Comment by bunderbunder | Hacker News Reader

Comment by bunderbunder | Hacker News Reader

I would be genuinely surprised if they weren't.

My data science graduate program had a class that analyzed major data science success stories. The very first one covered how Caesar's Entertainment built models and ran experiments to identify their "most valuable customers", figure out how to predict when they were getting ready to leave the casino, and intervene with incentives and perks designed to get them to stay and keep gambling. And also how all of their competitors rushed to implement their own programs in response.

Look at it from the casino's perspective: their entire business model is centered on exploiting quirks of human psychology to separate people from their money. Expecting prosocial behavior from them is like expecting a squirrel to ignore your bird feeders.

The EFF isn't saying it's a surprise that companies are doing this. Nobody's surprised by that. They're drawing attention to it and saying they shouldn't be allowed to.

I just don’t understand why casino’s feel the need to do that. They already have the edge, they would still turn a profit.

Same goes for banning advantage players. Why? The people that can successfully do it are a vanishingly small group, and even if every single one of them picks your casino because it doesn’t ban advantage players, the sheer amount of incompetent advantage players that would try alongside those would make it so you still turn a profit.

It's only the most cutthroat people who end up being in the position to make the decisions. So they end up making the decisions that come naturally to them

Isn’t this similar to all ads for useless stuff.

We’re being targeted to buy $100k cars we don’t need. Not much worse than being targeted to gamble an extra $10k.

At least with a car you know exactly what you're getting, you might not value it but many people out there are absolutely getting their money's worth back from a 100k car, be it ego or aesthetics or whatever, a gambling addict is just getting exploited and abused, there's no positive to it.

Is there any upside to vices in general?

Outside of vice taxes being a socially acceptable way to tax the poor.

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