I publish my own substack newsletters for work, and I've found a way to get HTML in that preserves formatting and doesn't introduce artifacts, does this work for you?
1) Save the raw HTML you're meaning to import into substack as a plain .html file. Drag that file into your browser as a new tab
2) Open that tab, Ctrl+A
3) Ctrl+C on the selected content
4) Open substack, start a new article
5) Ctrl+V in the text input field
This preserves images, links, blockquotes, more or less everything (in simple HTML at least).
The trick I've found is that you have to copy directly from an in-browser view, you can't just input the raw HTML source code itself.
I think there's still an end quote in some of the links that needs to be removed. If you want someone to help convert/vet the html (and substack quirks like footnotes), I'd be willing to take a shot at it.
I've had video game addiction to League of Legends for the past few years, and I relate very much to what was described. The key to the whole addiction really is 'dark flow' as the author described it. It was very easy to start a game, then go semi-brain dead for 30 minutes until the game ended which let me ignore reality like bad marks or a lack of social life, then after the game ended I just hop back in queue for another round with a couple minute break where I could browse reddit as match making occurs. For me, the only thing I could do to break addiction was to have the game entirely uninstalled. If it was on my laptop, I was basically guaranteed to play many, many hours a week.
As for why Duolingo, Khan Academy, fitbit don't inspire addiction, it's because they don't allow for 'dark flow'. League of Legends is a skill based game and to do well you need to think hard, but it's very easy to do mediocre with your brain half off. But it's not possible to learn a new language with your brain half off. On Duolingo, if you're actually learning, then your brain is too active to be in a dark flow state.
I went for the same explanation for lack of "virtuous", but I'm not as convinced: there should be some activities that would be low-intensity enough to work, like moderate treadmill/stationary bike. On the other hand, exercise chill enough to enter dark flow probably doesn't produce much result?
As for video games, I've similarly noticed dark flow, as well as normal flow: comparing both, they seem to rely on unconscious thought. The difference being that where "good" flow relies on instinct to anticipate/react to unconscious info, dark flow applies similar levels of unconscious reactions, but discarding even conscious info.
People absolutely get addicted to exercise. This is probably most evidence in extreme endurance athletes, like the guy who had his toenails surgically removed trying to set the record for fastest time running across the continental US, or Lynne Cox spending hours a day in ice baths to prepare for her swim between Alaska and Russia.
I think most people are unwilling to go to such extreme lengths - I enjoy running, but it's physically painful to run too much too often, or to do any form of exercise to excess, which limits how addictive it can be.
I am slightly addicted to exercise, and quite often get into a flow state on a treadmill. But for me, *harder* exercise makes it easier to get into flow, I think because it makes me so focused on getting through each 1/100 of a mile that I can't think about anything else or get bored. The distance counter definitely helps with gamification.
The other "virtuous" gamification that works for me is Anki. There've been times when I got to the end of a daily review and felt mildly disappointed that it was over.
Could anorexia tie into that dark flow as well? It almost seems counterproductive, since you need willpower to stay on a diet, but from what I understand people with anorexia really get off on not eating and feeling thin, so I wonder if that feeling gets tied into some kind of dopamine reaction.
I don’t claim to understand anorexia personally, but did achieve a similar “learn to love the pain” feeling when dieting in 2012. I’m bad at moderation and good at cold turkey, so I couldn’t lose weight without taking an approach of simply not eating more than 200 calories until about 6 PM. Whenever it hurt, it also felt euphoric because I knew it was working. Probably a dopamine reaction like you mentioned.
When I quit smoking cigarettes I did so with the help of a modified mindset where I relished the act of denying myself a cig in an almost sadistic/masochistic manner. It was a little disconcerting but eventually less so as I craved them less and as a result didn't have to work as hard at depriving myself of the act os satisfying my cravings.
Is there actually a difference between dark and good flow? Are they not just the same thing, but applied to different activities? I'm reminded of friends in college that would try Adderall to concentrate on homework but they would actually just concentrate on cleaning their apartment or video games.
In my personal example, both states were playing the same game. In both situations, time/outside stimulus went unnoticed until after the flow state ended.
In the "good" flow state, I was performing better than average, reacting more quickly to things, internalizing more information without having to consciously process it. Momentum increased, allowing for faster progress on high-level goals.
The "dark" flow state was often more predictable: I'd be in a nonoptimal external situation (tired, frustrated), but decide to carry on anyway. Upon entering the flow state, it felt similar to the "good" flow in that I was able to react decisively to make quick progress on the high-level goals, but the immediate steps were less efficent/likely to be correct, and any deviation or reaction was slower, more likely to fall onto attempting the planned idea "harder" rather than reevaluating. Frustration from failure just encourages attempting to focus more on the game in order to play better, leading back into the "dark" flow, wheras when something goes wrong enough to break "good" flow, it tends to either transition to normal play, or a full stop/reset as I have to
manually process all of the info I had been in tune with.
There's still enough similarities that I can't be sure they are separate phenomenon (are the differences causing the performance differences, or reactions to those results?) My emotions on them are starkly different, regreting dark flow as time wasted, wheras good flow, even similarly occurring as procrastination, doesn't get that same "waste of time" feeling, even without the reward of winning.
The comparison League of Legends is interesting. What separates a "fun and lowkey hobby you use to decompress" from an addiction? Is "dark flow" always bad, or only when it gets out of control?
The concept of addiction is fuzzy, especially when applied to activities. Like doopydoo, I play a lot of multiplayer video games noncompetitively, and I sometimes experience the desire to play them in a negative way, but only sometimes. Some days I genuinely want to play Dota 2, I play it for a limited amount of time, and then I stop and feel good about it. Other days, I play it to avoid the bad things in my life and get into a so-called "dark flow", but it's still a positive experience because it helps me decompress and I'm in a better headspace when stop playing. But on some days, I intend to only play a quick game or two but then get sucked into it and spend hours playing it instead of doing something more fulfilling, like reading or hiking. After these play session I often feel crappy and unfulfilled, and wish I had done something else.
Am I addicted to Dota 2? Hard to say. I still go to work, maintain a relationship, cook meals, keep my apartment clean, etc. I have no problem stopping when I need to do something. And 4 out of 5 times I play about as long as I want and then stop. But every 1 out of 5 times, I play for way longer than I intended and I avoid doing other activities I had intended to do and would have found more fulfilling.
Personally I consider the line an addiction when I want to stop playing but cannot. There have been other games I've played for dozens or hundreds of hours, but then I finished with them. Playing League of Legends never gets boring for me, so it's an addiction to me.
> on some days, I intend to only play a quick game or two but then get sucked into it and spend hours playing it instead of doing something more fulfilling, like reading or hiking. After these play session I often feel crappy and unfulfilled, and wish I had done something else.
I think on some accounts, this is the definition of addiction: you aren't particularly interested in something, but you do it to the expense of things that you do care about anyway. (This would be a sort of "syndrome" definition of addiction that ignores whether the cause of this syndrome is the same in all cases or whether there might be several different underlying conditions that lead to the same syndrome.)
Maybe we should look at these activities as tools we resort to for a variety of reason. What gamification seems to do is magnify the inherent allure of an activity, it’s a facade of fun that sometimes hides the steep slope of the effort/returns function. I wonder if the “dark flow” isn’t what happens when a low-effort steam-blowing “fun” activity becomes the dopaminergic acme of an otherwise gloomy existence? And some folks just keep going back, and back, and back to that easily accessible hilltop of realization, to the point where that short meaningful climb becomes the structural axis of their life, that in terms of which all other priorities are arranged and all other things evaluated.
I think you're right. If you're genuinely learning anything, you can't be in any flow state, it's too effortful. If nothing else, genuine learning requires making a lot of painful mistakes (which would break any pleasureable flow state) and then analyzing them (which is humiliating and effortful) and then consciously trying hard not to make them again.
Part of the problem of something like Duolingo (or even Khan) is that they work pretty well for the easiest part of the learning curve, the very beginning, where you're learning extremely easy parts of a something. The mental work is so easy the setbacks and mistakes are few enough and mild enough that they can be incorporated into at least a semi-flow state.
But when you get to the steep part of the learning curve, which is all about hard work, they don't work -- and indeed, you don't see apps in that region. Duolingo will get you an introduction to a language, but it quits long before you get even modestly proficient, somewhere in what would be the middle of a second semester college course. Same with Kahn: you can get the basic/beginning stuff very well, but in any field I've seen them tackle, they quiet right when it starts to get tough, at the point of transition between amateurism and beginning professional levels of competence.
Maybe learning physical skills can occur in a flow state; practicing physical skills is almost the canonical example of flow, repeating a motion over and over again (or playing a scale on the piano over and over again), a certain foot angle in soccer, a certain angle of the arm in a martial art. That does result in retention of skill.
It certainly can, but what I'm trying to get at is that I think there are distinct "regions" of learning which do and don't lend themselves to that state. In some cases there's an easy initial part, which poses so light a cognitive load that it's often fun for a while. (This is where I think the gamified learning efforts live.)
Then there's a part later on, when you are at a competent intermediate level, and it's sort of a question of smoothing out the rough edges and getting faster. In this case, you have the main aspects of the skill down, you don't have to think about it consciously all the time -- but you aren't a master, you can get better. This I think lends itself to the flow state, because the best learning takes place by encouraging a Zen-like attention without concentration to detail and the small feedback signals that are coming e.g. from muscular effort if it's skiing, or the facial expression of your listeners if you're practicing a foreign language.
And then I think there is usually a part in the middle, where it isn't easy, and also where the rough bones of the skill aren't in place, and where the learning is effortful. You have to concentrate hard, you make serious and discouraging mistakes, and it's mentally taxing (even if it's purely physical). If it was skiing, it's when you can barely get down the beginner level without falling only by supreme concentration and a little luck. If it was learning French, it's when most of the words come to mind quickly, but you have to think hard about endings and tenses, and you have to focus so much on getting the sentence out you can't be thinking about the next sentence before you've finished speaking.
I can imagine the length of each stage might be quite different for different skills and different people (with different pre-existing skills that may or may not partially map onto the new skills).
What I'm hypothesizing is that the 1st and 3rd stage can be enjoyable, albeit for very different reasons -- the 1st because the return on investment is high, for a modest effort you can get a significant feeling of initial accomplishment, the 3rd because it lends itself to flow -- but that the 2nd is just a hard effortful slog, where ROI feels low and the possibility of flow is absent.
And since we have this disparity in the nature of the stages, and a potential disparity in how long each is for different activities and different people, we expect a heterogeneity in how people view the mastery experience: for some, who speed through the 2nd stage, the whole experience is very positive. For others, who spend a lot of time in the 2nd stage, it's tough and if you quit in stage 2 overall it can be a negative.
Really interesting comment. There's a lot in here!
I have some access to an academic library so I looked up "csikszentmihalyi flow learning" and got a bunch of results. Reading your comment makes me curious about the nature of the interaction between flow states and memory in learning vs. gameplay. Vygotsky (and Piaget?) have the "zone of proximal development" theory, a "goldilocks" description - imagine a graph with x axis being "skill" and y axis being "challenge." A line from the origin at y=x, with a small band on either side, is the "zone" of proximal development of a learner engaged in a task. At low skill level, low challenge is just right and may produce flow. Further up, in medium skill/medium challenge, flow may also be produced. Non-flow occurs in a mismatch between skill and challenge. Above the line is the "tasks the learner cannot complete even with assistance" /or "anxiety" state. Underneath the line is the "too easy" or "boredom" section, sometimes labeled the "learner can complete without assistance" and I think you are right, I think learning apps live here, maybe attaining a low skill/low challenge "flow" element; it's worth considering whether the "flow" of this is related to learning or related to a sense of being rewarded for completing a mindless task (which might be pleasant but would not be flow per se). There is the eight-channel model of flow (Massimi & Carli, 1988); same axes, big circle divided into eight quadrants; relaxation, the "6 o'clock," is low challenge/moderate skill match; this too might be pleasant as a distraction;
boredom (4 oclock): low challenge, high skill
control (3 oclock): moderate challenge, high skill
flow (1/2 o clock): high challenge, high skill
arousal (12 oclock): high challenge, moderate skill
(At some point I will have to look at how to put images into substack comments) This is from Pearce, Ainley, & Howard, (2005) "The ebb and flow of online learning," Computers in Human Behavior, 21(5), 745- 771. This research considered flow as a process rather than as a state and created plots of individual skill/challenge correlation over time while the student engaged in an online learning activity, lots of weird zigzags, some stayed in the boredom region, some crossed back and forth.
In terms of language learning, there are several skills in play. Maybe the "stage 2" is the stage where the "converse" skill is at a lower level than the "vocabulary" skill, and a learner experiences mismatches in their own skill levels at different components of the larger task? Stage 1, converse means uttering one or two-word statements which may carry meaning, and doing that at all feels rewarding; stage 3, the learner is more familiar with sorting the vocabulary knowledge in a way that's useful for conversing, but stage 2 has a mismatch of bringing a new skill online, conversation, requiring handling the relatively new skill of vocabulary in a new way?
Or perhaps stage 2 enters the anxiety/worry/arousal side if the initial skills are not so firmly mastered. I think many people learning math hit a wall in between multiplication and fractions, and may continue on in coursework in an anxiety/worry/arousal state but simply can no longer continue once they reach algebra (bringing in the second skill of additional abstraction) because the multiplication facts are not firmly commanded (memory). It may take a large time sink of practice to get the facts/vocabulary down to the point where bringing in a second skill doesn't sink the ship.
Anyway there is a lot of research on this. I think you're right, it will vary by person, some of that will be the size of the individual's RAM for that activity. There also may be flow experience differences in terms of experiences of practicing versus experiences of performing or using the skill. (The "I totally understand this, why did I get a 50% on the test" phenomenon.)
Data point: I remember at some point finding an exercise in Khan's that allowed to accumulate points in the fastest way possible and repeating it for like an hour to get some higher-status badge (obviously there was no benefit in doing it learning-wise at that point). I also distinctly remember losing motivation for studying after earning all the visible (at the time) badges a few years ago (and that didn't even require getting very far, their badge system was/is not very well thought out).
However, recently I returned to Khan's to refresh (and learn some new) reasonably complicated topics (BC-calculus, statistics and linear algebra) and that worked out quite well. I completely ignored the gamification part of it this time though, it was the knowledge of topics themselves that motivated me. There's something to be said here about gamification of learning vs actually enjoying learning, but I can't quite put my finger on it.
I think in some cases a good flow state can be a great source of learning and inspiration. Sometimes when playing super smash bros melee It'll suddenly occur to me to do something I've never done before, and it works. Of course after that happens I try to make a conscious note to remember it, but I'm not sure if making that note fully takes me out of flow.
Pixar's "Soul" makes a big thing of the flow state and lost souls being the same thing in a way that is very similar to the idea of "dark flow". Good movie, worth the watch.
I've had problems with League as well. I've had periods of uninstalling and reinstalling it multiple times in succession. Ultimately, what mostly works is to not have an external mouse, which is pretty much required to play the game. I've also found that when I'm happier and more self-actualized in general, I feel less of a desire to play (like in the rat park experiment).
I do think it's possible to learn a language with your brain half off, but Duolingo just isn't very fun compared to a real game. Games, food, sex, and other primal urges really mash our neurological buttons, and putting a gamified layer on something else doesn't really fool anyone. Social media is an interesting gray area. Maybe information/gossip/what's happening in the tribe is a primal urge as well?
I've got an old DVD of 'Learn Calculus from a Girl'; bikini babes giggling and maybe explaining the first calculus equation. But there isn't a big overlap between Pronhub, whatever that mixed martial arts thing is now, Duolingo, and Khan Academy. Vice is sometimes more scrupulous than virtue but I think it's that if I ran a combination of all four I'd lose money from shakedowns by lawyers claiming to represent outraged parents.
If someone else tries it, I'd buy it. When Science Fiction was good it had elements of all four.
No, but the sight of two hard-rode 35-45 six-sevens parroting poorly-written salacious dialog was much improved by the possibility that I'd learn something. And, if I was forty years younger and that much more flammable, maybe I would have. I don't know if the intended buyers were male. A schoolgirl who wanted to destroy the math club would find this useful.
'Fill every rift with ore'- Dewy 19-25 9-10s in thin T-shirts instead of those stupid bikinis who could act and had good salacious dialog would have filled every rift with ore. Advanced calculus? No. Maybe something about conical sections.
I'm not sure I identify with experiencing "flow" as such, but I have felt video games to be addictive. From my mid-teens onwards I've mostly played single-player games, particularly long turn-based strategy games like Civilization and Total War. I went to university though where most of the work I was doing essentially needed to be done from (my uni) home, sat in my room, and I found social media and video games like these to be absolute hell in terms of how distracting they are. We often seem to want to define whether things are addictive by whether they have some kind of objective measure of brain-altering chemical interaction, but tie ourselves in knots arguing that some things seem obviously addictive to some people but don't meet the definition, while other things meet the definition but don't seem to be of much harm. But we could instead define by outcome; whether something has qualities that inspire repetitive behaviour that is carried out to the detriment of one's health (and health being a complete state of mental, physical, and social wellbeing... etc). Or at least to define addiction in much this way.
At university, I fell into a behavioural pattern of *click* scrolling through Facebook "for anything good", *click* scrolling through Twitter, *click* scrolling through Youtube - "OK, all caught up... what now?" I'd feel sort of itchy, my brain was restless. I'd know I have uni work to complete, lectures notes to look over, labs to prepare for... but my brain didn't feel /ready/ for that. I needed to calm the itchiness before I could knuckle down, so I'd seek out experiences *click-click* I remembered having while playing video games that were installed on my computer. Those fleeting feelings of satisfaction, though they varied in nature with the particular game. And I'd play for hours at a time trying to find them, switching between different games, but either never really finding them or them being, as I say, fleeting. Then I'd stop and wonder what I was doing, think that I needed to knuckle down, but figure I should probably just check if anything interesting was happening in the world first... *click* scroll through Facebook, *click* scroll through Twitter, *click* scroll through Youtube... I'd miss or delay meal times, eat into my sleep, put off uni work, waste entire weekends not cleaning my home, and also presumably see friends and other human beings less than I otherwise would, by getting stuck in these cycles. It was harming my health.
During that period, it was obvious that /something/ was wrong, but it actually took some time for me to believe that social media and video games were partly responsible. It took slightly longer to consider that I didn't (or at least no longer) consciously appreciate video games so much when they were designed to be like slot machines, if they don't have some additional benefit to me (like teaching me a bit of history or geography). I'd get frustrated upon realising that I'd spent an entire day playing a game that had been drip-feeding me feelings of small accomplishment without having made any improvement to my actual life. And I don't know if video games are comparable to slot machines in this regard, or if they are just a different kind of slot machine, but I really think this was their main attraction for me. Accomplishing something in real life can often seem so /hard/. Uni work only offered any sense of accomplishment after maybe an hour or more work, whereas video games and social media dangled the possibility of achieving it near-instantly. And when life feels difficult and scary, as it can do moving away from home for the first time to be at uni, I think it's natural to grasp for whatever small victories, small feelings of accomplishment, that you can find. It feels like mentally preparing oneself for longer, more arduous tasks --- like uni work --- from which the sense of accomplishment and improvement to our lives will be greater. I guess this is quite a familiar concept more generally; procrastination, but typically we associate that with actually beneficial tasks that we at some point want to do; like doing the washing, cleaning the home, etc. This is more like washing your clothes, cleaning your house, and mowing the lawn; five times in a row without eating or sleeping. Catch anyone doing that and I think you'd recommend a doctor.
I don't know if it's worth labelling myself as having had an addiction during that time, but I can certainly see how someone being in an amplified version of that situation might benefit from being considered an addict; my own life wasn't ultimately affected too badly, though it felt crap at the time. I also think there's an underappreciated factor of these games being designed to be as addictive as possible --- and gamers calling for them to be --- that only gets a look-in when a game has purchaseables and they more obviously resemble slot machines. But the perspective I feel I've gained has more recently been benefitting my life. Ensuring I work in an office during the week has instantly made accessing distractions much harder 9--5. Starting each day with half an hour of language-learning on Duolingo has given me a small sense of accomplishment that I can fall back on whether the rest of the day ends up being good or bad. It's a similar story with early morning exercise, also brief, that I am now trying to maintain. And I do still play video games and use social media, but I'm much more discerning in what games I play and when, and what I use social media for, and how easy I make it for myself to access the latter. I "unfriend" people (God, what a manipulative word) on Facebook if they post too many things that are irritatingly political -- it's not want I want to use Facebook for. Removing the Twitter shortcut from my phone's home-screen (Android phone) now means I have no muscle-memory for accessing the app, and I don't follow people who post things that aren't either calmly pleasant or simply informative --- no drama, please. They are mostly small changes, but I think they add up to a larger whole.
So something that I think is improving my ability to not be distracted is having real hobbies. "Real" in this sense means there's a thing in the world I am setting out to accomplish. If you *like* video games, your hobby can be video games, but it can't be "I'm going to boot up my game of choice" - you should be either designing a game, streaming games, or trying to be the best in the world at a game. "Being the best in the world at a game" implies watching pro matches, explainers - thinking deeply about the game for a little bit - *then* jumping into queue.
Having a wide variety of those tends to reduce the brain-itch portion of these apps and increase the portion of which I actually am choosing to spend my time.
> I fell into a behavioural pattern of *click* scrolling through Facebook "for anything good", *click* scrolling through Twitter, *click* scrolling through Youtube - "OK, all caught up... what now?" I'd feel sort of itchy, my brain was restless. I'd know I have uni work to complete, lectures notes to look over, labs to prepare for... but my brain didn't feel /ready/ for that. I needed to calm the itchiness before I could knuckle down, so I'd seek out experiences *click-click*
This is a very good description of the experience. Somehow, for me, this is much more of an issue when there are *two* different infinite streams - if I get to the point where it feels like I've "used up" my Facebook feed, I can switch to Reddit, and once I "use up" that feed, I think "maybe there's something new on Facebook again". It *feels* like if there were only one, I'd at least have a bigger push to get out at that moment where I've "used up" that feed.
Also, I think Civilization absolutely needs to add a "one more turn" button adjacent to the "next turn" button. If you press "next turn", it just goes to the next turn normally. But if you press "one more turn", it goes to the next turn normally, but at the end of the turn there is no "next turn" button available, just "quit to desktop". Obviously you *can* just start right back up, but you can give your future self a push to quit and go to sleep.
For some stupid reason I deliberately popped open [name of game removed] a few days ago on the weekend, even though I explicitly remembered someone saying on the old blog "why did that get mentioned here, clicker games directly trigger the prefrontal cortex." And I kept on remembering that phrase as I went from enjoyment to hate. At least I completed the game.
