Engineers of addiction
theverge.com
theverge.com
While every casino in the US displays signage claiming to support "responsible gaming" and claims to have policies in place to stop addicts from gambling, the reality is that if addicts were stopped, all casinos would be closed and bankrupt within a month. No capital-intensive industry could survive if 90% of their revenue suddenly vanished. And with that, we arrive at the truth: casinos are built explicitly for the creation and exploitation of addiction.
This is pretty evil, but it will continue happening as long as politicians can be bought to keep it legal. The only meaningful way to address it is to focus resources on treatment and prevention.
[1] http://www.wsj.com/articles/SB100014240527023046261045791233...
[2] http://www.gamesindustry.biz/articles/2012-12-12-monetizing-...
You could make this exact same argument for liquor sales.
The top 10% of regular drinkers have 10 drinks a day. If they reduced their consumption to that of the next decile, total ethanol sales would fall by 60 percent.[1]
We tried banning alcohol sales. It didn't work very well.
[1] http://www.the-american-interest.com/2014/10/05/the-alcohol-...
That might be persuasive if it were the only relevant information we had. But most US states maintained a complete ban on gambling for most of their existence, and those bans worked pretty well.
There is a lot of room between making something illegal, and promoting it to take advantage of people.
I'm having a hard time with this. Something doesn't have to be endorsed by the state to be culturally embraced, which seems to be what I'm understanding when I view both sentences in tandem. Apologies if I'm getting that wrong.
But if I view the first sentence in isolation:
> We still don't culturally embrace alcohol as a good thing.
I'm still baffled, but for different reasons. Alcohol is endorsed, celebrated, and embraced from top to bottom in nearly all corners of contemporary society. It's served nearly everywhere, consuming it is the cultural norm, not consuming it is viewed with suspicion, it's lauded as being crucial to one's enjoyment of an evening, social gathering, sporting event, flight, etc. Entire business models exist that would otherwise be unprofitable if not for alcohol sales. Many establishments are essentially loss leaders but for their alcohol sales (which are supposedly tangential to their primary business offering).
2.5 million deaths are alcohol-related every year. It's a factor in 40% of all violent crimes. 24% of incidents involving police have alcohol as a factor.
And yet, sit around at dinner with a group of guys and order a soft drink, and it's often viewed as abnormal behavior.
Why? Because, for reasons passing understanding, we culturally embrace alcohol as a good thing.
I don't recommend the alternative of seeing some of your friends or relatives drink themselves to death, even as their own closest friends fail to see what's going on. But you don't always have a choice. Sometimes the anecdotes find you.
Anecdotes aren't data, but they are what human beings are designed to believe. If you have trouble envisioning evident facts that are backed by piles of data, perhaps you need to collect a wider range of anecdotes.
10 standard drinks is two bottles of wine, and 3/5 of a bottle of scotch.
(Both using standard, 750 milliliter bottles.)
Where do you get 10 from?
And that 10% account for 90% of revenue doesn't mean that those 10% are addicted. There's obviously a long tail of people that only enter a casino once a year or less, which will obviously contribute little to its revenue. That doesn't mean semi-regular players must be addicted.
I don't doubt that there are addicted people, but I don't agree that the data you mention indicates a large problem.
More information is necessary to establish this claim.
It's hard to be a "healthy" semi-regular losing player, the ones I can think of off the top of my head are people with good jobs who hit the casinos a few times a month as a social event and lose what they would have spent at a bar anyway. They may drop $500 each per month, but the problem gambler may drop $10k in a week. It doesn't take many problem gamblers to get to 90% of the money coming in.
[1] https://marroturismo.files.wordpress.com/2015/03/tragaperras...
I think it's hard to be a "healthy" losing player because there aren't many good reasons to keep doing something that's costing you money when the whole point of the activity is to win money. But I suppose if you're always within 5 minutes of a slot-machine that changes things a little.
