Hacker News Reader

Humanity is going to face a reckoning about free will and agency at some point, I think.

If the gambler is but a slave to their lizard brain, then isn't the murderer too? Surely no-one sits down and performs calculus and determines "I will gamble" or "I will murder", they both come from an impairment of our higher senses of reasoning by our baser instincts of rage or pleasure.

I'm obviously not advocating for murder, to be clear. But maybe if we better understand our position philosophically, maybe we'll end up with less brutal prisons ("they're not in here because they are ontologically evil, but because their hardware predisposes them to harm others and we have to contain them for the good of the many") and more sympathetic/realistic laws that focus on controlling harm and are less caught up in vague notions of "freedom" (the freedom to have your hardware bugs exploited by gambling companies?) that are too shallow in the face of a better philosophical understanding of what free will and agency look like for creatures whose programming is primarily informed by a billion years of evolution to crave orgasms and sugar.

I think a large cohort of western society is in active rebellion against the Christian values that came before. This is already resulting in a rejection of the notions of moral agency and accountability (which are not unique to monotheistic religions or cultures). I won't take either side here - just an observation.

That aside, there's another dimension that is implicitly getting thrown out as well—and it's one that every well-developed civilization in history respected (including ours, until recently). That's the notion of wisdom as opposed to folly. That is, there are generally commendable and rewarding patterns of attitude and behavior; and there are patterns of attitude and behavior that lead to personal and corporate ruin. Chief among them is the golden rule ("treat others the way you'd want to be treated, and don't treat others the way you wouldn't want to be treated"), which is repeated in just about every ancient civilization's wisdom literature, and which is essential to civilizations and cultures surviving over the long term, not to mention building and keeping personal relationships.

This "do what you will, just don't hurt anyone" contradicts thousands of years of wisdom and forgets that it's possible to live well and be remembered with honor.

>Surely no-one sits down and performs calculus and determines "I will gamble" or "I will murder

What? People do both all the time

> Is it? Is an alcoholic's decision to drink, or a heroin addict's decision to shoot up? Is it a person with attention issues' decision to spend unreasonable amounts of money on micro-transaction-powered games?

Yes. Obviously the choices involved are easier or harder for individuals based on their predilections. But at the end of the day, it is still their choice.

"Predilections" in this context being measurable, structural/chemical differences in their brains, that they can do literally nothing about? Or are you thinking more about life circumstances, also often not their fault, that make them acutely vulnerable to it?

You and the top-level commenter clearly don't have a grasp on the neurology of addiction.

Addiction is a disorder that can't be controlled. The person with the addiction can control it for short periods of time, but it eventually overwhelms them.

If being addicted were a rational choice, we would not be able to addict rats to drugs and behaviors. Are rats making a rational decision? I think not.

This comment makes is pretty obvious that you have not personally dealt with, and probably do not intimately know anyone who has dealt with, addition.

Congrats to you.

A human can become addicted to literally any behavior. The solution isn’t to make illegal the behaviors that can be harmful when done in excess, it is to provide addiction counseling resources at no cost funded by the people who can control themselves. And higher amounts of control, like allowing users to ban themselves, or indicators that flag users as problem gamblers.

Making the behaviors illegal doesn’t actually help people you mention, it just drives them to less safe avenues and jail. Hardly help if you ask me.

People also have a right to discover for themselves that something is dangerous to them personally. It sucks, but not everyone is going to know off the bat that they have alcoholic tendencies.

I find it interesting that everyone is assuming I want gambling made illegal or something, when I said nothing of the sort. The comment I replied to postulates that gambling is fine because it's the person's choice. I replied asking if that was necessarily true given all of what we have learned and are learning about addiction, drawing comparisons to substances/behaviors, illicit and otherwise, that are known to be addictive. And everyone thinks I'm some moral crusader who wants to ban everything.

I don't, FWIW. I just think these questions are important and the answers are more complicated than "everyone can and should do whatever they want" or "everyone has to eat nothing but corn flakes and eschew all temptations in life for Jesus."

Though, I will say that I find it off-putting how many states in my Untied States are apparently totally fine with juicing their budgets with the profits of gambling enterprises. Like... we can definitely have gambling, but it feels exploitative that the state itself is raising money, even if that money is for public services, off the backs of known-to-be-addictive products.

