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Mobile sports gambling is like, really, really bad, mmm'kay
Color me in the not surprised category. The article, and the additional one's it links at the bottom, do a good job of toe-ing the line between "people should be given the freedom to make choices" and "holy shit this is sentencing those with addictive personalities to lives of poverty."
I'm not super interested in talking about sports gambling itself, although I welcome any good anecdotes, and would instead like to invite comments on the concept of "digital addiction."
There's enough literature out there now that there's a strong enough case to be made that digital technology - very specifically smartphones - can cause behavior patterns that can accurately be described as addictive. However, there is still a delineation between digital addiction and physical/neurological addiction of alcohol and drugs. As a society, we acknowledge the basic danger of these substances by age-limiting some and outright prohibiting others.
My general question would be; what are the major culture war angles on digital addiction? For kids? For all of society?
Restricting minor’s access to digital media- especially social media- is very much a culture war of the future. In the USA this is a thing we’ll increasingly associate with republicans.
At least in Australia currently there's an attempt to ban social media for your under 16. Not super up to date on Australian politics but this effort appears to be coming from Labor which is supposedly the center left party
Well yeah, I didn’t say ‘globally this will be a right wing crusade’. I said ‘in the US restricting minor’s social media will be increasingly associated with republicans’. Other countries might code it differently; I’d expect Japan, Germany, Hungary to make it a center right policy, and most of the rest of the Anglosphere+France to make it a center left thing.
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I've run sportsbooks both legal and frontier and I'm a pretty big gambling prohibitionist in my day-to-day life. If you're a wise guy, you're toeing a very fine line (yaddayadda promo arbitrage, soft books etc bit more leeway but even then) where even if you've got an edge you're likely going to run into issues in the medium/long-term if you get accustomed to high stakes gambling. If you're on the fish side, it's far too accessible and risk of ruin is very high especially in this current economic moment where most people feel a near-obligation to gamble in order to advance their socioeconomic situation.
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I think this is a textbook case of the wisdom of keeping things that will be addictive as hard to ge5 as possible. Sports gambling in a casino might not be so terrible. The steps necessary to get to a casino for any sort of gambling serve as an important brake on the behavior. The fact that such gambling can now but done using stored credit card information on a device that is carried in the pocket makes it almost impossible for anyone with the proclivity to addiction to ever have control. And this is true of other potentially addictive behaviors— if you have your addiction always available, you can’t easily say no to it.
I'm not sure this reasoning makes sense. People still blow their life savings in casinos, le famous twitter video. If 5x fewer people go to physical casinos, and as a result 5x fewer people blow their savings, does that actually make in-person gambling worth keeping legal? There could be a relative effect, but I'm not sure there is - I could easily imagine the opposite argument, where online gambling, relatively, makes it easier for casual to spend a little, because the friction of going to the place is relatively a higher cost if you only want to spend $20 vs being addicted. Probably better to just have the state assume the job of blocking compulsive gamblers from all gambling platforms (physical or not)
Imo experience with all sorts of addiction has taught us that almost nothing works once people are already addicted, and getting addicted can happen quite easily once you get in contact. If legal platforms block access, the addict will find another way. The key is to generate less addicts in the first place.
Low friction = more addicts = more problems. This is extra true for gambling, since it doesn't get you near-instantly chemically addicted the way some drugs do, it needs some time to be cultivated and re-enforced. If you need to repeatedly, physically go to a casino, people around you will notice, you might have to explain yourself to your partner or parents or close friends, and for yourself it's easier to notice when you start losing significant money. And noticing it early is important to get people to stop before it's too late. If you play on the phone, you yourself might only notice much, much later how much you have played and how much you really lost, and others notice even later, if at all. Not that this is impossible to happen with casinos, it's about the ease it happens with. There's related approaches, such as requiring casinos to change a fixed sum into a number of chips that you play with (which makes it obvious how much lost every time you go) vs just directly playing with cash (easier to lose more than you wanted to play with) or just pay by card (extremely easy to blow a lots of money), or to require limits on how much someone can lose in a specific time frame, and so on. All of these have the purpose to a) give a legal outlet to avoid the proliferation of a black market b) reduce the generation of addicts by increasing friction c) reduce the negative impact of being an addict by making sure you can only lose x money per hour or so spend.
