This was an entertaining read, but it seems like fairly old information in regards the role of the dopamine reward system in addiction in general. We already know with a pretty high degree of confidence, that chemicals and behaviors which act to "hijack" that system are almost inevitably addictive.
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.
> 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."
That's more of a list of potential causes rather than working theories to explain them. After all, it's really boiling down to, "Well it's something to do with nature, nurture, or a combination of the two." We know that, what isn't so well known is just how that works and why some people with those risk factors don't seem to have the same problems as others who do.
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?
A complete theory which can predict behavior and the correct responses to behavior, and which stands the test of time. I'm not sure how to label that... scientific?
I hope we never achieve that level of proficiency in psychology (and in a way, we already do -- look at ads, and in-game purchasing strategies). I'm not at all interested in a world where individuals can be reduced to automatons for whom we can "predict and elicit the correct responses to behaviour".
A complete theory of the dopamine reward system and its role in addiction, not a complete theory of every human being's psyche... is what I was pretty clearly talking about in context. No need to go all "future crime" on me and drag this so far off topic into the realm of speculation.
instead of awareness about the limbic system I suppose gamblers, smokers, etc just lack statistical reasoning and other abilities that would inhibit the dream of winning.
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.
Sure, let's call it "scientific", but let's not imagine this will ever be "complete".
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.
"Nature, nurture, or a combination of the two" is a gross mischaracterization. You have been given specific risk factors, of course you have to explore the specific mechanisms, but you have got a starting point.
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.
I would have liked to know more about those "certain genetic vulnerabilities". Detailing THOSE would have made this article much more interesting. I'm disinclined to read the writer's book because
of how rehashed her theory is.
As far as I could observe, on myself and others alike, it's about wether the transition happens under the radar or not. Being warned at the right time, forced to look at one's own condition and admit the degree of danger it carries if left as is, is usually enough to save the victim. There is more than that, of course. It all boils down to the amount of available willpower, which can be affected by a lot of factors. That willpower is also what prevents one's relapse, which an obvious fact for everyone, I suppose. What I'm not sure everyone is aware of is that willpower can be trained, the best starting from an early age. (Also, the willpower is not the same as discipline. Discipline is taken care of in schools, willpower training not so much.)
On the other hand, this doesn't align with my experiences or what I read at all. Alcohol seems to be extremely dangerous for certain groups of people, which is why they often choose not to drink at all, ever. While many other people can have the occasional drink and it doesn't go beyond that.
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.
"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/."
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.
I read a book once ("change anything") that was convinced that willpower practically "always loses" so you have to attack it differently, like modifying your environment/social environment/tools you know how to use, etc. Good read :)
Selection bias. Assuming will power to be a trainable trait...
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.
not sure why, but the use of the word "wrong" just bothers me. why can't a gambling addict be an experimental variation that MAY result in something game-changing (i'd bet a lot of the greatest entrepreneurs are basically risk addicted gamblers).
Maybe, with relation to entrepeneurs, but I think there are fundamental differences between business (and sports betting or poker) compared to casino games like slots and roulette.
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.
Perhaps that is true for poker and sports betting (although I don't believe tertiary level mathematics is a pre-requisite), but you don't necessarily need to be good at maths to be successful in business.
Dedication, vision, relationships and a whole host of other factors combine in successful business management, which can go a long way towards mitigating risk.
Many things are negative-EV that do not have the stigma of casino gambling, but we don't ridicule participants' math skills. On average, start-up founders lose money. Are they all as ignorant of math as gamblers?
In fact, I would guess that most human activity is negative-EV.
We like to refer to the brain causing things to happen that society doesn't like as wrong despite rarely being in a position to say with conviction whether the brain is acting 'right' or 'wrong'.
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.
Yes, exactly! I am experiencing the same issue. But, I am happy to say I've made significant headway on one project recently. Didn't get the result I wanted, so it's back to the drawing board (sigh).
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...).
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.
Jared Tendler[1] is a poker coach and has a great line that stuck with me, beyond my poker playing. It goes something like this
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.
Reminds me of that bit about people being less likely to actually follow through with their plans if they've already told people about what they're going to do, versus keeping it silent.
