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> It feels like you can spin this idea for nearly anything. Apparently 25% of alcohol sales are to alcoholics.

I'd like to propose not letting the perfect be the enemy of the good. I accept this argument about gambling might be slippery-slope-able but I think it's pretty obvious to everyone without a vested interest that it's causing extreme societal harm.

Would you be opening to banning just this one thing and then calling it a day and opening the floor back up to such arguments? I think modern politics is too caught up in the bureaucracies of maybe to let good ideas be carried out - honestly, this thought line could easily be written up into an argument that parallels strong-towns. Local bureaucracy is rarely created for a downright malicious reason - here we have a change that could cause an outsized positive outcome so why should we get caught up in philosophical debates about how similar decisions might be less positive and let that cast doubt on our original problem?

> I'd like to propose not letting the perfect be the enemy of the good. I accept this argument about gambling might be slippery-slope-able but I think it's pretty obvious to everyone without a vested interest that it's causing extreme societal harm.

I am pretty sure anyone without a vested interest will also realize that alcoholism has caused extreme societal harm as well. I would say with pretty strong certainty that alcohol has caused more damage, and is currently causing more damage, than gambling. I would be VERY curious to hear someone try to make an argument that more damage is caused by gambling than drinking. Drunk driving kills about 13,000 people in the US every year. Drunk driving accounts for 30% of all traffic fatalities. THIRTY PERCENT! I am sure we all know alcoholics, and so many people have been abused by angry drunks. The raging abusive alcoholic parent is a trope for a reason.

So clearly, we should not get too 'caught up in the bureacracies of maybe' and go ahead and banning just this one thing. Surely banning alcohol will make the world a better place!

Well, we tried that. It was a horrible failure. It lead to the rise of organized crime, and that fact is STILL harming us to this day, almost 100 years after we reversed the decision to ban alcohol.

In fact, when we legalized alcohol, a lot of the organized crime moved into gambling, and have used the fact that it is illegal to fund crime for decades.

I also hate how sports gambling and now prop gambling has taken over. I don't think we should just sit here and do nothing, but there are a lot of things we can do that isn't outright banning, which I think is bad for a lot of reasons.

We should outlaw gambling advertising, just like we did with tobacco. I am fine with adding other restrictions, and placing more responsibility to identify and protect problem gamblers onto the gambling companies. I am open to hearing other ideas, too.

My biggest problem with your comment is the idea that we should stop thinking about the consequences of an outright ban and just go ahead and ban it now. This isn't a 'philosophical debate', it is trying to make sure your action doesn't cause more harm than good. I think looking at other vices, seeing how we deal with those and what has happened when we have tried things like banning in the past, to inform us about how we can mitigate the harm gambling does to our society is a good thing.

We ban other drugs though? Just saying that we DO ban things already...

Yeah, and that is a great example of how it doesn’t work.

I agree, to a point, but it seems like this is the false dilemma that comes up every time, meanwhile there are achohol, fast food, and gambling ads imbued in nearly all popular entertainment and everywhere in public.

Is severely restricting the marketing of those things not a valid step in between having or not having liberties? For an adult to be free to engage in gambling, does insidious advertising also need to be permitted everywhere? If say 25% of people engaging with a highly addictive activity can't responsibly regulate their behavior with it, is it important that we allow a contingent of everyone else to abuse them?

I think about it like property rights and others. If we want everyone to respect the idea of private property ownership, then policy should act to contain abuse of those rights and somewhat fairly distribute access to them. If only an older richer generation benefits, and everyone else pays rent and effectively has to give up those rights, then eventually opposition to them should accumulate. I'm much more interested now in seeing bans on the ownership of multiple residential properties within the same municipality at present, and sympathizing with people seeking a market crash, than I am to actually try and buy a house, because the ratio is so wildly in favor of one group over another.

If only 25% of people didn't know someone who ruined their life gambling—and it's only a matter of time—then it would be potentially acted upon much more severely.

Alcohol, especially hard alcohol, used to have limits on advertising. Baseball is now literally sponsored by/partnered with Polymarket.

https://www.mlb.com/press-release/press-release-mlb-names-po...

Physical cards don't have the same 'whale' issue as electronic gambling/games on a phone that are designed to get you exactly to the point where you go 'ok, $20 more', that always is your pocket ready to feed that itch. No physical game/liquor store is using that kind of psychology or instant gratification (my understanding is addictiveness tied to action/reward length, with the most addictive things the ones with the most instant grattification?).

You also have an upper limit (which might be surprisingly high) with things like alcohol; nobody is drinking 200 gallons of whiskey a day, they'd be dead.

But nothing really limits how much you can burn gambling in a day. Even per app limits can be worked around with multiple accounts and multiple games.

Personal liberties are overrated, and a functioning society is underrated. OnlyFans, sports betting, and junk food appeal to some people with low impulse control and high time preference in the short term, but have massive negative consequences on everyone in the long run.