Here in the U.S. gambling is heavily regulated so unless you live unusually close to Las Vegas, Atlantic City, a Native American reservation, or other small areas where it's legal it takes a lot of effort to get to a casino. I don't really know but I'd guess that most people here are an hour or so from the closest legal gambling, and there are even states with zero legal gambling.
edit: look at the map about halfway down this page, it's out of date but sums up gambling access in America pretty well: https://www.stlouisfed.org/publications/regional-economist/j...
It's quite a complex issue. How do politicians regulate games without infringing on players' freedom? How do they discern lawful play from illegal play? Treatment, prevention and awareness is the only practical solution.
You don't seem to understand that addicts aren't free.
If, as downandout suggests, the industry can't exist without the addicts, then the choice isn't one of freedom versus tyranny. It's a choice of which infringement on freedom we find worse: a predatory industry ruining people's lives or the state saying, "Sorry, you can only play games for fun, not money."
Yes they are. Quit trying to overload the term. Are they slaves? No. Are they in prison? No. Freedom means the freedom from the tyranny of others, not from yourself.
On the other hand, I am in favor of regulation sufficient to make the worst-case-scenario equal to the worst-case-scenario of unemployment. The real social problem is only externalized beyond individual and dependents when the stereotypical problem gambler starts seeking lines of credit to further their addiction; This is to be avoided at considerable cost, because not only are their incentives compromised in a manner associated with addiction, but also in a manner associated with fear of whatever private sticks their patrons have to get them to repay the debt, and they have no legal means to do so.
I don't necessarily think we should ban anything that people could get addicted to. But I'm generally in favor of stopping people making money off of addicts. And I'm thoroughly in favor of banning people from trying to create new addicts. As an example, I think the cigarette advertising bans, mandatory on-pack warnings, and high cigarette taxes are swell.
I also think there are things to do other than "intervene [...] against participants with no desire for an intervention", so I think that's a bit of a red herring.
That's your own completely arbitrary definition of freedom.
Your use of "freedom" is one meaning, but it's not the only one, or even the main one. Note, for example, that the phrase "freedom from addiction" has 129,000 hits, and there are dozens of books with titled related to the phrase. Similarly, people talk of slavery to their addiction: E.g.: http://www.thehopeline.com/17-lows-of-addictions-part-2/
If you talk to actual recovering addicts, their experience is one of freedom. And they're not misusing the word; Webster's first definition is "the absence of necessity, coercion, or constraint in choice or action". That is distinct, in their view, from your definition, which they have next: "liberation from slavery or restraint or from the power of another".
Also, I don't know that we have to ban gambling. I don't think people having the occasional poker game is a big problem. It's industrial-scale exploitation of addicts that I take issue with. I think it would be sufficient to ban profiting from gambling.
I do think that eliminating the profit incentive is something that could work. The profit from gambling is cited as a redeeming quality, however, as a reason for legalized gambling to exist. The overwhelming idea, at least in the US, is that if people are going to have a vice (or fun, depending on your perspective), their activities should be taxed so that others (corporations and the government mainly) can profit from them. Perhaps if the money actually went to fund schools and other things that benefit society, I could get behind this viewpoint, but regardless of the claims of governments that have legal gambling, it doesn't. This John Oliver segment about it is pretty interesting: https://www.youtube.com/watch?t=789&v=9PK-netuhHA
I definitely agree with you that the society-benefit line is mostly a sham. With cigarette and alcohol taxes, the general goal is to discourage consumption. But many US states actively promote gambling, so I think it's a very different thing.
My experience is with 3rd world countries, specifically Thailand, where gambling is illegal. I know you're not advocating for a ban on gambling but I think it's worth a mention that due to its illegality, there are widespread issues that stem from it: corruption, cops being in on illegal gambling dens, and mafia / gangs that sprung up to run these under ground dens.
Aside from the more organized underground gambling, there are also smaller village style gambling where within a village / town / city, there are bookies that will collect your bet (and people bet on anything: soccer being the main one.) Basically addicts will find a way to gamble whether it's banned, discouraged, organized, or legalized.