Your argument is overly simplistic. Just because people can get addicted to anything doesn’t mean we should do nothing. Relying on personal responsibility alone is a cop-out, especially with something as addictive as sports betting.

Making it taboo or illegal could actually reduce harm by making it less acceptable and accessible. Prevention beats cleanup any day. Let’s not pretend that counseling alone is enough to solve this.

I didn’t say that we should do nothing. What I said is we should do things within a framework that allows people who engage in activities in non harmful ways to continue to do those activities, and to have those people fund helping people who can’t.

That funding can include sweeping out illegal gambling operations that prey on vulnerable people. No one would mind taking them out of there are legal options available to them.

That sounds fine to me. But legal gambling preys on vulnerable people, too. Gambling is highly addictive.

I don’t remember the number but it was something like a large single digit increase in personal bankruptcy in states that legalized gambling vs states that haven’t.

You mean in percent? Decrease? Increase?

yes percent

I wrote increase

I think the drug war has been such a colossal failure (often doing more harm to many of the people it was ostensibly meant to protect) that trying to make comparisons to drugs doesn't make the argument that you want.

I think sports gambling is clearly less addictive than drugs since underground gambling was never as big an industry as the drug trade, and I think that makes it far easier to deal with like a normal activity with externalities.

> I think the drug war has been such a colossal failure (often doing more harm to many of the people it was ostensibly meant to protect) that trying to make comparisons to drugs doesn't make the argument that you want.

I mean, valid point. But many mainstream folk who don't follow this science closely only associate addiction with drugs, hence the comparison.

FWIW, I also oppose the drug war because the only thing it's accomplished reliably is enriching dangerous people, fostering the year over year growth of the authoritarian state, and making the drugs themselves far, far more dangerous than they ever had to be.

> I think sports gambling is clearly less addictive than drugs since underground gambling was never as big an industry as the drug trade, and I think that makes it far easier to deal with like a normal activity with externalities.

I would just park that as being underground gambling is far less required. If you want heroin, you need to go to an underground dealer, there's no "legitimate" source of heroin. If you want to gamble, there are absolutely oodles of sources for that, that are completely legal and above board.

Heroin is just one of many opioids, all of which have similar effects for addicts. There are still legitimate sources of prescription opioids such as Oxycontin, although legitimate healthcare providers are now more selective about prescribing.

> Is it? Is an alcoholic's decision to drink, or a heroin addict's decision to shoot up? Is it a person with attention issues' decision to spend unreasonable amounts of money on micro-transaction-powered games?

Of that list, the only one that doesn't have commercials is heroin.

> Like, genuinely, good for you if you, like me, can just control your vices and not succumb to them like many can. Genuinely, I'm happy for you (and me!) but like... what about everyone else? Is having the wrong kind of brain just damn you to spend your entire life being robbed blind because "freedom"?

Yes. I have my own vices, but yes. I do not want to impose religious values on others.

What could be a solution to balance the freedom vs harm of those services?

For an adhd brain most of the internet is addictive, at least for me. My solution was to delete my social media accounts (still youtube is a problem), but I wouldn't want to be banned from those services just by my pre-condition.

I mean, social media and so many other contemporary internet products are engineered to be addictive, but that's to juice the revenue of their parent companies because their sole revenue is often advertising and addiction keeps people in their services longer and more frequently. It isn't a natural, innate feature of having, for example, a website where you and your friends share photos, make plans, and post things for one another to see. The addictive elements are almost universally the "gamification" of those services.

I think it's perfectly a solvable problem to have a social media service that performs all the jobs the users would want, while not pounding dopamine out of their brains continuously to make sure they never want to put their phones down.

Looking at it through that lens, I can't see the advertising of gambling as any different from advertising suicide.

It's a personal choice after all.

Fuck those people who are already degenerate suiciders, they should just get some control.

(/s to the last two sentences).

Advertising bright shiny new toys to children.

Advertising big 4wd trucks to adult males who haven't progressed to emotional maturity beyond the level of the children to whom bright shiny new toys are advertised.

Advertising as a whole is a fucking shit show. Swap your hard earned for this thing that might make you feel like your life is slightly more worthwhile for a few seconds. Pbbbt (flapping lips and tongue noise).