Wait what?! I've heard literally the opposite advice - the idea being people don't like to be made a liar of, so publicly promising you will do something makes you more inclined to do it
Unfortunately I'm the same way, side projects really addict me, and in a bad way. I'm quite happy while doing them (LOL) but then a few days afterward I'm a grumpy terrible human being while withdrawing. Any advice out there for me? :)
I think that's actually. Let them sit there for a while and wait for their turn.
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.
A lot like being a gambling addict. It really is gambling your time and energy.
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.
"But since addiction is defined as compulsive behavior that continues in the face of punishment, punishment is clearly not the best way to deal with it. Dozens of studies show that shame, confrontation, and humiliation are ineffective and can backfire when used in addiction treatment."
I suspect this is case with many things, that punishment is ineffective. Punishment ultimately assumes people are acting rationally, and they often do not.
Whenever I talk to people about the death penalty and harsh punishments such as torture, I like to point out just how irrational criminals often are. People do not commit a crime (most times) expecting to be caught, and so the penalty phase isn't a factor. There are many reasons why people act that way, but the bottom line is that they do.
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.
> 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.
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.
Very true, but that's even more of a nuanced and difficult long-term project, and too often it's easy for politicians to frame it as "soft on crime". For better or worse people really resent seeing criminals enjoy a standard of living that even begins to approach their own. That's another reason to raise the general standard of living, because until you do, people will just think in terms of, "Well I had it worse."
And in making people better off, you're also raising the downside to crime, because of all the nice things people have that they wouldn't get in prison.
Exactly. The criminal justice system is designed to control people who have something to lose. The penalties they can apply have far less impact on people with very little to lose. For some reason, not much airtime is devoted to discussing how we could motivate people to obey the law by giving them something to lose.
That's not hard to understand for a few reasons. First, it's not a simple 10 second sound bite, it doesn't get ratings. Second, a lot of people don't want to hear it, they're still into the fantasy of "bootstraps" for everyone. Finally, the vast majority of media is owned by large companies who want no part in spreading such a message even if it did get ratings and appealed to their audience.
> People do not commit a crime (most times) expecting to be caught, and so the penalty phase isn't a factor.
> 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.
Sure, if you can accurately create that impression among the population of likely bike thieves. Not so much if you're only impressing that upon the average citizen.
In a place like Japan of course, where the odds of being caught are higher, and the social consequences of stealing a bike are devastating, you do see less of that kind of crime. Emphasis on "See".
The main benefit of the death penalty is not deterrence, it is eugenic. Remove all of the irrationally violent from the gene pool for a few generations and you will soon have a population so much less prone to violent crime that you will forget why you had a death penalty in the first place. Until, that is, you start importing foreigners that have never had the violent culled from them, and all hell breaks loose in want of a solution that doesn't sound "racist."
To be blunt, this is one of the most fundamental differences between the most successful ethnic groups, and the least.
In 2014, the US executed 34 inmates. If you think that is enough to remove "the irrationally violent" from a country with a population of over 300 million, you might need to go back to a statistics class.
Not to mention that if any of those inmates had children, the irrationally violent gene would live on anyway.
>In 2014, the US executed 34 inmates. If you think that is enough to remove "the irrationally violent" from a country with a population of over 300 million, you might need to go back to a statistics class.
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.
I didn't realize this needed to be said here, but... you do understand how evolution and natural selection work, right? Beyond that, you understand the death penalty? We don't hunt down your progeny and kill them too. There is no "eugenic" benefit whatsoever, even if the scale were right, which it isn't. Even if eugenic control of violent tendencies were possible, which it isn't.
The worse "reality" gets, the better the escape looks. That's not even irrational, it's more like an emotional bankruptcy. If you don't have the emotional capital to address your current problems, things get even worse, but you still don't have the ability to address them. You need some kind of coping credit... Not sure where this analogy is going anymore but it could be interesting.
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.
This is the first I've heard of this - can you elaborate? Is the implication that there exist a fleet of "innocent"-appearing folks carrying vast swaths of money around? Are they identifiable as such?
I work for an online casino (you can dig my profile and find the link), addicts are definitely not rational. Every single machine we offer lists in its game rules the average payout percentage (I know because I read or wrote all of them), yet some people (not necessarily our customers) risk everything trying to "win-back" what they have lost.
Putting win percentages on gambling games is about as effective as putting lung cancer warnings on cigarettes.
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.
