The Critique of Dr. K: HealthyGamer is Wrong.

this video is a critique of the
therapeutic approach of dr k he's a guy who's genuinely trying to help people and the purpose of this video is to argue that his methods are genuinely mistaken genuinely wrong i completely recognize that he has good intentions this is a critique not a rant i'm not claiming he's wrong about everything overall i'd suggest that his advice is bad for most people most of the time not for everyone not all the time dr k's approach has several distinctive aspects he regards video game playing as partly positive and partly negative he tries to coach you on how to have the positive aspects without the negative my own bias in this discussion is that i would not sympathize with this sort of have your cake and eat it to approach not even with something very simple like drinking alcohol eating meat so on and so forth if you're talking to someone who has struggled their whole life with being an alcoholic is it useful to claim that drinking alcohol has benefits and let me just say i'm completely detached self-critical and nihilistic about this i can see the benefits of drinking alcohol in this society in this culture i can see the benefits of eating meat in the society this culture if you spend your time going out and drinking alcohol and eating meat and you live in canada or scotland or poland or the ukraine many other cultures that are dominated by alcohol drinking and mediating as the main mode of socialization there are benefits but i don't think my position if i'm trying to help alcoholics is to argue on that basis and i don't think there's any coherent ethical argument that would admit even part-time alcoholism part-time meat-eating so on and so forth so as i've just said dr k differs from me in trying to keep the positive while minimizing the negative he speaks at length about the unique positive qualities of friendships made through playing video games he talks about video games as something meaningful in the player's life another interesting contrast here would be to gambling as a pastime at some point we have to stop and ask ourselves is gambling positive or negative is gambling harmful is it ethical you know is it justifiable in your life even the waste of time you're you're let's say you have kids you're a parent but you're spending all your time going and gambling even if you don't lose money even if you break even every time if we're questioning gambling or we're coaching someone who's struggling with a gambling problem i'm not sure how comfortable any of us would be with dr k's approach friendship also is a very difficult thing to use to justify your choices in life some people make friends participating in prostitution i'm using the vague verb participating here quite intentionally however they do not necessarily make friends through prostitution that's not the purpose of prostitution and they may make enemies instead or they may remain isolated and alone some people make friends getting an mba studying business studying finance studying commerce in university and you would be surprised if you look at advertisements for mba programs they often ruthlessly try to market this kind of friendship to you like oh pay thousands of dollars to study business administration you'll make friends well well will i if you enroll as a student you will not necessarily make friends through the process of education that's not the purpose of education you may make enemies instead you may remain isolated alone now let me just ask do you think you can get a refund from the university if you say hey this is false advertising i signed up because you promised me that i'd make friends and colleagues in business is this is this really true now both of these examples that i have on screen right now prostitution and going back to university to get an mba i think it's actually very very difficult to come to a snap judgment about the good and evil these bring into people's lives i do have sympathy for the fact that there are many people for whom prostitution is the only kind of sexuality they can ever be involved in that may really be their whole social life in the same sense that dr k describes video game players who have no other friends no other social i actually do think these are quite difficult questions people wrestle with and it's not easy to conclude whether or not going back to university and studying to get mba is a waste of your time it's not at the top of this slide what i'm saying is friendship is a very difficult thing to use to justify your choices would dr k's social excuse for playing video games even make sense if we were trying to excuse we were trying to justify these much more social activities arguing that this activity gives you a sense of community seems to be a distraction from the question of whether or not the act itself is good or bad or a waste of time is it actually a good thing to play video games is it actually a good thing to play a particular video game because we all know they're not created equal world of warcraft is not the same as starting up your atari 2600 and playing asteroids or is this a bad thing being justified by extrinsic inconsistent and irrelevant factors you can ask this same question really quite profoundly about the prospect of going back to university to get an mba you can even ask it about vegan activism so to be very clear what i'm saying is even if friendship and having a sense of community is a legitimate reason to go back to university and get an mba right what if that is extrinsic inconsistent and irrelevant right like when you're actually sitting there with a huge textbook on your desk that says introduction to commerce and finance finance you've got to sit down and study that for the exam right it's it's irrelevant okay and again talking about it being inconsistent nobody's guaranteeing you nobody's guaranteeing you that you're going to have even one friend that you made in spending tens of thousands of dollars and years of your life in a university program if you look at this picture i think it i think it tells the whole story yes people do people do engage in vegan activism for the