I won't play video games during my workday, because I know they would destroy my workday. But "things in a browser" don't seem to count in my head and I'll spend lots of time, as many others have said, just scrolling out of some dark flow when I need to get to effing work.
this is my favorite review yet, though I haven't read all of the others.
My one issue is that, in my undergrad, we learned about early Skinner boxes, and mice did not work harder for random rewards than constant rewards. It's a small nitpick, but it's there.
I don't see that claim supported in the link? It compares a number of different partial reinforcement schedules, of which variable ratio (i.e. random rewards) gives the strongest response, but I don't see it comparing them to full reinforcement. If there's a sentence or two that I missed that says this clearly, could you excerpt it?
I mean it's a throwaway line in the intro, but I wouldn't use the word addictive here. His statement that randomness is addictive as demonstrated in rats by partial reinforcement schedules isn't really supported.
If randomness wasn't addictive, we'd expect rats to pull the lever a little less than a full reinforcement schedule. Which is what happens. Rats on a random schedule don't pull the lever less than an intermittent reinforcement schedule either. (2 pulls for a drop).
Rats on a random/variable schedule do have a bit longer extinction period when reinforcement stops, but while that is vaguely related to addiction, I don't think the existence of that effect supports the statement that "randomness is addictive".
I think you can make a variable schedule more / less addictive, using other techniques described, but, with rats, for it to be addictive in the first place, you usually start on a fixed schedule and move to a variable schedule.
Keep in mind, there's other types of randomness. A random time interval after last drop, is not nearly as addictive, for instance. So again, makes a catchy intro but not exactly accurate imo.
Reuven Dar has some surprisingly compelling evidence that cigarettes and tobacco are addictive for social and ritual reasons rather than because of the biochemistry of nicotine. I'm not fully convinced, but if true it would clearly have implications for addiction more broadly. I've always sort of wanted to see Scott review this literature.
I quit unsuccessfully a couple of times before kicking the habit, and my experience is it's definitely more social and psychological than to do with nicotine. The physical withdrawal is short and once done with, fine. But I still went back to smoking 6 months later, and lots of people do after years off. I'd like to see evidence on success rates of quitting using some kind of nicotine replacement Vs methods that focus on more counselling approach. Lots of people I know tried e-cigarettes and ended up back on tobacco, and when I quit using nicotine gum I went back to cigs I'm the end as well.
I've heard of people saying that kicking nicotine is harder than kicking heroin, there any truth to that? If so, what are these social and psychological elements that keep you coming back?
I always thought that the difference between alcohol/drug addiction and vices like gambling is once you reach a certain addiction threshold with the chemical substances, your body physically punishes you if you try to quit. I was also under the impression that withdrawal symptoms are worse for some substances than they are for others, and they are the main barrier to quitting.
Perhaps for some people nicotine has that level of physical withdrawal like alcohol/heroin, where you vomit/get the shakes/ can die if not weened off. But I think for most people (including me) the cravings / withdrawal from nicotine are unpleasant but manageable.
Psychologically I'd say smoking was a crutch for me when I felt anxious, or bored, or like I didn't know what to say at a party - and it feels pleasurable, controllable pleasure/distraction on demand. I think for lots of people who are addicted to some behaviour there's a paradoxical feeling of control in doing something self-destructive, or self-harming (including literal self-harm). You get engrained habits, used to doing something in a certain context, like smoking after a meal or while walking - change the context and it's a lot easier to stop.
Socially there's the thing of if you do drugs or drink a lot you end up friends with others who do so too, less of a factor with smoking but still a bit - I met a lot of my friends in outdoor smoking areas.
I've never tried heroin, but I've had a terrible time quitting nicotine generally – first cigarettes and now vaping. I've never had a problem with cocaine, but then I've only ever done it socially, and never regularly.
I did finally quit smoking cigarettes, for 8-10 years, and, that time, it was _easy_. My relapse involved a single cigarette and then sharing part of a pack with someone. I switched to vaping soon thereafter, as a less obviously terrible alternative. (Vaping does seem to be overall very much less terrible in many ways, tho, ironically, it's much easier to _dose_ myself much stronger than with cigarettes, because the latter is so much more immediately terrible.)
I have no _social_ elements to my vaping now – if anything, there are only _anti-social_ elements.
But, to me anyways, 'withdrawal' feels _extremely_ psychological. During my many attempts to quit, I've often found myself in something like a 'fugue' state where I felt like I was watching myself, e.g. go to the store and buy a new pack.
My most successful attempt at quitting – that lasted about a decade – also involved extreme psychology, e.g. disgust.
I've also noticed that, for some smokers/vapers/nicotine-users, including myself, we can mostly handle not having cigarettes/vape-stuff/nicotine-delivery-mechanisms, and for extended periods (e.g. hours, days, or even weeks on end), but as soon as they are even possibly accessible, we act compulsively to get a fix.
Both, both, can't it be both? And different factors impact different people differently. There seems to be a genetic combo that makes some people more likely to get addicted than others if they do smoke, and we've known for a long time that if you begin fairly regular use of a potentially-addictive substance in early or mid teens, it'll be much harder to quit than if you begin later, but use for the same amount of time at the same levels. It all works together!
I think the important message is that drugs are not 'uniquely addictive' in that the user has NO control, but levels of personal control vary a lot, based on both personal factors (genetics, ACE etc) and social/environmental factors. Despair seems to be a particularly encouraging factor for addictions.
I've always assumed, and seen in my clinical work, that compulsive behaviours work pretty much exactly the same was as addictions to psychoactive substances.
My understanding is that Dar has found essentially no evidence for chemical dependence in his work, though again I haven't made a deep dive into the details of these studies and I'm not fully convinced.
Oh, for sure. I go back and forth on "Scott's posts on neurology and mental health helped me understand myself better and give me better tools to eventually crawl out of my life long depression" and "Scott's posts on neurology and mental health let me feel i was doing something to improve my mental health, and thus gave me an excuse to not actually work on improving"
I think this is a common internet pattern too. There are tons of people reading about entrepreneurship instead of working on it, looking up motivational hacks instead of getting motivated, and so on.
I find messages like these suspicious and don't click on links like this. My instinct is that you're advertising for something not related, or trying to push some other website.
If there's a comment you've written out about this, I'd love to read it here in the comments section, rather than being redirected to a google doc. Having your content hidden behind a fold like this is bad and I wish this kind of thing wouldn't happen in this comment section.
I appreciate that, but while it's not crazy long it's too long for a comment.
The subject of this article is something I've been focused on for a number of years, and I've read a number of books on it, as well as working in the machine gambling industry directly for a couple of years.
What is lacking in the commentary is a definition of a 'game' that factors in such seemingly diverse activities as slot machines and chess. When you elucidate that the whole problem becomes, not exactly trivial, but manageable, even at scale.
I've been working on a new social network based upon these ideas optimised for purpose and fulfillment instead of behavioural addiction, so this is all very practical.
Check out the Google Doc, it's not a scam and an external link is warranted in this specific instance.
It is an expanded definition of "game" that includes things like bitcoin, football, science, democracy, and google search. Seven pages of mostly definitions.
Yeah but the definitions are important. It's not just a matter of "Bitcoin is a game", "science is a game", etc... That would be trite.
When you understand this it means you can build game systems that help people and bring them into confluence, instead of the parasitic game systems offered to us under the pretext of 'revealed preferences'.
Play is interaction for the purpose of entertainment.
I like to use Candy Land as an example. A child interacting with Candy Land in the intended manner is playing it and therefore Candy Land is a game for them. An adult supervising the child who knows that the outcome of Candy Land was predetermined when the deck was shuffled might not be deriving entertainment from the interaction; they are OPERATING Candy Land rather than PLAYING it, in the same manner as one might operate an eggbeater. Two people can be performing identical actions, yet only one of them is playing a game.
If this definition were complete then the statement 'to game the system' would be meaningless, since treating a pursuit like electoral politics as a game is not done for the purpose of entertainment.
I think you're eliding the distinction between treating something AS a game and treating it LIKE a game. Treating an election AS a game (as might be done by someone who lived in a different country and who had no stake in the election) might indeed be done for entertainment.
A person who treats something as a game from outside is not what people mean by 'gaming the system'. To game the system is an approach of a participant, a 'player', hence "don't hate the player, hate the game'. To treat a pursuit as a game while not engaging for entertainment purposes (games in this context can be life or death), indicates that entertainment is not a necessary part of the definition of a game. I might treat my exams as a game, but that doesn't mean I am attempting to get entertainment from the process.
If you read my document more closely you'll find the resolution of this is there and it won't offend your priors.
Your definitions seem consistent, but not necessarily *helpful for a conversation*. That is, your definitions don't match up with the ways that English speakers use those words, so if one person is using the normal English definitions while another person is using your definitions, confusion will result. For example, one of your examples is the education system, which approximately no one (who hasn't read your doc) would describe as a game. I suspect this happens because you're trying to create a definition that singly describes both the normal sense (something that someone does for entertainment) and the phrase "to game the system". However, the normal English definition of the word is probably something like
1) something interacted with for entertainment
2) a system of rules that in some ways resembles the first definition
That's not necessarily a bad thing, but it does mean that you should be careful with using your definitions. It's similar to many academic fields that redefine common terms in ways that people outside of those fields wouldn't use. Those academic fields are definitely helped by their terms, but there winds up being strife at the border.
Yes, I understand. The purpose of these definitions is to conduct conscious social engineering on a stable foundation, instead of solving stumbling blindly into accidental social engineering that outputs social validation slot machines like Jack Dorsey and Mark Zuckerberg.
It's meant to be a technical doc for people who want to create meta stable social tech that can scale and last for decades.
I often felt like the "education system" was a game, e.g. I 'played' the system. (That was probably in part, or maybe mostly, because the system actively prevented me from learning.)
A well written review, which I think found the right balance of summary and personal feedback.
I did this stuff for a while, so some thoughts.
1. All the tricks described are real.
2. I don't know of any genius psychologists working on these things. Features are implemented mostly on a "copy this successful thing, but a bit different" approach. Not necessarily less unethical, but certainly less sinister.
3. The book makes these games seem like alien technology directly hacking all our brains pleasure sensors. Most people will find these games boring and stupid. It's still tragic that people get addicted despite this. Perhaps more tragic.
4. The book attributes the success of the machines to their sheer addictiveness. In reality factors like density, efficiency and automation are probably more important.
5. Honestly, I'd say people find games way more addictive. The things I hear from people working on micro-transactions are, frankly, scary. Khan Academy and Duolingo are very successful, and they have to optimize for two things rather than one.
As you might notice, this is a 2013 article, so it's not unlikely that the modern equivalents of these games have greatly involved in their ability to manipulate players.
What I have noticed about modern freemium games is that they are now hilariously unsubtle. I universally uninstall them within minutes of downloading them, because they make it so transparently clear that you’ll need to pay to progress. And this tells me I’m not the audience for the game. They’re probably designing this whole segment of games to aim specifically at the minority of people who will be susceptible, and from whom they can successfully hook.
There _is_ a subsegment of PtW games where they're actually sufficiently well designed that you can take it as a personal challenge to do well in them without paying anything. You can never get to the top, of course, but there's a certain satisfaction in using player skill to beat up people who pay for their bonuses.
I like to do this a couple times a year. I download a game when I have some extra free time, and play it to see how well I can compete against other players, including those who are paying to progress. It's like I'm playing a subgame within the game, maximizing efficiency.
I have one rule that I only broke once, never ever spend money on one of these games. They're designed to make any money transaction just move you towards the "the climb is too steep to be fun anymore" section of the game faster. If you spent money to get there, you will want to spend more to keep progressing, even though the game gets harder and harder to progress in. That's when I stop playing and move on.
Most people's defences have evolved too, though. Once you've fallen for a dumb trick once, or seen enough of your friends do it, you won't fall for it again, which is why I no longer get a dozen Farmville invitations a day, and I haven't been invited to "punch the monkey to win $20K" for a couple of decades.
If you want to extract money efficiently the best thing would be stacking people neatly in rows, with vertical surfaces that don't consume space, without needing to pay operators or waste time by shuffling cards.
The free version of Duolingo is riddled with ads for freemium games. I downloaded Toy Blast through them. The thing Toy Blast did well at the beginning was make the levels beatable without spending money. They also seem to have a win progression that is influenced by how many minutes one has continued to play it or how many minutes one played last time.
I'd open the app, play a board and win immediately. Play another board, win immediately. Third board, suddenly more difficult, with a near miss feel. That appears to me to be the hook; the "I must pay in order to stay in my flow." I made myself never pay though and after ten tries or so the app would relent and let me win a few again. That was the cycle, if I could get through the loss boards the algorithm would eventually return easy wins. If I messed up one of those wins the app would give me a repeat easy board. "time" and "money spent" are terms in that equation. "speed of moves" is probably another.
In other words if Duolingo is "successful" it is probably in part due to how well they hand learners off to Freemium badlands. Other revenue.
About a year ago, I think they must have been not making enough money, they removed the easier wins. Then it was pointless and I deleted it.
It was a compulsive activity but did not cost money, only time.
It's very worrying. The often-paternalistic mindset of game designers would see nothing wrong in doing it for a non-F2P game, and if it's okay for a non-F2P game, surely it's okay for a F2P game?
I would agree with this - at least at my workplace, hardly anyone actually gambles even though (perhaps because?) we make this stuff. Meanwhile, a well-designed Free to Play game (i.e. Pay to Win) can be darkly impressive in how it uses every trick in the book, including the social pressure to carry your load within a "guild", putting you on a treadmill where you will lag behind if you don't pay, and the way it tries to ease you into payment play, like offering huge benefits _really_ cheaply just to get you to make that very first initial purchase that breaks down your resistance for additional ones. Gambling machines are child's play in comparison - the Free to Play market is where the true sophistication can be found.
On our previous discussion about consumers not wanting to pay for apps, I was reminded of the Oatmeal: https://theoatmeal.com/blog/apps
But being really resistant to that 99cent charge is important if you already have succumbed to other $5/day addictions! You know you are likely to start paying a lot more once you start spending money.
> If designers optimized gambling machines for addictiveness, why can’t they do the same for these apps?
There has been quite a lot of research into the neural correlates of addiction, and while I'm certainly not an expert here, I don't think any discussion of addiction is complete with considering the role of dopamine.
Addictions are built on top of activities that activate the pathways of reward, craving, and seeking in the brain. No matter how much gamification is thrown into the mix, you (or most people) aren't going to get addicted to being punched in the face, because this isn't the sort of thing that primes the pump of reward, habituation, and craving.
Yes, there's a reason that only vices are addictive, but it might be more accurate to say that there's a reason we call them vices: they are fundamentally attractive in ways that make people feel they need to resist or control them via moral codes or other mechanisms. If we weren't drawn to them naturally, we wouldn't be concerned with them. Activities (or chemicals) that take advantage of that natural attraction are the foundation that game designers are building on top of.
(Notably, a lot of really enjoyable activities don't involve craving. I love to ski, but I don't crave it in the way I crave caffeine, and while skiing can get me into a flow state in a way that a cup of coffee can't, coffee is addictive in a way that skiing just isn't.)
I'm not sure I fully buy this explanation, only because I've definitely known people who seemed addicted to things that don't inspire this sort of craving (at least in most people) and that are "productive". Two examples are exercise addicts and workaholics.
I consider myself somewhat of a workaholic (to the point where I actually need to stop myself from working via behavioral triggers such as setting alarms, because otherwise I'll work to the point where it's bad for my health and for my long-term productivity), and happen to also have dealt with addiction. Workaholism *feels* different from addiction, in a way I can't really put my finger on.
definitely possible to get addicted to skiing and crave it. Lots of fanatics will claim shredding is better than sex etc. maybe a good illustration that different people get addicted to different things. no matter the psychological tricks it would be almost impossible to get me hooked on slot machines for instance as just way too boring.
Many of the drugs directly or intensely trigger dopamine, while most activities probably do so at a somewhat lower level or less directly.
I'd bet we only consider things vices when they cause us trouble and are hard to stop, not just that they are fundamentally attractive in different ways than non-vices. For example; eating isn't considered a vice despite most people doing it pretty compulsively. Most people do crave food when they haven't eaten in a while, and the craving gets stronger and stronger the longer we go without eating. Many people spend more time, money and energy on food than they really need to, and I at least can think pretty obsessively about it. But we don't call it a vice because we consider eating justified and useful. It's a vice only if we eat so much or so strangely (binging for example) that it creates problems in our lives.
Nice review. My two cents on "virtuous addiction": I think this actually happened to me for a few months when Pokemon Go came out. The core gameplay was mostly "find the part of town with the most Pokestops, then walk in circles there until your legs give out." It had all the hallmarks of the flow state, and perhaps most importantly, you could do it with your brain half off.
Then there are people like one of my friends, who has one of those pendulum thingies that move his phone back and forth while it sits on the table, to trick the Pokemon Go game into thinking he is walking around.
I had a similar thing going with Ingress (the location-based game Niantic made before Pokemon Go); in fact, the reason why I bought a smartphone was specifically to addict myself on something that would give me exercise. And it actually worked for quite a bit; the game's statistics tell me that I logged a total of 277 kilometers of walking while playing it.
The two reasons why it stopped working was one, that it was *too* addictive - I knew that I couldn't just go out to play a little bit, if I did go then I might spend several hours chasing different portals, and as a result I'd avoid going out at all if I wasn't sure I had as much time as it might take. The other reason was that I reached level 8, which is the point where leveling up stops giving you new abilities, so working on further advancement stopped feeling motivating.
The authors of this work https://www.nber.org/papers/w28666 also mention this. They explore the idea that we are not only consuming content on social media, but also we're consuming attention (how we do it, and why platforms allow this). They claim this could explain, at least in part, why we seem to be so addicted to social media.
I design casino games including slot machines, and in the USA there are regulations against faking the reels to give near misses. The frequency with which symbols appear has to be consistent whether they are part of a winning configuration or not, so that in theory you can reverse-engineer the math and figure out how often you should win. (Recently certain states have begun to relax this regulation.)
The thing to remember is that all the slot machines will give similar “RTP” (return to player, on average 88%-95% of the player’s bet comes back as a prize and 5%-12% is kept by the casino, the higher RTPs usually go with the higher-bet-amount machines of course). The designer is trying to keep the player playing HIS game rather than a different game, and players generally come in with a certain amount of money which they will usually lose but which they will get several hours of enjoyable play out of if the game is well-designed. The money lost is considered part of the “entertainment budget”.
A key metric is the doubling percentage—the game is volatile enough that a player who quits when he either doubles his money or loses or it will walk away a winner 20-30% of the time, enough that they sometimes get the satisfaction of beating the casino THIS TIME. If they always ended up broke they wouldn’t enjoy playing.
There is also a distinction between “destination” casinos and “locals” casinos. Players on the fancy Las Vegas Strip casinos are there to splurge and the games are therefore greedier. But no st casinos make their money from regular players whom they need to keep coming back, so they have to offer better odds.
My recommendation is, if you must play a machine, the Blackjack and Video Poker machines give way better odds, if you learn some strategy it is easy to keep the House Edge under 2%. On the casino tables, Baccarat and Craps also have good odds and don’t require any strategic skill (except to avoid the sucker bets and just make the main bets).
The best trick that I personally have seen are the machines that play a few-second snippet of a song you know (I'm thinking in particular of the Star Wars machines) while the reels are spinning. If your brain wants to hear the next few-second snippet, it has to press the button again.
Can you tell me more? A lot of what the review describes (like reel mapping) seems to qualify as "faking the reels to give near misses". Is the book describing something that never happened, that used to happen but is now not happening, that is only relevant outside the US, or what?
IIUC based on the comment and this link (http://stoppredatorygambling.org/wp-content/uploads/2012/12/Harrigan-presentation-to-the-2010-NH-Gambling-Commission.pdf) from the review, the symbols on the reel can be weighted non-uniformly to increase the likelihood of near misses, but there's some other thing called "near misses" which is NOT allowed--presumably making near misses more likely in some way that can't arise from weighting the probabilities of each symbol. (E.g., each of three reels has probabilities 2/3 cherry, 1/3 blank, but 100% of the time you see 2 cherries and 1 blank because the reels aren't independent.)
It used to happen but for decades (since the 90’s, maybe earlier) it violated casino regulations in the USA. However, loopholes have been sought and there are some games in the last few years that technically fall under a different kind of math but have a similar near-miss effect, this is likely to be addressed soon but in the meantime the games are out there and doing well.
A college acquaintance back in the 90s who was from Las Vegas had a summer "job" that consisted of playing video poker all day, every day. Apparently if you had a big enough bankroll (his boss provided that) and followed the correct strategy, you ended up slightly favored against the house. Or so I was told.
Video poker shows you a hand, asks you to hold some cards and replace others, and then based on the final hand gives a payout. I think it's something like your initial payment for a pair, twice the payout for a two pair, five times for a straight or a flush, etc. Different machines offer different payout schedules, and if you are familiar with the math of it all, you can calculate which payout schedules and which strategies of holding and replacing optimize your return, sometimes above the 99% level (but only if you play frequently enough to occasionally get a royal flush).
It is (was?) common that a Video Poker machine had a machine-level jackpot. If you need to play until you win it (and then leave as it resets to a low level that you don't like), persistence and bankroll matters.
My parents had optimized the strategy in the pre-pandemic times (former computer programmers with math grad education) and calculated that at the most favorable machines, you usually get 99.6% return with optimal play, but that the free giveaways of buffet meals, cruises, movie tickets, and home goods, often added up to a net positive (at least, if you consider your time at the machines as entertainment, the way that people consider spending money on a movie).
There's online calculators now where you can input the pay chart and it will tell you the best strategy and expected return. You are correct that casino bonuses do make some machines plus EV.
Blackjack is still the best game in the house though. If you play at a shoe game at middling stakes your chance of getting kicked out is pretty low and you can still make plus EV on top of free drinks and bonuses
I honestly don't get why people do this- certainly if you're smart/dedicated enough to be plus-EV at a shoe blackjack game like this, you're smart/dedicated enough to be net-positive at a low-middling NL hold'em game, which has the same benefits and a lot more player control (and, in my experience, a lot more enjoyable). Certainly you won't be net-positive at high enough stakes to attract pro players, but plenty of 5/10 NL games have a lot of dumb money around.