In the case where it's illegal, the creditor who the addicts borrow money from are usually loan sharks or gang members that take extreme means to recover any money they can. Many families lose homes, life-savings, or even get killed. So it gets pretty bad, IMO it's worse than a legalized gambling system.
People who wants to gamble prefer to go to the legal means as it pose much lower risk of extreme repercussions... but if it's not legal, some of them would still find a way to gamble. This may mean that the number of people who do gamble reduces... but I'm not sure by how much and whether that ends up tipping the scale in favor of a ban.
So as far as I'm concerned, gambling should be legal, as I don't want addicts to ever worry about coming forward. And if somebody wants to be the office bookie as long as he pays out every dollar he takes in, hey, have fun. But the moment somebody has a profit incentive to hook people and keep them hooked, I think we've created a very dangerous situation.
This part, though, I take issue with: "Basically addicts will find a way to gamble whether it's banned, discouraged, organized, or legalized." That's somewhat true for addicts not in recovery. But I think it ignores people in recovery, those getting started on recovery, and those with addictive potential who aren't yet addicts. For those people, availability all matters a lot.
We've managed to reduce smoking a great deal without black-market tobacco farmers springing up. There's no reason we can't do something similar with other addictive products.
However, It's not only about the slot machines. You can find the underlying model in many other products, like freemium apps. There's much more subtlety than closing down casinos. Illegal businesses – which don't employ workers nor pay taxes – would likely exploit the new prohibition and its victims.
> "Sorry, you can only play games for fun, not money."
Addiction-prone individuals will still be unable to function normally in day-to-day life. That's why I believe that treatment, prevention and awareness trumps other obvious proposals.
[citation needed]
> That's why I believe that treatment, prevention and awareness trumps other obvious proposals.
That's a couple of different kinds of false dichotomy. Nobody is saying one can't have treatment, prevention, and awareness while also, say, placing such heavy regulation on gambling that the amount of addiction is minimized. As a comparable model, look at cigarettes.
They even use casino terminology , bucketing their users into minnows , whales and what not.
For free to play games most users spend almost nothing. But there are these users that spends thousands of dollars on the game as if it were nothing.
Of course, if you assume even half of those people are lying, that's where the addiction is. You'll tell yourself stories and tell others stories, so they don't see you as a weak person.
If gambling was outlawed, gamblers & casino owners would find other ways. A fool and his money.
(Also if gambling was outlawed, where the fuck would we get VC money from?)
You're suggesting that this is unusual but it's just the Pareto Principle, which applies to... pretty much every set of data ever, and serves as no evidence for anything.
I'm not against what you are saying, but you need to find a better argument than this.
> "I lost my husband two years ago to throat cancer," she explained. "He was the love of my life, and I started doing this just to — I was out of my mind and spent a lot of time at the cancer center." ... Singleton says she never recovered from the pain of her loss, and that’s why she keeps coming back to the slots.
The person quoted above is in need of counseling and support. Instead, she's getting a drip-feed of low-cost morphine to mask her loss, like a debtor going from pay-day loan to pay-day loan to stay solvent.
Academically, we seem to have strong evidence linking stress to reduced impulse control. I'm no expert in the matter, but surveys such as this [1] seem convincing. Despite this, the popular conversation seems to stay away from root causes and instead ends at the label 'addict.'
I wonder what percentage slot machine and clash of clans-styled mobile gaming revenue is due to this kind of coping-related addiction. downandout's comment [2] suggests it is probably quite high.
[1] Casino licenses in most countries are tied to paying for treatment of people with gambling addiction/compulsions - similar to how many countries approach decriminalisation of addictive substances. I assume you do not fund any such programs - is that correct?
(FWIW, I haven't been with the company since 2012.)