Personal liberties being overrated is a wild take. I feel like this is one of those things that is easy to say when it isn't something you are interested in being infringed upon. I would be curious if you would feel the same way if people were trying to ban something you want to do.

The idea that prioritizing the good of society, rather than one's personal desires, is considered a "wild take" is just a reflection of the culture of narcissism you live in.

Again, it is kind of crazy to take polar opposite views on this.

We mostly all grow up starting off with very few personal liberties and gaining them as we get older. We routinely take them away from people of they show they cannot be trusted with those liberties.

At present that process is fairly blunt, but it could be more nuanced. And that doesn't have to mean micro judging every interaction like China's social credit system. It could mean to allow freedoms wherever possible, but curtail those freedoms, where it has a negative impact on the rest of us.

And I think the best way of doing this is to put responsibility on the person or group causing the negative impact. So the gambler who embezzles money due to the addiction is just as responsible as the company who enables their addiction. Why cant we send both to jail? Or if there is not enough cause to deprive them of liberty, divert them from jail under probation. For a company that could mean enforcing open books and monitored communications, to make sure they are on the straight and narrow..

What we need to do though is to value both society and personal liberty.

It's not polar opposite views, I'm just saying that personal liberties are overrated not that they're inherently bad.

There are entire political schools of thought that put maximizing personal liberty above everything, and the trend in America has been to allow more vices at the cost a functioning society. Sports betting just being a recent example.

> And I think the best way of doing this is to put responsibility on the person or group causing the negative impact.

Agreed. There are people profiteering at the cost of society and they should be punished for it.

> What we need to do though is to value both society and personal liberty.

Also agreed. We are not really that far off in conclusions I believe.

We probably could both be more nuanced with our statements.

What I hear when you say “the good of society” is that this means we would allow the majority to choose what is “for the good of society” and then enforce that on others.

You might not mean that. You are probably thinking of obvious “good” like not dying and not going bankrupt. But that is just what you are thinking of.

There are a lot of people who think other things are what is meant by “the good of society”. Lots of people think keeping trans people from having gender affirming surgery is “for the good of society”. Lots of people think requiring teaching the 10 commandments in school is “for the good of society”.

There are views like this on all sides. Some people think owning guns are for the good of society while some people thinking banning them is for the good of society. Some people think allowing people to eat meat harms society. Some people think gay marriage harms society.

So, do we allow all personal freedoms to be voted on by the populace? Or do we make the burden higher to infringe on individual freedoms?

Now, I do think we can place some limits when the damage far outweighs the cost of denying the freedom, but it has to really be worth it, because yes, individual freedom is very, very important.

The market producing what people desire is a functioning society. All the concern about so called addiction is simply a displaced puritanism disguised as humanism.

So, adults who gamble a lot never steal from their parents, siblings and friends in order to keep on gambling?

A father who gambles a lot would never threaten his parents or his wife's parents to stop allowing those parents to visit their grandchildren unless those parents give the father money for gambling? (I.e., the father is making the threat not because he judges the grandparents to be a bad influence on the child, but rather to extract money from the grandparents that the grandparents would not otherwise choose to give because they know it will just go to gambling.)

In your opinion, it is displaced puritanism to want to do something about the fact that in our society such things happen frequently?

This ignores the fact that as a society there are certain desires that are agreed upon as harmful, such as CSAM. Everything must have its limits.

You use the words "so called addiction" as if addiction is not an extremely well-documented pyschological (and in some cases physical) phenomenon. Gambling preys on the fact that the variable reward rate method of reinforcement is the one that produces the most dopamine in our brains. Unless someone is acutely aware of how they are being manipulated it is very easy to become addicted to something that is financially dependent on your addiction.

> I don't have a solution,

Just try to entertain any alternatives. Any at all.

There could be public option to opt-in to have your specific “personal liberties” curtailed, like for alcohol. Doesn’t affect you at all. Completely opt-in. Only for those who want it.

No solutions? Or no corporate-backed solutions?

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47532954

What you're arguing for is more or less what the status quo has been for gambling. Like gambling? Cool! You can go to Vegas or a casino on native lands to do it. We have geofencing for mobile apps as well if you don't want to sit next to a smoker pulling a slot machine. Curbing it like this -- but not making it entirely unavailable -- acts as a buffer against the social malaise described in the article.

It's just not going to be a clear hard line. Would it be ok for alcohol companies to sneak in an additive that makes those who consume their product ten times as likely to develop alcoholism? I think that's a different scenario than just selling a product, and I think that there is a lot of corporate activity just like the former.

Why does it have to be either/or? Why not just ban the thing you don't want and just criminalise the whaling?

an added negative aspect of going further down the banning path is:

it lessens the need (or signal) to improve education, or does it not?