(Just to clarify: I really don't think this is hard. I was net-positive playing 2-3 spread in Phoenix for years, and that was *after* paying $6 for my Kilt Lifters at the table every hour or two, and tipping normally- which isn't required and you could totally skip without being kicked out)
I attended a talk by a professional card counter and he said he was optimized for blackjack, not poker. Different skills and he wouldn't try professional poker.
the company i used to work for used to own some casinos, and through that heard of lots of other tricks these places use. One i remember was that the machines placed near the exits/elevators are tuned to have the worst odds, because typically people who play them are just getting rid of spare change / looking to burn 5min and so have no expectations of winning at all.
One fascinating thing about Video Poker games is that if you find them in the right state (a high machine-level jackpot), your expected win may be above 100% _as long_ as you can stay on the machine until you earn the jackpot. There are also Blackjack games that allow you a tiny bit over 100% RTP with perfect play, but where it's not worth the effort if you just want to make money.
I have a few more hypotheses re: the gap between the addictiveness of computer gambling and "virtuous addictions":
1. Orthogonal constraints. A "virtuous addiction" app designer needs to make the app both addictive AND good. This constrains their options. On the other hand, a purely-addictive app designer simply needs to make the app addictive. If something's non-addictive, it goes. It's not surprising that a group optimizing for a single objective can hit it harder than a competing group operating under a major constraint.
2. Not targeting addiction. "Gamification" apps may, for institutional reasons, shy away from the factors that could make them maximally addictive. In your essay you describe the addiction-promoting tactics as increasingly ethically dubious. Apps designed to promote some good behavior may be more likely to avoid ethically dubious practices. (Not super high confidence on this but it's possible.)
3. Reality. When you gamble money you are actually losing money. This actual outcome may tie in to risk-reward systems much more powerfully. Gamification apps have shied away from this. (I can't bet on the Duolingo Owl.)
4. Addiction rarity. We all live in a world with gambling machines; while they are powerfully addictive they only seem to affect a relatively limited total slice of humanity. (You can put forward a Rat Park or a genetics or whatever hypothesis you'd like for this.) That means that the total baseline propensity for addiction (or for any particular addiction) may not be that high; and so the member of the general public who picks up gameified tech—thinking NOT, "let's look for an addiction!", but instead" let's learn French!" or whatever—may just have a relatively low likelihood of getting addicted. (This pairs well with other hypotheses; if a small fraction of humans are addiction-prone, and slot machines are more powerful than the owl, then it may not be surprising that everyone is with slot machines and nobody with the owl.)
"You will earn Gems or Lingots for completing lessons on Duolingo. Typically you will earn Gems or Lingots when you meet your daily XP goal."
That's not really addictive enough. Suppose I want to make a gambling bet with my Gems. I have to *earn* those gems. To do that, I have to complete the daily goal. That's tough. It may be so tough that the effort of earning enough points to get enough gems to make the gamble is more off-putting than the thrill I get from making the once-a-week gamble.
To be truly addictive in the same way, Duolingo would have to do the same thing as the "purchase in-game currency to advance" model for freemium games. Now you can spend hours doing the slog of learning the vocabulary, hit the XP daily goal, get your gems, save them up for the once-a-week opportunity to gamble - OR you can *buy* points towards gems, and if you buy a particular bundle deal of gems you can gamble TWICE a week! For BIG PRIZES! (or a chance of approximately 1 in 2 million of a crappy prize as it works out in reality). Guess which model would garner the most dosh for Duolingo, and which most people would break their resolution and try "just this one time"?
*That's* the addiction model, and having played freemium games where I went in grimly determined never to buy any points, and ended up buying points because hey they're so cheap and I only need a couple of hundred and never buying more (and then I bought more), you can fall into that trap so easily.
Maybe it's even simpler: a "virtuous addiciton" would be almost by definition anti-"flow". We usually equate virtue with getting "better" in some way -- e.g. getting fitter, learning something, becoming more productive, actualy producing more, et cetera. Each and every one of these things is mentally effortful -- requires focus, concentration, the use of what Kahneman calls "System 1" thinking, routine frustration and retrenchment, making mistakes and learning from them, emotional bruising, the combustion of much glucose in the brain.
That's not to say that *all* exercise or learning is non-flow -- certainly when you are polishing your skills, it's possible. You can be a very good skiier and the process of getting even better may involve getting into a pleasureable "zone" where you listen to tiny muscle/environment feedbacks while almost duplicating Franz Klammer's 1984 Innsbruck run. w00t! You can be a pretty good speaker of Japanese and the process of becoming really good could involve a pleasureable "zone" state of conversing with speakers at a slightly higher pace and sophistication than you have yet achieved.
But for the steepest part of the learning curve, which lies between the easy introduction and the state of modest competence, it's *all* effortful, conscious, non-flow, and it involves a great deal of mistake and mistake-analysis-correction. There's no way to be addicted to this, because it's almost its definitional opposite.
I personally find kinesthetic learning to be very flow-like. For example, you brought up skiing. This is a very good example. When I am working on linking my turns in the moguls, for example, I end up screwing up a lot. But I just get up if I fall or stop and restart, re-assess, and continue. There is not much conscious thought going on, though I may talk to myself, either berating myself for screwing up or patting myself verbally on the back. But all this is very automatic and non-introspective, and time passes without notice. I am happy and in the moment.
However, I also experience this flow-like state at the steepest part of the learning curve, when I am picking up a new sport or physical hobby. Many people find this stage very frustrating, and that's why a lot of people have a hard time picking up new physical skills. However, I love this frustration and love to drop into the repetitive failure that eventually results in a success. When I do this, I feel like I am in a flow state.
I have come to realize that I am different in this and have often wondered why that is. A part of it is that I am a kinesthetic learner, I think. For example, I need to write things down to remember them. The movement of my hand does something to my brain to make it more likely to retain the information. But another part is just my addiction to that feeling of eventual success. I love that feeling more than anything and am will to keep failing to eventually have that feeling.
Thanks for the comment. Maybe you bring to the kinesthetic learning a pre-existing state of competence that puts you immediately in the more enjoyable intermediate-to-advanced part of the learning curve? That plus the existence of the (definitely addictive) previous state of success might result in a very different experience.
I'm thinking of the example of language learning: it turns out I am quite good at that, for unknown reasons, probably genetic. The second language I learned (meaning first foreign) was challenging and non-flow, but those after it were easier *even in the beginning* and more enjoyable. I think there is some part of the brain that got wired up with the first challenge, so I skipped some of the effortful early "I'm never going to get this!" frustration the second and subsequent times.
Maybe you have a similar experience with some kinds of athletic learning? I recall Eric Heiden (famous speed skater) saying that in the off season he took up inline skating and found it fit very comfortably.
I've seen people at skate parks doing something similar to what you describe - they try a trick, fall off, get up, get back on the board, try a trick again. Definitely appears to be a kinesthetic-learning flow, as well as a supportive community for that, where there are fifteen people at the park all doing that and reinforcing each other.
But some people get up on a board, fall off and may do it a few more times that day but don't go back the next day. Is it a different experience of physical pain? Is it fewer ties to the skate community? Is it generally lower "frustration tolerance"?
That barrier to entry into positive flow is important.
I can't remember the exact source, and it's probably been described in several (or many) 'aphorisms', but the idea is that the feeling of frustration like you described _always_ precedes 'enlightenment', and I've similarly found (or so I think) that I have trained myself to _appreciate_ those feelings of frustration when learning something new.
I think also that something that is extracting money from people usually has more money to spend on addictive features, while something that just takes constant money can't give you payouts that reward the addiction the same way.
I think it's important to note that people are quite capable of getting addicted to gambling even in the absence of any of all the flashy lights and clever tricks. A great many gambling addicts spend their days in the dingy and unoptimised surroundings of a bookmaker's office.
The underlying activity of gambling is addictive (or compulsive, or something) which many of these other things aren't.
> If designers optimized gambling machines for addictiveness, why can’t they do the same for these apps? If bad machines can be made addictive, then why can’t good machines?
The problem is that (for lack of a better term) simple addictions are easier than complex addiction. In the same way that slots are more addicting than poker (faster reward loop, more stimulating), it's also more stimulating than "good" addictions. A good addiction is something like an app that helps you keep a habit running every day. even as it is gameified, only a tiny portion of the habit is gamified. Running every day still is the same experience it always is, and it will be the majority of the "use gamified app, run" loop. maybe you spend 5min doing addicting app stuff, and 20 minutes doing running stuff (which is exhausting and sucks).
However, there is a parallel experience - addiction to self help *content*. Stuff that tells you to get up, go, solve your problems through the power of will. You read it, you're stimulated, and instead of getting up and solving your problems (hard, long reward loop), you seek out more of the stimulant - more self help. You can find tons of youtube vlogs and articles and blogs of people talking about their addiction to self help, and how it didn't actually help them.
A very good point. I've seen people get addicted to making plans for self-improvement. Actually executing the plans is exhausting and non-fun, and so never gets done. But making the plans! Yes that is a lot of fun.
People do similar things dreaming about home improvement, and fitness improvement, too. It's a very interesting category. One could argue straight-out money gambling has similarity, too, because, after all, the hypothetical goal of the gamble is to win money -- that is, to achieve an improvement in the state of your wallet.
See also: r/boardgames Check Out My Collection posts where OP posts a kallax with 40 games then comments "I've only played 10 of these, my most recent purchases haven't even left the shrinkwrap"
I suspect it is even worse -- successful self-help defeats itself.
If you could actually give a lecture that makes people super productive, the next time you would want to give a lecture, all your customers would be like "sorry, I am too busy working on my startup". You could only sell one book.
If you advice does NOT work, but it makes people feel good, they will come for more lectures, and more books.
Therefore, even if actually miraculous self-help teachers exists, they are not the ones you know. They are neither popular nor rich.
This is something (or something similar) I think about in the context of planned obsolescence. It's not true that there are NO industries/areas-of-activity that aren't (financially) successful with a 'project'-based business model (e.g. Hollywood, publishing, video games), so maybe there IS hope that, e.g. self-help, dishwashing machine manufacturers, could be similarly re-tooled.
I AM pretty sympathetic to planned obsolescence tho, as it's an obvious strategy to keep one's 'concern' (e.g. business) a 'going concern', which is obviously useful for the owners, managers, and employees of that concern.
I wonder what observational evidence Schull (or the author of the review, or society at large) would or should view as supporting the opposite idea, namely that the participant in the activity is at fault for engaging in it self-destructively. I’m not saying that this can’t be answered, only that it strikes me as a difficult question, and perhaps an important one before we dismiss the “fault” hypothesis too quickly and categorically.
In a way, there is obviously a human fault here (most of us probably have some experience with addiction, however minor?), but as the review notes, triggering the fault requires circumstances external to the person.
It seems to me that most addictions necessarily require a "personal fault" (genetic susceptibility) and also a "corporate fault" (somebody working hard to encourage addictive behavior or sell addictive substances for profit, though possibly taking token measures to assuage their feelings of responsibility). If either one of these is missing, the addiction won't (can't?) happen. It helps to have some kind of third-party fault too, such as a crappy work/home life that makes the person want to escape to the relative pleasantness of a slot machine.
I think the natural thing to say is that if a situation changes when circumstances change, then a good part of the causation can be attributed to the changed circumstances. If something stays constant when circumstances change, then a good part of the causation is internal.
Suppose it is descriptively true that X routinely steals from stores, but when police officers are present and watching him, he is deterred from stealing anything. I think your criterion is satisfied—changed circumstances, i.e., the presence of police officers, changes X’s proclivity to engage in the destructive behavior. But it isn’t obvious, to me at least, that that really means that the “fault” explanation should be viewed as less plausible simply by virtue of the criterion being satisfied.
>>Third, maybe all designers worth their salt work for casinos, and virtuous apps are scraping the bottom of the barrel when they hire designers. The incompetent designers who work for virtuous apps just aren’t smart enough to create addictive products.<<
I suspect that this hypothesis comes closest to the truth. There isn't as much incentive or profit, on the whole, in the "virtuous" ones, and the lack of incentive causes them to be, quite simply, lower quality.
I have ADHD, and like many people with ADHD, I am reasonably prone to behavioral addictions. It requires constant vigilance to prevent them, and I still don't always succeed. I've been addicted to certain "free-to-play" games in the past, for example. I also use DuoLingo regularly, and I can say there's frankly no comparison between the two, in terms of addictiveness.
There are a few elements in DuoLingo that show "promise" in that regard (such as achievements or advancing your rank and league) but not many. Take in-game currency, as an example. Free-to-play games typically have at least one (if not more than one) in-game currency and a dizzying array of things to buy with it. Typically, many items or actions flatly require it. DuoLingo does have in-game currency, but the problem is, there's almost nothing you can buy with it. So, once you've bought the few available perks (as I have), there's very little incentive to earn more currency or keep going endlessly. Similarly, FitBit was uncomfortable to wear, and I found the app rather clunky and unintuitive to use. It wasn't really clear to me what was even *supposed* to be addictive about it.
So, those are just one or two examples, but it's illustrative of my point that the quality isn't generally there with the virtuous stuff. I truly wish it were, so that when I indulge bad habits, as inevitably happens from time to time, I could at least get something worthwhile out of it, but it's just not.
For what it's worth, Habitica (a to-do list gamification), came the closest for me, but it wasn't effortlessly social enough to hold my interest. I didn't see much point in fun new digital outfits or backgrounds, when no one was seeing them but me, and questing alone wasn't as motivating. But I probably could have tried harder to find a guild too. *shrug*
I wonder about this. Why do you think the incentive is lacking for the virtuous ones? As far as I can tell, Duolingo is nowhere near underfunded - they're valued at 2.4 billion dollars, and raised a 35 million dollar round last year. They should be able to compete favorably with free-to-play games, at least on a salary basis, when it comes to getting the best designers.
Honestly, I don't know! I've wondered about that too. Maybe, as someone else suggested, the fact that they are, in some sense, on the "virtuous" side of things makes them avoidant of maximally effective but more ethically questionable techniques. But that still doesn't really explain instances, as with the virtual currency, in which the virtuous app uses the same technique as the vice apps but just does so incompetently.
Possibly because Duolingo and similar apps are about a goal, e.g. learning to be reasonably fluent in a language. That's the end goal, not "get the suckers to spend hours and hours using this app and spending money to do so". If Duolingo switched to "we don't give a damn if you can say 'Où est la plume de ma tante ??' after eighty hours on 'learning' French but you *will* have sunk two hundred bucks into this app during that time " *then* they'd design it to maximise addictiveness.
The part about gamblers and flow reminded me of Edward Ugel's "Money for Nothing" (a memoir about gambling, high-pressure commission sales, and the business of buying out lottery annuities). Ugel suggests that one thing setting apart problem gamblers is that the primary appeal of gambling becomes the thrill of risking loss, not the possibility of winning, so no amount of actually losing detracts from that primary appeal.
I wonder if some of the more extreme sports have a similar appeal in the sense that they seem to be about how close you can get to dying and survive not so much what you achieve, but that's an outsider's perspective on my part
An overall great review but the push back against capitalism as the root of evil is perfunctory and poorly argued.
Modern China is very capitalist. It's no more a communist country right now than north Korea is democratic. If it walks like a duck, quacks like a duck, why are you paying attention to the faded lettering saying, "cat?"
There have been capitalist states with one party systems. To go for a very applicable example, Taiwan before 1987 was a one party dictatorship which defined itself then and now in capitalist terms.
Communist states tend to be one party authoritarian states, but that doesn't mean that one party authoritarianism is equal to communism.
Also, even if we extend charity and accept the PRC as still being communist, Macau is not a good case. Gambling is allowed in Macau because it is explicitly and legally separate from the rest of China as special administrative zone.
Again, separating gambling from society is a long and storied tradition. Arch capitalist Singapore has a very successful casino, but Singaporeans and permanent residents are required to pay a 100$ cover charge to enter the door. It is meant to fleece tourists not residents.
I think the idea that "capitalist society in particular creates people who are susceptible to gambling addiction" is still very much plausible.
Indeed it is *plausible*, but I think the point the author was making is that gambling addiction has been a problema *for as long as mankind has made records of itself*, so why speak of gambling addiction as something caused specifically by capitalism?
I think this is a point I would need to read the book to actually understand, though. However, if the description of the book the author provided is accurate, it seems to me like the kind of work that would go on a very deep explanation of an interesting topic and then just throw a rant about neoliberalism in there for "politically conscious researcher" points.
I would say there is bit of correlation between "capitalist enough to be literate in the ancient world" and "capitalist enough to have a gambling problem".
The vast majority of ancient records we have are written by the wealthiest members of their societies.
Though this is an argument about my third hand reading of the reviewers second hand reading of the author's primary work which in itself bases its capitalism stance on secondary reading of others.
"Capitalism" is sometimes used as a word for a social condition in which every interaction is transactional. I couldn't tell you which thinker came up with this but it goes beyond explicitly economic action. I think Deleuze/Guattari went after this a bit in "Capitalism and Schizophrenia", a society so atomized by transactionality that a human can't retain personhood (but that book is always already being forgotten anyway, even while being read).
Personally I think transactionality operates on a separate axis from "capitalism" per se but I believe many people see them as identical or as merged. When people argue that a non-capitalist society would be kinder to workers, there is fundamentally a non-transactional protection being described.
Gambling does initially look like an overgrowth of transactionality, but another poster mentioned thrill of risking loss versus euphoria of winning and that the addiction results from becoming compulsive about the former, so that losing provides no brakes (writer Ungel addressed this, according to that poster).
I'm interested by the use of the phrase "late capitalism" in particular. This phrase was coined by Werner Sombart, an early-20th-century German economist, in a book titled "Der moderne Kapitalismus" which laid some of the intellectual groundwork for National Socialism.
The implied meaning is that capitalism is in its final stage, and will soon end and be replaced by something else. The fact that the phrase is about a century old, and capitalism is still around, does not reflect well on its accuracy.
I've seen this phrase crop up a few times recently, in a similar context, and I'm curious how a piece of Nazi rhetoric ended up being popular in Western academia.
If we deem capitalism to have begun with the repeal of the Corn Laws in 1849, it won't be long before "late capitalism" comprises the majority of capitalism!
I wouldn't go that far. The Wealth of Nations, written in 1776, is (I would say) an early analysis of capitalism - and remember that it's discussing trends that existed prior to its publication.
The founding of the Dutch East India Company in 1602 is, I think, a decent marker for the beginning of capitalism, depending on how widely you define it: it was the first publicly-traded company, allowing anyone with capital to invest in its activities.
" I'm curious how a piece of Nazi rhetoric ended up being popular in Western academia." Well, the answer to that is obvious from mere inspection, but is currently unsayable.
A really outstanding review. Described the book in enough detail so that you knew what it said, and could decide whether it was worth actually reading, while also presenting a nice separate critique, so that if you didn't want to do a deep dive (by reading the book) you were at least informed of the terms of the debate and the ideas present, and could riff on those.
Also, just plain good English writing. Very well done indeed.
one difference is the lack of randomness and losing.
Like, if you get an answer right on Duolingo, you get a happy bell and animation - you don't lose points the majority of the time and then gain big one of the times
fitbit similarly has all the rewards, but none of the randomness - you set yourself a step goal, you walk that number of steps, you achieve it. Maybe if every 500 steps you either won or lost points, you'd feel compelled to walk more
Also the Duolingo tasks aren't identical enough to build up the rush. I think if it were all arranging the little word-buttons to match a sentence correctly it would reach flow/dark flow more quickly. It interrupts itself with having to speak words into the microphone and having to hear spoken language. Maybe that's their error, it brings in speech/other people; I associate dark flow with silence.
This is very true. I was thinking the main difference was the challenge-skill balance they mentioned above - addicting games are just challenging in enough to keep you engaged without making you get frustrated, but learning a language or doing exercise can be more challenging. I think that combined with the lack of randomness would easily explain the difference between 'virtuous' and non-virtuous apps.
Kind of tying back into the Rat Park concept, I think the life-ruining aspect of a lot of the most addictive activities and substances is probably important.
For myself, procrastinating is most tempting when I already feel hopelessly behind. And of course the marginal minute of procrastinating makes me even farther behind.
Likewise being broke probably increases the appeal of the sort of “dark flow” that slot machines provide and the fact that they makes you more broke seems like it would be reinforcing.
That would predict that virtuous activities are only addictive once they start ruining your life, but that definition has an unsatisfying circularity to it.
I think virtuous activities can become addicted once you experience a similar *sized* change to your life -- i.e. they cause a change which is unexpectedly large, but on the up side.
So for example someone who wins first place in a difficult athletic competition, especially if that's something he never expected to be able to do, can get addicted to that sport, to the wish to have the amazing experience again. Someone who hits it unexpectedly big in business or winning an election or gaining some outsized unexpected level of public recognition could become addicted to trying to re-achieve that.
Call it the Bruce to Caitlyn Jenner effect. Once you've been the center of the entire world's attention, you might very well spend the rest of your life trying to recapture that, and be willing to go to...extreme lengths to do so.
Maybe there is some insight to be gained on virtuous addiction from "big boy" gambling- the stock market. The common wisdom and evidence say that you can't beat the market- but the market is still going to increase ~15% per year, iirc. I know I've fallen down rabbit holes of various types of analysis/straight up dumb guessing on the market, similar to how I treat my more traditional addictive vices (video games), and I'll gain and lose money locally, but I end up ahead by the years end, at least so far; the "addiction" keeps me funneling a large part of my excess income into my "casino" account instead of my safer account that is all ETFs that I let money sit in.
My gut instinct is to say this works because the background steady state is positive (market generally goes up), and the wheels of the activity are only marginally correlated; another poster suggested Pokemon go works here because you are walking in pursuit of the game goal. I don't think you can effectively background e.g. language acquisition, that or it takes too long and the "fun" parts aren't that fun. Although as I write this, it occurs to me that on duolingo I've been in a holding pattern of mostly just doing the review exercises to keep my streak up for about a month, and I *think* I'm trending upwards in my language skills (I solve the problems faster/understand the sentences better).
About DuoLingo: it certainly can be addictive. Last summer I found myself spending a 1–2 hours on it each day. I realized it was becoming a problem when I was reluctant to join a real-life conversation in the language I was learning, because I was busy doing DuoLingo. After that, I've cut way back on it.
Hm, I haven't used Duolingo in a while, so maybe they've upped their game, but I don't remember it being particularly addictive or even enjoyable. Maybe I should give it another try.
I thought this was pretty good and put me in mind of the one time I ever visited Vegas. I liked it there a lot more than I expected to because it was so forthrightly superficial, I couldn't help but respect it.
As for the why of gambling apps and not duolingo, I think it's related to the second point. But if vice is intrinsically alluring, that just pushes the question back another step, why? The pain of the loss is key I think, without that, there's no joy in gambling and not much in any kind of game. See for example: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Su1Rdw3SRHY
Re. the NRA: So what you're saying is, if most people hear a story about a kindly old grandmother who picked up a shotgun and blew someone's head off, and became a murderer, they blame the gun for causing her to murder. Without the gun, she would still be that kindly old grandmother.