sake of friendship for the sake of community and they may even get deeper and deeper into animal rights extremism they may find themselves involved in illegal activities and terrorism for the sake of friendship for the sake of this sense of community there were people in this crowd in this photo who went to this protest because they wanted to spend time with the girl in the pink shirt yes you know men get involved in politics to meet women and women get involved in politics to meet men and people do it for friendship and community and guess what this is not a value neutral fact it's actually bad and evil and wrong attributing your decisions to the quality of friendship or to the community is just an evasion of responsibility for making the decision yourself is this a good political protest or not is getting an mba a good idea or not is drinking alcohol a waste of my time and talent or not you have to evaluate the activity you have to evaluate the decision the commitment you're making on its own terms and looking in the mirror evaluating who you are because this isn't just about some random person's time and talent is this a waste of your talent is there something better you could be doing than enrolling in that mba program or standing around and holding a sign at this protest right the answer well all my friends are doing it and i want to be part of this community is the wrong answer and i think it's obvious to everyone if you're talking about joining a religious cult getting involved with terrorism or something that this way of thinking is really bad and evil and dangerous and wrong but it seems like the example of devoting like six hours a day to playing video games it seems that somehow that doesn't raise the same questions and concerns perhaps just because we perceive video game playing as childish and childlike but if you're an adult devoting your time to this from my perspective it's just as deadly serious as enrolling in an mba program getting involved political activism or becoming a gambler becoming an alcoholic i'm going to refer to this as the empty church phenomenon imagine you have a friend who's lost his faith in mormonism or any other mainstream religion but they tell you that they continue going to church for the sake of friendship for the sake of this sense of community going to church for other people does not make sense all you're doing is letting those people make the decision for you oh well i don't really know what the point of this political protest is i don't know what this activism is going to accomplish but i'm doing this for these other really you're doing it for other people it's other people why don't you do your thinking for yourself right if you really believe in the mormon faith if you really believe when you pray that that god has listened listed you okay that's a reason to go to church right you're going to an empty church you're going to church that's full of people but there's no god there okay that doesn't make sense you have to make this decision for yourself playing video games for other people does not make sense good or bad at what point do you take responsibility for making the decision for yourself the extent of the negative impact of these habits may only be self-evident relative to some clearly stated goal now to be clear that doesn't mean that there aren't negative impacts in other contexts but we tend to think about these things relative to goals and when we when we add particular goals to the equation then the negative impacts become self-evident number one if someone claims that occasional cocaine use is harmless is it harmless for a police officer if you want your career to be as a police officer in public service is it really harmless for you to use cocaine say once a month now each and every one of us has some responsibilities in life some aspirations in life some ambitions that may be very different from being a police officer but what i'd like to suggest to you is that if you really just think it through you will realize that the police officer has commitments that make it unacceptable for him to be an occasional cocaine user you also have commitments that make it unacceptable or you ought to number two if someone claims that gambling betting on sports is harmless is it harmless for an athlete same pattern of thought number three is drinking alcohol harmless for a pilot number four or any of these things harmless for a parent you're just talking about someone who has a full-time job and they're raising a kid did they have a weekend to spare every month to use cocaine did they have three hours six hours on friday or saturday to go to a casino and gamble is that just for a normal person who has a job full-time job and they were supposed to be spending the rest of the time raising educating caring for the kids is that harmless do they have time to be an alcoholic or have you ever most parents have to quit all this stuff because of your commitments right and now obviously what i'm asking you is is it compatible with playing video games in my in my opinion no it's it's just not possible to justify playing video games for three hours a day if you want to get into talking about five minutes a day you know obviously the the quality of the question changes as we adjust the quantity the positive aspects of video game friendships according to dr k are number one that they're not based on appearances number two that they're not based on wealth number three that they're not based on geography and number four they reflect some kind of deep knowledge of who you really are he paints this beautiful inspirational picture which probably relates to his own experience in life of the contrast between meeting people face to face and they judge you in your appearance they judge you on your ethnicity they judge you on how attractive you are they judge you based on your wealth your social class your education and where geography is this great limiting factor to who becomes your friends and he sees video games as liberating us in this week can we not think through really counter-arguments this do you think nobody is on twitch right now trying to be friends with