me to the degree that I look out for your interest, even if I suffer harm as a result. The more harm I am willing to take on your behalf, the higher the level of trust. The highest level of trust, which is most visibly demonstrated by the US Secret Service, is the willingness to suffer grave bodily harm, up to and including death. In short, if I would “take a bullet for you”, that is the highest level of trust a person can demonstrate. So the prisoner’s dilemma is really about social trust. Individuals who win their freedom by ratting out their compatriots are by definition untrustworthy. In a high-trust community, however, everyone looks out for everyone else.

As a species, we bestow the attribute of prestige on the most trustworthy individuals, those who look out for and contribute the most to the social good. As far as we can tell, chimps actually share this attribute. In an updated TED Talk on Alpha Males, Frans de Waal explained that even chimps value coalition building over raw strength and ability. Frans de Waal is a renowned primatologist and ethologist. He is a professor at Emory University in Atlanta, Georgia. And in his updated TED talk, he said that even female chimps in a tribe also have a hierarchy. Interestingly, one of the functions of the alpha male is to protect the weaker females from the alpha female. It is all about checks and balances. Primates value group well-being over individual dominance and power.

Investment

This final part of the Hooked loop is simply genius and unique to Homo Sapiens. It is the idea of customization, of “putting our fingerprints” on something. Humans are creatures of paradox. Or to put a more positive spin on it, we are creatures that live in the balance of opposing forces. Two such forces are our desire for group acceptance (social approval or prestige), and our craving for agency, or individualism. Consequently, when you give someone the opportunity to invest some of their own uniqueness into the application, this strengthens their perceived connection to the app.

In other words, we all want to be unique, in a group we feel like we belong to. Giving the user the ability to invest in an application addresses this desire (craving) for uniqueness. We can customize our avatar with skins, or post a picture of ourselves on social media, or share our thoughts in a Tweet or an update. I saw this when I worked in a lab at the Boys and Girls Club. We helped the kids build little cardboard race cars. Everyone in a group, doing the exact same STEM lesson, however, what took it over the top was that we let each kid decorate and customize their car. Every single kid in every single lesson jumped at the chance. Over sixty thousand kids participated in that program and I don’t remember a single kid refusing to customize their weird little cardboard car. We all have a deep-rooted desire to show up. Apps that give us the opportunity to do so only increase our emotional attachment to the experience.

This is also where the companies are learning to make enormous amounts of money through what we call microtransactions. One dollar here, five dollars there. I have heard parents lament that their kid spent money on “skins.” This is why. Players are looking for chances to become unique. And if you tailor the experience to layer in some envy… watch out. People will go to insane lengths to not only generate approval, but envy in others. Feeling envy sucks. However, being envied must mean we have secured the precious prestige we are after.

The Trigger Revisited

The holy grail, as it were, of apps is when the player no longer needs an external trigger to start the action, but they self-trigger. Like a smoker who reaches for a cigarette out of habit, the player will pick up their phone or tablet to check the results. Professor Haidt pointed out that these techniques were being designed into software in the early 2000s; however, it was not until the smartphone put the internet in our pocket with 24-hour-a-day, 7-day-a-week access that the addiction spirals really took off for both adults and, later, as parents gave their children phones, kids.

Summary

So a hook loop hacks an ancient mammalian behavior loop by triggering a consistent behavior which receives a variable reward. The player or user can never quite figure out how to get the consistent reward, so the dopamine cycle gets ramped up. Commitment to the app is enhanced by allowing the player to invest in personalizing their experience. When the player no longer needs the notification/trigger to prompt the player to action, the developer has “won” and the behavior is now well on its way to becoming what looks like addiction. No chemical dependency necessary. No social isolation and despair required. We can bypass trauma and go straight to hell.

Okay, that might be a little harsh. However, ask the parents who try to take away the devices from their obsessed kids how it feels. In the stories I hear, everyone suffers. That sounds like Hell to me.

8:03 a.m. - Bagel Time

Okay, today is another full day of meetings, some with friends. Every Friday, I meet with two fellow “dads” I met through little league baseball. When I first got into coaching, my neighbor Mark McGinnis was responsible for the coaches, and he gave me two amazing pieces of advice:

1. If you’re going to form a club team to help your son improve, form a team out of neighborhood kids. You’ll make friends for life.
2. Say something nice about every kid after a game.