Folks with osteoporosis tend to have more difficulty killing people with bare hands, but yeah, she just needs to do some research into murder methods that don't require a lot of strength. Something involving the carotid arteries, maybe? Poison? Boring people to death?
"maybe vices are just inherently more addictive than virtues". what is addictive are freebies. easy wins with no effort. case in point my roommate uses a fitness app where you can enter a draw for every 10 push-ups you do. he freely admits he cheats on the app daily.
Seems like the problem is that virtue is more difficult to check (by an app) than vice. I can't check whether you actually did 10 push-ups, but I can check whether you paid for my in-game currency.
On the other hand, apps like Duolingo can check your language skills, so you can't cheat there. (Well, you could open Google Translate in the next tab, but most people probably wouldn't.)
The problem is that Duolinguo can't reward me with anything I actually want. Their business model doesn't allow giving out significant real prizes, and they have been unable to entice me to believe that their little blue diamonds are fun to have.
It seems to me that, no matter the _quality_ of addictive gambling/apps/whatever, there is always the choice of whether they shall be present in one's life in any nonzero _quantity_.
Framed this way, it is clear that highly-addictive outlets of all kinds, while indeed "vices", are nonetheless in a position to provide a unique service to the rest of the world.
The uniqueness is an unfortunate byproduct of modern society's ever-increasing desire to stamp out individual adversity even at the cost of great amounts of total adversity.
In short, this service is colloquially known as an "idiot tax".
Other such providers of this service have included charlatans, quacks, snake-oil salespeople and con-people. Their dwindling is a great loss to the rest of us who are capable of peacefully coexisting with them without being mysteriously moved to donate them anything.
The problem with identifying behavioral issues like gambling, sex addiction etc.. etc. as addictions is less the question of whether or not they qualify as 'addictions' in some definitional sense (after all they are all dopamine releasing activities and have similar behavioral responses) but the implicit moral categorization. Yes, all these things share this dopamine reward pathway but plenty of other things we see as good and desirable do as well. Many of us feel that way about successes at work, others get that thrill from meeting new people and maybe impressing them or making a good point in an online community.
The problem is that the real distinction we are making when we call something an addiction is really between problematic/harmful behavior and beneficial/acceptable behavior. The guy getting his dopamine hits starting companies, proving theorems or making friends isn't harming themselves in the same way the problem gambler might be so we don't call it an addiction.
That's fine but the word is deployed to create the impression that something more medical and technical is going on than a judgement about the desirability of some behavioral pattern and that is misleading to the general public.
I think we also should distinguish between the internal experience. Genuine chemical addiction is ultimately a horrific experience for the *user*. Very few don't hate it passionately. But they just can't quit. It's not *just* a craving or a sense that if I were doing X right now things would be more fun. There is also a deep fear and loathing for the state (which nevertheless isn't sufficient to keep the addict away).
So when we say "I'm addicted to caffeine" because I get a headache and am grumpy without my morning cuppa, or "I'm addicted to running" because I really feel better overall if I take a 5 mi cross-country run in the evening, this is really nothing like the experience of being addicted to heroin, with the simultaneous compulsion toward and intense revulsion for the drug.
People use the word broadly because in many ways they lie on the same biochemical spectrum, similar pathways in the brain are invoked, but I think there's a limit to how useful this is: in the end, the biochemistry is only part of the phenomenology. There is the social and logos aspect, which you mention, and there is also a significant different in the interior psychological experience.
Pro poker players are an interesting case in point because they demonstrate that skill level alone is enough to transform addictive behaviour into a high-status vocation in the eyes of the public. So even though few would argue that pro players aren't having an internal experience of addiction, they aren't classified and don't bare any stigma as addicts.
I read Addiction By Design when I was writing my book on luck. I thought it was harrowing and eye-opening. For me the most fascinating parts of the books were less about the casinos’ strategies to achieve addiction and player extinction, but about the experiences of the players themselves—particularly the ideas of flow, assimilation into the game, and indifference to winning. The review of the book is good and fair.
having worked in IT for casino: the casino is not allowed to adjust the odds of a particular slot machine, but it is allowed to adjust the odds of a bank. if someone relatively new to the casino begins playing you want to sit in that same bank of slots.
Virtuous apps aren't addictive / flow-inducing because there are no immediate status gains to be anticipated. We don't care about levelups and badges, we care about levelups and badges other people care about.
Not particularly. Just like in American schools, cool kids getting good grades is cool and high status, while uncool kids getting good grades is mostly neutral(though I think in both cases it's plainly better socially to be uncool with good grades than uncool with bad grades). However, in Japan, in-class excellence is even more stigmatized. Any Hermione Grangers quickly get shamed into shutting up, even more so than in the US.
Duolingo does show you your points both compared to strangers in a leaderboard and friends. As do fitness apps such as Strava. And that is definitely an extra incentive to keep up every day (for me at least). And I was also motivated by the personal levelups and badges.
Pokemon Go is absolutely addictive in a way that Fitbit isn't. I'm not sure if Niantic is just better at this, or just more committed. I've planned activities throughout an entire week to bump up my walking to the magic 50 km. It's somewhat self limiting in that there's only so much walking you can do in a day, and there's really not much to do that doesn't involve walking. But yeah, humanity can make addictive virtuous experiences, we just don't.
For a couple of short years, the Basis Peak fitness tracker was a thing. It had _by far_ the best gamification/virtuous addiction/whatever you want to call of it of any fitness tracker out there. Badges for different activities. Badges for doing multiple things a day. Badges for doing things multiple days in a row. I can't really describe it well, but I managed to lose about 15 pounds over the course of several months (and while I was a little overweight, I've never been obese to the point that losing 15 pounds was easy) and due in part to the incentives of the app, I was biking into work 2-3 times a week (16 miles each way), in addition to many other activities. The device got discontinued and due to it's cloud integration, it stopped working. While I have managed to lose weight and keep it off since then (mostly just through better diet), it was by far the most physically active I've ever been in my life since I stopped regularly playing sports in undergrad. I've tried the fitbit twice for sustained periods of time and didn't get _nearly_ the same feedback.
My point is that good design is _so important_ in making these things work (which the review mentions). Why no other device has picked up the Basis peaks design, I have no idea. But if I could get it again, I would pay many hundreds of dollars (it was about 150 new at the time.
It didn't have any hardware abilities that fitbits and other trackers don't (It was just a heart-rate monitor with accelerometers for activity detection), so there is no reason current trackers couldn't be as good (probably better with the improvements of the past 5 years). It's really frustrating to me since I had found something that worked well for me, over a relatively sustained period of time, and no one out there is bothering to replicate it.
One thought I had is that both you and the author are drawing to strong a division between “unhealthy, addictive behavior” that incorporates activities that are basically empty calories (gambling, social media addiction, etc.) and healthy, behavior where you do lots of good things (???).
I’m not on social media. I’ve watched you all from the sidelines. You’re all insanely addicted. I’m 47, so I clearly remember when all of you USED to do other things, but now you stare at your phones and little else. You even talk about Facebook posts while we’re out to dinner even though you know I’ve no fucking idea what you’re talking about. It’s real, and it’s a serious bummer.
And I don’t participate. Unfortunately, what I do instead is stare at my phone reading Substack articles, all day long (and before Substack, blogs). I’ve subscribed to a ridiculous number of Substacks at a cost that I’ve hidden from my wife, and there are probably eight longform articles for me to read a day. God forbid I miss the third 6,000 word article of the day written about cancel culture.
Maybe the problem is the PHONES. Maybe the problem IS the pills, regardless of what the rats tell us. Maybe there are objects that cause addictions. Facebook existed before smartphones, and you all incorporated into your lives just fine. But when it was put on your phones, wow.
I’m not convinced that me reading eight Substack articles a day is materially more beneficial to me, my family, or society, than you staring at your phone all day owning the Xs on Twitter. It’s all just too much time, too much busyness. Anything that distracts us from our duties (to our families, our community, our jobs) to this extent is bad. So put me down for blaming the phones and the pills.
I wrote this way too quickly - I've got run. When you read it, please pretend it's more polished.
There have happened a few things since 2012, perhaps especially in Europe. The state possessing the regulatory power creates an interesting back-and-forth. The state wants gambling (this provides income, either directly through having a state lottery, or indirectly through concessions and taxes), but it doesn't want addiction - addiction has significant social and PR costs. The lotteries would kinda want properly addicted players, but realize that because the state has the regulatory power, and can be influenced by the public's perception, there are limits to how far they can push things, and ideally they would like to pre-empt actual regulations by their own systems. Therefore, both sides like a pretty high amount of spending from each person, while trying to reduce social costs (an interest of the state) or the risk of harsher regulation due to social costs and public relations (the game providers).
For instance, the Norwegian state lottery runs gambling machines with a number of restrictions on them (some of these come from above, from the political parts of the system, and others are created by the state lottery itself in order to seem responsible to its superiors). These include a player card linked to your identity (this being Scandinavia, it's easily achieved and hard to bypass), enforced loss limits on a daily/weekly/monthly level (well under $1000 monthly), making it illegal to put the gaming machines in establishments that serve alcohol, capping individual wins to just a few hundred dollars, and forbidding some of the methods discussed in the review, like near-misses or features that encourage a "one more round" mindset. The whole system also runs on a centralized network, making it even easier to control and analyze play. These kinds of "responsible gaming" systems are increasingly common throughout Europe.
Another thing that has happened since 2012 is the increase of web/app-based gambling (obviously accelerated by the Corona pandemic). But what's strange here isn't that it has happened, but rather that it hasn't happened _more_. For what else that you could do online would you even consider going to a specialized machine outside your home to do the same thing on _its_ screen? With a casino, there's an obvious explanation - the surroundings make for a different experience, and it's easy to see how it would encourage flow. But a lot of gaming machine play happens on fairly simple machines placed in numbers of one to three in coffee shops and 7-Eleven type stores that certainly don't bring that kind of ambience.
Oh, and the review misses one very different reason for machine gambling - money laundering. If the tracking in the system and the operating processes is weak, you can play with unlaundered cash, having an excuse for your wins (the wins come out laundered) while the system doesn't care about your losses. AML/CTF laws post-9/11 try to crack down on this, and it's easy to see how the more centrally controlled a system is, the better the transparency becomes. Under the Norwegian solution, for instance, you can only use bank funds in the first place, making the system essentially proof against money laundering.
It's worth noting that in the US, the ability to launder income via casinos has been gone for decades. Casinos fall under all the provisions of the Bank Secrecy Act, which means reporting suspicious cash activity, suspected structuring or attempts to structure, refusal to show ID or fill out reporting paperwork, etc, to FinCEN the same way a bank does.
I have a pretty hardcore internet pornography addiction I've been working to get over, it was created over the decades and I don't know it was a problem until I tried to quit. But I've also been working on getting rid of it and studying math and computer science to hopefully switch careers.
So here's my take on the different flows. I like math and computer science, out of all things in my life its what I enjoy the most. However I usually drag my feet to start studying for the day and it usually feels like I am fighting myself to do so even while I know I will enjoy it and feel good when I am done. When I am working on a programming problem getting into a state of flow is easy. There is a big difference between doing and studying, studying requires 100% conscious effort to get things right and correct my errors, programming takes half my mental effort as I have some best practices ingrained so I can usually iteratively try things to see what works. I enjoy both those activities, but they are draining for me mentally.
Porn is a hit of a wonderdrug, whatever bad feelings are usually wiped away and I am wired in a state of dark flow for hours. It's like a lightswitch in my head with an on/off, if I screw around on the web or go anywhere I am not supposed to and whatever neurons get activated I know my day is shot. I can feel the change instantly, I feel my head constricting and I feel more locked in to my mind rather than controlling it. impulses get amplified 100x. A true rogue agent seems to take over.
It would be nice if I got to have the controls and just avoid content I don't want to see usually. But its not that simple, Something I call adjacency cascade usually always leads me back to porn. As an example lets say I watch YouTube, I look up meme videos, I scroll through those until I see I see one that's slightly sexualized, I tell myself I shouldn't but If I am already feeling bad my ego is already depleted. It keeps hopping down those lines until I find a rare uncensored porn video on youtube.
My rouge addiction agent uses all latent intelligence I have to optimize it's one goal, and Its really really good at breaking down all barriers I create if it gets power. I am smarter than myself. (as a fun corollary my addiction helped me understand the orthogonality thesis and deceptive agent AI research easily and intuitively.) My solution was the same but more hardcore that the OP. I blocked all the internet except for sites I use to study. No searches on google, if I don't know something I have to find it another way. and congrats you made the cut.
Addiction doesn't feel like 'you' from the inside, maybe that's what's so enticing, but once you get back in the drivers seat and see all the time the rouge agent has wasted just to hurt you, you wish you never gave up the seat in the first place... Until it whispers those sweet nothings of escape in your ear again.
One thing that I feel i underrated in overcoming internet addictions is the positive power of social factor. Often people do not have resources to go to a therapist, but just having a living person who you know you'll talk to for 10 minutes in the evening to tell them that another day was a waste and they'll tell you the same and then you'll say what you're going to try tomorrow and so on, can make a lot of difference.
Question: how much of casino's profits comes from people with gambling addictions? I'd have thought lower in Vegas than for local casinos, but are there stats on this?
Depends on the casino. Here in Australia I suspect our casinos' profits come mostly from Chinese money laundering, with gambling addictions a distant second.
Are gym rats and workaholics addicts? There is certainly a flow aspect to their behavior.
In terms of the rat park experiment, I recently went to a fancy spa resort that had a strict no cell phone policy. I was worried I’d have withdrawal. But with so many activities it was an absolute delight.
I've known gym rats who work out to the detriment of their personal relationships, who keep increasing the difficulty of workouts when their bodies are telling them clearly it's too much, who work out when ill or injured .... So yes, definitely can be addictive.
Apparently there are two flavours of workaholics. The ones who work so much because they are avoiding something (avoid negative emotions by getting into the flow, avoid spouse by not coming home from work until they are asleep, avoid fear of failure by always working harder than the other person ....) experience a lot more negative effects from their high work hours (on physical and mental health etc) than do those who work a lot because they love their work and find it super satisfying.
"Good flow" = when studying or solving a problem or working on a project or exercising; you are in the zone and you do something useful.
"Neutral flow" = when playing video games; you are exercising some skills, but ultimately nothing useful, and probably procrastinate from something useful.
"Evil flow" = when gambling; the zone is about destroying your wealth and possibly your life.
The question how much are addicts responsible for their addiction seems obvious from the perspective of multiple agents in the mind. There is a part of the mind that wants playing on the machine and losing the money. There are other parts of the mind that would prefer to keep the money for something more useful. The machine is designed to provide advantage to the gambling part of the mind in the internal fight. Yes, the addict had a dark side, but it was not obvious that the dark side was going to win against the rest of the brain, perhaps the rest of the brain would win. The machine did whatever it could to support the dark side, and then the owners said "well, it was a dark side of *your* mind, why do you blame us?"
As an analogy, imagine a country, where a certain small fraction of population (let's say 1%) are some kind of Nazis. A foreign government contacts them, sends them tons of money, weapons, provides training, helps them hack government computers, and so on (the only thing the foreign government does *not* do is send their own people). There is a revolution, and the country becomes a Nazi dictatorship. And the foreign government says: "hey, why does anyone accuse us of interfering? it was *their* citizens that did the revolution, how could that be our fault?"
On Khan Academy games and Duolingo: they are absolutely addictive. For around a year I logged on to Duolingo every day and dutifully logged my 30 points so that I could keep my streak. I don't know whether that's because I've grown up online so I'm just predisposed to any form of internet addiction but in any case, yes. Obviously those aren't the same as other types of addictions (it's five minutes of a language exercise, in my opinion it doesn't have the same capacity) but they do create a compulsion to go through with that language exercise to the point where your autonomy can disappear.
The reason why I'd also say that Duolingo and Khan Academy-esque academic games aren't as addictive as Instagram or TikTok is that they don't have any element of humanity to them. After a certain point the experience of logging your points just becomes stale and unnecessary--at least in the face of the "one more video" or "ten more minutes" impulse that you'd otherwise find in social media.
In terms of what a "virtuous addiction" would look like, I submit that I am addicted to air, water, and food. I consume these compulsively and suffer from serious withdrawal symptoms if I attempt to give them up. Luckily, they're good for me (with the exception of some of the food) so it's just a virtuous addiction.
Or if that's a bit too biologically primal to count, how about this? I am addicted to showering every morning, brushing my teeth once or twice a day, and going to work five days a week. Much like any other addiction I know I physically _could_ stop if I wanted to but it would make me feel bad; nonetheless I'm pretty sure that if I could get out of these habits then I'd eventually stop feeling the urge. Anyway, these are all virtuous (or at least beneficial) things that I feel strongly compelled to do, they just don't seem like "addictions" because they're so commonplace and beneficial that nobody uses that particular frame to analyse them.
Very nice review, winner for me so far. I noticed myself circling down the TikTok drain the last 2 weeks and convinced myself I was getting something useful out of it. Just deleted it, thank you.
My virtuous app is my radiology reading worklist. I switched jobs from an academic to more private practice environment and have been able to get into a flow much more easily due to the larger volume but lower complexity of cases. I think many of my peers would call the academic to private move as a downgrade, but it has definitely improved my work enjoyment.
This is my favourite review so far - by a long shot. In fact I'd wager that it is the review Scott predicted with 60% certainty would win the book review contest. [And I also notice Scott joining in the comments with something positive vibey]
Having said that, the first things that come to mind as I comment, are criticisms. That fact was surprising enough to me that I stopped to wonder why it might be. A couple of answers presented themselves. Firstly I recently re-read Scott's "I can tolerate everything except the outgroup" and there was enough overlap between this reviewers worldview and my own for the differences to cause a certain amount of grievance in me.
Secondly, I'm a recovering compulsive gambler and therefore take it as read that non-gamblers can't possibly have an understanding of the lives, motivations and experiences of people that do (or did) gamble compulsively.
However, having noticed the arousing of my completely gratuitous prejudices, I'm left with very few criticisms at all. I was annoyed at the ending, but of course the problem was entirely mine. I was enjoying the flow of the review in the way I would a good Tom Hanks movie - I was in good hands, utterly trusting, and then suddenly I was thrown back into my everyday life with its uncomfortable unpredictability.
And the teaser at the end - that the book had numerous personal stories from gambling addicts, but the reviewer didn't have time or space for them, annoyed me for a few seconds. Then I realised it was an extremely good decision to omit them - but to let the reader know that they were in the book should the reader be interested. They would both take up a huge amount of space for very little addition to the review, and also wouldn't be a particularly good fit for typical SSC/ACX readers. Too much anecdote, too little persuasive argument.
The writing was deceptively good - another Tom Hanks anology would probably be appropriate. There weren't any literary pyrotecnics, just polished, unfussy clarity. What I liked most was the intellectual and general humility of the review, especially because it is something I lack.
A good example of some of the qualities I admired is how the reviewer dealt with the authors contention that capitalism is somehow responsible for the prevalence of gambling addictions. I don't know if that seems more ridiculous to me than it does to the reviewer, but I would have been launching tirades of sarcasm and ridicule. What I read was a calm but convincing rebutal. Most impressive.
I especially liked that the reviewer managed to convey something central about gamblers - or at least the vast majority of those I met in rehabs and in the meetings of gamblers anonymous. Which is (contrary to the reviewers and most peoples initial understanding) that gamblers are not primarily motivated by trying to win more money. Yes, superficially it looks (and can feel) like that. But it is, as was said, much more frequently, and more deeply, about escaping to a safer, more comforting place. Which is indeed why winning can be such a depressing experience.
The book reviewed was specifically about slot machines and it is quoted as saying that "Machine gambling is not like other kinds of gambling" Of course, a book devoted to one kind of gambling is prone to making such distinctions, but although Iim maybe out of touch with the addictive power of modern gambling machines, I find that hard to believe. I'd bet that the majority of money gambled on the high streets of Britain is still spent in betting shops and not on gambling machines of any kind. Vegas, of course, is a different world entirely..
probably was discussed before in the comments, but still:
I think the reason apps like duolingo aren't as addictive is because duolingo has to teach you a language, at least with mild efficacy (and a fitbit has to get you fit and so on).
Under these restriction, it isn't necessarily the case that gambling machine engineers could have made a machine addictive. Learning a language is by default hard, or should I say broccoli, otherwise everybody would do it all the time just for fun and there wouldn't be a need for apps to gamify learning. Gambling machines have no such limitations and can focus on purely chocolate aspects of gaming. This doesn't map perfectly with vice and virtue but the correlation is pretty obvious.
So some activities have inherent broccolian qualities to begin with.
Came here to say this as well. Gambling machine designers have many more degrees of freedom. They just need to make money and stay legal. As you say, Duolingo needs to do that _and also teach you a language_.
The slot machines have another advantage too: when they want to reward the user they can give them cash money.
>Designers replaced mechanical levers with buttons and physical reels with video screens. This made the games three to four times faster. The quicker each game, the more money gamblers can spend during their gambling session. Quicker games are also more addictive. Bally, a casino company, targets 3.5 seconds per game
This is an important thing to understand. Casinos don't particularly optimize towards taking all your money. They optimize towards making you play as many games as possible.
You know card-counting? People often wonder "why don't casinos take easy steps to stop you doing that? Such reshuffling the deck after each hand, or dealing from four mixed decks, etc?"
They don't because it would waste time and slow the pace of games. Fewer games means they make less money. It's not worth it just to catch the occasional decent card counter (as opposed to random idiots who rush to casinos after seeing it in a movie). They more than cover their losses by speeding up game-time for the remaining 99%.
Maybe my information is out of date, but I thought card counting would get you kicked out of casinos, your name and face added to a list of known card counters and shared with other casinos, etc.?
You have to do it well enough and reliably enough to consistently make enough money that you are enough of an annoyance to the casino to deal with you.
If you count cards out loud, they'll also probably kick you out for being a tool.
I think that's true in Vegas (Nevada) too – it's not _illegal_ (or otherwise prohibited) to count cards.
But a casino manager, in a YouTube video, claims that casinos can 'ban' patrons for any reason, e.g. including card counting. The video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NNWEWFWtJ1Q
There's one thing that's common in addictive activities that I think can't be easily replicated by self-improvement ones: the conjunction of feelings of "just one more time" (which hacks or hedonic treadmill) and ex post regret. When it comes to self-improvement, you'll either give up or achieve a milestone and stop to give yourself a rest.
