Take it with a huge grain of salt. There are some fun cocktail-party facts and some reasonable suggestions for changing your own habits, which are fine as "hey, why not try it, it might work for you."
It's just not much good as "scientific evidence proves that..."
[For example: Experimental group improved by a "dramatic" 40%, but control group improved by only a "paltry" 30%! ... which actually meant that group A improved by 5 points out of 50, and B by 3 points out of 50! ... which is probably a statistical fluke, and even if not, it's certainly not a scientifically interesting difference! Argh.]

Also, it's kinda funny that most of the book warns against the dangers of overusing artificial metrics. Then, the last chapter suggests fixing our problems with gamification... i.e. artificial over-reliance on metrics.

But again, good fodder for suggesting new approaches. I'd like to apply a couple of these ideas in my teaching, if I can figure out how.

Fun facts:
* Steve Jobs and other tech titans don't allow their kids to play with the same tech (iPads etc) that they push on everyone else.
* Relief vs. reward: addictions involve positive reinforcement (a reward you'll enjoy if you do X), while obsessions and compulsions involve negative reinforcement (if you do X, you'll be relieved of the pressure to do it). Personally I think a lot of marketing etc. is more about relief than reward: it's not that you'll actually *enjoy* having this new product, but rather that you'll buy it to *stop feeling bad* that other people have it and you don't. Same with trying to "get the complete set" or rack up all the points in a game: it's not that *having* 100% completion is fun, but that *not having* it feels bad.
* Check out the Internet Addiction Test. Many items seem harmless alone, but it's disconcerting once you see how many of them stack up.
* "Addiction" originally meant becoming a slave to work off a debt you can't pay, back in ancient Rome. Only later did it mean other kinds of tough-to-break bonds.
* Addictions are strongly tied to the setting/context/environment, not just the behavior itself. Scientists caused a caged monkey to get addicted to pressing a bar; it returned to behaving like a normal monkey when it "detoxed" outside the cage; but when put back it, it'd return to the frantic addictive behavior. So... put physical and psychological distance between yourself and the original setting when you try to break an addictive behavior.
* Addictions could be thought of as a hijacking of brain systems meant for good purposes: we've evolved ways to persist in difficult-but-important things (like raising kids), but sometimes these mental systems end up helping us persist in bad things instead.
* Adolescence and early adulthood are high-risk periods for addiction: young folks have many new responsibilities but haven't yet built up the coping skills, social support networks, and other healthy ways to deal with hardships. So, try to help your kids build resilience before and during the teen years.
* Wanting vs liking (perhaps related to relief vs reward?): It's easy to disrupt "liking" an addictive behavior, but once the "want" is established it is MUCH harder to disrupt. You can crave something, even if you don't enjoy it when you have it.
* "Don't break the streak" is a nice motivator---until you overdo it, like runners who try to keep up an unbroken streak of running every day for decades, even when they're sick or injured. The longer your streak, the more willing you are to go to extremes to keep it up. (I wonder: What if these runners didn't reward themselves for unbroken streaks longer than, say, a month? After a month, you start on the next 1-month streak, and just try to rack up many months, whether or not they are continuous. Then if you're sick, no worries, you can take a needed rest day, because it won't break your score by too much...) Also, games like FarmVille apparently use this streak-mentality to make money: if you miss a day, you can pay them (real money) to "revert the damage" to the crops you didn't water yesterday or whatever. So, they feed an unhealthy obsession *and* make money off of you: truly predatory!
* The Dollar Auction Game: a brilliant little trick. Sounds like it'd be fun to expose my statistician colleagues to this and see what happens. Also apparently a good way to raise money for charity if you bid off something larger like $20 instead.
* The Zone of Proximal Development: things you can't do at all are too hard; things you can do alone may be boring; but you learn a lot on the things you can just barely do with a little bit of help. Similar to the state of Flow, when your skill level is appropriate for the task's challenge level. (Right now, my PhD thesis is *not* in either of these states :P but I hope to get back in there soon!) One problem is that games, email, and other electronic distractions are designed to keep you in flow... so, one solution is to disrupt that flow artificially. Use old hardware which makes the experience slow and clunky. Don't keep your smartphone handy at all times. [Are there other suggestions out there?]
* Near-wins can be more addictive than genuine wins. In a game of skill, near-wins do legitimately signal that you're almost there, you can nearly do it, just try a little harder next time! But games of luck hijack this too and suck us into spending more time on something useless or harmful (like casino games or lotteries designed to give results that look *almost* like a win. You think to yourself: I got 4 in a row and would have won if it'd just had that 5th one---let me try again!)
* Sometimes the hard problem isn't knowing how to start, but how *not to stop.* When you want to build a new habit like regular exercise or healthier eating, it's easy enough to do it for one day, but what are your (unconscious) "stopping rules" that make you fall off the bandwagon? (No good answers here, sadly.)
* The Zeigarnik Effect: people hate cliffhangers, and they'll better remember unresolved tasks than resolved ones. (See for example the vitriol around the waiting times between Game Of Thrones books...) I wonder: Could we use the Zeigarnik Effect in teaching/education somehow? Assign in-class problems near the end of lecture, and *don't* allow quite enough time to finish, with the hope that the students will mull over the problem outside of class?
* Catherine Steiner-Adair's work on parenting: Don't be scary (rigid), crazy (overreacting), or clueless (about your kids' lives, modern tech, etc.)
* Self-determination theory: focuses on 3 basic human needs, for autonomy (I'm in control of my own life), competence (I can overcome external challenges and experience mastery), and relatedness (bonds with family & friends). (Again, the process of getting a PhD really dampens down all 3 of these needs a lot of time :P ...)
* Don't try to *drop* old bad habits, but *replace* them with better new ones. (So what are some good examples? Not many actual suggestions here.) Or, when resisting something, instead of saying you *can't* do it, say you *don't*: you're not playing the martyr who is forbidden by external forces, but the autonomous person of integrity who chose to take this stand.
* Daimler's office emails are set to delete when the employee is on vacation, with an auto-reply message suggesting someone else who can help if the email is urgent. That sounds lovely, but also requires the whole company to buy-in; you'd probably just alienate everyone if you try this alone...
* "Don't Waste Your Money motivator": set your goal and set aside money every week as you work towards it. If you fail, donate the money to someplace you don't support: an opposing political party or a frivolous cause. But if you succeed, take the money out and spend it "relationally"---a meal with friends, a gift for family, etc.---as a double-benefit reward.
* Planning fallacy: When wondering whether to take up a new activity, ask yourself if you can afford to do it *today*. We tend to overestimate how much time we can free up later, but we're better if we extrapolate from the amount of time we have today.
* Just Press Play: gamified educational environment. Sounds like it's not just gamifying specific computerized tasks, like assigning points and badges for online math exercises... but rather, the offline experience is gamified too, and in particular there are collaborative aspects. There's a "quest" which promises a reward to the entire freshman class if over 90% of them pass a certain difficult required course... so they found students were motivated to help each other, even getting help from junior and senior students. Maybe it's worth trying to gamify useful study habits like this.