For similar reasons, nowadays I feel like the old approach of having a small amount of a drug being mostly legal or at least not super punished, but if you were caught trading significant amounts you were fucked, was a certain sweet spot. The friction to even start drugs was quite significant. There is an argument to institute a similar ban on gambling, where small-scale private gambling is explicitly legal, but once you do it large-scale it becomes illegal full-stop. You can then still meet with friends and play a round of poker with real money but still mostly low stakes, but you don't get this industrialised pipeline of addict generation we have now.
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Well, the more friction you can place between you and your addiction the better. Yes, people can and do blow their life savings at casinos. But that’s worlds harder than blowing through your savings when the casino is on an always online phone you carry in your pocket. When you have to go to a casino to gamble, you need to get dressed, get your wallet, drive for 10-15 minutes to the casino, walk across the parking lot, into the casino, find a machine and put in the credit card. Those actions probably mean about 20-30 minutes of being able to talk yourself out of it.
This kind of thing in reverse is true of exercising. The more friction between you and exercise, the less likely you are to actually do it. So they advise keeping your gym clothes and shoes on your dresser, having any needed equipment at home, etc. because at every step you can talk yourself out of it. Do I really feel like fighting traffic to get to the gym? And if the answer is anything other than a very firm yes, chances are you’ll be on the couch Motte-posting instead of exercising. Or maybe you want to eat healthier. The standard advice is stop buying junk food and instead buy the healthy stuff. The reason is that inertia will work in your favor here. You’ll be hungry and all the food in your home is healthy, you don’t necessarily want carrot sticks, but getting potato chips means getting in the car, driving in traffic to the store, walking to the chip aisle, buying the chips, paying, driving through traffic back home before you can finally eat them. The extra effort isn’t worth it most of the time, so carrot sticks it is.
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I think the argument is that people who have an edge and are thus gambling rationally are much less likely to be dissuaded than gambling addicts.
Zvi says that the online platforms would be unprofitable without preying on compulsive gamblers, so I'm not sure that this cashes out to a difference in worldstate.
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Yep. Physical barriers to harmful behaviors are a pretty decent brake to keep them from proliferating throughout a society. Low agency people are more susceptible to those behaviors, but also probably less likely to go to the trouble of accessing them if its difficult enough.
In Florida, most gambling was relegated to Seminole Tribe casinos, so they necessarily couldn't proliferate beyond the boundaries of the reservations. Florida has a deal with them where they pay up a chunk of the revenue and the state bans gambling elsewhere in its territory. It in theory keeps gambling minimized in the rest of the state and makes it easier to supervise and regulate the places where it does occur.
Now, the Seminoles have worked to make it maximally enticing to come out to the Casinos, and maximally difficult to leave once you're there, but at least it required you to physically drive there, and at some point you'd have to go home. So in a sense it beat, and still beats having a mini-casino on every street corner, which is harder to regulate and will probably ruin more people.
Las Vegas does this on a much grander scale, of course.
Digitizing the casinos... man. Its the rough equivalent of hooking up a pipeline to everyone's house that could dispense heroin, meth, and/or crack cocaine on demand. If you don't have to venture into the seedier parts of town and risk getting mugged to get your fix, I'm sure more people will partake.
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I think the most palatable change would be something akin to banning those under age 16 from having social media accounts. Maybe a step further, banning them from possessing smartphones altogether (yes, enforcement would be a bear. No arguments there). Give them a basically functional blackberry-esque device that can send and receive messages and has GPS functionality and bluetooth, and no app store.
I think there has been vastly insufficient discussion of superstimuli and policies that address the proliferation of ways one can completely wreck their life in short order. Just like drugs are more potent than they were 50 years ago, marketing companies are much, much better at their jobs and barely-legal scams are more efficiently predatory than ever before. And meanwhile, humans are, if anything, a little dumber on average.
Like, I am libertarian as fuck when it comes to social issues, but I've experienced the rush that gambling brings and my sincere belief is that we HAVE to provide some 'friction' in place to prevent people from slipping into deep, DEEP holes from which there is no escape, or at least they'll be stuck climbing out for years.
Consider if you owned a property with an extremely deep sinkhole on it, that was surrounded by smooth, polished rock with low friction coefficient on a 20 degree slope, so that anyone who wants to approach the edge of the pit would find it very difficult to climb back out without special equipment, and some % of people are going to slip and fall into the pit. If you're charging admission to view the pit, I argue we can reasonably say you're being extremely negligent (and therefore at least partially responsible) if you didn't provide people with adequate warnings, safety equipment, and AT LEAST a guardrail around the edge to keep people from sliding in.