But then... NUCA ZARIA: Effective Addiction
We build an addictive industry and transfer all earnings to effective charities. Then we send a message to our victims, I mean, customers, saying "Thanks for saving 20 kids from malaria. Please keep going," so they'll feel proud and be cured.
That's how many lotteries work; as fund-raisers for specific 'causes'. Even in places like Quebec where lotteries/scratch cards etc are mostly a gov't monopoly and profit goes into general revenue (aka 'the tax on stupidity'), the gov't makes a point of showing the many marvelous ways the money is used; schools! hospitals! highways!
People aren't the only ones addicted to gambling, governments are too.
About the part where virtuous apps don't addict as easily as vices, couldn't this just be because vices like slot machines don't take much effort while the Duolingo's and the Fitbit's do take effort? Like, pushing a button for the dopamine hit is going to be more addictive then spending mental effort to learn more of a language or spending physical effort to workout.
Hmmmm, we know there are certain factors that make substances more/less prone to trigger addiction/compulsive use.
The ones I remember are;
- must have a pleasurable effect (this is why we don't get addicted to Tylenol)
- the faster the pleasurable effect hits, the more addictive (this is why crack is more addictive than snorting cocaine which is more addictive than taking it in tablets)
- the shorter the pleasurable effect, the more addictive
- if there is a down after the pleasurable effect wears off (ie, you actually feel worse than you did before taking the drug), more addictive (all stimulants do this, some more than others)
Then we add in factors like how often the person is using the drug (cigarettes; hundreds of tiny hits a day! Each drag counts!) etc
It seems to me that similar factors might explain why game-ifying around good/desired habits hasn't worked that great. Slot machines are pleasurable, fast, wear off fast, and we can take hundreds of 'hits' in a short time. FitBits can't 'reward' us for every. damned. step. Although even without that, I've known of a couple of people who get VERY compulsive about their step total.
The 'dark zone' certainly fits with the stress factor; people who are addicted to substances or who have compulsive behaviours such as gambling, video-gaming, shopping etc are much more likely to indulge or over-indulge or relapse when their stress is up or they are unhappy but avoiding.
Then of course the consequences of the addiction/compulsive beh create more stress and unhappiness .....
We know that people are much more likely to get addicted to something that goes well the first couple of times they try it, whether it's a substance (felt great and laughed a lot using cannabis the first time, or had a panic attack) or activity (won the first few times you gambled, or lost?).
So now I'm wondering whether gaming machines/online gambling takes advantage of that. When a gambler can be identified (by the card they use to play?) as trying a specific game or site for a first time, make them win. Or a few smallish wins within the first few times they play. Then set the winning ratio back to normal .....
This would work particularly well on those sites where you can play poker for free. Free games? Win ratios much higher than usual. Once they're playing for $, back down to normal.
In this game, players had to time a button press to stack 1-3 blocks on top of previous rows. If they got to the penultimate row, they could cash out for a small prize. If they kept going, the top row had the potential for expensive prizes (e.g., a 3DS).
The top row was a lot faster, and the player could absolutely mess up the timing. However, the operator menu in the game also let the arcade owner set the rate that big prizes were allowed to be won. If it wasn't time for a win, even a perfectly timed player would get a "near-miss" when the game cheated and moved the block one space over. If you watched carefully, you could see this happening.
Conversely, if it WAS time for a win, the top row would move a bit slower. If you payed attention and noticed this happening, you could watch someone lose because of bad timing, walk over there, and win the big prize yourself. A few of the regulars at the arcade used to do this and then go sell the 3DS's to Gamestop, which I had no problem with. They'd spend that money on the DDR machine.
I'm pretty sure newer versions of the game have removed this exploit, but not the cheating "near misses". There's plenty of other redemption games with similar behavior.
This is also why "crane games" and machines like these are often regulated as gambling devices; they look like games of skill but they're rigged to make you lose some of the time even if you play "perfectly".
> I think this is the biggest gap in Schüll’s theory. If designers optimized gambling machines for addictiveness, why can’t they do the same for these apps? If bad machines can be made addictive, then why can’t good machines?
It seems to me that you answer this question in your review:
> When it comes to machine gamblers, my theory is completely incorrect. People who spend hours and hundreds on machine games are not after big wins, but escape. They go to machines to escape from unpredictable life into the “zone.”
I suspect that given the nature of virtuous tasks, you can't design a system that lets someone escape into "the zone" the pursue them. If you're trying to get better at picking up the dishes, or exercising, eventually you have to stand up and actually do the work, which will shove you right back into "unpredictable life".
Thinking about this some more, I'm realizing that there's lots of instances in my life where I start to plan how I am going to make big changes, which in itself serves as means of escape from reality. But as soon as I am asked to return to unpredictable life and implement those changes it all falls apart.
Another problem is that a lot of "virtuous tasks", e.g. picking up the dishes, are finite/limited. Once you've 'picked up the dishes' for the day/period, you're done – and _finishing_ is end to being in the 'zone' (being in 'flow').
I think this was one of the best reviews so far, reading it was rather... addictive. I think the mention of 'dark flow' was one of the most interesting parts - the idea of creative/productive flow and the brain-deadness of procrastination having something in common has been in my head for a while now, but this helped my clarify what the difference could be.
Someone in the comments mentioned randomness, which I agree would make a big difference (e.g. Duolongo points are hardly random, you only get them when you remember vocabulary or something). But TikTok and other social media aren't that random either - perhaps the key is the lack of 'challenge-skill balance'? If there is very little challenge but otherwise still a lot of engagement, maybe that leads to a dark flow.
Good review! The gacha mechanism which was developed in Japan has found its place in tons of mobile games during the last 5 years especially, and kids are used to the idea of gambling as a normal risk to take, from a very young age. If you walk past a pachinko parlor in Japan in the evenings, you can observe thousands of people who spend 2-3 hours sitting there immediately after work, completely immersed in the "dark flow" outlined in the review. The appeal of games like Candy Crush and Clash of Clans among older demographics is a well-known phenomenon as well. Games have addiction circuitry to begin with, and if you add a gambling component, I don't really see how it could possibly be overcome by most individuals. After dumping about $100 into a gacha game a few years ago and then quitting it a few months later due to feeling like it was a chore, I play multiple ones with a no-spending rule purely for art/game mechanics. My outlook is that this issue is going to become a full-blown catastrophe among swaths of young adults in the next decade and it will become a societal concern just like cigarettes and hopefully, meet its end in a similar way too.
Definitely the best review so far. I simply deny (refute and repudiate) the idea that addiction isn't 90% or more circumstances over genetics. (I'm not quite willing to say it's 100%, but I'm close.) That doesn't mean it's just "willpower" or "just" a personal failing. Let me put it this way: people who feel a calling and whose lives are in order simply don't waste their lives gambling or getting high or drunk enough they destroy their lives. Said another way, the addiction doesn't destroy men's lives; men's lives are destroyed and so they become addicted.
I admit this would be a hard thing to argue with me about, for if you pointed to a guy and said 'his life was good until he got addicted', my response would be to deny the premise: 'it obviously wasn't.'
Great review. Small nit for the author: While I agree that the connection between late stage capitalism and gambling isn't strong, Macau *is* actually a hotbed of capitalism, one of the "one china, two systems" areas that stayed westernized and capitalist during the latter 20th century, just like Hong Kong.
I've derived the my sole income from professional gambling for the last five years (things kinda got awkward at my old programming job at a startup after I came out in support of brexit and trump, which was a factor in my deciding to quit and move to vegas)
Professional APs tend to hate the casinos because they knowingly exploit addicts and delusional system-players while barring anyone who has a real edge as soon as they're detected. I'd guesstimate that addicts are only 25% of casino patrons in Vegas but the majority of casino revenue (they're outnumbered by casual tourists who only lose a little). Genuine professional APs are fewer than 1 in 1000 casino patrons (not counting poker players who sit around waiting to pounce on drunk tourists, or small time slot hustlers scavenging the obviously scavengable slots like Ocean Magic. I mean people who beat the house for a living).
It's interesting to see doctors and lawyers punt money away on gaming decisions that are mathematically silly. They may be rational in their domains of expertise, but it doesn't transfer. They throw money away on the basis of superstitions.
To the ideal advantage player, it feels good to be playing with a positive expectation, and feels bad to be playing with a negative expectation, regardless of the actual outcome. Kind of like how the ideal utilitarian might be able to suppress his feelings of ickiness or warm fuzzies, to just shut up and calculate his expected utility. At this point I'm so jaded that I can win or lose $50k in a few minutes and feel nothing, so that helps.
A minor correction to the OP: money on the card did not directly replace coins. TITO (ticket-in-ticket-out) replaced coins, and it is still the dominant system.
I was already addicted to video games like world of warcraft long before I tried gambling, so I never found it particularly compelling as entertainment. All the gambling games are really lame compared to the latest video games. For me it was just all about the money. I calculated that I could make more per hour from AP than I could make from other things, so I did that.
I theorize that a good treatment for gambling addiction might be to get someone addicted to the most exciting video games instead, so that they start to find all the slot machines to be super lame by comparison. And then you can gradually taper down to less dopaminergic video games such as turn-based RPGs from the mid-90s, and then quit entirely. Perhaps the sequence could go TF2 deathmatch, TF2, Portal, Escape Velocity, Civ4, Realmz, nada.
I liked this one a lot. Clear, cogent, readable, and interesting. It presents the book's core argument clearly and charitably but not uncritically. The questions the reviewer raises don't seem all that mysterious to me. Most patterns of behavior, especially simple ones, are unhealthy when pursued compulsively. And I sometimes gets compulsive over the video games or TV shows I use to unwind, so I can easily understand that there's a spectrum from "I'm doing this because I enjoy it" to "I'm doing this because it's designed to hyperstimulate certain processes in my brain". Besides wishing it went into a little more depth, I can't find anything to fault here.
This probably sounds silly, but... if gambling addicts plan and budget around their need to gamble, and they deliberately seek to gamble, and gambling away money is the thing they prefer to do with their time... then the "seatbelts you can refuse to wear" won't work, but then, why do we have the obligation to stop them from doing the thing they want to do with their resources? For all the description of how insidious the machines are to trick people into thinking they are close to winning, it goes on to say that the gamblers don't really care that much about winning and do not behave like people who have been tricked. They have a weird-ass hobby, one that they can take to a self-destructive level, but there's a lot of hobbies like that. Why do we have the obligation or the right to stop them?
How many people do you know who are by the "behavioral addiction" standard "addicted" to football or basketball or hockey? Okay, less than the national average given the audience here, but it's still a thing you know about. When do we have the obligation to step in and make their hobby stop?
> Why do we have the obligation or the right to stop them?
I don't think we have either an obligation or a 'right' to stop them, but I'm sympathetic to (and also share) _wanting_ to 'help' them, as gambling sure _seems_ like a symptom of something bad (to at least some degree).
It's worth noting that physical machines are vulnerable to manipulation as well. For example, modern claw machines can be programmed to raise or lower the claw's gripping strength in order to manipulate the win probability, limit payouts, produce near misses, etc.
Pretty sure that part was referring to ancient China.
nevermind, it specifically says "modern". Carry on.
Some of us would argue that there are no capitalist societies. True capitalism has never been tried.
Formatting bug: something that should be a link around the text "Moore's Law" is instead the text OF the html for a link.
Thanks, fixed.
Also some of the links are malformed, the url contains the prefix spec.commonmark.org with the intended url in quotes.
Aargh, I wish there was an HTML conversion site that wasn't awful. Thanks for the tip, I've fixed it.
I publish my own substack newsletters for work, and I've found a way to get HTML in that preserves formatting and doesn't introduce artifacts, does this work for you?
1) Save the raw HTML you're meaning to import into substack as a plain .html file. Drag that file into your browser as a new tab
2) Open that tab, Ctrl+A
3) Ctrl+C on the selected content
4) Open substack, start a new article
5) Ctrl+V in the text input field
This preserves images, links, blockquotes, more or less everything (in simple HTML at least).
The trick I've found is that you have to copy directly from an in-browser view, you can't just input the raw HTML source code itself.
I think there's still an end quote in some of the links that needs to be removed. If you want someone to help convert/vet the html (and substack quirks like footnotes), I'd be willing to take a shot at it.
Have you tried pandoc? It can transform between a lot of formats, including html.
More minor, but the link to the Wikipedia for "Csikszentmihalyi’s flow" includes a quotation mark that breaks the link.
I've had video game addiction to League of Legends for the past few years, and I relate very much to what was described. The key to the whole addiction really is 'dark flow' as the author described it. It was very easy to start a game, then go semi-brain dead for 30 minutes until the game ended which let me ignore reality like bad marks or a lack of social life, then after the game ended I just hop back in queue for another round with a couple minute break where I could browse reddit as match making occurs. For me, the only thing I could do to break addiction was to have the game entirely uninstalled. If it was on my laptop, I was basically guaranteed to play many, many hours a week.
As for why Duolingo, Khan Academy, fitbit don't inspire addiction, it's because they don't allow for 'dark flow'. League of Legends is a skill based game and to do well you need to think hard, but it's very easy to do mediocre with your brain half off. But it's not possible to learn a new language with your brain half off. On Duolingo, if you're actually learning, then your brain is too active to be in a dark flow state.
I went for the same explanation for lack of "virtuous", but I'm not as convinced: there should be some activities that would be low-intensity enough to work, like moderate treadmill/stationary bike. On the other hand, exercise chill enough to enter dark flow probably doesn't produce much result?
As for video games, I've similarly noticed dark flow, as well as normal flow: comparing both, they seem to rely on unconscious thought. The difference being that where "good" flow relies on instinct to anticipate/react to unconscious info, dark flow applies similar levels of unconscious reactions, but discarding even conscious info.
People absolutely get addicted to exercise. This is probably most evidence in extreme endurance athletes, like the guy who had his toenails surgically removed trying to set the record for fastest time running across the continental US, or Lynne Cox spending hours a day in ice baths to prepare for her swim between Alaska and Russia.
Yes, I've definitely been addicted to exercise in the past. Unfortunately, you can cure yourself pretty fast by taking a break.
I think most people are unwilling to go to such extreme lengths - I enjoy running, but it's physically painful to run too much too often, or to do any form of exercise to excess, which limits how addictive it can be.
I am slightly addicted to exercise, and quite often get into a flow state on a treadmill. But for me, *harder* exercise makes it easier to get into flow, I think because it makes me so focused on getting through each 1/100 of a mile that I can't think about anything else or get bored. The distance counter definitely helps with gamification.
The other "virtuous" gamification that works for me is Anki. There've been times when I got to the end of a daily review and felt mildly disappointed that it was over.
Could anorexia tie into that dark flow as well? It almost seems counterproductive, since you need willpower to stay on a diet, but from what I understand people with anorexia really get off on not eating and feeling thin, so I wonder if that feeling gets tied into some kind of dopamine reaction.
Yep.
I don’t claim to understand anorexia personally, but did achieve a similar “learn to love the pain” feeling when dieting in 2012. I’m bad at moderation and good at cold turkey, so I couldn’t lose weight without taking an approach of simply not eating more than 200 calories until about 6 PM. Whenever it hurt, it also felt euphoric because I knew it was working. Probably a dopamine reaction like you mentioned.
When I quit smoking cigarettes I did so with the help of a modified mindset where I relished the act of denying myself a cig in an almost sadistic/masochistic manner. It was a little disconcerting but eventually less so as I craved them less and as a result didn't have to work as hard at depriving myself of the act os satisfying my cravings.
Is there actually a difference between dark and good flow? Are they not just the same thing, but applied to different activities? I'm reminded of friends in college that would try Adderall to concentrate on homework but they would actually just concentrate on cleaning their apartment or video games.
In my personal example, both states were playing the same game. In both situations, time/outside stimulus went unnoticed until after the flow state ended.
In the "good" flow state, I was performing better than average, reacting more quickly to things, internalizing more information without having to consciously process it. Momentum increased, allowing for faster progress on high-level goals.
The "dark" flow state was often more predictable: I'd be in a nonoptimal external situation (tired, frustrated), but decide to carry on anyway. Upon entering the flow state, it felt similar to the "good" flow in that I was able to react decisively to make quick progress on the high-level goals, but the immediate steps were less efficent/likely to be correct, and any deviation or reaction was slower, more likely to fall onto attempting the planned idea "harder" rather than reevaluating. Frustration from failure just encourages attempting to focus more on the game in order to play better, leading back into the "dark" flow, wheras when something goes wrong enough to break "good" flow, it tends to either transition to normal play, or a full stop/reset as I have to
manually process all of the info I had been in tune with.
There's still enough similarities that I can't be sure they are separate phenomenon (are the differences causing the performance differences, or reactions to those results?) My emotions on them are starkly different, regreting dark flow as time wasted, wheras good flow, even similarly occurring as procrastination, doesn't get that same "waste of time" feeling, even without the reward of winning.
The comparison League of Legends is interesting. What separates a "fun and lowkey hobby you use to decompress" from an addiction? Is "dark flow" always bad, or only when it gets out of control?
The concept of addiction is fuzzy, especially when applied to activities. Like doopydoo, I play a lot of multiplayer video games noncompetitively, and I sometimes experience the desire to play them in a negative way, but only sometimes. Some days I genuinely want to play Dota 2, I play it for a limited amount of time, and then I stop and feel good about it. Other days, I play it to avoid the bad things in my life and get into a so-called "dark flow", but it's still a positive experience because it helps me decompress and I'm in a better headspace when stop playing. But on some days, I intend to only play a quick game or two but then get sucked into it and spend hours playing it instead of doing something more fulfilling, like reading or hiking. After these play session I often feel crappy and unfulfilled, and wish I had done something else.
Am I addicted to Dota 2? Hard to say. I still go to work, maintain a relationship, cook meals, keep my apartment clean, etc. I have no problem stopping when I need to do something. And 4 out of 5 times I play about as long as I want and then stop. But every 1 out of 5 times, I play for way longer than I intended and I avoid doing other activities I had intended to do and would have found more fulfilling.
Personally I consider the line an addiction when I want to stop playing but cannot. There have been other games I've played for dozens or hundreds of hours, but then I finished with them. Playing League of Legends never gets boring for me, so it's an addiction to me.
> on some days, I intend to only play a quick game or two but then get sucked into it and spend hours playing it instead of doing something more fulfilling, like reading or hiking. After these play session I often feel crappy and unfulfilled, and wish I had done something else.
I think on some accounts, this is the definition of addiction: you aren't particularly interested in something, but you do it to the expense of things that you do care about anyway. (This would be a sort of "syndrome" definition of addiction that ignores whether the cause of this syndrome is the same in all cases or whether there might be several different underlying conditions that lead to the same syndrome.)
Another way of describing it is that there's no satiation.
Maybe we should look at these activities as tools we resort to for a variety of reason. What gamification seems to do is magnify the inherent allure of an activity, it’s a facade of fun that sometimes hides the steep slope of the effort/returns function. I wonder if the “dark flow” isn’t what happens when a low-effort steam-blowing “fun” activity becomes the dopaminergic acme of an otherwise gloomy existence? And some folks just keep going back, and back, and back to that easily accessible hilltop of realization, to the point where that short meaningful climb becomes the structural axis of their life, that in terms of which all other priorities are arranged and all other things evaluated.
I think you're right. If you're genuinely learning anything, you can't be in any flow state, it's too effortful. If nothing else, genuine learning requires making a lot of painful mistakes (which would break any pleasureable flow state) and then analyzing them (which is humiliating and effortful) and then consciously trying hard not to make them again.
Part of the problem of something like Duolingo (or even Khan) is that they work pretty well for the easiest part of the learning curve, the very beginning, where you're learning extremely easy parts of a something. The mental work is so easy the setbacks and mistakes are few enough and mild enough that they can be incorporated into at least a semi-flow state.
But when you get to the steep part of the learning curve, which is all about hard work, they don't work -- and indeed, you don't see apps in that region. Duolingo will get you an introduction to a language, but it quits long before you get even modestly proficient, somewhere in what would be the middle of a second semester college course. Same with Kahn: you can get the basic/beginning stuff very well, but in any field I've seen them tackle, they quiet right when it starts to get tough, at the point of transition between amateurism and beginning professional levels of competence.
Maybe learning physical skills can occur in a flow state; practicing physical skills is almost the canonical example of flow, repeating a motion over and over again (or playing a scale on the piano over and over again), a certain foot angle in soccer, a certain angle of the arm in a martial art. That does result in retention of skill.
It certainly can, but what I'm trying to get at is that I think there are distinct "regions" of learning which do and don't lend themselves to that state. In some cases there's an easy initial part, which poses so light a cognitive load that it's often fun for a while. (This is where I think the gamified learning efforts live.)
Then there's a part later on, when you are at a competent intermediate level, and it's sort of a question of smoothing out the rough edges and getting faster. In this case, you have the main aspects of the skill down, you don't have to think about it consciously all the time -- but you aren't a master, you can get better. This I think lends itself to the flow state, because the best learning takes place by encouraging a Zen-like attention without concentration to detail and the small feedback signals that are coming e.g. from muscular effort if it's skiing, or the facial expression of your listeners if you're practicing a foreign language.
And then I think there is usually a part in the middle, where it isn't easy, and also where the rough bones of the skill aren't in place, and where the learning is effortful. You have to concentrate hard, you make serious and discouraging mistakes, and it's mentally taxing (even if it's purely physical). If it was skiing, it's when you can barely get down the beginner level without falling only by supreme concentration and a little luck. If it was learning French, it's when most of the words come to mind quickly, but you have to think hard about endings and tenses, and you have to focus so much on getting the sentence out you can't be thinking about the next sentence before you've finished speaking.
I can imagine the length of each stage might be quite different for different skills and different people (with different pre-existing skills that may or may not partially map onto the new skills).
What I'm hypothesizing is that the 1st and 3rd stage can be enjoyable, albeit for very different reasons -- the 1st because the return on investment is high, for a modest effort you can get a significant feeling of initial accomplishment, the 3rd because it lends itself to flow -- but that the 2nd is just a hard effortful slog, where ROI feels low and the possibility of flow is absent.
And since we have this disparity in the nature of the stages, and a potential disparity in how long each is for different activities and different people, we expect a heterogeneity in how people view the mastery experience: for some, who speed through the 2nd stage, the whole experience is very positive. For others, who spend a lot of time in the 2nd stage, it's tough and if you quit in stage 2 overall it can be a negative.
Really interesting comment. There's a lot in here!
