Our incredible brains are easily high-jacked. Another concerning trend in global/societal mental health that stresses different parts of it (e.g. increased ER visits). If the entirety of humanity is a connected mind let's say, and more and more parts of it are being damaged by companies that capitalize on "flaws" in the human brain -- which means our shared mentality keeps weakening and can be exploited more and more. It's just so much easier now because there is a machine in your pocket full of endless ways to high-jack your mind and attention.
We live in really crazy/fascinating times, accelerating human problems at "internet scale".
There is also the direction of influencing those in charge of creating laws and orders and ways to prevent society from collapsing. Law makers who give in to lobbying -- I mean some of these prices points are quite low: $XX,XXX to get someone to vote "yes" for a thing that impacts millions of constituents and earns the lobbying orders of magnitude more than the payout. That is excellent ROI.
Yeah it is so absurd. The going cost of a politician in local California politics is on the order of $30-60k a year. Very inexpensive when they vote on policies shaping billions of dollars worth of sales.
It is interesting how we actually ended up forming societies and cultures with how many little broken things occur in our minds. I guess as the saying goes "What doesn't kill you leaves you a hollow broken shell to pump out more copies of your DNA".
maybe its the other way around. my wife and I are pretty 'special', but when we step in to try to make up the different for each other we're a little more basically functional.
Organizing into communities and societies is absolutely what has allowed humanity to prosper beyond the sum of its parts. Our propensity for both idealism and shame, while being deeply intertwined with our vulnerability to highjacking, are also things that allow us to imagine something better and strive to achieve it. There's nothing that brings out shame better than the presence of other people, and nothing more inspiring than working well together with others towards a common goal.
Because these problems have never been dealt with. We scold victims and sell this "individual responsibility"/"bootstraps" bullshit to avoid doing so. Some of us create these products that actively fuck with people's ability to make decisions well, and then we yell at those people and tell them to act right.
The only difference now is the Internet both makes it frictionless and therefore so much easier to do, and the Internet also then let's us see into the lives being ruined in the process. But the problem remains exactly the same: if you, as a person, have no ethics and see no issue in causing misery at scale, you can make a LOT of fucking money in our society. And not only will you likely not be charged, now they'll probably call you an innovator and put you on a magazine.
And then we wonder why everything is getting worse all the time.
And before anyone tries the gotcha with me, no I do not work at any firm like this. No gambling, no social media, no recommendation algorithms. The company I work at comes by it honestly: we sell solutions to problems people actually have. And no we're not worth 66 trillion dollars but, we can all sleep at night. And that's not so bad.
> In 2024, Ontarians wagered $82.7 billion CAD on these sites through 2.6 million player accounts.
Truly astounding numbers. Without a doubt, online gambling is the most preventable public health crisis of our generation. None of this had any business getting legalized.
Important context that many of these dollars are counted multiple times.
Ex: you bet 100 and win, bringing your holdings to 200. You bet another 100 and lose, back to 100. You’ve gambled $200 but have arrived at the same number you started with.
I have friends who gamble in excess of 100k/yr total. In general their net is +/- 3k. $3,000 is a lot to spend on a hobby, but the overall number can be misleading
That figure seemed way off to me (gut response) so I did a tiny bit of digging: Ontario claims income (primary household income) for 2024 was $791B. ~10% isn't as shocking as I expected.
Wagering 10% of your household income is not shocking?? What would it take to shock you? That is an astounding amount.
Most people are living paycheck to paycheck. I've watched gambling destroy more than one family member's lives.
To put this number in context: estimate 1/3 of income for rent, so this is 1/3 of their rent?! Translating that to my own rent is an amount that would immediately lead me to quit forever.
It's both better and worse than it seems. I'm guessing something like 50% of folks gamble $0. Then another 45% gamble some amount of their income, averaging 10%. Finally 5% will gamble everything they have and send their family careening into poverty.
By transaction volume yes. Presumably it’s not all spending though, if you regularly win back some of that money. The same dollar is probably wagered multiple times before it is lost.
Ontario lotteries pay out about 58 cents per dollar in, so that's still $13,000 annually out-of-pocket for a total spend of $31,000. That's crazy money.
It also could be inflated due to winnings being put back into another bet. A single dollar could be accounted for multiple times if used in multiple bets.
