CONCEPT
The Structural Similarity Problem
The diagnostic challenge that clinical addiction criteria cannot distinguish compulsive gambling from compulsive building—identical behavior, opposite valence, collapsed framework.
The structural similarity problem is the empirical observation that the DSM criteria for behavioral addiction—preoccupation, escalating engagement, failed attempts at control, continued engagement despite negative consequences, use to escape distress—describe both the gambler who cannot stop playing and the builder who cannot stop creating. The criteria measure the relationship between person and activity, not the activity's output. They identify a pattern: absorbed attention, difficulty disengaging, relational costs, the colonization of non-engagement time by thoughts of the next session. The pattern is present in compulsive gambling and in what Segal calls the orange-pill experience of AI-augmented building. The clinical framework cannot distinguish them, because it was not designed to.
In The You On AI Field Guide
Schüll's work revealed that addiction criteria are not measuring a deficit in the person but the effects of a designed environment on normal neural architecture. The gambler who meets seven of nine DSM criteria for gambling disorder is not suffering from an internal pathology that would manifest in any environment. She is responding predictably to an environment