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Comment by komon | Hacker News Reader

A really great short documentary on this subject is Louis Theroux's "Gambling in Las Vegas". His frank manner really cuts to the core of not only the length to which addicts will justify gambling but also to the lengths to which the casino employees justify their enabling.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uJRYUZbxwyA

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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q5EcyUaZQrU

Better version that doesn't have all kind of broken artifacts.

I enjoy hearing the justification of "friendship" between the high roller, and his fixer. Pretty hilarious.

Reminds of the strategies freemium devs employ where they do their best to snare "whales" who are players who will causally drop thousands of dollars on various in-game powerups and skins. There was a report a few months ago claiming these players are responsible for 70% of an app's revenue!

I imagine its similar for casinos, so they have no real incentive to actually stop addiction as addicts are their revenue generating "whales."

Absolutely the case, though casinos don't have quite the same incentives. Freemium devs can't fly in wealthy players and customize their games, for instance.

But this absolutely explains a lot of these things. For a while, I wondered why freemium games don't offer an "unlock all" option for $2, or $10, or $100? Turns out, it's because even $100 would be a massive loss compared to what the 'top' players sink into Candy Crush.

For that matter, the heaviest-drinking 10% of adults consume more alcohol than the other 90% combined.

This whole question has affected my feelings on addiction and vice industries. Its one thing to have an industry that has harmful side effects, or drives some people to failures of willpower. It's another to have an industry that depends on addiction or compulsive use, and it turns out that's almost always the case.

> Freemium devs can't fly in wealthy players and customize their games, for instance.

I wish I could remember the source but I'm sure I've heard of freemium developers researching their biggest whales and then tailoring high end items to match the colours of their favourite football team.

They absolutely do stuff like that. There's a freemium game developer that lives in my neighborhood. Something crazy like 50% of their income came from just a handful of people (literally - something like five people). Naturally, the devs made the effort to reach out and figure out why those people were buying things and what the company could do to keep them buying, asking what features they'd like to see and what models they liked.

Some games do target individual whales, at least according to one article on gamasutra.

That factoid about the heaviest drinking 10% is probably wrong, by the way.

Basically, it comes out of survey data about how much alcohol people consume. But when you take the actual results from the survey and multiply it by the population of the US, you only get about half as much alcohol consumption as there are sales of alcohol.

So the guy who ran the survey just multiplied all the numbers by two. People who said they had 5 drinks per night, he assumes they have 10 drinks per night. In contrast, the people who said they have 1 drink per month, he assumes 2 drinks per month.

That's pretty dubious. It seems like it's a LOT more plausible that if you have 3 drinks per month, you'd report just one, than if you report 5 drinks per night, actually you take 10.

Reference: http://vinepair.com/booze-news/10-americans-consume-10-drink...

Wow, thank you. That really changes the initial result.

I remember being shocked by those numbers. 10 per night is high-impact even with high tolerance, and totally out of the question for lots of people. For 5% of Americans to drink more than that would be wild, since you've largely slashed your potential demographic to good-sized men.

And the reverse explanation, where the low end is particularly bad at estimating, would match with everything else people estimate. If you have a beer after work and a second with dinner, you can probably say "two a day" with confidence. If you have a glass of wine sometimes, out with friends, but not often, it's not terribly easy to guess whether that's two a month or one every two months.

I sort of see why he used his estimate, because you have to bring up the low end hugely to account for so much absence, but it seems unjustifiable to assume that the heaviest drinkers could even survive having their numbers doubled.

Yeah, I think that probably a huge chunk of the difference is just that actually a lot of alcohol purchased is disposed of unconsumed.

Tie that with a modest increase in the lower-end reporters, and perhaps a modest decrease in the highest-end reporters (are there people who said they average 5 drinks a night who really average 4 because in fact their drinking is variable per night and averaging across a week is more mental record keeping + math than they bothered with when answering a survey?), and you get something that strikes me as more congruent with basically all other facts that I've observed about the world.

Now, that probably does still mean that the top decile accounts for an astonishing percentage of overall alcohol consumption, on a relative basis -- just the absolute amount is less incredible.

The 'failure to consume' part didn't even occur to me. Between half-emptied drinks that go bad and liquor cabinets which have been stocked but barely used for decades, it can't be a small amount.

And yeah - I don't doubt it's a power law thing, pretty much all addictive substances are. I imagine the 95th percentile of use for a lot of drugs would be lethal for a first-time user. But the raw dose claimed for alcohol here was bizarre, and I'm glad to have it explained.

Do most capitalistic ventures rely on whales? Or is it limited only to ones that feed off addictions?

Addictive ones only, basically.

There's two things restraining other businesses from profiting like this.