somebody because they're appearance you don't think being beautiful or attractive matters in terms of who is pursued who has friends and who is alone within the world of video gaming yes twitch broadcasting may be an extreme example but it's indicative i remember people telling me uh that this was in the old days everquest which i've never played and everyone was desperately trying to be friends with you know the tiny minority of attractive women uh who are within the game and so on you know or women of the right age you know sadly i mean the claim that friendship made through video games will necessarily be profound or disregard these factors you know to say there are arguments to the contrary or instance contrary is an understatement but even if these four points were true would these would these factors justify spending your time surrounded by a friend group who are a bunch of drunks who are a bunch of gamblers say well i know these guys who are into drinking and gambling and prostitution and because they don't judge me based on my appearance they don't judge me based on my wealth and they know me foreign i'm gonna keep on drinking and gambling and living this dis lifestyle because that's my friend group do you see what you're doing there you're refusing to make the judgment for yourself is is drinking alcohol good or bad is gambling good or bad is this going to be part of your life yes or no it's your decision it's your responsibility don't shift that responsibility onto your friend group not even if you have this friend group that you know never judged you based on your appearance or your wealth which are you know those are wonderful things that dr k talks about and he gives this wonderful picture of how playing massively multiplayer online games will bring these friends drive but are you kidding what percentage of video game players don't have any such meaningful friendships online or offline do you really never talk to him he has a practice where he's giving these people therapy do you really not know anyone as a video game addict who lacks precisely these types of friendships and they lack them precisely because they're addicted to video games therefore dr k concludes people should not quit video games because they will lose some or all of their most important friends and the people should instead seek a balanced life that includes video games but not addiction his own definition of a balanced life will be discussed below so here the problem becomes even more philosophically interesting dr k's model of the balanced meaningful life is one often unattainable and too incompatible with adult video game playing so casually he says get a job that's intellectually rewarding most people can't not now not ever now i'll just digress to mention i have many many videos criticizing jordan peterson i have a very low opinion of jordan peterson i dislike his philosophy i disagree with many of the things he says however jordan peterson is one of the few people i've ever heard talk honestly about the fact that the vast majority of people will never have an intellectually rewarding job like the vast majority of people on planet earth if you want something intellectually rewarding and meaningful it's not going to be your job and he points out that he himself is in the tiny minority of people who are exceptions to that rule like there's some intellectual component to his job i can say that for myself too as a youtuber making this video but for most people you have to recognize whatever is going to be intellectually rewarding in their lives is going to transpire in those few hours when they're not busy with their job when they're not busy raising their kids or maybe taking care of their grandparents or shopping or showering or all the things right it is a lie to say to really anyone that they can get an intellectually rewarding job if we switch the frame of reference to some exotic culture this suddenly becomes clearer i've been in villages in cambodia i've been in villages in laos where everyone's a rice farmer you want to know your career options in life farming rice period oh your father's a rice farmer you're going to be a rice farmer if this stereotype seems too extreme or unreasonable to you i could challenge you also to just look at the job listings in a country like cambodia but hey you might as well look up the job listings in the city where you're living right now and scroll down through the jobs that are hiring and ask yourself how many of those jobs are intellectually awarding and how many could the average person ever possibly hope to apply for and attain if they are intellectually rewarding so likewise very rapidly he says oh get meaningful friendships most people can't i'm here tempted to digress into a whole lengthy autobiographical set of reflections it would have been reasonable for me to assume that going to university to study the politics and history of asia i would have made friends with other people who share that interest with me other people who interested in the politics of history and asia back when i was studying buddhist philosophy i should have had all kinds of friends who lasted the rest of my life are interested in buddhist philosophy when i was involved in vegan activism no this is not guaranteed okay and it's such an understatement to say it's not guaranteed it's unbelievably rare to meet someone connect with someone and stay connected to someone who's a meaningful friend you might as well just say to somebody who's going to have sex with prostitutes on a regular basis let's say it's somebody who has never had any other kind of relationship other than sleeping with brothers oh well why don't you just stop sleeping with prostitutes and find true love well true love is not easily attainable it's incredibly rare to even have a chance at true love is incredibly rare so invoking these ideas like getting an intellectual rewarding job or finding meaningful friendships as if there are things you can do just as simply as turning off a video game console as if they were even as easy as quitting alcohol or quitting cocaine things i admit are difficult to do no this is hard and to be