ESPECIALLY if you were enticing people to come view the pit with the promise that some small number of guests would get fabulously wealthy, and the closer they get to the edge of the pit, the more they could possibly win.
Even my deepest belief in personal freedom doesn't require that the pit must be tolerated as-is, in its maximally dangerous state.
But metaphorically speaking, we're apparently allowing thousands of these sorts of pits to dot the psychological landscape, with bright flashing advertisements drawing in patrons and no mechanisms in place to 'rescue' those who fall in.
It is bad enough for adults who get sucked in, kids whose entire development was awash in these stimuli might not even develop basic defenses, since this is what they would consider 'normal.' The kids these days have gambling mechanics in ALL their video games, they've already made and lost minor fortunes in Crypto, they can gamble on literally any sports event they want, and they grew up watching influencers shilling them on the most harebrained of get-rich-quick schemes.
And meanwhile, financial literacy is barely ever taught.
Also, it is patently absurd that the rules as they exist allow anyone over 18 or 21 to throw money away gambling, but if they want to invest in early-stage startups they have to have a certain amount of wealth built up already.
The 'problem' such as it is, if we start investigating and making rules for those who have addictive personalities, or are easily manipulated, or simply don't understand odds/statistics and restrict their ability to use their own money in ways they wish. Maybe they have restricted bank accounts that limit them to, say $500/day withdrawals. Maybe they're not allowed to take on long-term debt, or we legally cap the amount of debt they can take to some specific % of their net worth. Or require them to pass an annual financial audit to exercise certain rights...
Because if we don't, there's a certainty that many of them will blow up the entirety of their savings and becomes a burden on the rest of us later on. And thus we can only do our best to mitigate this externality.
Well, we're essentially carving out a different class of citizens with reduced individual rights due to their vulnerabilities. What's the justification for letting such people vote? Or have a bank account at all? Or have kids?
Imagine being a very smart and disagreeable 15 year old stuck in a small town somewhere. You want to be on the internet, learning to code, arguing about politics, and making friends similar to you ... except social media is banned, lmao. The internet is where the future is, and where power is, keeping kids off it isn't advantageous to them.
My guess is in most cases he would be better off learning to deal with his disagreeability in a way that does not prevent him from forming meaningful relationships with his local community, as opposed to fleeing into an online bubble of like minded people and becoming atomized and terminally online and building an identity about being very smart. If anything your example makes me more convinced kids should not be on social media, not less.
Also, the fact that in some very specific circumstances social media might have a positive effect on children, does not necessarily mean it is a good idea to have children on social media. I have not looked into it too deeply so I am open to having my mind changed about it, but I have the impression Jonathan Haidt shows pretty convincingly that social media have had a catastrophic effect on teenage mental health, so if that is true it might still be a good idea to ban or at least disincentivize social media for children.
Finally, banning social media is not the same as banning the internet. In a world where social media is banned, your hypothetical very smart child can still get on the internet and look up information of coding and such, without having to be on tiktok or anything like that. This would raise questions about the definition of social media. Maybe it would be feasible to treat platforms that have some sort of addictive recommendation algorithm differently from places where you look up your own content, so kids could look up stuff about coding or politics or find an online community that they like, while not being allowed on tiktok or youtube or whatever and be exposed to algorithms that are basically trying to get you addicted to the platform's content. Or this type of algorithmic feed could become a separate 16+ feature of these platforms or whatever where everyone can use these platforms and look up stuff whereas you have to validate your account and prove you are 16+ before you get access to the addictive features. I am just fantasizing on the spot about specific policies, but trying to get kids off of addictive social media platforms does not have to mean a blanket ban on everything fun and useful on the internet.
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Do you think the modal teen fits thar description?
Of course not, but someone here's more likely to have been like that in the past
Yes, but the policy debate is going to have to consider that the damages being caused to a majority of the teens out there might outweigh the loss to the comparative handful of teens who benefited from unrestricted internet access.
Which is just another way of saying that they don't have the right to benefit from that ability, and that ability should be redistributed to everyone who doesn't. (It's ironic that the types of people who complain about more rules being "communism" are directionally and trivially correct, yet most of them aren't smart enough to explain why.)
I think a social media ban for this subgroup is likely to pass in some way, shape, or form, but that's mainly because we don't think anyone under 18 (21? 25? 120?) is actually a human being (more like 3/5ths of one). And because it's going to be the Boomers doing it, it's going to be something stupid and ham-fisted that includes stuff like 4chan and StackOverflow (i.e. the places high-value teenagers are more likely to visit) but excludes YouTube Shorts-type content factories (which is what everyone over 30 thinks 'social media' is, and is more about dealing with the Evil New Media that they can't get their kids off of because there's basically nothing else for them to do).