Not that I am saying that this number is ok, gambling is a net negative on any society.
The gross amount doesn't tell you how much money is being lost to gambling. I'm not going to soften that wording, it really is lost, but such a shocking gross amount means the average loss is in the thousands per year. Gambling is also the archetypal whale hunt. Your best customers are harmed most by your product.
There's nothing else that delivers that level of harm directly to a device in your pocket.
It's a long tail. The vast majority make $20 parlay wagers here and there and they're the real cash cow. And then there are the degens that make $2,000, or $5,000 wagers on everything because otherwise "what's the point?".
Short of outright banning (which I would favor), we can at least make mobile wagers capped at say $100 and the same account can't wager more that $500 within a 24 hour period.
That would allow people to have their fun but seriously limit the blast radius when they inevitably lose big repeatedly.
> The vast majority make $20 parlay wagers here and there and they're the real cash cow.
You got the meaning of "whale" wrong. The majority of the winnings / losings come from the "long tail" addicts.
> And then there are the degens that make $2,000, or $5,000 wagers on everything because [they are addicted]
I think my edit more accurately reflects what is going on.
You need to put more time into the proposal if you want to make it serious. How long would it take for people to learn they need "alt accounts" to gamble?
Suggestions:
1. Ban advertising of gambling.
2. Ban "remote" gambling including phone apps.
What would it take to make progress on this in the current regulatory environment? Post a link to someone who has thought about it.
Basically printing money just like tobacco companies used to be (and now are again with smokeless products). I'm not generally in favor of morality police laws, but this is so egregious it's beyond morality to me- it's vulnerable peoples' firmware getting exploited to give predatory actors their money.
Self-harm and suicide attempts account for some situations, I think following that you can imagine others. The article mentions that 70% include other mental health disorders, with a gambling addiction as a contributing factor for presentation.
is the sense that it wont immediately bankrupt you, yes, they are different.
but my skimming of the study itself is that something else occurs (mental episode of some sort, such as anxiety attacks or suicide attempts, etc.) and gambling is noted as a primary or contributing factor in the billing code. it does not appear like someone wakes up, realizes they have an addiction to gambling, and then walks into the ER.
the reason i brought up cost is because gambling addicts having a mental crisis are not typically sitting on piles of cash. a canadian gambling addict would be more willing to visit the ER than a us one because of the cost of the visit.
the pay vs. wait argument is a fun one, but im not super interested in hashing it out here
> "More than 70 per cent of gambling disorder emergency department visits involved another mental health condition or heavy substance use and almost one-third of the visits led to hospital admission."
Ok, so I assume they mean that these emergency visits were for things like drug overdoses and psychotic episodes in people led to by their gambling disorders, not for the gambling disorders themselves. What a strange way of writing this up. A gambling disorder is a chronic problem, not an acute one.
There's a difference between "emergency visit for X" where you treat X and "emergency visit (for Y) because of X" where you treat Y proximal to X, and people could learn to be more discerning in their use and interpretation of language.
> emergency department visits in which a gambling disorder was recorded as either the main or a contributing reason for the visit.
from the study
> An ED visit for a gambling disorder was defined on the basis of the clinical judgement of the treating team and was identified when ICD-10 codes F63.0 (pathological gambling) or Z726 (gambling or betting problems) were coded as the main or contributing reason for the visit.
> In 29.3% of these ED visits, a gambling disorder was listed as the primary cause of the visit,
Also, the ICD ontology specifically exists for billing purposes and isn't the same as patient diagnostic classification, though there is overlap and people do mistakenly use it as such sometimes. But there's a difference between "emergency visit for X" (treat X) and "emergency visit because of X" (treat Y proximal to X). (I also edited my original comment to include this last part, since it seems likely to create confusion)
there's a difference in semantics between clinical reason and billing, agreed, though it seems that the news article did not sensationalize the study, and the study uses at least one valid code that can be a primary reason for a visit, and while I'm absolutely just a random dog on the internet, for me the overlap in meaning seems significant to warrant the use of this term.
The paper lists the mental health conditions as "anxiety disorder, bipolar disorder, major depressive disorders, self-harm, acute stress
reaction and other". I'm surprised that multiple people went into the ER to seek treatment for a gambling addiction without being flagged for anything else. It seems like there should be a better place for people looking for help to go.