blunt it's highly improbable this aspect of dr k's approach is summed up when he says things like get your confidence from meaningful accomplishments in the real world instead of video games let's be honest most people can't and i'm not just talking about teenagers here most people whether they're in their 20s 30s 40s they have no meaningful accomplishments they never will have any meaningful accomplishments so we got to talk about living a life in the absence of meaningful accomplishments in the same sense that we have to talk about leading a meaningful life in the absence of ever having this kind of intellectually rewarding job his whole model of building a life that's worth living requires things that are unattainable for most people i know i invoked the image before of someone who is a rice farmer in a small town in cambodia or laos okay it may seem hard to relate to but the vast majority of us in our way are rice farmers we're born into circumstances we had no choice about we have no control over and we're stuck with very few viable career paths in front of us most of us live our lives with the consequences of decisions that were made for us sometimes by the generation immediately prior by our own parents sometimes by circumstances that have been accumulating for generations now at the bottom of the screen i ask again do you think you can raise a child if you play video games for just three hours per day and let's ask more broadly what can you do if you play video games for three hours a day and we assume you have a job and you've got to buy groceries you've got a shower three hours per day it's probably all that you've got to give so maybe this idea which is quite appealing of building a life that's worth living maybe what we have to face up to is that it is actually incompatible with adults playing video games that playing video games will preclude the possibility of you having a meaningful life so to sum up his overall argument is that we shouldn't contrast video game addiction to quitting instead we should contrast this appealing prospect of building a meaningful life we should build a meaningful life and then playing video games will become a positive part of this life all of the other elements will so to speak come into balance the strongest part of his approach is his critique of mainstream therapy he points out i think quite reasonably that they have a tradition of coaching people and counseling people evolved in response to alcoholism and chemical addictions and that in general the advice and help you're going to get from a therapist is not terribly useful for quitting or managing video game addiction that in general the type of advice to be found in textbooks in his field and the type of advice you're going to get from people in his field is pretty much irrelevant to the problem at hand the greatest disadvantage of his approach is that his criteria for identifying both what is good and what is bad about video gaming are external to and are relevant to the playing of video games as such so this is subtle many of you might not have noticed this but what he says is that playing video games is only a problem if it causes other problems that is issuing the question that is a refusal to evaluate what's good and bad about video gaming as such what he says again and again i'm not putting words in his mouth openly is that when playing video games causes problems for your career causes problems in your work life when playing video games causes conflict within your family when playing video games causes health problems then and only then playing video games is a problem then and only to that extent playing video games as a pro he claims that the benefits of video games are friendship but this is no more guaranteed by the game itself than it is by enrolling in an mba as we said before so what's it going to be dr k at what point do we evaluate video games as such the good and the bad of them the problems caused by them without misdirecting the audience to consider genuinely extraneous things like the attainability of these elusive friendships or possible negative impacts on your work your family your health no i want to talk about video game playing as such i want to talk about the real problem here i don't want to talk about inessential extraneous benefits i don't want to talk about inessential extraneous harms in offering criticism of this kind i always take the time to do what i consider due diligence research i take the time to check is it possible that these few youtube videos i saw presented by the person i'm criticizing misrepresent their work someone makes youtube video talking about how they dropped out of university and they're happy about it and they encourage you to drop out of university also but if you look around you might find that they later made a video saying the opposite saying that they regret dropping out of university that it was a rash decision they may have made a later video saying that they're going back to university in this way i really do try to get a sense of the person's whole message of their whole business what it is they're selling here on youtube before i publish a criticism this kind in this case i have to say i was shocked i was really shocked when i took the time to check what was going on within the discord run by dr k what i found is that the barely perceptible strain of watered-down hindu spirituality found on his youtube channel is revealed to be a truly cult-like trap drawing in recruiting and converting young people yes but people of all ages who are at a vulnerable time in their lives where they need help they need guidance because they're struggling with video game edition or these other issues that he discusses on his youtube channel the question i put to the people in his discord would this be acceptable if they were a man with a phd with similar credentials doing similar counseling who was then drawing people in and presenting them in the same way with the truths the doctrines the practices of scientology or of islam would you guys feel comfortable with what you've got going on here about so-called hindu spirituality very real religious