Not talking about the theory part of education, more the parts that are not handled well in schools like e.g. (!) habits and understanding better what is behind your daily actions (often “Glaubenssätze” are the reason). Many important parts of education is assumed to happen at home, and only very much later I saw through close friendships to what and what extent (!) some people have to go through… not having grown up in a household permitting learning essentially important life skills (or usually worse… grew up with mindsets that make it very much harder to tackle problems in a helpful way).

TLDR: More banning can result in a weaker signal to improve aforementioned (!) classical education weaknesses, which can spiral into more problems, more need and calling for banning/micro-managing adults, more resistance, more damaging/self-damaging adult actions, … spiral (and bigger threatening fights over the different approaches and the very real felt need to restrict others to feel safe).

That is a topic that I think AND care a lot (!!) about, so very happy for comments pros and cons (but please in a constructive manner). Also very happy about private messages/new insights/blindspots/…

This is definitely an aspect, but it's also a continuum - there are some people who will "never" be able to be educated out of addiction. Something needs to be done to protect them (or we just admit there's a subclass of human who exists to feed other parasitic ones).

25% is too low, I think it's more like 80% of alcohol sales to drinkers that consume unhealthy amounts (whether that makes you an "alcoholic" or not is rather subject).

Well I think a good way to differentiate things that are guilty-pleasures like a twinky and gambling is to take a survey of people and see what % say "I wish I had never ever gambled in the first place" vs "I wish I never had been allowed to buy twinkies"

It'd actually be quite easy to set certain sane limits on gambling like you can't gamble more than 1% of your annual income per year, but I bet gambling platforms would fight that like the plague because those are their whales, the true addicts.

I know 100s of people who've been to vegas and had a good time gambling, not one of them would say "I wish I'd never gambled in the first place". I personally know zero people who gambled so much they regret it. I'm not denying those people exist, but I suspect if you ask everyone, a very small percent have had a strong negative experience

Yes it's a very small % of the population, but it's actually a significant percent of the earnings of these platforms.

Just for illustration -- when I worked at Zynga they'd sell in-game purchases for over $10k USD for virtual items because there were people who just couldn't help themselves, and those "whales" were actually the bulk of the profit of the company.

That's why these platforms should have mandatory sane limits that can only be exempted with special circumstances.

It has to be regulated outside of the platform, because otherwise you just get people using multiple platforms.

If the maximum you could spend gambling each day was $20 across all online platforms, you'd not really have an issue.

> Well I think a good way to differentiate things that are guilty-pleasures like a twinky and gambling is to take a survey of people and see what % say "I wish I had never ever gambled in the first place" vs "I wish I never had been allowed to buy twinkies"

I don't think this is a fair comparison, because it is much easier to tie losing all your money to gambling than it is to tie your health issues to twinkies. For one, it isn't just twinkies, it is a bunch of different foods, and the consequences are temporally separated from the action; you don't eat a twinkie and immediately notice you are bigger and less healthy. Your heart attack will come years down the line, and there was no one action you took that you can regret, so the feeling is not the same. Gambling is very easy to feel the pain, you lose a bet and you lose the money, immediately.

The real litmus test for your beliefs is gun rights. Taken to it's logical conclusion you would think that you would be staunchly pro 2A.

I'm not sure my position on 2A but it seems you're making a pretty big leap to connect them.

Guns kill others. To me, that's a big difference. Gambling does not, only indirectly, you gamble your money away your family doesn't eat. But if you're going indirect than anything fits. Cars kill more than guns.

You could argue the similarity is that some people can be responsible with guns and others can't but you're back the previous point. Irresponsible gun use directly harms others. Irresponsible gambling at most indirectly harms others.

> Cars kill more than guns.

In most countries, but not in the US.

Just some context because gun violence studies are probably the most manipulated data sets in history. The two numbers (auto deaths and gun deaths) are pretty close to each other and different policies can and do push one above the other.

- Most of those gun deaths are suicides and the vast majority would happen anyway without guns.

- This wasn't true before about 2015 and the change (increase in non-suicide gun deaths) over the last decade is largely the consequence of 'defund the police' policies.

- 90+% of gun violence happens in about 4 urban zip codes, all of which have some of the strictest gun control laws in the US.

There is a reason you have never heard a criminologist rail about guns (its usually a sociologist). The data points to problems with other policies. Also gathering the data honestly is difficult; people stop reporting types of crimes when the police stop investigating those types of crimes.

PS A "curve-off" public welfare policy is far more effective than banning guns.

Not to get into a gunfight in the gambling hall, but:

> Most of those gun deaths are suicides and the vast majority would happen anyway without guns.

Apparently any form of obstacle between a suicidal person and their gun greatly reduces successful suicides.

Things like the gun being in a safe that McSuicidepants owns, operates, and can get in with a fingerprint. Things like the bullets being on the other side of the room.

Americans desperately trying to justify their firearm fetish is embarrassing.

> PS A "curve-off" public welfare policy is far more effective than banning guns.

Roll eyes emoji.