At least there's a playbook for defeating tech-illiterate Boomers that more or less just needs to be dusted off. I think there's a real future in distributed social media among people smart enough to insert an SD card into a Raspberry Pi and edit a few configuration files.
I mean, it shouldn't be controversial to say that youth is a form of 'mental disability' that most people overcome through age and experience.
I'd be in favor of there being some kind of basic test that someone can past to 'remove' that disability in a legal sense, rather than having a blanket age of consent.
The sheer size of my political outgroup is clear evidence to the contrary. Most of them are over 18, too.
Oi, where's your freedom license?I am too, but the problem is that society won't tolerate it being an actual, legible test (mainly because muh disproportionate impact, but also because there's a lot of ego/conscience-approval involved in the assumption of righteous disenfranchisement by default, much like there is with all the -isms).
This is currently fulfilled by "having enough common sense to lie to the website about his or her date of birth, and intelligent enough not to contradict that lie after the fact". Fake IDs serve a similar purpose, or at least they did back when they were easier to make; half the problem I have with this scheme is that it makes this much harder (they are/were natural escape valves), as in the face of -ism-driven lawmaking the question of who it actually applies to and what they'll be doing instead won't be seriously considered.
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They're trying to legislate this in Australia right now.
Does everyone need to show their ID to get a social media account up? Do I need to show ID for this website? Who is storing my information and where is it going? What about VPNs (every second youtuber is shilling them, kids could easily set one up) to bypass the ban and log in from a more permissive jurisdiction - ban them? What about 4chan or its derivatives - they can't be bothered to do age-verification (and don't have the resources) - ban them? Xbox and Playstation have online chat, thousands and thousands of games have online chat. Are they all social media? In a stroke online privacy is greatly diminished, along with all small web forums.
At least in crypto you have marginally higher chances of making money and it's not inherently rigged against you. Down with sports betting, up with Shiba and Doge.
Societies' restrictive energies should remain focused on drugs, they cause much more harm than gambling does.
Thanks, hadn't picked up on small sites not being excepted. I think some of the smaller players could say "bite me" due to lacking assets in Oz, but that's not the ideal solution.
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I find that I agree with you across the board, but one footnote on my annoyance with the current state of affairs:
I feel like these online services already do this. They advertise, but they close with a line about gambling addiction. Everyone is simultaneously bombarded with advertisements for gambling and admonishments about how you need to be really careful. To me, this feels like the worst of both worlds, where we legalized something that's apparently quite destructive for quite a few people, but with the caveat that everyone has to be antagonized about how dangerous it is. I bet $2 on Josh Allen to score a rushing touchdown because I think it's fun. Leave me alone. Stop telling me over and over and over that I'd better watch out about how addictive it is. Either let people ruin their lives or don't, but don't do this stupid in between thing where we all acknowledge that it's ruining lives and therefore everyone needs to hear about that.
Overall, I guess I just increasingly believe that the typical person should pretty much not be extended credit on much of anything. They just don't seem to be able to conceptualize how credit lines work, what interest is, and so on.
For me, it is fine. I can gamble once a week a couple of dollars and it is fun without causing me any harm.
But I can’t help but note the business doesn’t really run on people like me. I don’t make the house enough money. It is dependent on the whales. Those guys lose a ton of money. I the business is unseemly.
Yep. I have a reflexive dislike for ANY business model that is entirely reliant on a small number of customers spending 10-100x of the average to stay profitable.
Has at least something to do with me being EXTREMELY sensitive to attempts to hack my psyche, which is the hallmark of such places. Oh, your game is "free to play?" Pardon me if I don't want to spend mental effort resisting the 1001 ways your game is constantly trying to convince me that spending in-game money is more important than food.
On the other hand, when I play such games I do not feel having to expend any particular mental effort to resist shelling out cash, any more than I feel compelled to take any Nigerian princes up on their offers. If you're not in the susceptible target audience, those games really are free.
But it kind of feels like free riding off of people who are destroying themselves.
'Zactly. On the one hand I don't mind free-riding by, say, using ad-blocker on sites where I was never going to click the ads anyway.