Maybe they also mean suicidality after ending up in a ton of debt? Or just other self-harm because of it?
Personally, I really don’t like the expansion of legalized gambling. I’m not surprised it’s causing serious issues.
I would at least be more OK if it happened but advertising was heavily restricted/banned in context. The fact that every professional sport seems to be nothing but a thin wrapper around gambling ads now can’t possibly be good for us as a society.
I have never felt anything about gambling. Most boring thing ever. I don't feel anything about investment, and wrote automation to track mine because it's all so boring.
I wouldn't tempt fate to try to expose myself more, but it doesn't seem like I contain whatever is required to form these addictions.
Has it been studied if some people are just much more vulnerable than others, and are there predictive factors?
I feel the same way - it's just not fun for me. I like playing poker with my friends, but I like the social aspect of it - putting down $20 on the table is no different than buying a few beers at a bar, and I don't care if I come out of the game with more or less money.
Going to a casino, which I've done a few times, is just wildly disinteresting.
But I know I'm prone to other sorts of addictions, so I guess gambling is somehow different.
I like alcohol and trying new things, whether that be food or languages. I get nothing from gambling. Not all stimuli affect everyone equally. You’d need something approaching a unified theory of consciousness to adequately explain this finely..
Unfortunately I fail to empathise with gamblers not because I think they deserve to be afflicted by this disease but simply because I have never found gambling appealing as an activity.
I bought a few lottery tickets when the prize reaches astronomical proportions but it was always a case of going along and doing it with family/friends just for fun.
I guess I could understand the appeal if the chances to actually win something were pretty good but it’s a well known fact that the house always wins in the end.
>I fail to empathise with gamblers [...] because I have never found gambling appealing as an activity.
that was a strange sentence to read! the whole point with empathy is being able to do it despite not sharing the same feelings or point of view. it's putting yourself in their shoes, and attempting to understand the things they would feel.
maybe you meant you can't "relate to" or "identify with" or something
We don’t have to fully outlaw gambling or other forms of high risk entertainment, but we absolutely should be outlawing the pervasive advertising these companies are doing. You can’t enjoy sports these days without dodging tons of ads for betting platforms
Because there is a significant amount of externalized costs we should increase the impedance: taxes, banning/regulating advertising, cooling off periods, limits, et cetera.
I'd settle for making these apps play fair at least. Being able to effectively ban users who are good at sports betting by limiting their wagers to trivial amounts[1] is a "heads we win, tails you lose" situation and contradicts their marketing claims.
All gambling should be state owned. It is a strict societal loss anyway, we can at least soften the overall blow.
Losses can be redistributed and cover for the externalities of gambling. And we will be able to control the knob on how addictive we make them.
For profit companies have the target to maximize their profit, so of course they will ramp up any method that can bring in more revenue.
Pretty much agree. But even then, the state should not be incentivizing its use (looking you, CA lottery and friends).
Gambling is a drug, and should be recognized as such.
Our incredible brains are easily high-jacked. Another concerning trend in global/societal mental health that stresses different parts of it (e.g. increased ER visits). If the entirety of humanity is a connected mind let's say, and more and more parts of it are being damaged by companies that capitalize on "flaws" in the human brain -- which means our shared mentality keeps weakening and can be exploited more and more. It's just so much easier now because there is a machine in your pocket full of endless ways to high-jack your mind and attention.
We live in really crazy/fascinating times, accelerating human problems at "internet scale".
There is also the direction of influencing those in charge of creating laws and orders and ways to prevent society from collapsing. Law makers who give in to lobbying -- I mean some of these prices points are quite low: $XX,XXX to get someone to vote "yes" for a thing that impacts millions of constituents and earns the lobbying orders of magnitude more than the payout. That is excellent ROI.
Yeah it is so absurd. The going cost of a politician in local California politics is on the order of $30-60k a year. Very inexpensive when they vote on policies shaping billions of dollars worth of sales.
It is interesting how we actually ended up forming societies and cultures with how many little broken things occur in our minds. I guess as the saying goes "What doesn't kill you leaves you a hollow broken shell to pump out more copies of your DNA".
maybe its the other way around. my wife and I are pretty 'special', but when we step in to try to make up the different for each other we're a little more basically functional.