In addition to the gambling issues, the presence of poker machines in my city has help kill off the live music scene. Pub owners now prefer to make their money from zombies-slot players, and the community and friendly atmosphere created by humans playing music has been practically destroyed as a result.
IMO poker machines, especially, are a blight on the gaming world. I only feel lucky the dumbed-down 'game play' is nothing that would appeal to me or people I know, and personally speaking I would never want to use my software skills to help separate some of society's most vulnerable and naive from their money.
I would reason that, same as for alcohol and other drugs, there should be more money directed from profits towards support for addicts. I realise it's not a good idea, in general, to be overly paternalistic in general; my statement was made more from a personal point of view in terms of what work I would or would not be involved in.
I understand if you don't feel comfortable answering in public though.
(and to be clear: while I have strong personal feelings about whether I would or should create gambling apps, I'm truly not writing this as an excuse to judge you. Doing so would be hypocritical, as there's plenty behavior in my life currently that doesn't fit my convictions.)
EDIT: just noticed you've already gone into this further down in the conversation.
Some very random thoughts and (sorry to yell but I know someone is going to tell me how one of these doesn't justify things but...) NONE OF THESE ARE MEANT TO JUSTIFY ANYTHING:
1. I am just a dev and had never been to a casino in my life prior to developing the game. I just took the job since I wanted to go the high risk/hard reward route. I am fully cognizant of the "I was just the accountant at Auschwitz" counter argument. I just developed the thing and had fun, frustration, and huge amounts of stress learning about things like high concurrency and such.
2. I am guilty of compartmentalizing and avoid thinking about the effects.
3. I was under the understanding that for a a while at least we were cutting people off when they spent over a certain amount. I assume at some point we stopped doing this, but avoided asking when.
4. Due to political reasons, I was sidelined and didn't have any decision making clout. I was just a dev once we grew to a certain point.
5. I'm fairly far to the left politically, but found some of the more libertarian arguments persuasive in terms of adults are adults and should be able to smoke weed, drink beer, and play slots if they want to.
6. I tell myself that with the money earned, I can now do good things for the world and any projects I do from now on will be non-profitish. I have yet to do anything of the sort.
7. It was all very gradual. If an existing casino company had tried to hire me, I would likely have not worked for them. We started off with multiplayer games like Blackjack and Roulette and the focus was on social really more than casino. It's the kind of lobster boiling problem: Since it was so gradual, it was tough to see if/when a line was crossed.
8. Casino has a particularly bad reputation. Is working for J.P. Morgan any better? What about Starbucks, which has basically built their empire on a caffeine addiction?
My first job was writing code for a company that took advantage of poor and desperate people. I didn't see that for a few years. But, it was a good veneer -- help people who wanted to go to school to improve their lot in life. I genuinely thought I was doing something good.
But these for-profit schools ended up abusing government regulations and guarantees around student loans, which has largely led to the student loan crisis. However, I thought that I was buying stuff in my community, it bought my family a house and a reliable car, and we were paying a lot of taxes.
Every company has some variation on this. Starbucks has been great for coffee growers around the world and has exposed many people to boutique/single-origin coffee, but like you said, it's built on addiction. But any restaurant is doing the same -- they're doing whatever they can to bring you in and have you pay money for food. I mean, you have to eat, right? And restaurants are all about flavor and presentation and unique ingredients -- they're triggering your dopamine, which they hope will entice the diner to spend more money. Car salesmen are the same way -- everybody kinda needs a car, but they try to take advantage of our lack of information, and try to cover it with dopamine-based ideas: smooth leather, new car smell, perfect paintjob, fast car, get a bunch of chicks, people will really know you've done well in life, etc.
Everything in live is built on dopamine though -- it's why we do anything. To reduce it to dopamine trigger = bad for humanity is not fair.
I didn't really expect an answer, so thank you for giving one anyway. From what you write, I get the impression that could be described as a "slippery slope" kind of situation, which I can understand. I don't know how I'd behave myself given those circumstances, although I'd of course like to think I'd resist somehow - but perhaps I'm fooling myself. And you are right that there are a lot of industries of questionable/negative moral worth out there (I listed a few of my picking in my previous comment, but you could add certain parts of banking/finance industry, tobacco industry and many others..)