First, lots are basically fixed-consumption - if you buy a vacuum cleaner, there's effectively no chance of selling you another one next week. Across all your customers, you have an effectively flat purchase rate. So all you can do there is improve margins and reach unserved customers (and maybe pursue planned obsolescence).

Second, most unbounded-consumption businesses have normal distributions of consumption. People who buy string cheese maybe eat an average of five a week, with a low-SD normal distribution around that. So you market your cheese sticks to your prototypical customer to maximize profit.

Any power-law business sells to whales. That means drugs and gambling, but I should also observe that enterprise sales count. If Proctor and Gamble will pay 10,000X as much for your security consulting as a local pizza shop, you're selling to whales.

Thanks for sharing—my family was ripped apart due to my father's unbridled gambling. Although it's conceivable that casinos play their part in motivating people to gamble, much of the addiction is a battle within the individuals.

Absolutely an individual choice. Why someone chooses to continue to detriment is an infinte pool of rationalizations.

I did it for the entertainment & group inclusion(poker). I justified it as I didn't lose $200, I paid for several(sometimes many) hours of entertainment. Then one time I ran out of time while I was up several hundred. The next time was again time constrained and I walked w/ $700.* The last time I met an old friend I haen't sen in 15 years and we blew our cash on drinks talking about old times. I figure I'll never be this close to even ever again so I haven't played again in 9 years.

*I'm still way behind, but figure the odds of recouping more are stacked against me.

funny thing about addiction. I agree that in the beginning it's a choice. But i think every event biases the choice a little bit. So, if it's go to the movies or go gambling, the first time around it's a 50/50 split. then next time around it's a 40/60 split, the next time around 20/80 split. Clearly the rate of bias modification curves vary from person to person.

That, in and of itself isn't bad, nothing wrong with always picking gambling when you have some free time and money.

With addiction, of any kind, it kind of creeps past the point of free time and money. Preferring X over sleep, work, food, whatever other things are important is where it gets pretty rough for people.

So anyway, yeah, there's an element of personal choice. When the biases get so strong, it's hard to recognize that a choice is even being made. People don't exactly choose to brush their teeth in the morning, it's just something that happens as part of the morning routine. It's technically a choice, but the bias is so strong, people rarely consider not brushing their teeth. (as a somewhat silly example)

Good thing toothpaste isn't addictive... hope the Crest folk aren't reading this. Very good point, though. I was lucky, I had several positive experiences in a short time period and could rationalize my decision to desist. I have failed repeatedly to mirror that experience with my other addictions, cigs and sex. *

* More so than just getting a lot, I was missing work, foregoing important events and losing sleep to engage with any woman who gave me permission. Aging & perpetual lack of funds cured that one for me, although it is always on my mind. I can not credit that to any personal strength.

edit:reword last sentences and fix *s

This does make me wonder why there's not an AM and PM toothpaste sub category. AM toothpaste with caffeine and PM with some type of mild sedative. They could double sales

There surely is AM toothpaste: https://www.powertoothpaste.com/

I always figured toothpaste for sensitive teeth contains local sedative.

Any toothpaste with menthol (pretty much all of them) contain a local sedative, it's just not addictive

At least in India there use to be an addictive toothpaste. The toothpaste had nicotine and it was common to see people with a brush in their mouth 24x7.

http://doctor.ndtv.com/faq/ndtv/fid/51302/How_can_my_addicti...

i think the difference is that gambling directly activates the dopamine centers in the brain. to the extent that they discuss this during work meetings to make them more addictive. when you center your work discussions on how to make something more addictive, you are dealing with something that can cause addiction. i guarantee you that nobody in the crest plant has ever had a discussion like this.

I almost stopped smoking, but I justified having a few at work and after work because I got to hang out with my colleagues socially, and I don't like to drink without a cigarette.

I employ the social rationalization, too. And what's a smoke break without a smoke? The secondary benefit for me is one of my early cessation attempts I knew I couldn't succeed if I drank so I quit drinking and never recommenced after I started smoking again.

That's a great documentary. I'd like to see a followup on some of the people he interviewed. Some research online will show that the "Mattress King" had lost his young son shortly before this was filmed

Could you provide a link to this? I googled for "Mattress King" and found stories ie: Reddit; but nothing about his son... thanks.

Google Allan Erlick

Wow, that's amazing for the ways the people interviewed will talk about gambling (especially the different ways that they resist Theroux's efforts to get them to talk about the expected outcome of a gambling session, think about how much money they're losing, or identify a point at which they would stop).

Just google for HN threads about sports books and daily fantasy sports.

They are nearly a continuous eye roll of outraged geeks complaining about how states like NY were an affront to freedom and liberty.

Edit: The downvotes are awesome on this topic. Folks love their crack.

It's block in my country. Does anyone have a mirror?

http://eachvideo.com/watch?v=q5EcyUaZQrU

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