Organizing into communities and societies is absolutely what has allowed humanity to prosper beyond the sum of its parts. Our propensity for both idealism and shame, while being deeply intertwined with our vulnerability to highjacking, are also things that allow us to imagine something better and strive to achieve it. There's nothing that brings out shame better than the presence of other people, and nothing more inspiring than working well together with others towards a common goal.
Because these problems have never been dealt with. We scold victims and sell this "individual responsibility"/"bootstraps" bullshit to avoid doing so. Some of us create these products that actively fuck with people's ability to make decisions well, and then we yell at those people and tell them to act right.
The only difference now is the Internet both makes it frictionless and therefore so much easier to do, and the Internet also then let's us see into the lives being ruined in the process. But the problem remains exactly the same: if you, as a person, have no ethics and see no issue in causing misery at scale, you can make a LOT of fucking money in our society. And not only will you likely not be charged, now they'll probably call you an innovator and put you on a magazine.
And then we wonder why everything is getting worse all the time.
And before anyone tries the gotcha with me, no I do not work at any firm like this. No gambling, no social media, no recommendation algorithms. The company I work at comes by it honestly: we sell solutions to problems people actually have. And no we're not worth 66 trillion dollars but, we can all sleep at night. And that's not so bad.
> In 2024, Ontarians wagered $82.7 billion CAD on these sites through 2.6 million player accounts.
Truly astounding numbers. Without a doubt, online gambling is the most preventable public health crisis of our generation. None of this had any business getting legalized.
Important context that many of these dollars are counted multiple times.
Ex: you bet 100 and win, bringing your holdings to 200. You bet another 100 and lose, back to 100. You’ve gambled $200 but have arrived at the same number you started with.
I have friends who gamble in excess of 100k/yr total. In general their net is +/- 3k. $3,000 is a lot to spend on a hobby, but the overall number can be misleading
Wow, good thing I'm a curmudgeon who only wants to bet at an IRL sportsbook. A place I only get around to visiting every few years.
No good can come of me having a gambling app, I already fool around too much with stocks.
That figure seemed way off to me (gut response) so I did a tiny bit of digging: Ontario claims income (primary household income) for 2024 was $791B. ~10% isn't as shocking as I expected.
Wagering 10% of your household income is not shocking?? What would it take to shock you? That is an astounding amount.
Most people are living paycheck to paycheck. I've watched gambling destroy more than one family member's lives.
To put this number in context: estimate 1/3 of income for rent, so this is 1/3 of their rent?! Translating that to my own rent is an amount that would immediately lead me to quit forever.
The key word is *as*. It's a lot, it's shocking, it's not *as* shocking as my I thought on first read.
It's both better and worse than it seems. I'm guessing something like 50% of folks gamble $0. Then another 45% gamble some amount of their income, averaging 10%. Finally 5% will gamble everything they have and send their family careening into poverty.
Really? That's an incredible number to me. 10% of all household spending goes to gambling?! 31,000 dollars per player *per year*? The mind boggles.
By transaction volume yes. Presumably it’s not all spending though, if you regularly win back some of that money. The same dollar is probably wagered multiple times before it is lost.
Ontario lotteries pay out about 58 cents per dollar in, so that's still $13,000 annually out-of-pocket for a total spend of $31,000. That's crazy money.
An average of $31807 per person...
Average is meaningless for anything that isn’t a normal distribution. The median spend per account is probably like $100.
It also could be inflated due to winnings being put back into another bet. A single dollar could be accounted for multiple times if used in multiple bets.
Not that I am saying that this number is ok, gambling is a net negative on any society.
The gross amount doesn't tell you how much money is being lost to gambling. I'm not going to soften that wording, it really is lost, but such a shocking gross amount means the average loss is in the thousands per year. Gambling is also the archetypal whale hunt. Your best customers are harmed most by your product.
There's nothing else that delivers that level of harm directly to a device in your pocket.
It's a long tail. The vast majority make $20 parlay wagers here and there and they're the real cash cow. And then there are the degens that make $2,000, or $5,000 wagers on everything because otherwise "what's the point?".
Short of outright banning (which I would favor), we can at least make mobile wagers capped at say $100 and the same account can't wager more that $500 within a 24 hour period.
That would allow people to have their fun but seriously limit the blast radius when they inevitably lose big repeatedly.