I guess what amazes me is the number of people willing to sacrifice their limited time on this planet to actively work on stuff that is (if one is being honest with oneself) providing net negative value to society as a whole, making this world a shittier place for everyone. (Saying this as a relatively non-religious person).
Re: #8. I don't see casinos and drugs (including alcohol) going away any time soon, and attempting to stop them is misdirected in my opinion. The problem is that for a small proportion of the public (typically people with mental health issues) they end up being used as self-medication, often unknowingly, and can make bad situations worse - leading to financial ruin, families torn apart, suicide or overdose in the case of drugs. (JP Morgan & Starbucks don't have these properties.)
For that reason, in the meatspace, casinos are highly regulated and need to identify and protect vulnerable people. So yes - while your app is a substitute for a physical activity, in the physical world that person would have gone through many more hoops that would have allowed people to help them or notice their problem. In digital space, there is no such visibility and there are no regulations, which is why it becomes interesting to see what people do and say about what they do.
Well, casinos make their money by financially immiserating their customers, while J.P. Morgan is almost directly the opposite - they want to make all their clients wealthier. And (some extreme individual cases perhaps excepted), nobody ever ruined their life because of "caffeine addiction" (a somewhat dubious concept).
That said, I do subscribe to the "live and let live" position on the matter, and I don't think people should be criticized for working for a gambling business (or tobacco, alcohol, freemium mobile games, or other businesses in the same realm).
Thing is I know that a lot of our customers really, really love it, because we spend a lot of time making the games really great and fun to play. They know that at the end of the day they lose money, but the same is the case for going to the movies (cost of tickets + drinks), a theme park, etc.
"What a scam Double down Casino is. It's designed for the player to fail with low odds of winning. I've bought probably close to $100 in chips the past few months. Just bought $8.00 today to play the American Idol Slot machine and money was gone within 15 minutes. This is ridiculous. It's not like I'm winning real money back but rather looking for some entertainment. I could have paid that and enjoyed a movie for 2 hours. Will never buy another chip again and warn everyone against doing it. They get you hooked before long. I would rather go out and buy a computer casino program for $20 bucks and have endless entertainment. This company is raking in a fortune and giving nothing in return !!!!"
Do I think you are a bad person--no. Do I feel too many people take advantage of the poor, depressed, and uniformed--yes. Do I feel people rationalize their behavior in the sake of money--yes.
This is how our economy and capitalism in general work. There is no room for morality in such a system (though that's not to say there shouldn't be). By your same logic, employees of health insurance companies should be held responsible for their companies actions leading to the preventable death of their customers. Employees working for aircraft companies should be held responsible for the deaths their armed fighters cause. And the guy making minimum wage at the gas station should further be held responsible for the actions of his parent company and the thousands of death they caused. These are all ridiculous things, as is expecting someone who has worked on gambling games to feel morally irresponsible for doing nothing wrong.
I'm not sure I understand what you're saying; do you mean that people were literally looking for an iPad version of a slot machine, and you just filled that void?
I have no problem with helping people understand how to use their brain chemistry to help themselves do things they want to do. This, however, just feels so bad for the human race as a whole.
I guess what I'm saying is that it makes me sad that this happens and that people are okay with doing it.
>Las Vegas doesn’t exist because of some decision to hedonically optimize civilization, it exists because of a quirk in dopaminergic reward circuits, plus the microstructure of an uneven regulatory environment, plus Schelling points. A rational central planner with a god’s-eye-view, contemplating these facts, might have thought “Hm, dopaminergic reward circuits have a quirk where certain tasks with slightly negative risk-benefit ratios get an emotional valence associated with slightly positive risk-benefit ratios, let’s see if we can educate people to beware of that.” People within the system, following the incentives created by these facts, think: “Let’s build a forty-story-high indoor replica of ancient Rome full of albino tigers in the middle of the desert, and so become slightly richer than people who didn’t!” [http://slatestarcodex.com/2014/07/30/meditations-on-moloch/]
Moral qualms will be crushed by competitive dynamics. I'm pretty afraid of this addiction arms race, especially with the coming rise of VR.