I took that to heart. For my oldest son, Ryan, I was not confident enough to start a club team, so we found him a club team. We never really made friends with those parents, and he really did not keep in touch with any of the kids from that team. (I’m sure I also contributed to that because we were obsessed with getting him on “the best teams.” - sheesh, the things you do as a parent you believe are right only to look back and ask, “what was I thinking?"). However, for his younger brother, I had coached enough by the time he was old enough that I felt confident I could start a team. And Ryan’s club coach offered to help me, so we created this team made of neighborhood kids. I told the parents I did not know if we could win, but I committed to teach every kid how to pitch and to hit. I wanted to teach them the same skills I was teaching my boys. And Mark was right. The parents and kids that joined over the years became fast friends, and fifteen years later, the “Sister Wives” still get together regularly for coffee or drinks, and “The men” meet every morning Friday at Bagel Nosh to catch up. As for Matt? He and his core of friends stay in touch through Snapchat (I think), but they always get together when they are in town for the holidays. (Young adults tend to scatter after college - welcome to our mobile economy.)

As for saying something nice about every kid? That should be a blog post in itself, but I’ll say this. After every single game, I sat down and wrote a game summary email to the parents where I compiled statistics and made the effort to say something nice about every kid. One parent printed off the emails and put them in a book as a keepsake for their son. I also learned that as the coach, I benefited as much as the kids because my last memory of each game was something positive about every player, and it made me want to come back and coach them again, and again, and again through 21 games in a season.

What is the quote from the Bible? I think it’s in Ephesians… Okay, I found it. Thanks, ChatGPT!

“Do not let any unwholesome talk come out of your mouths, but only what is helpful for building others up according to their needs, that it may benefit those who listen.” - Ephesians 4:29

If you want to check out a report, you can find it here: Sample Little League Game Summary

Mr. McGinnis gave some good advice.

Plus, social connections are considered one of the three key pillars to living a long, healthy life. Exercise and nutrition are the others. However, I have heard it said that loneliness kills more people than a three-pack-a-day cigarette habit. (That is attributed to Dr. Vivek Murthy, a former U.S. Surgeon General.) Sensational, but that’s the point. Get out there and spend time with your friends.

Human connection is important. (To them as well as to your own well-being.)

01:29 p.m.

I finished wrapping up filming some social media videos, which I hope will help me reach the parent audience I am trying to get to. What is interesting to me is that the two young men who helped me today were fascinated by my content. I’m a little nervous because the visual representation is way more assertive and bold than my normal voice. Still, it is me. However, it is directed to be attention-grabbing and informative. Well, you can’t try to reach people by hiding.

I had this one thing that popped into my head, that as the gamers themselves grow up, many of them are also frustrated by some game behaviors they see as shady. I also realized I need to get some more statistics and specifics on games.

1:56 a.m.

I revisited a quote that came up in my daily readwise review:

“Origen performed the castration operation on himself. Justin reports that Christian men in his time, the second century A.D., implored surgeons to remove their testicles; many monks of Mount Athos accepted castration at that time,” (Robert Bly, Iron John)

Dear Lord, why?

When I see a quote like that, I will often stop and go back into the book or ask ChatGPT to help me understand the broader context. I read Iron John because Robert Moore talked about it so much in his book King, Warrior, Magician, Lover. One of my personal goals was to find a model for healthy male maturity. I do that. I will read the books authors cite.

From ChatGPT: Robert Bly, in Iron John, refers to Origen’s self-castration not just as a shocking historical fact but as a symbol of how the masculine spirit can be cut off from its full vitality–especially in religious or overly civilized contexts.

Bly’s point was that we need to learn to balance our primal nature and our spiritual nature. Or as he put it, live upstairs without being afraid to go into the basement. Suddenly this truck me in the context of Hikikomori and the lost men. Only, they have made the basement the intellectual and rational and a place where men run from their vitality, and they have made the upstairs, the outside world the place to be feared. The world for men has metaphorically turned upside down.

4:04 p.m.

Friday afternoon. I have finished running errands and assembling gifts for my fellow board members for tomorrow’s board appreciation dinner. I hope they like them. I also realize that I need to get more specific about which games are the worst or most addictive. Are there statistics? I have some more work to do, but not today. It’s the weekend.