What goes wrong in the brain chemistry of a gambling addict?
nautil.us
nautil.us
> The high is in expecting an outcome, desiring it, imagining it, not in its fulfillment.
I am staring at unfinished side projects of mine and they are staring back at me.
Visualizing your win is important to help you stay focused on a goal but equality important is not to get carried away with the visualization. If you imagine yourself winning too often, you'll feel like you already achieved that goal and won't be as motivated to follow through. After-all, what's the point in doing the extra work, if you already think you've won?
He's got a lot of other really good insights. If you're a poker player, I highly recommend his audio books which are available on audible.
-- Spock
(From memory, paraphrasing)
The one that Goodreads and other sites attribute to Flaubert is: "Pleasure is found first in anticipation, later in memory." I couldn't find a source for this but I think rather than Flaubert this is from Julian Barnes's book Flaubert's Parrot, which has:
“Remember the botched brothel-visit in L’Education sentimentale and remember its lesson. Do not participate: happiness lies in the imagination, not the act. Pleasure is found first in anticipation, later in memory.” (https://www.goodreads.com/work/quotes/1414912-flaubert-s-par...).
This quote does not appear in the full text of that book, though (https://archive.org/stream/sentimentaleduca00flauiala/sentim...).
I totally agree with the sentiment expressed, of course. The real lover not being as beautiful or desirable as the imagined version is a common motif esp. in Middle Eastern literature.
I do, however, remember selectively reading the book later in school so I must have mis-appropriated that memory.
I am yet to have a single unfinished side project that I wouldn't be recycling a few years later into something related to my day job.
And yes - it starts with high expectations and dreaming about the outcome, sketching the thing, engineering parts of it - and when it's almost there, then I lose interest. But by that time the hardest part - figuring out how - is done. And it's absolutely addictive.
The difference is that at a Casino, all games are rigged so that your expected value over large number of iterations in any game is that you'll lose money. In a startup, the expected value over investing a lot of time and energy is that you'll gain money in the end. VCs are giving you money to keep gambling, and asking you to give them a cut of your winnings. The house is run by the market.
Jokes aside, though, did I read it right that you're saying you don't have enough side projects? Start a bigger one then.
I suspect this is case with many things, that punishment is ineffective. Punishment ultimately assumes people are acting rationally, and they often do not.
The result is that the only way to impress upon people that crime "doesn't pay", is to make the rate of solving crimes in general much higher. That's... REALLY hard, expensive, it's nuanced and it takes time. Making punishments more draconian is easy, stroke of the pen easy, and it makes angry people feel good. They can't imagine that harsh punishments don't send some kind of message, because to them it does.
Sadly...
There's actually two sides to it: you can lower the upside to crime, or raise the upside to non-crime. Things like better education, job creation, better social security benefits, etc. all contribute to lowering people's need/desire to commit crimes.
Which it doesn't.
> The result is that the only way to impress upon people that crime "doesn't pay", is to make the rate of solving crimes in general much higher.
If you're trying to impress upon people that crime doesn't pay, doesn't it also make sense to focus on creating the impression that the rate of solving crimes is higher?
You don't have to catch more bike thieves, you just have to make them believe that they're going to get caught.
To be blunt, this is one of the most fundamental differences between the most successful ethnic groups, and the least.
Not to mention that if any of those inmates had children, the irrationally violent gene would live on anyway.
You're right, it isn't nearly enough. I am talking about the effect from the past when execution was an immediate and extremely common punishment, not an ordeal that costs millions of dollars and years of retrials and appeals.
I was not necessarily advocating for eugenic programs today; I think the problem is better solved for most countries by stricter boarder controls and ending the insane policies of unrestricted immigration of violent unassimilable men. But if I were, the death penalty is not the only way to go about it; mandatory sterilization for violent criminals would have the same effect, given time and the willingness to use it consistently.
>Not to mention that if any of those inmates had children, the irrationally violent gene would live on anyway.
Yes, but you will get many of the irrationally violent before they can sire any children. Over generations this compounds and you end up with Swedes instead of Somalians.
I cut this out from my original post, but I'll add it now. Every people came from nothing. Every people had their times of feast and their times of famine. Social capital does not come from wealth, wealth comes from social capital. From being able to trust that your neighbor is probably not going to murder you and your family in your sleep.
And so you see that some groups bounce back from crippling poverty and brutal wars. And others have merely found more advanced ways to kill their neighbors.