One could argue that the value added here is the environment. Otherwise most peoples' dopaminergic reward circuits will not erroneously evaluate slot machines in an empty desert positively.
What exactly is the difference between vegas and any other kinds of entertainment that could possibly be addictive then? (WoW or other MMORPGs, tetris, board games...)
For example, I spend the same on an MMO subscription no matter how often I play.
This is obviously a moral gray area. Anything can be addictive. How much is too much? But I do feel that things like scientifically designed gambling are certainly on the dark side of the divide.
I wonder if, over time, this addiction arms race might not harden us a little bit against these cognitive blind spots?
I have absolutely no idea if this is plausible, but it is generally the nature of a Red Queen's race.
A) We already educate people about addictive behaviors, and it's not that effective, and
B) If you're going to allow potentially-addictive gambling at all, you probably want to do it in a way such that people must overcome a major barrier to engage in it, like a plane flight or a long drive, which is already accomplished by the centralization of gambling in Las Vegas.
So, the gaudy money-hungry casinos in the middle of nowhere are a lot closer to the ideal gods-eye-view casino than Scott Alexander suggests.
(Not to mention the ecosystem around entertainment there that has produced positive-sum results like magic shows and boxing matches.)
It's a complex subject that we do a poor job of addressing.
It's as immoral as selling a car for 10x an appropriate price, by not voluntarily revealing a critical flaw. Both involve "cheating" someone based off a sort of information/computation asymmetry.
Addicting someone's brain in way that creates value (e.g. getting them to exercise) is obviously worth a significant cost - and I'm totally ok with someone making a profit on that!
In the slot example, it's an "information-computation asymmetry" - the slot machine literally knows how you think and is pushing your psychological buttons in order to cheat you. It's even rewiring your brain (your dopamine response AKA your computation) so that it can push your buttons more effectively.
In both cases, the "cheater" is enabling and taking advantage of asymmetry. They are explicitly harming the other party in a way that benefits them.
(If you have a better term than information-computation asymmetry I'd love to know what it is!)
It's the same argument when it comes to legalizing cannabis -- people are just going to smoke it, no matter your personal opinion on whether or not it's a good idea. The state is better off regulating for safety, legitimizing the business, and collecting taxes to offset the perceived social harm.
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I suppose the implication with addiction (and its analogies here) are that they provide a way to get something of value from the consumer (money) without providing them any value in return -- only the illusion of value. Its not to say that all addictive products are inherently value-less -- but that their perceived value is far greater than their actual value -- by design (with the perception being driven by addiction).
Your specific point -- that endorphin hit you get is a social reinforcement for a positive contribution to the community of Hacker News. Its not an addiction by design -- its using our internal wiring as it was intended (social contribution makes us feel happy)
Broccoli that is as addictive as chocolate might be more inherently valuable than normal broccoli - since consumers of it are more likely to keep eating it and stay healthier, and so it could be sold for a premium to those who value that.
Though if it later sold for as much as cocaine because of withdrawal symptoms...I would consider that a problem!
EDIT: now I'm confused. The comment I thought you were replying to appears to be a different comment now and the original deleted. Maybe I'm going crazy.
A more moral strategy would be to foster user awareness with threshold mechanisms: "You spent more than [threshold]$ today. We won't accept any more purchases until tomorrow."
If you're interested, I highly recommend N. Schüll's Addiction by Design.
If there is a solution, I think it lies in educating the population and making access as inconvenient as possible.
I wonder why mobile app stores haven't implemented such a mechanism.
2) The popup might "break the spell" and frustrate players. They would likely move to more compelling activities.
