I suggest you read through , “These Inventions Were Built to Trick Us.” Here is a nice condensation of its ideas done by Claude Opus 5.5:
The essay starts with a classic piece of ethology. In the 1940s Niko Tinbergen gave a mother oystercatcher a plaster egg several times bigger than her own. She kept trying to sit on it, though she could barely climb on top, and she neglected her real eggs. Tinbergen had found a supernormal stimulus: an exaggerated cue that sets off an instinct more strongly than the natural thing it evolved to detect.
The essayist’s point is that every animal can be fooled this way, but only humans build such lures deliberately and sell them to each other. Instincts that served hunter-gatherers well now work as handles that industries pull for profit. What we get is pleasure now and a worse life later. Here are the main examples from the essay, condensed:
Five ways ancestral drives are being exploited
| Paleolithic instinct | What it once did for us | How it’s exploited now | The cost |
|---|---|---|---|
| Craving fat, sugar, salt | Signaled calories that kept us from starving | Ultraprocessed foods (e.g., Doritos: corn dried, pulverized, rehydrated, extruded, fried, then salted, sweetened, and flavored) | They now supply most of the calories in the American diet |
| Attraction to novel, salient social information | Tracking the group, spotting threats and opportunities | Hyperedited, hyperpersonalized video feeds. Cal Newport: “What is a TikTok video if not a digital Dorito?” | Less time with friends in person, more solitude; people spoke about a third fewer words in 2019 than 15 years earlier |
| Mate selection by signs of health and youth | Choosing fertile, healthy partners | Cosmetic surgery that exaggerates full lips, smooth skin, and large eyes; social-media “looksmaxxing” pushing young men toward steroids and jaw remodeling | A runaway race toward caricatured features |
| Pursuit of valuable but uncertain rewards | Hunting and foraging under uncertainty | Round-the-clock gambling apps (FanDuel, DraftKings, BetMGM) with loyalty tiers, celebrity pitches, and in-game microbets | Compulsive betting with no casino walls to contain it |
| Trust in human faces, voices, and empathy | Building cooperation and reading social partners | AI deepfakes rated more trustworthy than real faces; AI text judged “more human” than human writing; AI medical replies rated more empathetic than physicians’ | Our social instincts can now be imitated, and outdone, by machines |
The essayist calls AI “the most powerful ultraprocessing technology of all.” Taken together, these amount to an “ultraprocessed world”: a habitat redesigned, mostly for profit, to bring out our impulses rather than our best.
What can be done
On your own: change your microhabitat. Notice how these stimuli grab you, then make them harder to reach:
- Move the irresistible snacks out of the pantry, or at least onto a very high shelf
- Charge your phone anywhere except the nightstand
- Delete apps that feel compulsive, and use blockers like One Sec or Opal
- Use countermeasures such as GLP-1 drugs: “fight fire with fire”
Together: change the shared habitat. Individual willpower only goes so far. The essay suggests:
- Soda taxes and school cellphone bans
- Limits on attention-hijacking algorithms, especially for young users
- A ban on microbets in gambling apps
- Regulation of how frontier AI models are developed and released
Nozick’s experience machine, now running
The essay ends with Robert Nozick’s thought experiment from 50 years ago: would you float in a tank for life, with electrodes giving you the feeling of writing a great novel or making a friend? Nozick thought few people would agree, because we want to do things and be a certain kind of person, not just have the experiences. The essayist’s reply is that we don’t have to imagine the machine anymore, because we’re already living in it. So the question isn’t whether to plug in. It’s how deliberately we choose to unplug.
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