> The vast majority make $20 parlay wagers here and there and they're the real cash cow.
You got the meaning of "whale" wrong. The majority of the winnings / losings come from the "long tail" addicts.
> And then there are the degens that make $2,000, or $5,000 wagers on everything because [they are addicted]
I think my edit more accurately reflects what is going on.
You need to put more time into the proposal if you want to make it serious. How long would it take for people to learn they need "alt accounts" to gamble?
Suggestions:
1. Ban advertising of gambling.
2. Ban "remote" gambling including phone apps.
What would it take to make progress on this in the current regulatory environment? Post a link to someone who has thought about it.
Basically printing money just like tobacco companies used to be (and now are again with smokeless products). I'm not generally in favor of morality police laws, but this is so egregious it's beyond morality to me- it's vulnerable peoples' firmware getting exploited to give predatory actors their money.
> Emergency room visits for gambling disorders
Are Canadian ERs different than ERs in the U.S.? Why would one go to an emergency room, seek emergency treatment, for a gambling disorder?
Self-harm and suicide attempts account for some situations, I think following that you can imagine others. The article mentions that 70% include other mental health disorders, with a gambling addiction as a contributing factor for presentation.
is the sense that it wont immediately bankrupt you, yes, they are different.
but my skimming of the study itself is that something else occurs (mental episode of some sort, such as anxiety attacks or suicide attempts, etc.) and gambling is noted as a primary or contributing factor in the billing code. it does not appear like someone wakes up, realizes they have an addiction to gambling, and then walks into the ER.
> is the sense that it wont immediately bankrupt you, yes, they are different.
also in the sense that you'll wait for a looong time to get treatment
the reason i brought up cost is because gambling addicts having a mental crisis are not typically sitting on piles of cash. a canadian gambling addict would be more willing to visit the ER than a us one because of the cost of the visit.
the pay vs. wait argument is a fun one, but im not super interested in hashing it out here
A few months ago I read an article that compared vibe coding to gambling[0] and I've found it a useful model.
[0]: maybe this one: https://www.fast.ai/posts/2026-01-28-dark-flow/
Out of seemingly nowhere a few years ago, the canadian local landscape changed overnight.
I feel like I am walking around las vegas half the time.
Virtually every corner store has turned into those english sports betting pubs or whatever they have all over England.
It's disgusting.
How does someone at the ER for gambling addiction present?
> "Emergency room visits for gambling disorders"
Huh?
> "More than 70 per cent of gambling disorder emergency department visits involved another mental health condition or heavy substance use and almost one-third of the visits led to hospital admission."
Ok, so I assume they mean that these emergency visits were for things like drug overdoses and psychotic episodes in people led to by their gambling disorders, not for the gambling disorders themselves. What a strange way of writing this up. A gambling disorder is a chronic problem, not an acute one.
There's a difference between "emergency visit for X" where you treat X and "emergency visit (for Y) because of X" where you treat Y proximal to X, and people could learn to be more discerning in their use and interpretation of language.
> emergency department visits in which a gambling disorder was recorded as either the main or a contributing reason for the visit.
from the study
> An ED visit for a gambling disorder was defined on the basis of the clinical judgement of the treating team and was identified when ICD-10 codes F63.0 (pathological gambling) or Z726 (gambling or betting problems) were coded as the main or contributing reason for the visit.
> In 29.3% of these ED visits, a gambling disorder was listed as the primary cause of the visit,
Contributing reason, sure, but main reason makes no sense.
Maybe. On the other hand it's common for genuine medical problems to 'make no sense' to a layperson. That tradition goes back thousands of years.
apparently there's an ICD code for it
i guess if someone gets a meltdown (mental breakdown) after losing a lot of money
That definitely still seems like contributing.
Also, the ICD ontology specifically exists for billing purposes and isn't the same as patient diagnostic classification, though there is overlap and people do mistakenly use it as such sometimes. But there's a difference between "emergency visit for X" (treat X) and "emergency visit because of X" (treat Y proximal to X). (I also edited my original comment to include this last part, since it seems likely to create confusion)
there's a difference in semantics between clinical reason and billing, agreed, though it seems that the news article did not sensationalize the study, and the study uses at least one valid code that can be a primary reason for a visit, and while I'm absolutely just a random dog on the internet, for me the overlap in meaning seems significant to warrant the use of this term.
https://icdlist.com/icd-10/F63.0
https://icdlist.com/icd-10/Z72.6 "The code is not accepted as a principal diagnosis "
The paper lists the mental health conditions as "anxiety disorder, bipolar disorder, major depressive disorders, self-harm, acute stress reaction and other". I'm surprised that multiple people went into the ER to seek treatment for a gambling addiction without being flagged for anything else. It seems like there should be a better place for people looking for help to go.