People who are severely addicted to slot machines don't care about winning or losing. They just want to keep the flow. Every distraction is detrimental to the experience.
But in all seriousness, it seems that the things that are most destructive are those things that have brains have been trained to drip feel-good chemicals - we distill the essence of that thing and make it easy and cheap to reproduce. Your brain likes it when you eat food because it keeps you alive? Well, it looks like a lot of that is coming from sugar/carbs. How about we put an absurd amount of sugar in water and call it "soda," adding a little caffeine for good measure, and sell it for $1/bottle? Your body reacts pleasantly (in the short-term) to fats? Here's a hamburger. Your body will eventually regret it, and overall the outcome will be negative, but the initial spike will be enough that you either never put the two together, or can't resist it.
Evolution has trained you to enjoy reproducing? Well really you just enjoy the act of sex. And actually not even sex per se, it looks like we can stimulate you with a few visuals and something touching you... porn becomes one of the biggest industries that exist.
Drugs are a much more literal version of that, distilling what makes your brain act certain ways in a literal sense. But in my mind whether or not something is a "drug" isn't binary; it's a continuum. I'd like to see someone try to take Diet Coke away from my cousin and then convince me it's not a drug.
So is candy crush an addiction? For some people, absolutely. They've moved themselves along that continuum.
The scary thing is if you have a consumer product, trying to make someone become addicted is pretty much the definition of what you do. Cigarettes are good business; would you start a cigarette company? Soda is good business, would you start a soda company? Brownies are good business, would you start a brownie company?
It seems to me that our minds haven't yet adapted to the reality that now the entire world of information is in our pockets, not to mention buzzing and sending us notifications. It's certainly no mystery why people are always so buried in their phones. It really concerns me personally, enough that I turn off all notifications and don't even allow myself to download certain apps, because I know I'd use them. My hosts file is full of sites that are addictive.
I don't know what the answer is, but it's something I think about a lot as the founder of a consumer product. I would love people to feel like they have to come back and use my site every day. I'm trying to create that feeling. Is that a good thing or a bad thing? I don't know.
And then get flattened because it turns out that you can get the same stuff for free.
But I digress. Porn isn't a replacement for sex, it is just easier. Condoms do allow you to have sex "pointlessly", ie. with no resulting children, does that make condom manufactures "wrong" somehow? They distilled sex down to a better version (sex without chance of kids or STDs), but it is unnatural, right?
However if condoms are okay, what puts the limit on porn? How is porn materially different from sex without kids? Aren't they just really points on a continuum?
"The "zone" is flow through a lens darkly: hyperfocused, neurotransmitters abuzz, but directed toward a numbness with no goal in particular."
"I don’t have to think. And I know I can’t win."
"You know how you get people younger to gamble? Hand them a fucking telephone."
"A more exact replica of a slot may be Tinder. The mechanics of the dating app mirror the experience of playing slots."
"It’s okay to addict people as long as your business model doesn’t depend on it."
Different manifestations of the same sort of thing, if you shift your perspective just a bit and look at how people use them.
If I am interpreting you correctly, you're saying that anything can become potentially addictive. I agree with you that our reward system is flawed enough such that as long as you provide any sort of value there are people out there who will mistakenly fall into an infinitely loop trading away all their resources (be it time or money) in exchange for the product/service.
I think the intent is important distinction though. A company that maliciously constructs scenarios where they know the typical human will fail due to known bugs in their evolution is not much different from a blackhat. I think the more typical scenario is that the company has to work around our bugs (such as building user interfaces that our imperfect visual cortex can easily understand) just so we can make a fair and willing transaction that provides value to the both sides.
There used to be a problem with "Vandal Patrol" - people would use tools to auto-revert edits and apply templates. Some of those people saw more reverts as being better, and would very rapidly revert and template, often catching good faith edits and users. (As far as I know that got mostly sorted out.)