I have some access to an academic library so I looked up "csikszentmihalyi flow learning" and got a bunch of results. Reading your comment makes me curious about the nature of the interaction between flow states and memory in learning vs. gameplay. Vygotsky (and Piaget?) have the "zone of proximal development" theory, a "goldilocks" description - imagine a graph with x axis being "skill" and y axis being "challenge." A line from the origin at y=x, with a small band on either side, is the "zone" of proximal development of a learner engaged in a task. At low skill level, low challenge is just right and may produce flow. Further up, in medium skill/medium challenge, flow may also be produced. Non-flow occurs in a mismatch between skill and challenge. Above the line is the "tasks the learner cannot complete even with assistance" /or "anxiety" state. Underneath the line is the "too easy" or "boredom" section, sometimes labeled the "learner can complete without assistance" and I think you are right, I think learning apps live here, maybe attaining a low skill/low challenge "flow" element; it's worth considering whether the "flow" of this is related to learning or related to a sense of being rewarded for completing a mindless task (which might be pleasant but would not be flow per se). There is the eight-channel model of flow (Massimi & Carli, 1988); same axes, big circle divided into eight quadrants; relaxation, the "6 o'clock," is low challenge/moderate skill match; this too might be pleasant as a distraction;
boredom (4 oclock): low challenge, high skill
control (3 oclock): moderate challenge, high skill
flow (1/2 o clock): high challenge, high skill
arousal (12 oclock): high challenge, moderate skill
anxiety (10 oclock): high challenge, low skill
worry (9 oclock): moderate challenge, low skill
apathy (7/8 oclock): low challenge, low skill
relaxation (6 oclock): low challenge, moderate skill
(At some point I will have to look at how to put images into substack comments) This is from Pearce, Ainley, & Howard, (2005) "The ebb and flow of online learning," Computers in Human Behavior, 21(5), 745- 771. This research considered flow as a process rather than as a state and created plots of individual skill/challenge correlation over time while the student engaged in an online learning activity, lots of weird zigzags, some stayed in the boredom region, some crossed back and forth.
In terms of language learning, there are several skills in play. Maybe the "stage 2" is the stage where the "converse" skill is at a lower level than the "vocabulary" skill, and a learner experiences mismatches in their own skill levels at different components of the larger task? Stage 1, converse means uttering one or two-word statements which may carry meaning, and doing that at all feels rewarding; stage 3, the learner is more familiar with sorting the vocabulary knowledge in a way that's useful for conversing, but stage 2 has a mismatch of bringing a new skill online, conversation, requiring handling the relatively new skill of vocabulary in a new way?
Or perhaps stage 2 enters the anxiety/worry/arousal side if the initial skills are not so firmly mastered. I think many people learning math hit a wall in between multiplication and fractions, and may continue on in coursework in an anxiety/worry/arousal state but simply can no longer continue once they reach algebra (bringing in the second skill of additional abstraction) because the multiplication facts are not firmly commanded (memory). It may take a large time sink of practice to get the facts/vocabulary down to the point where bringing in a second skill doesn't sink the ship.
Anyway there is a lot of research on this. I think you're right, it will vary by person, some of that will be the size of the individual's RAM for that activity. There also may be flow experience differences in terms of experiences of practicing versus experiences of performing or using the skill. (The "I totally understand this, why did I get a 50% on the test" phenomenon.)
This is an excellent point, and one I don't think I've seen made before.
Data point: I remember at some point finding an exercise in Khan's that allowed to accumulate points in the fastest way possible and repeating it for like an hour to get some higher-status badge (obviously there was no benefit in doing it learning-wise at that point). I also distinctly remember losing motivation for studying after earning all the visible (at the time) badges a few years ago (and that didn't even require getting very far, their badge system was/is not very well thought out).
However, recently I returned to Khan's to refresh (and learn some new) reasonably complicated topics (BC-calculus, statistics and linear algebra) and that worked out quite well. I completely ignored the gamification part of it this time though, it was the knowledge of topics themselves that motivated me. There's something to be said here about gamification of learning vs actually enjoying learning, but I can't quite put my finger on it.
I think in some cases a good flow state can be a great source of learning and inspiration. Sometimes when playing super smash bros melee It'll suddenly occur to me to do something I've never done before, and it works. Of course after that happens I try to make a conscious note to remember it, but I'm not sure if making that note fully takes me out of flow.
The phrase "dark flow" also came to me reading this review. This is definitely a phrase that needs to enter the mainstream lexicon.
Pixar's "Soul" makes a big thing of the flow state and lost souls being the same thing in a way that is very similar to the idea of "dark flow". Good movie, worth the watch.
I've had problems with League as well. I've had periods of uninstalling and reinstalling it multiple times in succession. Ultimately, what mostly works is to not have an external mouse, which is pretty much required to play the game. I've also found that when I'm happier and more self-actualized in general, I feel less of a desire to play (like in the rat park experiment).
I do think it's possible to learn a language with your brain half off, but Duolingo just isn't very fun compared to a real game. Games, food, sex, and other primal urges really mash our neurological buttons, and putting a gamified layer on something else doesn't really fool anyone. Social media is an interesting gray area. Maybe information/gossip/what's happening in the tribe is a primal urge as well?
I've got an old DVD of 'Learn Calculus from a Girl'; bikini babes giggling and maybe explaining the first calculus equation. But there isn't a big overlap between Pronhub, whatever that mixed martial arts thing is now, Duolingo, and Khan Academy. Vice is sometimes more scrupulous than virtue but I think it's that if I ran a combination of all four I'd lose money from shakedowns by lawyers claiming to represent outraged parents.
If someone else tries it, I'd buy it. When Science Fiction was good it had elements of all four.
Did it effectively teach you calculus? Since you don't know if it even explained the first calculus equation, I'm guessing no...
No, but the sight of two hard-rode 35-45 six-sevens parroting poorly-written salacious dialog was much improved by the possibility that I'd learn something. And, if I was forty years younger and that much more flammable, maybe I would have. I don't know if the intended buyers were male. A schoolgirl who wanted to destroy the math club would find this useful.
'Fill every rift with ore'- Dewy 19-25 9-10s in thin T-shirts instead of those stupid bikinis who could act and had good salacious dialog would have filled every rift with ore. Advanced calculus? No. Maybe something about conical sections.
I'm not sure I identify with experiencing "flow" as such, but I have felt video games to be addictive. From my mid-teens onwards I've mostly played single-player games, particularly long turn-based strategy games like Civilization and Total War. I went to university though where most of the work I was doing essentially needed to be done from (my uni) home, sat in my room, and I found social media and video games like these to be absolute hell in terms of how distracting they are. We often seem to want to define whether things are addictive by whether they have some kind of objective measure of brain-altering chemical interaction, but tie ourselves in knots arguing that some things seem obviously addictive to some people but don't meet the definition, while other things meet the definition but don't seem to be of much harm. But we could instead define by outcome; whether something has qualities that inspire repetitive behaviour that is carried out to the detriment of one's health (and health being a complete state of mental, physical, and social wellbeing... etc). Or at least to define addiction in much this way.
At university, I fell into a behavioural pattern of *click* scrolling through Facebook "for anything good", *click* scrolling through Twitter, *click* scrolling through Youtube - "OK, all caught up... what now?" I'd feel sort of itchy, my brain was restless. I'd know I have uni work to complete, lectures notes to look over, labs to prepare for... but my brain didn't feel /ready/ for that. I needed to calm the itchiness before I could knuckle down, so I'd seek out experiences *click-click* I remembered having while playing video games that were installed on my computer. Those fleeting feelings of satisfaction, though they varied in nature with the particular game. And I'd play for hours at a time trying to find them, switching between different games, but either never really finding them or them being, as I say, fleeting. Then I'd stop and wonder what I was doing, think that I needed to knuckle down, but figure I should probably just check if anything interesting was happening in the world first... *click* scroll through Facebook, *click* scroll through Twitter, *click* scroll through Youtube... I'd miss or delay meal times, eat into my sleep, put off uni work, waste entire weekends not cleaning my home, and also presumably see friends and other human beings less than I otherwise would, by getting stuck in these cycles. It was harming my health.
During that period, it was obvious that /something/ was wrong, but it actually took some time for me to believe that social media and video games were partly responsible. It took slightly longer to consider that I didn't (or at least no longer) consciously appreciate video games so much when they were designed to be like slot machines, if they don't have some additional benefit to me (like teaching me a bit of history or geography). I'd get frustrated upon realising that I'd spent an entire day playing a game that had been drip-feeding me feelings of small accomplishment without having made any improvement to my actual life. And I don't know if video games are comparable to slot machines in this regard, or if they are just a different kind of slot machine, but I really think this was their main attraction for me. Accomplishing something in real life can often seem so /hard/. Uni work only offered any sense of accomplishment after maybe an hour or more work, whereas video games and social media dangled the possibility of achieving it near-instantly. And when life feels difficult and scary, as it can do moving away from home for the first time to be at uni, I think it's natural to grasp for whatever small victories, small feelings of accomplishment, that you can find. It feels like mentally preparing oneself for longer, more arduous tasks --- like uni work --- from which the sense of accomplishment and improvement to our lives will be greater. I guess this is quite a familiar concept more generally; procrastination, but typically we associate that with actually beneficial tasks that we at some point want to do; like doing the washing, cleaning the home, etc. This is more like washing your clothes, cleaning your house, and mowing the lawn; five times in a row without eating or sleeping. Catch anyone doing that and I think you'd recommend a doctor.
I don't know if it's worth labelling myself as having had an addiction during that time, but I can certainly see how someone being in an amplified version of that situation might benefit from being considered an addict; my own life wasn't ultimately affected too badly, though it felt crap at the time. I also think there's an underappreciated factor of these games being designed to be as addictive as possible --- and gamers calling for them to be --- that only gets a look-in when a game has purchaseables and they more obviously resemble slot machines. But the perspective I feel I've gained has more recently been benefitting my life. Ensuring I work in an office during the week has instantly made accessing distractions much harder 9--5. Starting each day with half an hour of language-learning on Duolingo has given me a small sense of accomplishment that I can fall back on whether the rest of the day ends up being good or bad. It's a similar story with early morning exercise, also brief, that I am now trying to maintain. And I do still play video games and use social media, but I'm much more discerning in what games I play and when, and what I use social media for, and how easy I make it for myself to access the latter. I "unfriend" people (God, what a manipulative word) on Facebook if they post too many things that are irritatingly political -- it's not want I want to use Facebook for. Removing the Twitter shortcut from my phone's home-screen (Android phone) now means I have no muscle-memory for accessing the app, and I don't follow people who post things that aren't either calmly pleasant or simply informative --- no drama, please. They are mostly small changes, but I think they add up to a larger whole.
So something that I think is improving my ability to not be distracted is having real hobbies. "Real" in this sense means there's a thing in the world I am setting out to accomplish. If you *like* video games, your hobby can be video games, but it can't be "I'm going to boot up my game of choice" - you should be either designing a game, streaming games, or trying to be the best in the world at a game. "Being the best in the world at a game" implies watching pro matches, explainers - thinking deeply about the game for a little bit - *then* jumping into queue.
Having a wide variety of those tends to reduce the brain-itch portion of these apps and increase the portion of which I actually am choosing to spend my time.
> I fell into a behavioural pattern of *click* scrolling through Facebook "for anything good", *click* scrolling through Twitter, *click* scrolling through Youtube - "OK, all caught up... what now?" I'd feel sort of itchy, my brain was restless. I'd know I have uni work to complete, lectures notes to look over, labs to prepare for... but my brain didn't feel /ready/ for that. I needed to calm the itchiness before I could knuckle down, so I'd seek out experiences *click-click*
This is a very good description of the experience. Somehow, for me, this is much more of an issue when there are *two* different infinite streams - if I get to the point where it feels like I've "used up" my Facebook feed, I can switch to Reddit, and once I "use up" that feed, I think "maybe there's something new on Facebook again". It *feels* like if there were only one, I'd at least have a bigger push to get out at that moment where I've "used up" that feed.
Also, I think Civilization absolutely needs to add a "one more turn" button adjacent to the "next turn" button. If you press "next turn", it just goes to the next turn normally. But if you press "one more turn", it goes to the next turn normally, but at the end of the turn there is no "next turn" button available, just "quit to desktop". Obviously you *can* just start right back up, but you can give your future self a push to quit and go to sleep.
Clicker-games are probably the most addictive.
For some stupid reason I deliberately popped open [name of game removed] a few days ago on the weekend, even though I explicitly remembered someone saying on the old blog "why did that get mentioned here, clicker games directly trigger the prefrontal cortex." And I kept on remembering that phrase as I went from enjoyment to hate. At least I completed the game.
I won't play video games during my workday, because I know they would destroy my workday. But "things in a browser" don't seem to count in my head and I'll spend lots of time, as many others have said, just scrolling out of some dark flow when I need to get to effing work.
this is my favorite review yet, though I haven't read all of the others.
My one issue is that, in my undergrad, we learned about early Skinner boxes, and mice did not work harder for random rewards than constant rewards. It's a small nitpick, but it's there.
https://courses.lumenlearning.com/suny-fmcc-intropsych/chapter/reading-reinforcement-schedules/
Read this one if you haven't yet - https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/your-book-review-progress-and-poverty
I did! It was good. I think I'm mostly caught up. I liked that one too, maybe #2 :)
I don't see that claim supported in the link? It compares a number of different partial reinforcement schedules, of which variable ratio (i.e. random rewards) gives the strongest response, but I don't see it comparing them to full reinforcement. If there's a sentence or two that I missed that says this clearly, could you excerpt it?
I mean it's a throwaway line in the intro, but I wouldn't use the word addictive here. His statement that randomness is addictive as demonstrated in rats by partial reinforcement schedules isn't really supported.
If randomness wasn't addictive, we'd expect rats to pull the lever a little less than a full reinforcement schedule. Which is what happens. Rats on a random schedule don't pull the lever less than an intermittent reinforcement schedule either. (2 pulls for a drop).
Rats on a random/variable schedule do have a bit longer extinction period when reinforcement stops, but while that is vaguely related to addiction, I don't think the existence of that effect supports the statement that "randomness is addictive".
I think you can make a variable schedule more / less addictive, using other techniques described, but, with rats, for it to be addictive in the first place, you usually start on a fixed schedule and move to a variable schedule.
Keep in mind, there's other types of randomness. A random time interval after last drop, is not nearly as addictive, for instance. So again, makes a catchy intro but not exactly accurate imo.
Reuven Dar has some surprisingly compelling evidence that cigarettes and tobacco are addictive for social and ritual reasons rather than because of the biochemistry of nicotine. I'm not fully convinced, but if true it would clearly have implications for addiction more broadly. I've always sort of wanted to see Scott review this literature.
This is certainly true for every smoker I've known. Would also love a review.
I quit unsuccessfully a couple of times before kicking the habit, and my experience is it's definitely more social and psychological than to do with nicotine. The physical withdrawal is short and once done with, fine. But I still went back to smoking 6 months later, and lots of people do after years off. I'd like to see evidence on success rates of quitting using some kind of nicotine replacement Vs methods that focus on more counselling approach. Lots of people I know tried e-cigarettes and ended up back on tobacco, and when I quit using nicotine gum I went back to cigs I'm the end as well.
I've heard of people saying that kicking nicotine is harder than kicking heroin, there any truth to that? If so, what are these social and psychological elements that keep you coming back?
I always thought that the difference between alcohol/drug addiction and vices like gambling is once you reach a certain addiction threshold with the chemical substances, your body physically punishes you if you try to quit. I was also under the impression that withdrawal symptoms are worse for some substances than they are for others, and they are the main barrier to quitting.
Perhaps for some people nicotine has that level of physical withdrawal like alcohol/heroin, where you vomit/get the shakes/ can die if not weened off. But I think for most people (including me) the cravings / withdrawal from nicotine are unpleasant but manageable.
Psychologically I'd say smoking was a crutch for me when I felt anxious, or bored, or like I didn't know what to say at a party - and it feels pleasurable, controllable pleasure/distraction on demand. I think for lots of people who are addicted to some behaviour there's a paradoxical feeling of control in doing something self-destructive, or self-harming (including literal self-harm). You get engrained habits, used to doing something in a certain context, like smoking after a meal or while walking - change the context and it's a lot easier to stop.
Socially there's the thing of if you do drugs or drink a lot you end up friends with others who do so too, less of a factor with smoking but still a bit - I met a lot of my friends in outdoor smoking areas.
I've never tried heroin, but I've had a terrible time quitting nicotine generally – first cigarettes and now vaping. I've never had a problem with cocaine, but then I've only ever done it socially, and never regularly.
I did finally quit smoking cigarettes, for 8-10 years, and, that time, it was _easy_. My relapse involved a single cigarette and then sharing part of a pack with someone. I switched to vaping soon thereafter, as a less obviously terrible alternative. (Vaping does seem to be overall very much less terrible in many ways, tho, ironically, it's much easier to _dose_ myself much stronger than with cigarettes, because the latter is so much more immediately terrible.)
I have no _social_ elements to my vaping now – if anything, there are only _anti-social_ elements.
But, to me anyways, 'withdrawal' feels _extremely_ psychological. During my many attempts to quit, I've often found myself in something like a 'fugue' state where I felt like I was watching myself, e.g. go to the store and buy a new pack.
My most successful attempt at quitting – that lasted about a decade – also involved extreme psychology, e.g. disgust.
I've also noticed that, for some smokers/vapers/nicotine-users, including myself, we can mostly handle not having cigarettes/vape-stuff/nicotine-delivery-mechanisms, and for extended periods (e.g. hours, days, or even weeks on end), but as soon as they are even possibly accessible, we act compulsively to get a fix.
Both, both, can't it be both? And different factors impact different people differently. There seems to be a genetic combo that makes some people more likely to get addicted than others if they do smoke, and we've known for a long time that if you begin fairly regular use of a potentially-addictive substance in early or mid teens, it'll be much harder to quit than if you begin later, but use for the same amount of time at the same levels. It all works together!
I think the important message is that drugs are not 'uniquely addictive' in that the user has NO control, but levels of personal control vary a lot, based on both personal factors (genetics, ACE etc) and social/environmental factors. Despair seems to be a particularly encouraging factor for addictions.
I've always assumed, and seen in my clinical work, that compulsive behaviours work pretty much exactly the same was as addictions to psychoactive substances.
My understanding is that Dar has found essentially no evidence for chemical dependence in his work, though again I haven't made a deep dive into the details of these studies and I'm not fully convinced.
How would that work for porn?
Reading ACX is part of my dark flow. I'm reading it right now to procrastinate getting out of bed.
Oh, for sure. I go back and forth on "Scott's posts on neurology and mental health helped me understand myself better and give me better tools to eventually crawl out of my life long depression" and "Scott's posts on neurology and mental health let me feel i was doing something to improve my mental health, and thus gave me an excuse to not actually work on improving"
I think this is a common internet pattern too. There are tons of people reading about entrepreneurship instead of working on it, looking up motivational hacks instead of getting motivated, and so on.
*Especially* getting in arguments in the comments.
Take that back!
:)
The question is, what is a Game? The answer is in this Google Doc: https://docs.google.com/document/d/17Qu2pki_gphSzZCFBBOGOWKKN5-XrVRMVlgGCNhU8fE/edit?usp=drivesdk
I find messages like these suspicious and don't click on links like this. My instinct is that you're advertising for something not related, or trying to push some other website.
If there's a comment you've written out about this, I'd love to read it here in the comments section, rather than being redirected to a google doc. Having your content hidden behind a fold like this is bad and I wish this kind of thing wouldn't happen in this comment section.
I appreciate that, but while it's not crazy long it's too long for a comment.
The subject of this article is something I've been focused on for a number of years, and I've read a number of books on it, as well as working in the machine gambling industry directly for a couple of years.
What is lacking in the commentary is a definition of a 'game' that factors in such seemingly diverse activities as slot machines and chess. When you elucidate that the whole problem becomes, not exactly trivial, but manageable, even at scale.
I've been working on a new social network based upon these ideas optimised for purpose and fulfillment instead of behavioural addiction, so this is all very practical.
Check out the Google Doc, it's not a scam and an external link is warranted in this specific instance.
Probably all for which FBV is asking is that the short intro/precis you just wrote could have been included in your original post.
It is an expanded definition of "game" that includes things like bitcoin, football, science, democracy, and google search. Seven pages of mostly definitions.
Yeah but the definitions are important. It's not just a matter of "Bitcoin is a game", "science is a game", etc... That would be trite.
When you understand this it means you can build game systems that help people and bring them into confluence, instead of the parasitic game systems offered to us under the pretext of 'revealed preferences'.
A game is a thing that you play.
Thats enlightening. What is 'play'?
Play is interaction for the purpose of entertainment.
I like to use Candy Land as an example. A child interacting with Candy Land in the intended manner is playing it and therefore Candy Land is a game for them. An adult supervising the child who knows that the outcome of Candy Land was predetermined when the deck was shuffled might not be deriving entertainment from the interaction; they are OPERATING Candy Land rather than PLAYING it, in the same manner as one might operate an eggbeater. Two people can be performing identical actions, yet only one of them is playing a game.
If this definition were complete then the statement 'to game the system' would be meaningless, since treating a pursuit like electoral politics as a game is not done for the purpose of entertainment.
I think you're eliding the distinction between treating something AS a game and treating it LIKE a game. Treating an election AS a game (as might be done by someone who lived in a different country and who had no stake in the election) might indeed be done for entertainment.
A person who treats something as a game from outside is not what people mean by 'gaming the system'. To game the system is an approach of a participant, a 'player', hence "don't hate the player, hate the game'. To treat a pursuit as a game while not engaging for entertainment purposes (games in this context can be life or death), indicates that entertainment is not a necessary part of the definition of a game. I might treat my exams as a game, but that doesn't mean I am attempting to get entertainment from the process.
If you read my document more closely you'll find the resolution of this is there and it won't offend your priors.
Your definitions seem consistent, but not necessarily *helpful for a conversation*. That is, your definitions don't match up with the ways that English speakers use those words, so if one person is using the normal English definitions while another person is using your definitions, confusion will result. For example, one of your examples is the education system, which approximately no one (who hasn't read your doc) would describe as a game. I suspect this happens because you're trying to create a definition that singly describes both the normal sense (something that someone does for entertainment) and the phrase "to game the system". However, the normal English definition of the word is probably something like
1) something interacted with for entertainment
2) a system of rules that in some ways resembles the first definition
That's not necessarily a bad thing, but it does mean that you should be careful with using your definitions. It's similar to many academic fields that redefine common terms in ways that people outside of those fields wouldn't use. Those academic fields are definitely helped by their terms, but there winds up being strife at the border.
Yes, I understand. The purpose of these definitions is to conduct conscious social engineering on a stable foundation, instead of solving stumbling blindly into accidental social engineering that outputs social validation slot machines like Jack Dorsey and Mark Zuckerberg.