On the other, I really don't like to think that I am getting something for free because somebody else is vastly overpaying relative to the value they're getting. It is easy to imagine they're some rich loner who has endless spare cash, but it is still a predatory model. Also, in game settings, the 'free' players are arguably there just to be easy opponents for the overpowered paid whales. Not really a fan of playing the role of disposable mook so some other guy can live out his power fantasy.
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I think those disclaimers are a fig leaf in this case. At best.
Its like having people sign a waiver that they understand "Gravity is a powerful force that pulls you downward" before you enter the pit zone. I don't think psychological "nudges" are actually a real thing, honestly.
To me, a 'guardrail' is something that physically prevents you from falling in. Unless you climb over it. In this case that may be something like a restriction on your bank account that prevents you from depositing money into an app or withdrawing cash at a Casino after a certain period of time or above a certain amount.
There's a (strong) case that banks shouldn't be peeking over their clients' shoulders and judging what they use money on, so I'm really trying to think of ways to put something TANGIBLE in place that might allow someone to slide right up to the point of absolute ruin, but stop at the edge and have a chance to retreat, or at least think over the implications before jumping in.
And of course, degenerate gamblers will just borrow money from 'friends' or loan sharks if their bank cuts them off, so there are no 'foolproof' solutions.
Here's an example: if an elderly customer suddenly tries to withdraw a large sum of money, the system pauses the transaction and directs the teller to arrange an interview with a security officer that ensures the customer is not being scammed by someone impersonating their grandchild in sudden financial trouble.
Is this kind of meddling permissible?
Another example: if a customer suddenly tries to transfer a large amount to an account that doesn't belong to them, the system pauses the transaction and directs the customer to upload a document that explains the purpose of the transaction.
Is this kind of meddling permissible?
Finally, if a customer tries to transfer more than X to online gambling companies this month, the system pauses the transaction and suggests the customer sets up a monthly gambling limit.
I don't think this kind of meddling is more bothersome than the previous ones.
I personally would like to get rid of the two examples you mentioned as well. The kind of big brother monitoring banks do is obnoxious as hell and I'm not convinced it is an overall value-add for society.
That's because your parents haven't yet deposited their life savings into a "secure account" because a helpful "FBI agent" told them to.
It turns out that I do not hold opinions on policy based on whether or not the negative consequences of said policies personally impact me or those I love.
But why?
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No, and making it so is likely to result in a wave of exit from banks and into cash-stuffed mattresses.
Depends on what you mean. Such transfers may be interrupted by fraud detection and the customer might have to prove his bona fides (which is annoying enough) but having to write an essay explaining to one's bank why you're spending your own money isn't really acceptable.
It’s pretty common and most people don’t keep Benjamins under their mattress.
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It's standard procedure in Europe. It actually saved me money when someone managed to clone my wife's card.
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I question whether there’s a difference between addiction to drugs and addiction to gambling. If gambling induces an endogenous release of dopamine at a level commensurate to the release of dopamine from cocaine, then there is literally no reason to treat cocaine as “more addictive” than gambling. It’s the same addictiveness. One involves cognition, but that doesn’t alter the addictiveness.
Every child allowed to play a modern video game is being trained for a life of gambling by way of lootbox mechanics. It’s really the ultimate disproof of liberalism. We shouldn’t give people free choice where (1) they lack wisdom to discern the complicated costs and benefits, (2) their instincts overrides rationality. That’s because the choice is not actually free. It’s either coerced by an illusion or coerced by an animalistic instinct.
My first instinct was that drugs categorically different because they cause physical dependence and withdrawal symptoms. A quick google search tells me that gambling withdrawal is a thing, but all the sources are treatment centers, and all the symptoms are psychological. Withdrawing from amphetamine left me pretty much non-functional for weeks. I doubt gambling can cause that sort of nervous system damage.
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The argument perhaps goes that you can mentally train yourself to resist the effects of a given stimuli when the source of the neurological effect is entirely local to your own brain. End of the day, you can make a 'choice' to stop pushing the button.
But there's no training yourself to resist the introduction of exogenous drugs.
I'd object to the use of the term 'coerced' here, but otherwise mostly agree. I think its mostly based on the idea that they are not psychologically or philosophically prepared to give 'informed consent' to behaviors that have complex long-term implications. They literally cannot comprehend the effects, so while they can 'agree' to the terms, the consent lacks the actual 'comprehension' which is necessary for someone to truly consent to and accept the risks of a given transaction.
And the world has only gotten more complex, not less, so normal legal standards around 'age of consent' are, arguably, entirely outmoded for addressing this issue.
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