When people ran for admin there was sometimes a tendency to just count number of edits, rather than look at the quality of edits.
But still, Wikipedia didn't want that, and they didn't deliberately set out to addict people in order to extract as much money as possible from them.
And Wikipedia doesn't have advertising at all, so don't throw out your back lugging them goalposts.
You know, it's just Google's main revenue stream. By several orders of magnitude.
But let's take a step back. Do you actually intend to defend your assertion that advertising is the same in kind as literally taking money out of somebody's pocket? Or is this just the tacit admission that, no, you can't, so let's play definitional games?
My point, no matter how you attempt to recast it, is that Google/Youtube depend on an addictive dynamic. They do. You keep coming back. You keep watching the next video. they make money when you do that. You can try to recast that all you want, but if people didn't keep clicking on the next result or next video, Google/YouTube wouldn't make money.
Why do you think there's a related videos sidebar on YouTube? Why do YouTube videos end with more links to other videos?
It's an (early-on) movement exploring ways to build products that respect our time and focus. (Watch the video for a good overview).
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voluntary_Exclusion
some states have a state-wide list and some casinos in other states have their own self-exclusion lists
The casinos are not raking in the money from slots and table games like they were in decades prior. What used to be free or loss leaders for the casinos (rooms, buffets, shows, nightclubs, even the pools) are now massive revenue generators for the resorts.
Aside from that, casinos are also experimenting with games of skill (aside from poker) as possible ways to attract players now.
http://www.npr.org/sections/money/2015/04/24/402010841/the-f...
You're pretty far off base here. Just looking at the Las Vegas Sands Corp's 10K, their annual revenue by source:
Casino - $12.0B
Rooms - $1.54B
Food/Bev - $0.78B
Mall - $0.55B
Convention, retail, other - $0.55B
So well over 80% of their revenue still comes from gaming -- and this is all extremely high margin revenue. The Casino PR industry is making a lot of noise about how diverse their income streams are but it doesn't follow in reality.
1) Slots can be fun- Most people think slots are bad because they are "addicting". They conclude that these machines are addicting in large part because they themselves can't wrap their heads why ANYONE would spend so much money on a game without some serious mental disorder. But that completely ignores the actual voices of the users (who slot designers actually talk to). Players actually enjoy the thrills of winning AND losing. We have to come to grips that what others consider fun is sometimes beyond our realm of imagination. And just because we don't understand the thrill of their experience, doesn't mean the machine is tricking them. I don't see most people confused when their 75 year old grandmother doesn't like Call of Duty.
2) Spending lots of money on slots isn't necessarily a symptom of addiction- I have met so many people (Completely normal, wealthy people) who have a limit of spending $30/day on slots in their spare time. That is, they spend around 10k/year on slots. Anyone seeing 10k/year would think that this person was addicted, but they don't measure his/her background. Slot players tend to be older, they tend to spend on little else (they don't go out to bars!), tend to have a good amount of free time, and tend to have a good bit of savings. They - of all people- should be allowed to play slots if they so choose to. Obviously the money society spends on slots would be better used to feed some starving child or build some fancy new lifesaving technology. But that's more of a critique of capitalism, not just slots.
3) Casinos don't target gambling addicts- Of course slot makers do basic A/B testing of their games. But it's not like casinos put ads outside of Gambling Addicts Anonymous meetings. They target people in general, and gambling addicts will always find a way too them. When do we start placing the responsibility on the end user?
4) Is the rate of problem gamblers (gamblers who spend a lot of money and can't) who use slot machines higher than the rate of alcoholics? Shopping addicts? Drug addicts? Do you suggest banning alcohol because some people can't handle it?
5) Casinos and slots are heavily regulated by what they can and cannot do. Moreover, taxes on casinos do go to fund problem gambling help, schools, and a lot of great other things.
In the end, unless you actually take an effort to learn how to enjoy slots, you won't understand why people like it. And because of that, you will just vilify the industry. Eerily similar to the war on drugs.