Peoples who have created anything remotely resembling a functioning society don't act with this brutality and frequency towards their own kin and tribes, no matter the circumstance. Either the Papua New Guineans and others like them have gone "backwards" from a common ancestor (insert pedantic comment about how there is no such thing as devolution), or the kin-killing irrationally violent genes were always there and the rest of us eliminated most of the people that carried them because they were preventing us from operating even the most primitive of villages.
So not rational.
Casinos don't care that they ruin some people, just like big tobacco doesn't care if most of their customers eventually die from their product, so long as the money changes hands first.
Little old bag ladies carrying $100K's of cash around NYC for drug lords are untouched, because anyone who might be tempted to rob them knows that within a few hours they'd be dead.
Swift, widely-known "justice" (punishment) can be a good deterrent.
So harsh punishments can be effective. If people see that breaking a law usually results in bad outcomes then they'll often adjust their behaviour.
His further commentary was that while the trader is going strong, huge rewards accrue to the trader and management. When it blows up, often, instead of instituting any meaningful oversight, the trader and management are fired, new people hired who have no institutional memory of the previous problem.
Will today's generation, who spends time playing free mobile games, been as keen to spend money for slots when they get older?
My first time trying out the actual "pull down the slot handle" machine was mindnumbingly boring.
Nearly every fun business ignores seniors except casinos. Night clubs dont want them, tv doesnt want them, gaming doesnt want them, etc.
when was the last time your local bar had a seniors night? At a casino, its senior night every day.
I can imagine drug addiction, you get that high right away - positive feedback loop.
Interesting that just expecting the outcome in gambling can cause addiction. For the serious poker players, they train themselves to ignore the results. Being results-oriented is a bad thing. Making the correct decision before the result is the focus. Educational article for me.
Of course, I always limit myself with a set amount of cash, and leave the cards in the room... if I win, great. If I don't that's my price for the time spent (at the lowest buy-in tables).
What isn't so well understood is why some people are so much more vulnerable to that process, and others so resistant, not to mention the continuum between them. Unfortunately as far as I can read, this article doesn't offer any new information on that critical issue.
"Like most addictions, Townsend-Lyon’s gambling problem didn’t come out of nowhere. Similar to most women with addiction, she’d had a traumatic childhood—including emotional and physical abuse and ongoing sexual abuse by a close family member and another perpetrator. Also, like most women with addiction, she had pre-existing psychiatric problems; in her case, obsessive-compulsive disorder, post-traumatic stress disorder, and bipolar disorder.
Studies of addicts show that trauma and certain genetic vulnerabilities—especially the two in combination—increase risk for a wide range of mental illnesses and a bewildering spectrum of addictions that include gambling, sex, alcohol, and opioids. The availability of escapist drugs and activities help determine what form the problem takes. But gambling and drugs themselves don’t cause addiction, a myth that often interferes with getting to the personal root of the problem."
It is like saying that because some smokers don't get chronic respiratory disease, all observations of correlation are meaningless until someone proves the exact biochemical effects that link tobaco with such diseases.
What isn't well-known to me is what you'd accept as an explanation of "just how that works" - are you looking for a psychological explanation? A biochemical one? An anthropological one?
Here's another question: what's a "complete" catalogue of behavior? What are the "correct" responses to behavior?
These things don't exist; your attempt to produce a complete theory describing them is a doomed effort. Science is a liminal enterprise. Wriggle your little forearms in frustration all you like, you'll never have a "complete" understanding.
You're going to have to excuse me now, this isn't a good use of anyone's time.
With the limbic system, maybe the strength varies and some are literally weak. Or, they underestimate the strength, perhaps because of statistical reasoning again. Most likely the effects vary individually.
On the other hand, because of the limbic system everyone can become addicted. some people just take their chances and others are weary.
In fact, that's a pattern I've noticed: there are people who will often not touch certain substances, activities, etc., for fear that they will get addicted to it. It seems to take less willpower to just not do it compared to doing a moderate amount of it.
Meanwhile, I don't seem to get addicted to anything whatsoever and I don't think awareness or willpower has anything to do with it. The key thing is just that I don't develop much of reaction and I can easily forget about the substance/activity. It just doesn't stick. It's not that I'm actively resisting a desire, /I just don't have one/. Another thing that doesn't stick for me? Habits. I wonder if these two are related. Most people seem to develop habits much faster and better than I do.
> What I'm not sure everyone is aware of is that willpower can be trained, the best starting from an early age.
I'm very curious what you're basing this on. I would say that is quite a claim to make. And how far? For whom? Is there a cap? Does it depends? Last time I tried to look up willpower trainability, hoping for some solid resources, I came up short.