It's meant to be a technical doc for people who want to create meta stable social tech that can scale and last for decades.
I often felt like the "education system" was a game, e.g. I 'played' the system. (That was probably in part, or maybe mostly, because the system actively prevented me from learning.)
A well written review, which I think found the right balance of summary and personal feedback.
I did this stuff for a while, so some thoughts.
1. All the tricks described are real.
2. I don't know of any genius psychologists working on these things. Features are implemented mostly on a "copy this successful thing, but a bit different" approach. Not necessarily less unethical, but certainly less sinister.
3. The book makes these games seem like alien technology directly hacking all our brains pleasure sensors. Most people will find these games boring and stupid. It's still tragic that people get addicted despite this. Perhaps more tragic.
4. The book attributes the success of the machines to their sheer addictiveness. In reality factors like density, efficiency and automation are probably more important.
5. Honestly, I'd say people find games way more addictive. The things I hear from people working on micro-transactions are, frankly, scary. Khan Academy and Duolingo are very successful, and they have to optimize for two things rather than one.
'Freemium' game monetization is definitely a lot scarier, as explored here: https://www.gamasutra.com/blogs/RaminShokrizade/20130626/194933/The_Top_F2P_Monetization_Tricks.php
As you might notice, this is a 2013 article, so it's not unlikely that the modern equivalents of these games have greatly involved in their ability to manipulate players.
What I have noticed about modern freemium games is that they are now hilariously unsubtle. I universally uninstall them within minutes of downloading them, because they make it so transparently clear that you’ll need to pay to progress. And this tells me I’m not the audience for the game. They’re probably designing this whole segment of games to aim specifically at the minority of people who will be susceptible, and from whom they can successfully hook.
There _is_ a subsegment of PtW games where they're actually sufficiently well designed that you can take it as a personal challenge to do well in them without paying anything. You can never get to the top, of course, but there's a certain satisfaction in using player skill to beat up people who pay for their bonuses.
Or just sheer persistence - sometimes they let you grind your way to success.
I like to do this a couple times a year. I download a game when I have some extra free time, and play it to see how well I can compete against other players, including those who are paying to progress. It's like I'm playing a subgame within the game, maximizing efficiency.
I have one rule that I only broke once, never ever spend money on one of these games. They're designed to make any money transaction just move you towards the "the climb is too steep to be fun anymore" section of the game faster. If you spent money to get there, you will want to spend more to keep progressing, even though the game gets harder and harder to progress in. That's when I stop playing and move on.
Most people's defences have evolved too, though. Once you've fallen for a dumb trick once, or seen enough of your friends do it, you won't fall for it again, which is why I no longer get a dozen Farmville invitations a day, and I haven't been invited to "punch the monkey to win $20K" for a couple of decades.
Agree, see above.
An encyclopedia of addictive techniques in computer games: https://www.darkpattern.games/
I'd like to know more about #4 ("actors like density, efficiency and automation are probably more important").
If you want to extract money efficiently the best thing would be stacking people neatly in rows, with vertical surfaces that don't consume space, without needing to pay operators or waste time by shuffling cards.
The free version of Duolingo is riddled with ads for freemium games. I downloaded Toy Blast through them. The thing Toy Blast did well at the beginning was make the levels beatable without spending money. They also seem to have a win progression that is influenced by how many minutes one has continued to play it or how many minutes one played last time.
I'd open the app, play a board and win immediately. Play another board, win immediately. Third board, suddenly more difficult, with a near miss feel. That appears to me to be the hook; the "I must pay in order to stay in my flow." I made myself never pay though and after ten tries or so the app would relent and let me win a few again. That was the cycle, if I could get through the loss boards the algorithm would eventually return easy wins. If I messed up one of those wins the app would give me a repeat easy board. "time" and "money spent" are terms in that equation. "speed of moves" is probably another.
In other words if Duolingo is "successful" it is probably in part due to how well they hand learners off to Freemium badlands. Other revenue.
About a year ago, I think they must have been not making enough money, they removed the easier wins. Then it was pointless and I deleted it.
It was a compulsive activity but did not cost money, only time.
Oh, and a final point. AI is already being built to manage the wins, losses and near misses to optimize user engagement. This is a bit worrying.
It's very worrying. The often-paternalistic mindset of game designers would see nothing wrong in doing it for a non-F2P game, and if it's okay for a non-F2P game, surely it's okay for a F2P game?
I would agree with this - at least at my workplace, hardly anyone actually gambles even though (perhaps because?) we make this stuff. Meanwhile, a well-designed Free to Play game (i.e. Pay to Win) can be darkly impressive in how it uses every trick in the book, including the social pressure to carry your load within a "guild", putting you on a treadmill where you will lag behind if you don't pay, and the way it tries to ease you into payment play, like offering huge benefits _really_ cheaply just to get you to make that very first initial purchase that breaks down your resistance for additional ones. Gambling machines are child's play in comparison - the Free to Play market is where the true sophistication can be found.
On our previous discussion about consumers not wanting to pay for apps, I was reminded of the Oatmeal: https://theoatmeal.com/blog/apps
But being really resistant to that 99cent charge is important if you already have succumbed to other $5/day addictions! You know you are likely to start paying a lot more once you start spending money.
> If designers optimized gambling machines for addictiveness, why can’t they do the same for these apps?
There has been quite a lot of research into the neural correlates of addiction, and while I'm certainly not an expert here, I don't think any discussion of addiction is complete with considering the role of dopamine.
Addictions are built on top of activities that activate the pathways of reward, craving, and seeking in the brain. No matter how much gamification is thrown into the mix, you (or most people) aren't going to get addicted to being punched in the face, because this isn't the sort of thing that primes the pump of reward, habituation, and craving.
Yes, there's a reason that only vices are addictive, but it might be more accurate to say that there's a reason we call them vices: they are fundamentally attractive in ways that make people feel they need to resist or control them via moral codes or other mechanisms. If we weren't drawn to them naturally, we wouldn't be concerned with them. Activities (or chemicals) that take advantage of that natural attraction are the foundation that game designers are building on top of.
(Notably, a lot of really enjoyable activities don't involve craving. I love to ski, but I don't crave it in the way I crave caffeine, and while skiing can get me into a flow state in a way that a cup of coffee can't, coffee is addictive in a way that skiing just isn't.)
I'm not sure I fully buy this explanation, only because I've definitely known people who seemed addicted to things that don't inspire this sort of craving (at least in most people) and that are "productive". Two examples are exercise addicts and workaholics.
I consider myself somewhat of a workaholic (to the point where I actually need to stop myself from working via behavioral triggers such as setting alarms, because otherwise I'll work to the point where it's bad for my health and for my long-term productivity), and happen to also have dealt with addiction. Workaholism *feels* different from addiction, in a way I can't really put my finger on.
definitely possible to get addicted to skiing and crave it. Lots of fanatics will claim shredding is better than sex etc. maybe a good illustration that different people get addicted to different things. no matter the psychological tricks it would be almost impossible to get me hooked on slot machines for instance as just way too boring.
Many of the drugs directly or intensely trigger dopamine, while most activities probably do so at a somewhat lower level or less directly.
I'd bet we only consider things vices when they cause us trouble and are hard to stop, not just that they are fundamentally attractive in different ways than non-vices. For example; eating isn't considered a vice despite most people doing it pretty compulsively. Most people do crave food when they haven't eaten in a while, and the craving gets stronger and stronger the longer we go without eating. Many people spend more time, money and energy on food than they really need to, and I at least can think pretty obsessively about it. But we don't call it a vice because we consider eating justified and useful. It's a vice only if we eat so much or so strangely (binging for example) that it creates problems in our lives.
It's possible to think of eating as a vice-- that happens in anorexia, and I'd say sometimes in religion and in mainstream dieting culture.
Nice review. My two cents on "virtuous addiction": I think this actually happened to me for a few months when Pokemon Go came out. The core gameplay was mostly "find the part of town with the most Pokestops, then walk in circles there until your legs give out." It had all the hallmarks of the flow state, and perhaps most importantly, you could do it with your brain half off.
Then there are people like one of my friends, who has one of those pendulum thingies that move his phone back and forth while it sits on the table, to trick the Pokemon Go game into thinking he is walking around.
I had a similar thing going with Ingress (the location-based game Niantic made before Pokemon Go); in fact, the reason why I bought a smartphone was specifically to addict myself on something that would give me exercise. And it actually worked for quite a bit; the game's statistics tell me that I logged a total of 277 kilometers of walking while playing it.
The two reasons why it stopped working was one, that it was *too* addictive - I knew that I couldn't just go out to play a little bit, if I did go then I might spend several hours chasing different portals, and as a result I'd avoid going out at all if I wasn't sure I had as much time as it might take. The other reason was that I reached level 8, which is the point where leveling up stops giving you new abilities, so working on further advancement stopped feeling motivating.
I guess whether "walking around in circles" counts as virtuous depends on what you'd be doing with your time otherwise.
In the context of social media, thinking about what exactly users are "addicted" to is also important. Great social scientist Gary Becker believed that (one of) the most addictive factor to people is...people. https://freakonomics.com/2008/11/11/gary-becker-thinks-the-most-addictive-thing-is/
The authors of this work https://www.nber.org/papers/w28666 also mention this. They explore the idea that we are not only consuming content on social media, but also we're consuming attention (how we do it, and why platforms allow this). They claim this could explain, at least in part, why we seem to be so addicted to social media.
I design casino games including slot machines, and in the USA there are regulations against faking the reels to give near misses. The frequency with which symbols appear has to be consistent whether they are part of a winning configuration or not, so that in theory you can reverse-engineer the math and figure out how often you should win. (Recently certain states have begun to relax this regulation.)
The thing to remember is that all the slot machines will give similar “RTP” (return to player, on average 88%-95% of the player’s bet comes back as a prize and 5%-12% is kept by the casino, the higher RTPs usually go with the higher-bet-amount machines of course). The designer is trying to keep the player playing HIS game rather than a different game, and players generally come in with a certain amount of money which they will usually lose but which they will get several hours of enjoyable play out of if the game is well-designed. The money lost is considered part of the “entertainment budget”.
A key metric is the doubling percentage—the game is volatile enough that a player who quits when he either doubles his money or loses or it will walk away a winner 20-30% of the time, enough that they sometimes get the satisfaction of beating the casino THIS TIME. If they always ended up broke they wouldn’t enjoy playing.
There is also a distinction between “destination” casinos and “locals” casinos. Players on the fancy Las Vegas Strip casinos are there to splurge and the games are therefore greedier. But no st casinos make their money from regular players whom they need to keep coming back, so they have to offer better odds.
My recommendation is, if you must play a machine, the Blackjack and Video Poker machines give way better odds, if you learn some strategy it is easy to keep the House Edge under 2%. On the casino tables, Baccarat and Craps also have good odds and don’t require any strategic skill (except to avoid the sucker bets and just make the main bets).
May I interest you in this Super Bunnyhop review of Metal Gear Solid 3 Pachislots in Japan:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ROC3CEv72Z0
The best trick that I personally have seen are the machines that play a few-second snippet of a song you know (I'm thinking in particular of the Star Wars machines) while the reels are spinning. If your brain wants to hear the next few-second snippet, it has to press the button again.
Great information. Thanks
Can you tell me more? A lot of what the review describes (like reel mapping) seems to qualify as "faking the reels to give near misses". Is the book describing something that never happened, that used to happen but is now not happening, that is only relevant outside the US, or what?
IIUC based on the comment and this link (http://stoppredatorygambling.org/wp-content/uploads/2012/12/Harrigan-presentation-to-the-2010-NH-Gambling-Commission.pdf) from the review, the symbols on the reel can be weighted non-uniformly to increase the likelihood of near misses, but there's some other thing called "near misses" which is NOT allowed--presumably making near misses more likely in some way that can't arise from weighting the probabilities of each symbol. (E.g., each of three reels has probabilities 2/3 cherry, 1/3 blank, but 100% of the time you see 2 cherries and 1 blank because the reels aren't independent.)
It used to happen but for decades (since the 90’s, maybe earlier) it violated casino regulations in the USA. However, loopholes have been sought and there are some games in the last few years that technically fall under a different kind of math but have a similar near-miss effect, this is likely to be addressed soon but in the meantime the games are out there and doing well.
It really sounds like the book is saying people will "fake the reels", though. Does that actually happen?
Enough that regulators bother about forbidding it, yes.
A college acquaintance back in the 90s who was from Las Vegas had a summer "job" that consisted of playing video poker all day, every day. Apparently if you had a big enough bankroll (his boss provided that) and followed the correct strategy, you ended up slightly favored against the house. Or so I was told.
Video poker machines with plus EV pay tables are incredibly rare nowadays but it's believable back in the 90s
Am I missing something? I thought how well you did in poker depended on how good you were at the game. Is video poker not like that?
Video poker isn't poker. It's just poker inspired.
Video poker shows you a hand, asks you to hold some cards and replace others, and then based on the final hand gives a payout. I think it's something like your initial payment for a pair, twice the payout for a two pair, five times for a straight or a flush, etc. Different machines offer different payout schedules, and if you are familiar with the math of it all, you can calculate which payout schedules and which strategies of holding and replacing optimize your return, sometimes above the 99% level (but only if you play frequently enough to occasionally get a royal flush).
> (but only if you play frequently enough to occasionally get a royal flush).
This is a bad way to think about expected return. Your EV is the same no matter how many times you play. You just get lower variance from more plays
It is (was?) common that a Video Poker machine had a machine-level jackpot. If you need to play until you win it (and then leave as it resets to a low level that you don't like), persistence and bankroll matters.
My parents had optimized the strategy in the pre-pandemic times (former computer programmers with math grad education) and calculated that at the most favorable machines, you usually get 99.6% return with optimal play, but that the free giveaways of buffet meals, cruises, movie tickets, and home goods, often added up to a net positive (at least, if you consider your time at the machines as entertainment, the way that people consider spending money on a movie).
There's online calculators now where you can input the pay chart and it will tell you the best strategy and expected return. You are correct that casino bonuses do make some machines plus EV.
Blackjack is still the best game in the house though. If you play at a shoe game at middling stakes your chance of getting kicked out is pretty low and you can still make plus EV on top of free drinks and bonuses
I honestly don't get why people do this- certainly if you're smart/dedicated enough to be plus-EV at a shoe blackjack game like this, you're smart/dedicated enough to be net-positive at a low-middling NL hold'em game, which has the same benefits and a lot more player control (and, in my experience, a lot more enjoyable). Certainly you won't be net-positive at high enough stakes to attract pro players, but plenty of 5/10 NL games have a lot of dumb money around.
(Just to clarify: I really don't think this is hard. I was net-positive playing 2-3 spread in Phoenix for years, and that was *after* paying $6 for my Kilt Lifters at the table every hour or two, and tipping normally- which isn't required and you could totally skip without being kicked out)
I attended a talk by a professional card counter and he said he was optimized for blackjack, not poker. Different skills and he wouldn't try professional poker.
the company i used to work for used to own some casinos, and through that heard of lots of other tricks these places use. One i remember was that the machines placed near the exits/elevators are tuned to have the worst odds, because typically people who play them are just getting rid of spare change / looking to burn 5min and so have no expectations of winning at all.
One fascinating thing about Video Poker games is that if you find them in the right state (a high machine-level jackpot), your expected win may be above 100% _as long_ as you can stay on the machine until you earn the jackpot. There are also Blackjack games that allow you a tiny bit over 100% RTP with perfect play, but where it's not worth the effort if you just want to make money.
I have a few more hypotheses re: the gap between the addictiveness of computer gambling and "virtuous addictions":
1. Orthogonal constraints. A "virtuous addiction" app designer needs to make the app both addictive AND good. This constrains their options. On the other hand, a purely-addictive app designer simply needs to make the app addictive. If something's non-addictive, it goes. It's not surprising that a group optimizing for a single objective can hit it harder than a competing group operating under a major constraint.
2. Not targeting addiction. "Gamification" apps may, for institutional reasons, shy away from the factors that could make them maximally addictive. In your essay you describe the addiction-promoting tactics as increasingly ethically dubious. Apps designed to promote some good behavior may be more likely to avoid ethically dubious practices. (Not super high confidence on this but it's possible.)
3. Reality. When you gamble money you are actually losing money. This actual outcome may tie in to risk-reward systems much more powerfully. Gamification apps have shied away from this. (I can't bet on the Duolingo Owl.)
4. Addiction rarity. We all live in a world with gambling machines; while they are powerfully addictive they only seem to affect a relatively limited total slice of humanity. (You can put forward a Rat Park or a genetics or whatever hypothesis you'd like for this.) That means that the total baseline propensity for addiction (or for any particular addiction) may not be that high; and so the member of the general public who picks up gameified tech—thinking NOT, "let's look for an addiction!", but instead" let's learn French!" or whatever—may just have a relatively low likelihood of getting addicted. (This pairs well with other hypotheses; if a small fraction of humans are addiction-prone, and slot machines are more powerful than the owl, then it may not be surprising that everyone is with slot machines and nobody with the owl.)
I looked that up, and it says:
"You will earn Gems or Lingots for completing lessons on Duolingo. Typically you will earn Gems or Lingots when you meet your daily XP goal."
That's not really addictive enough. Suppose I want to make a gambling bet with my Gems. I have to *earn* those gems. To do that, I have to complete the daily goal. That's tough. It may be so tough that the effort of earning enough points to get enough gems to make the gamble is more off-putting than the thrill I get from making the once-a-week gamble.
To be truly addictive in the same way, Duolingo would have to do the same thing as the "purchase in-game currency to advance" model for freemium games. Now you can spend hours doing the slog of learning the vocabulary, hit the XP daily goal, get your gems, save them up for the once-a-week opportunity to gamble - OR you can *buy* points towards gems, and if you buy a particular bundle deal of gems you can gamble TWICE a week! For BIG PRIZES! (or a chance of approximately 1 in 2 million of a crappy prize as it works out in reality). Guess which model would garner the most dosh for Duolingo, and which most people would break their resolution and try "just this one time"?
*That's* the addiction model, and having played freemium games where I went in grimly determined never to buy any points, and ended up buying points because hey they're so cheap and I only need a couple of hundred and never buying more (and then I bought more), you can fall into that trap so easily.
Here, have a skit video about in-game microtransactions: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AGmXPk5MhuU
The other problem is that it's trivial to earn massive amounts of Lingots and there's nothing to spend them on.
Maybe it's even simpler: a "virtuous addiciton" would be almost by definition anti-"flow". We usually equate virtue with getting "better" in some way -- e.g. getting fitter, learning something, becoming more productive, actualy producing more, et cetera. Each and every one of these things is mentally effortful -- requires focus, concentration, the use of what Kahneman calls "System 1" thinking, routine frustration and retrenchment, making mistakes and learning from them, emotional bruising, the combustion of much glucose in the brain.
That's not to say that *all* exercise or learning is non-flow -- certainly when you are polishing your skills, it's possible. You can be a very good skiier and the process of getting even better may involve getting into a pleasureable "zone" where you listen to tiny muscle/environment feedbacks while almost duplicating Franz Klammer's 1984 Innsbruck run. w00t! You can be a pretty good speaker of Japanese and the process of becoming really good could involve a pleasureable "zone" state of conversing with speakers at a slightly higher pace and sophistication than you have yet achieved.
But for the steepest part of the learning curve, which lies between the easy introduction and the state of modest competence, it's *all* effortful, conscious, non-flow, and it involves a great deal of mistake and mistake-analysis-correction. There's no way to be addicted to this, because it's almost its definitional opposite.
Damn the lack of editing -- I meant "System 2" thinking of course. Bah.
I personally find kinesthetic learning to be very flow-like. For example, you brought up skiing. This is a very good example. When I am working on linking my turns in the moguls, for example, I end up screwing up a lot. But I just get up if I fall or stop and restart, re-assess, and continue. There is not much conscious thought going on, though I may talk to myself, either berating myself for screwing up or patting myself verbally on the back. But all this is very automatic and non-introspective, and time passes without notice. I am happy and in the moment.
However, I also experience this flow-like state at the steepest part of the learning curve, when I am picking up a new sport or physical hobby. Many people find this stage very frustrating, and that's why a lot of people have a hard time picking up new physical skills. However, I love this frustration and love to drop into the repetitive failure that eventually results in a success. When I do this, I feel like I am in a flow state.
I have come to realize that I am different in this and have often wondered why that is. A part of it is that I am a kinesthetic learner, I think. For example, I need to write things down to remember them. The movement of my hand does something to my brain to make it more likely to retain the information. But another part is just my addiction to that feeling of eventual success. I love that feeling more than anything and am will to keep failing to eventually have that feeling.
Thanks for the comment. Maybe you bring to the kinesthetic learning a pre-existing state of competence that puts you immediately in the more enjoyable intermediate-to-advanced part of the learning curve? That plus the existence of the (definitely addictive) previous state of success might result in a very different experience.
I'm thinking of the example of language learning: it turns out I am quite good at that, for unknown reasons, probably genetic. The second language I learned (meaning first foreign) was challenging and non-flow, but those after it were easier *even in the beginning* and more enjoyable. I think there is some part of the brain that got wired up with the first challenge, so I skipped some of the effortful early "I'm never going to get this!" frustration the second and subsequent times.
Maybe you have a similar experience with some kinds of athletic learning? I recall Eric Heiden (famous speed skater) saying that in the off season he took up inline skating and found it fit very comfortably.
I've seen people at skate parks doing something similar to what you describe - they try a trick, fall off, get up, get back on the board, try a trick again. Definitely appears to be a kinesthetic-learning flow, as well as a supportive community for that, where there are fifteen people at the park all doing that and reinforcing each other.
But some people get up on a board, fall off and may do it a few more times that day but don't go back the next day. Is it a different experience of physical pain? Is it fewer ties to the skate community? Is it generally lower "frustration tolerance"?
That barrier to entry into positive flow is important.
I can't remember the exact source, and it's probably been described in several (or many) 'aphorisms', but the idea is that the feeling of frustration like you described _always_ precedes 'enlightenment', and I've similarly found (or so I think) that I have trained myself to _appreciate_ those feelings of frustration when learning something new.
(My version of skiing is rock climbing.)
I think also that something that is extracting money from people usually has more money to spend on addictive features, while something that just takes constant money can't give you payouts that reward the addiction the same way.
I think it's important to note that people are quite capable of getting addicted to gambling even in the absence of any of all the flashy lights and clever tricks. A great many gambling addicts spend their days in the dingy and unoptimised surroundings of a bookmaker's office.
The underlying activity of gambling is addictive (or compulsive, or something) which many of these other things aren't.