Yeah, that was kind of odd.
Maybe they also mean suicidality after ending up in a ton of debt? Or just other self-harm because of it?
Personally, I really don’t like the expansion of legalized gambling. I’m not surprised it’s causing serious issues.
I would at least be more OK if it happened but advertising was heavily restricted/banned in context. The fact that every professional sport seems to be nothing but a thin wrapper around gambling ads now can’t possibly be good for us as a society.
> emergency department visits in which a gambling disorder was recorded as either the main or a contributing reason for the visit.
I wonder how many were for suicide attempts after a huge loss specifically.
I'm getting sick of the ads. It's in every NHL commercial break, Rogan (though I don't know about it now) has them as sponsors
Guys, it's predatory. Stop
I have never felt anything about gambling. Most boring thing ever. I don't feel anything about investment, and wrote automation to track mine because it's all so boring.
I wouldn't tempt fate to try to expose myself more, but it doesn't seem like I contain whatever is required to form these addictions.
Has it been studied if some people are just much more vulnerable than others, and are there predictive factors?
Yes. One interesting example is that compulsive gambling is a side effect of a certain class of drugs for treating Parkinson’s disease.
https://parkinsonsjournal.com/en/parkinsons-disease/gambling...
I feel the same way - it's just not fun for me. I like playing poker with my friends, but I like the social aspect of it - putting down $20 on the table is no different than buying a few beers at a bar, and I don't care if I come out of the game with more or less money.
Going to a casino, which I've done a few times, is just wildly disinteresting.
But I know I'm prone to other sorts of addictions, so I guess gambling is somehow different.
I like alcohol and trying new things, whether that be food or languages. I get nothing from gambling. Not all stimuli affect everyone equally. You’d need something approaching a unified theory of consciousness to adequately explain this finely..
Unfortunately I fail to empathise with gamblers not because I think they deserve to be afflicted by this disease but simply because I have never found gambling appealing as an activity.
I bought a few lottery tickets when the prize reaches astronomical proportions but it was always a case of going along and doing it with family/friends just for fun.
I guess I could understand the appeal if the chances to actually win something were pretty good but it’s a well known fact that the house always wins in the end.
>I fail to empathise with gamblers [...] because I have never found gambling appealing as an activity.
that was a strange sentence to read! the whole point with empathy is being able to do it despite not sharing the same feelings or point of view. it's putting yourself in their shoes, and attempting to understand the things they would feel.
maybe you meant you can't "relate to" or "identify with" or something
Privately funded health care solves this.
it'd be cool if you expanded on that thought for the rest of us
Let me guess - because some people are unable to consume this form of entertainment responsibly, we have to make it illegal for everyone?
Makes sense. While we’re at it let’s kick the war on drugs back into high gear, reinstate prohibition, and make other higher risk behavior illegal.
We can go back to how it used to be, when you had to go to a gambling establishment in person
Why would we do that? I’m perfectly capable of using a gambling app responsibly.
We don’t have to fully outlaw gambling or other forms of high risk entertainment, but we absolutely should be outlawing the pervasive advertising these companies are doing. You can’t enjoy sports these days without dodging tons of ads for betting platforms
I don’t see why advertisement for gambling is any more offensive than advertisement for any other form of entertainment
Watching a TV show or a movie that you saw a commercial for isn't going to bankrupt you and cause you to lose your house.
Because there is a significant amount of externalized costs we should increase the impedance: taxes, banning/regulating advertising, cooling off periods, limits, et cetera.
I'd settle for making these apps play fair at least. Being able to effectively ban users who are good at sports betting by limiting their wagers to trivial amounts[1] is a "heads we win, tails you lose" situation and contradicts their marketing claims.
[1] https://www.cbc.ca/sports/opinion-sports-betting-morgan-camp...