practices and people being drawn in and being given meditation lessons i would say being invited to participate in meditation rituals would you feel comfortable with this if this were instead someone with academic credibility and seemingly medical expertise drawing people in and recruiting them to participate in islamic or mormon practices one of the people wrote back to me i was very quickly silenced and kicked out which is not surprising for a cult group someone else someone who claimed to be a buddhist monk actually just posted a link to a single scientific study a study i could very easily debunk saying that meditation is uh scientifically valid i was not allowed to respond to this or engage in a discussion about it you know i said no no no no you guys are mistaken people were writing back to me saying oh well they do this hindu stuff they do this buddhist stuff they draw people into this but all of it's scientifically valid i said no you don't realize that's what the scientologists say scientology also recruits people into their cult claiming that it's scientifically about the people who sell transcendental meditation it's normally just called tm transformation overtly hindu culture they have decades and decades of recruiting people with pseudo-scientific claims presenting their religious practice as scientific and guys you may not have that much experience with islam it's quite common in islam too there are really strong arguments presented by muslims that islam is the religion of science that it's science that proves that the quran is correct there's a whole discourse there that for some people is powerful and convincing or lures them into accepting the religion and maybe later they realize that this isn't scientifically valid at all or maybe they live with that illusion their whole life is long but above all seeing as quitting video games is the locus classicus for this discussion today do you not know there are people who claim it's a simple scientific fact that playing video games benefits you that playing video games makes you more intelligent that has been scientifically proven to have these kinds of cognitive efforts and do not know the opposite that there are people who claim that playing video games does terrible harm to you mentally emotionally and otherwise and that this has been simply proven the discussion of the effects of video games in our lives is itself a great example of pseudoscience and innuendo being presented as science will his advice help people or harm people to give you a parallel answer really awful diet advice on the internet can still help people because it's part of the process of them taking a personal interest in and showing initiative in trying to improve their health somebody who's already taken the step to come on youtube and look for advice about how to improve their diet how to lose weight how to improve their health they may benefit from discussions about how to do that even if every element of the advice is wrong the problem is this irrelevant health advice may be part of the process of people helping themselves or it may provide excuses for them to continue in their bad habits so it may be harmless for you to watch a video that tells you that you should have zero added salt in your diet to solve a particular health problem and improve your health and you get committed to this zero salt diet and that just may be part and parcel of you making the effort to pay more attention to what you eat pay more attention to the balance of calories and exercise and this sort of thing and therefore the fundamentally bad or relevant advice that you should be avoiding salt it may be part and parcel of a positive process of your life or or you may eat tremendously unhealthy foods and make excuses for the fact that you're still gaining weight not achieving your goals the advice isn't working that your health is even deteriorating because you've taken this irrelevant criterion of avoiding salt you've elevated it to being the most important thing in how you plan your diet and then you're ignoring all kinds of obvious questions and yes by the way tragically i do know people who followed crazy diets they got the internet sadly these examples really do have consequences of the real world i end the video with criticism of dr k that definitely applies to some of the advice you will find on my own youtube channel i'm always interested in criticizing my own approach to these problems when i criticize others what if having a meaningful life is a dangerous irrelevant criterion to bring into these discussions in the first place so i have on screen one person asked the other well i have to develop a meaningful life like dr k says and then my indulgence or addiction will come into balance you see what's happening here they're not interested in dealing with the particular addiction or the particular indulgence instead they've gotten motivated by this idea or this ideal of pursuing a meaningful life and they're expecting video games to cease to be a problem once they've achieved that and the other person answering no you just need to quit now deal with the consequences later waiting on the attainment of this meaningful life is irrelevant and what if it's actually a dangerous distraction no just recognize that this particular indulgence or this particular addiction is bad and quit now quit drinking now quit gambling now quit prostitution now quit playing video games now in some ways it's a positive thing that i put together the first ninety percent of this video unaware of the depth of dr k's involvement in peddling a corrupt form of hinduism a corrupt form of buddhism spiritual practices that i would consider not cult-like but to be blunt an actual cult it's convenient because i presented the first ninety percent of this video without an awareness of the real danger that dr k presents to those who are taken in by the veneer of scientific and academic respectability i'm sorry that i have to conclude this video by saying that this is another dangerous man presenting himself as innocuous recruiting people into a cult by pretending that he cares by pretending that he's just trying to help