I haven't observed that my willpower ever increased. If anything, it decreases over time if I try to apply it to the same thing. If I went to do something for a month, it's harder to do it next month. I can make a given activity take less willpower. I can become more efficient at it. I can apply motivational tricks. But the amount of actual willpower seems to stay roughly the same and relying on it is a recipe for disaster in my case.
Willpower trainability is in the same bucket as things like ego depletion and stereotype threat and smiling causes happiness and all those other things that I would take with a pound of salt due to the complexities of studying such things.
That's exactly the end result of the actively trained willpower for me.
"I'm very curious what you're basing this on. I would say that is quite a claim to make. And how far? For whom? Is there a cap? Does it depends?"
All I can give you for sure are my own experiences and the methods my parents used in this regard. However, these are close to what I've seen in martial arts training and other domains. Since my childhood years my parents were very watchful for my instincts and urges and intervened most of the time. They made me aware of my impulses and what triggers them and when I failed to control myself they actively pushed me to slip into a harsh or painful lesson. I remember one of them when I had a definite plan for my hard raised money and they exposed me to a good salesman. I knew what salesmen do and they warned me that that one was better than the others and I had to resist or risk my money on some overpriced unimportant thing for me. I lost, but the lesson stood and now I'd say it worth both the money and the bad feeling that came after. I had many lessons, starting from addressing the appetites for sweets (like any kid) to resisting the provocations for violence (where I had to consciously know when it is or isn't necessary), but usually it didn't come to the hard part.
I think the most important bit was that I developed a sense of my own willpower resistance and its limits. Of course there is a cap, but I kind of sense when I'm about to slip, and I routinely test those limits in a controlled environment. The willpower is not there to be abused, it's there to buy you some time to change course when you realize you're going to be trapped. And yeah, it depends on a lot of things.
"I haven't observed that my willpower ever increased. If anything, it decreases over time if I try to apply it to the same thing. If I went to do something for a month, it's harder to do it next month. I can make a given activity take less willpower. I can become more efficient at it. I can apply motivational tricks."
I think here you confuse willpower with motivation. Willpower is the ability to exert self control regarding your urges, when you have them. What you describe here is a case where you don't have any urges at all. It may involve willpower if you abstain from something when you push yourself to do something else, but it's not used directly. Motivation is another thing that it's addressed enough in our society.
It'd be clear our current society does not recognize this fact, and that it would lack methods to train in effectively. People that seem to have reasonably high will power would be those that either won the genetic lottery or stumbled on some way to (informally) train themselves while trying to do something else.
It would be as if a bunch of tall, reasonably fit guys in their 20s went to play a basketball match against an NBA team. The fact that they would have no chance has more to do with their lack of (serious) trainning that with their innate lack of basketball talent.
'Fear' keeps us away from Bears and cliffs ... but risk and gambling? Tricky one.
I think lottery jackpot winners would disagree with that. You're only guaranteed a negative outcome in these types of games when you've iterated enough times to reach a statistical conclusion. In the meantime, short-term luck in the game's variance could earn you a lot of money or lose you far more than you'd expect. If the expected value of $1 bet in blackjack is $0.99, the return of a single hand will never be that; it would be -$1, $0, $1, $1.50, etc.
Perhaps there's a real world bias as well. Historically, humans had many more children than would live long enough to bear children. Those who played it safe wouldn't thrive enough to have a lot of children. Those who did take a lot of risks either got erased from the record, or went on to have a lot of children. Genghis Khan is probably the best example!
Furthering the idea, bears and cliffs are risky, but a sensible human would have been even more afraid of other humans. And yet, the most cosmopolitan societies tend to be the most successful in terms of demographic health measures as well as economic, political, and even military strength.
Just as it's said that mobsters may be some of the most cautious investors of their accumulated wealth, places where people or more risky in terms of not "othering" as many people get a lot of benefits from the ready trust they place in their neighbors.
In humans modern life comes with problems our biology was not designed to deal with and it fucks us up.
Regarding the former, hard work and study can affect the outcome. The latter are machine programmed and can't be beaten.
I don't know, but wouldn't be surprised if these two types of gambling attracted different types of people.
Dedication, vision, relationships and a whole host of other factors combine in successful business management, which can go a long way towards mitigating risk.
In fact, I would guess that most human activity is negative-EV.
Many actions are considered wrong and a particular brain activity is somewhat arbitrarily chosen as the single cause of that action, and thus wrong in and of itself. It's as useful as saying that phishing happens because the TCP handshake is fundamentally broken.
It also speculates why there are suddenly so many betting shops clustering in UK high streets.
Spoiler: it's because the number of terminals per shop is legally limited and the bookies want to get a large number in a small area.