I wonder what evolutionary pressures caused humans to have these qualities? Surely the dopamine response in a crude way - but can we link the actual 'gambling-like' elements to human behaviours that might have been beneficial?
'Fear' keeps us away from Bears and cliffs ... but risk and gambling? Tricky one.
In most forms of organized gambling, the odds are against you, so the behavior only has negative outcomes. In real life, this is not always the case. Lots of the most successful people you're aware of (CEOs, VCs, actors, musicians, politicians, etc) probably took a series of pretty insane risks at some point in their life. If they had not, they would just be normal people. But they did, and they got a huge payoff. That's why risk taking is wired into many of us.
> In most forms of organized gambling, the odds are against you, so the behavior only has negative outcomes.
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.
I think that's an interesting question. On a site devoted to entrepreneurship, taking risks sounds pretty good. And, due to survivorship bias even poorly calculated risks will sound good.
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.
Practice. Practice in dealing with day-to-day risk. Pretty much everything we do that doesn't directly contribute to our survival is practice for the things that do. We also call this play or, in cats, mindless torture of cute furry animals.
In humans modern life comes with problems our biology was not designed to deal with and it fucks us up.
I heard a lecture from a guy who'd made a fortune on a trading desk then got a Ph.D in psychology. Many of the same characteristics are going on with traders. But there's a twist. Since there's an arguable logic to trading, once a trader makes a good trade and experiences that high, in order to achieve a similar high the next time, the trade has to be more extreme. Each time he/she is convinced in their own intelligence. This pattern continues unabated (in the absence of meaningful oversight which is rarely given when someone's on a roll) until the trader blows up completely.
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.
Yeah, the incentives on wall street hugely promote risks. You'll get paid a huge bonus if your bet pays off. And then downsides are limited to just losing your job, in which case you just go get a new one.
I've gambled a lot with poker and sports betting (where you're against other people), but always felt like a dumb ass when I played those casino games (blackjack, craps). Such a strong negative feedback loop to me. I never understood how people could get addicted to gambling.
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.
Dunno, for me, blackjack was great for meeting others - I was always having interesting side discussions with people I was with, or I wanted to get with. The gambling and drinks were just social lubricants.
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).
How about the brain chemistry of asian compulsive gamblers? You can be in the middle of Ohio where it's 99% white people, step into a casino and it's chinatown.
That probably has to do with cultural preferences for the type of gambling that's happening in the casino. I'd suspect pretty strongly that if you looked at other forms of gambling (lottery tickets, scratchers, bingo halls, etc.) you'd see a more representative cross-section of the population.
Walking past senior citizens whiling away hours at Vegas slot machines, I've often wondered how things would be different if they'd grown up in a time of ubiquitous video games.
Will today's generation, who spends time playing free mobile games, been as keen to spend money for slots when they get older?
I'm not quite a senior citizen so this is purely anecdotal. (I also have no desire to gamble whatsoever, so this probably makes it even more anecdotal) I grew up with video games - modern slots and "video poker" hold absolutely zero appeal to me. They are worse than the most horrible 2600 games from my youth. They simply aren't "fun" and a casino owner would get way more money from me with a Galaga or Pac-man arcade machine (not my favorite games by far) than any fancy "video slot machine".
I was inclined to agree, until I found the gloriously cheesy Centerfold slot arcade and a few others that are pretty fun rides when they choose to take you on one.
My first time trying out the actual "pull down the slot handle" machine was mindnumbingly boring.
These casinos offer alot more than games...tons of discounts, cheap food, comps, advertisements aimed at seniors, a community of seniors always there, etc.
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.
For those in the UK or with access to BBC iPlayer, Panorama just broadcast this reportage programme on fixed odds betting terminals which briefly mentions how they exploit brain chemistry in gambling addicts.
When I didn't have much else going on with my life, the excitement of getting a high score on a video game made me feel better and gave a sense of accomplishment.
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[ 2.8 ms ] story [ 247 ms ] threadWhat 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."
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Affect
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.
> 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.
-- Spock
https://youtu.be/-wtYGZt7aI4
(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.
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.
[1] http://jaredtendlerpoker.com/tmgp1and2/
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 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.
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.
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 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.
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.
'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.
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.
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).
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.
http://bbc.in/2cRJ9j0
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.