Quotes:
* p.3: "According to Tristan Harris, a 'design ethicist,' the problem isn't that people lack willpower; it's that 'there are a thousand people on the other side of the screen whose job it is to break down the self-regulation you have.'"
* p.40, 229, 232, 243: several takes on the idea that kids learn empathy, understanding, and other parts of human interaction by interacting face-to-face. It can be much harder to learn these things when you interact so much by texting, posting on Facebook, etc.---you don't immediately see the impact that your words have on another person.
* p.106: "...it's hard not to wonder whether major life goals are by their nature a major source of frustration. Either you endure the anti-climax of succeeding, or you endure the disappointment of failing." Even people who reach incredible successes (like breaking a world record in sports) don't savor the success---they just want to move on to the next goal.
* p.114: "Counting steps and calories doesn't actually help us lose weight; it just makes us more compulsive. We become less intuitive about our physical activity and eating." (quote from Leslie Sim)
* p.117: "When you approach life as a sequence of milestones to be achieved, you exist 'in a state of near-continuous failure.' Almost all the time, by definition, you're not at the place you've defined as embodying accomplishment or success. And should you get there, you'll find you've lost the very thing that gave you a sense of purpose---so you'll formulate a new goal and start again." (quote by Oliver Burkeman, partly quoting Scott Adams) ... I worry this applies to tenure in academia. I know some folks who sacrificed a lot because they *felt driven* to reach tenure; but in the end, they don't actually *savor the accomplishment* of being tenured. When are those sacrifices worthwhile? Apparently Adams suggests replacing major goals (you get there or you don't) with "systems," i.e. "something you do on a regular basis that increases your odds of happiness in the long run." For him it's creating something small on a daily basis, like a daily cartooning or writing session: "a steadier stream of low-grade highs... guides to a fulfilling life, day by day..." For me, this sounds like my project to read one of my grandpa's philosophy books each year---it's about the journey of *reading* itself, not about the destination of *having read* them all.
* p.229: "Remember: once your cucumber brain has become pickled, it can never go back to being a cucumber." (quote from Hilarie Cash) ... Once you've been addicted and treated, you can't "have just one more" (smoke just one more cigarette, play just one more game of WoW) without massive risk of total relapse. Treatment doesn't erase the addiction and give you a fresh start, allowing moderation; it's most helpful if you avoid the bad thing completely.