🍎🍒🍓 Winner, winner, chicken dinner. This has been my favorite review.
> If designers optimized gambling machines for addictiveness, why can’t they do the same for these apps? If bad machines can be made addictive, then why can’t good machines?
The problem is that (for lack of a better term) simple addictions are easier than complex addiction. In the same way that slots are more addicting than poker (faster reward loop, more stimulating), it's also more stimulating than "good" addictions. A good addiction is something like an app that helps you keep a habit running every day. even as it is gameified, only a tiny portion of the habit is gamified. Running every day still is the same experience it always is, and it will be the majority of the "use gamified app, run" loop. maybe you spend 5min doing addicting app stuff, and 20 minutes doing running stuff (which is exhausting and sucks).
However, there is a parallel experience - addiction to self help *content*. Stuff that tells you to get up, go, solve your problems through the power of will. You read it, you're stimulated, and instead of getting up and solving your problems (hard, long reward loop), you seek out more of the stimulant - more self help. You can find tons of youtube vlogs and articles and blogs of people talking about their addiction to self help, and how it didn't actually help them.
https://www.google.com/search?q=addiction+to+self+help&rlz=1C1GCEA_enUS938US938&oq=addiction+to+self+help
A very good point. I've seen people get addicted to making plans for self-improvement. Actually executing the plans is exhausting and non-fun, and so never gets done. But making the plans! Yes that is a lot of fun.
People do similar things dreaming about home improvement, and fitness improvement, too. It's a very interesting category. One could argue straight-out money gambling has similarity, too, because, after all, the hypothetical goal of the gamble is to win money -- that is, to achieve an improvement in the state of your wallet.
See also: r/boardgames Check Out My Collection posts where OP posts a kallax with 40 games then comments "I've only played 10 of these, my most recent purchases haven't even left the shrinkwrap"
And the video game equivalent, e.g. 'I have 100 games in my Steam library and I've only played 10.', is so common it's a cliché.
I suspect it is even worse -- successful self-help defeats itself.
If you could actually give a lecture that makes people super productive, the next time you would want to give a lecture, all your customers would be like "sorry, I am too busy working on my startup". You could only sell one book.
If you advice does NOT work, but it makes people feel good, they will come for more lectures, and more books.
Therefore, even if actually miraculous self-help teachers exists, they are not the ones you know. They are neither popular nor rich.
This is something (or something similar) I think about in the context of planned obsolescence. It's not true that there are NO industries/areas-of-activity that aren't (financially) successful with a 'project'-based business model (e.g. Hollywood, publishing, video games), so maybe there IS hope that, e.g. self-help, dishwashing machine manufacturers, could be similarly re-tooled.
I AM pretty sympathetic to planned obsolescence tho, as it's an obvious strategy to keep one's 'concern' (e.g. business) a 'going concern', which is obviously useful for the owners, managers, and employees of that concern.
I wonder what observational evidence Schull (or the author of the review, or society at large) would or should view as supporting the opposite idea, namely that the participant in the activity is at fault for engaging in it self-destructively. I’m not saying that this can’t be answered, only that it strikes me as a difficult question, and perhaps an important one before we dismiss the “fault” hypothesis too quickly and categorically.
In a way, there is obviously a human fault here (most of us probably have some experience with addiction, however minor?), but as the review notes, triggering the fault requires circumstances external to the person.
It seems to me that most addictions necessarily require a "personal fault" (genetic susceptibility) and also a "corporate fault" (somebody working hard to encourage addictive behavior or sell addictive substances for profit, though possibly taking token measures to assuage their feelings of responsibility). If either one of these is missing, the addiction won't (can't?) happen. It helps to have some kind of third-party fault too, such as a crappy work/home life that makes the person want to escape to the relative pleasantness of a slot machine.
I think the natural thing to say is that if a situation changes when circumstances change, then a good part of the causation can be attributed to the changed circumstances. If something stays constant when circumstances change, then a good part of the causation is internal.
Suppose it is descriptively true that X routinely steals from stores, but when police officers are present and watching him, he is deterred from stealing anything. I think your criterion is satisfied—changed circumstances, i.e., the presence of police officers, changes X’s proclivity to engage in the destructive behavior. But it isn’t obvious, to me at least, that that really means that the “fault” explanation should be viewed as less plausible simply by virtue of the criterion being satisfied.
>>Third, maybe all designers worth their salt work for casinos, and virtuous apps are scraping the bottom of the barrel when they hire designers. The incompetent designers who work for virtuous apps just aren’t smart enough to create addictive products.<<
I suspect that this hypothesis comes closest to the truth. There isn't as much incentive or profit, on the whole, in the "virtuous" ones, and the lack of incentive causes them to be, quite simply, lower quality.
I have ADHD, and like many people with ADHD, I am reasonably prone to behavioral addictions. It requires constant vigilance to prevent them, and I still don't always succeed. I've been addicted to certain "free-to-play" games in the past, for example. I also use DuoLingo regularly, and I can say there's frankly no comparison between the two, in terms of addictiveness.
There are a few elements in DuoLingo that show "promise" in that regard (such as achievements or advancing your rank and league) but not many. Take in-game currency, as an example. Free-to-play games typically have at least one (if not more than one) in-game currency and a dizzying array of things to buy with it. Typically, many items or actions flatly require it. DuoLingo does have in-game currency, but the problem is, there's almost nothing you can buy with it. So, once you've bought the few available perks (as I have), there's very little incentive to earn more currency or keep going endlessly. Similarly, FitBit was uncomfortable to wear, and I found the app rather clunky and unintuitive to use. It wasn't really clear to me what was even *supposed* to be addictive about it.
So, those are just one or two examples, but it's illustrative of my point that the quality isn't generally there with the virtuous stuff. I truly wish it were, so that when I indulge bad habits, as inevitably happens from time to time, I could at least get something worthwhile out of it, but it's just not.
For what it's worth, Habitica (a to-do list gamification), came the closest for me, but it wasn't effortlessly social enough to hold my interest. I didn't see much point in fun new digital outfits or backgrounds, when no one was seeing them but me, and questing alone wasn't as motivating. But I probably could have tried harder to find a guild too. *shrug*
I wonder about this. Why do you think the incentive is lacking for the virtuous ones? As far as I can tell, Duolingo is nowhere near underfunded - they're valued at 2.4 billion dollars, and raised a 35 million dollar round last year. They should be able to compete favorably with free-to-play games, at least on a salary basis, when it comes to getting the best designers.
Honestly, I don't know! I've wondered about that too. Maybe, as someone else suggested, the fact that they are, in some sense, on the "virtuous" side of things makes them avoidant of maximally effective but more ethically questionable techniques. But that still doesn't really explain instances, as with the virtual currency, in which the virtuous app uses the same technique as the vice apps but just does so incompetently.
Possibly because Duolingo and similar apps are about a goal, e.g. learning to be reasonably fluent in a language. That's the end goal, not "get the suckers to spend hours and hours using this app and spending money to do so". If Duolingo switched to "we don't give a damn if you can say 'Où est la plume de ma tante ??' after eighty hours on 'learning' French but you *will* have sunk two hundred bucks into this app during that time " *then* they'd design it to maximise addictiveness.
The part about gamblers and flow reminded me of Edward Ugel's "Money for Nothing" (a memoir about gambling, high-pressure commission sales, and the business of buying out lottery annuities). Ugel suggests that one thing setting apart problem gamblers is that the primary appeal of gambling becomes the thrill of risking loss, not the possibility of winning, so no amount of actually losing detracts from that primary appeal.
That's interesting.
I wonder if some of the more extreme sports have a similar appeal in the sense that they seem to be about how close you can get to dying and survive not so much what you achieve, but that's an outsider's perspective on my part
An overall great review but the push back against capitalism as the root of evil is perfunctory and poorly argued.
Modern China is very capitalist. It's no more a communist country right now than north Korea is democratic. If it walks like a duck, quacks like a duck, why are you paying attention to the faded lettering saying, "cat?"
There have been capitalist states with one party systems. To go for a very applicable example, Taiwan before 1987 was a one party dictatorship which defined itself then and now in capitalist terms.
Communist states tend to be one party authoritarian states, but that doesn't mean that one party authoritarianism is equal to communism.
Also, even if we extend charity and accept the PRC as still being communist, Macau is not a good case. Gambling is allowed in Macau because it is explicitly and legally separate from the rest of China as special administrative zone.
Again, separating gambling from society is a long and storied tradition. Arch capitalist Singapore has a very successful casino, but Singaporeans and permanent residents are required to pay a 100$ cover charge to enter the door. It is meant to fleece tourists not residents.
I think the idea that "capitalist society in particular creates people who are susceptible to gambling addiction" is still very much plausible.
Indeed it is *plausible*, but I think the point the author was making is that gambling addiction has been a problema *for as long as mankind has made records of itself*, so why speak of gambling addiction as something caused specifically by capitalism?
I think this is a point I would need to read the book to actually understand, though. However, if the description of the book the author provided is accurate, it seems to me like the kind of work that would go on a very deep explanation of an interesting topic and then just throw a rant about neoliberalism in there for "politically conscious researcher" points.
I would say there is bit of correlation between "capitalist enough to be literate in the ancient world" and "capitalist enough to have a gambling problem".
The vast majority of ancient records we have are written by the wealthiest members of their societies.
Though this is an argument about my third hand reading of the reviewers second hand reading of the author's primary work which in itself bases its capitalism stance on secondary reading of others.
"Capitalism" is sometimes used as a word for a social condition in which every interaction is transactional. I couldn't tell you which thinker came up with this but it goes beyond explicitly economic action. I think Deleuze/Guattari went after this a bit in "Capitalism and Schizophrenia", a society so atomized by transactionality that a human can't retain personhood (but that book is always already being forgotten anyway, even while being read).
Personally I think transactionality operates on a separate axis from "capitalism" per se but I believe many people see them as identical or as merged. When people argue that a non-capitalist society would be kinder to workers, there is fundamentally a non-transactional protection being described.
Gambling does initially look like an overgrowth of transactionality, but another poster mentioned thrill of risking loss versus euphoria of winning and that the addiction results from becoming compulsive about the former, so that losing provides no brakes (writer Ungel addressed this, according to that poster).
I'm interested by the use of the phrase "late capitalism" in particular. This phrase was coined by Werner Sombart, an early-20th-century German economist, in a book titled "Der moderne Kapitalismus" which laid some of the intellectual groundwork for National Socialism.
The implied meaning is that capitalism is in its final stage, and will soon end and be replaced by something else. The fact that the phrase is about a century old, and capitalism is still around, does not reflect well on its accuracy.
I've seen this phrase crop up a few times recently, in a similar context, and I'm curious how a piece of Nazi rhetoric ended up being popular in Western academia.
If we deem capitalism to have begun with the repeal of the Corn Laws in 1849, it won't be long before "late capitalism" comprises the majority of capitalism!
I wouldn't go that far. The Wealth of Nations, written in 1776, is (I would say) an early analysis of capitalism - and remember that it's discussing trends that existed prior to its publication.
The founding of the Dutch East India Company in 1602 is, I think, a decent marker for the beginning of capitalism, depending on how widely you define it: it was the first publicly-traded company, allowing anyone with capital to invest in its activities.
" I'm curious how a piece of Nazi rhetoric ended up being popular in Western academia." Well, the answer to that is obvious from mere inspection, but is currently unsayable.
Formatting bug: 10,000 (222222) should have some multiplication symbols in between the three instances of the number "22".
Holy crap. You recognized that?
I mean. If you showed me '22 = 4' I could guess 'uhh, you need a plus there'
But you could never show me '10000 = 222222' and have me realize 'oh you missed the two multiplications'
To be fair I noticed the middle two 2s were italic. So nitpicky attention to typography helped as much as quick math thinking.
A really outstanding review. Described the book in enough detail so that you knew what it said, and could decide whether it was worth actually reading, while also presenting a nice separate critique, so that if you didn't want to do a deep dive (by reading the book) you were at least informed of the terms of the debate and the ideas present, and could riff on those.
Also, just plain good English writing. Very well done indeed.
Some people previously complained that they couldn't tell which book reviews were by me vs. contest entries.
You can tell this one isn't by me, because I would have made a bigger deal about the kabbalistic implications of slot machine reels having 22 symbols.
Go on – what are the kabbalistic implications of 22?
It's the number of letters in the Hebrew alphabet.
One day, one of these slot machines is going to spell out the true name of God.
Alternatively, one of them already has, and we are living in the world that comes after that happens, for better or worse.
Luckily slot machines don't have a speech synthesizer, let alone a human soul.
Arthur C. Clarke's "The Nine Billion Names Of God" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Nine_Billion_Names_of_God
Yes, that's a great reference. I was specifically referencing the movie Pi, though :)
Suffice to say that it is not a coincidence, because nothing is ever a coincidence.
185% dead link
And what's 185% mean, anyway? Sometimes you'd win twice? Or is that the expectation value of the payout?
It seems to refer to the expected return on a bet: 185% rather than the normal 95% or so.
re: virtuous apps
one difference is the lack of randomness and losing.
Like, if you get an answer right on Duolingo, you get a happy bell and animation - you don't lose points the majority of the time and then gain big one of the times
fitbit similarly has all the rewards, but none of the randomness - you set yourself a step goal, you walk that number of steps, you achieve it. Maybe if every 500 steps you either won or lost points, you'd feel compelled to walk more
Also the Duolingo tasks aren't identical enough to build up the rush. I think if it were all arranging the little word-buttons to match a sentence correctly it would reach flow/dark flow more quickly. It interrupts itself with having to speak words into the microphone and having to hear spoken language. Maybe that's their error, it brings in speech/other people; I associate dark flow with silence.
This is very true. I was thinking the main difference was the challenge-skill balance they mentioned above - addicting games are just challenging in enough to keep you engaged without making you get frustrated, but learning a language or doing exercise can be more challenging. I think that combined with the lack of randomness would easily explain the difference between 'virtuous' and non-virtuous apps.
Kind of tying back into the Rat Park concept, I think the life-ruining aspect of a lot of the most addictive activities and substances is probably important.
For myself, procrastinating is most tempting when I already feel hopelessly behind. And of course the marginal minute of procrastinating makes me even farther behind.
Likewise being broke probably increases the appeal of the sort of “dark flow” that slot machines provide and the fact that they makes you more broke seems like it would be reinforcing.
That would predict that virtuous activities are only addictive once they start ruining your life, but that definition has an unsatisfying circularity to it.
I think virtuous activities can become addicted once you experience a similar *sized* change to your life -- i.e. they cause a change which is unexpectedly large, but on the up side.
So for example someone who wins first place in a difficult athletic competition, especially if that's something he never expected to be able to do, can get addicted to that sport, to the wish to have the amazing experience again. Someone who hits it unexpectedly big in business or winning an election or gaining some outsized unexpected level of public recognition could become addicted to trying to re-achieve that.
Call it the Bruce to Caitlyn Jenner effect. Once you've been the center of the entire world's attention, you might very well spend the rest of your life trying to recapture that, and be willing to go to...extreme lengths to do so.
Maybe there is some insight to be gained on virtuous addiction from "big boy" gambling- the stock market. The common wisdom and evidence say that you can't beat the market- but the market is still going to increase ~15% per year, iirc. I know I've fallen down rabbit holes of various types of analysis/straight up dumb guessing on the market, similar to how I treat my more traditional addictive vices (video games), and I'll gain and lose money locally, but I end up ahead by the years end, at least so far; the "addiction" keeps me funneling a large part of my excess income into my "casino" account instead of my safer account that is all ETFs that I let money sit in.
My gut instinct is to say this works because the background steady state is positive (market generally goes up), and the wheels of the activity are only marginally correlated; another poster suggested Pokemon go works here because you are walking in pursuit of the game goal. I don't think you can effectively background e.g. language acquisition, that or it takes too long and the "fun" parts aren't that fun. Although as I write this, it occurs to me that on duolingo I've been in a holding pattern of mostly just doing the review exercises to keep my streak up for about a month, and I *think* I'm trending upwards in my language skills (I solve the problems faster/understand the sentences better).
About DuoLingo: it certainly can be addictive. Last summer I found myself spending a 1–2 hours on it each day. I realized it was becoming a problem when I was reluctant to join a real-life conversation in the language I was learning, because I was busy doing DuoLingo. After that, I've cut way back on it.
Hm, I haven't used Duolingo in a while, so maybe they've upped their game, but I don't remember it being particularly addictive or even enjoyable. Maybe I should give it another try.
I thought this was pretty good and put me in mind of the one time I ever visited Vegas. I liked it there a lot more than I expected to because it was so forthrightly superficial, I couldn't help but respect it.
As for the why of gambling apps and not duolingo, I think it's related to the second point. But if vice is intrinsically alluring, that just pushes the question back another step, why? The pain of the loss is key I think, without that, there's no joy in gambling and not much in any kind of game. See for example: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Su1Rdw3SRHY
1st Ol Trbetr
2nd Qba'g pbagenqvpg Tnyra
3rd Ur pnyyrq uvf Whzob
4th Tnaqnys naq Rmrxvry
5th Obbx fgnoovat gvzr
6th Ab, ohg jr pna yrnea n ybg fgvyy
7th Orrc obbc V nz na nqqvpg
8th Ebzr jnfa'g qrfgeblrq va n qnl
9th *Qha Qha*
10th Jung qvq gur theh fnl gb gur ubgqbt iraqbe?
V frr jung lbh qvq gurer
Great review. One of my favorites.
Re. the NRA: So what you're saying is, if most people hear a story about a kindly old grandmother who picked up a shotgun and blew someone's head off, and became a murderer, they blame the gun for causing her to murder. Without the gun, she would still be that kindly old grandmother.
Folks with osteoporosis tend to have more difficulty killing people with bare hands, but yeah, she just needs to do some research into murder methods that don't require a lot of strength. Something involving the carotid arteries, maybe? Poison? Boring people to death?
So you would also blame the gun for causing her to murder? Do you think that addiction and homicide by gun are caused by the same neural mechanisms?
"maybe vices are just inherently more addictive than virtues". what is addictive are freebies. easy wins with no effort. case in point my roommate uses a fitness app where you can enter a draw for every 10 push-ups you do. he freely admits he cheats on the app daily.
Seems like the problem is that virtue is more difficult to check (by an app) than vice. I can't check whether you actually did 10 push-ups, but I can check whether you paid for my in-game currency.
On the other hand, apps like Duolingo can check your language skills, so you can't cheat there. (Well, you could open Google Translate in the next tab, but most people probably wouldn't.)
The problem is that Duolinguo can't reward me with anything I actually want. Their business model doesn't allow giving out significant real prizes, and they have been unable to entice me to believe that their little blue diamonds are fun to have.
It seems to me that, no matter the _quality_ of addictive gambling/apps/whatever, there is always the choice of whether they shall be present in one's life in any nonzero _quantity_.
Framed this way, it is clear that highly-addictive outlets of all kinds, while indeed "vices", are nonetheless in a position to provide a unique service to the rest of the world.
The uniqueness is an unfortunate byproduct of modern society's ever-increasing desire to stamp out individual adversity even at the cost of great amounts of total adversity.
In short, this service is colloquially known as an "idiot tax".
Other such providers of this service have included charlatans, quacks, snake-oil salespeople and con-people. Their dwindling is a great loss to the rest of us who are capable of peacefully coexisting with them without being mysteriously moved to donate them anything.
Fitness apps, by and large, don't have randomized rewards.
The problem with identifying behavioral issues like gambling, sex addiction etc.. etc. as addictions is less the question of whether or not they qualify as 'addictions' in some definitional sense (after all they are all dopamine releasing activities and have similar behavioral responses) but the implicit moral categorization. Yes, all these things share this dopamine reward pathway but plenty of other things we see as good and desirable do as well. Many of us feel that way about successes at work, others get that thrill from meeting new people and maybe impressing them or making a good point in an online community.
The problem is that the real distinction we are making when we call something an addiction is really between problematic/harmful behavior and beneficial/acceptable behavior. The guy getting his dopamine hits starting companies, proving theorems or making friends isn't harming themselves in the same way the problem gambler might be so we don't call it an addiction.
That's fine but the word is deployed to create the impression that something more medical and technical is going on than a judgement about the desirability of some behavioral pattern and that is misleading to the general public.
I think we also should distinguish between the internal experience. Genuine chemical addiction is ultimately a horrific experience for the *user*. Very few don't hate it passionately. But they just can't quit. It's not *just* a craving or a sense that if I were doing X right now things would be more fun. There is also a deep fear and loathing for the state (which nevertheless isn't sufficient to keep the addict away).
So when we say "I'm addicted to caffeine" because I get a headache and am grumpy without my morning cuppa, or "I'm addicted to running" because I really feel better overall if I take a 5 mi cross-country run in the evening, this is really nothing like the experience of being addicted to heroin, with the simultaneous compulsion toward and intense revulsion for the drug.
People use the word broadly because in many ways they lie on the same biochemical spectrum, similar pathways in the brain are invoked, but I think there's a limit to how useful this is: in the end, the biochemistry is only part of the phenomenology. There is the social and logos aspect, which you mention, and there is also a significant different in the interior psychological experience.
Behind every beautiful thing there's been some kind of pain
Pro poker players are an interesting case in point because they demonstrate that skill level alone is enough to transform addictive behaviour into a high-status vocation in the eyes of the public. So even though few would argue that pro players aren't having an internal experience of addiction, they aren't classified and don't bare any stigma as addicts.
Great point!
I read Addiction By Design when I was writing my book on luck. I thought it was harrowing and eye-opening. For me the most fascinating parts of the books were less about the casinos’ strategies to achieve addiction and player extinction, but about the experiences of the players themselves—particularly the ideas of flow, assimilation into the game, and indifference to winning. The review of the book is good and fair.
Aren't we down on rat park? It's one of those typical too-good-to-be-true sociology experiments of the postwar era IMO. Also Scott: https://slatestarcodex.com/2017/10/25/against-rat-park/
having worked in IT for casino: the casino is not allowed to adjust the odds of a particular slot machine, but it is allowed to adjust the odds of a bank. if someone relatively new to the casino begins playing you want to sit in that same bank of slots.
Virtuous apps aren't addictive / flow-inducing because there are no immediate status gains to be anticipated. We don't care about levelups and badges, we care about levelups and badges other people care about.
I believe this is also the greatest failing of school. Failure to connect learning to the status games kids play.
I think that in some cultures (Japan?) getting good grades confers status rather than ostracism.
Not particularly. Just like in American schools, cool kids getting good grades is cool and high status, while uncool kids getting good grades is mostly neutral(though I think in both cases it's plainly better socially to be uncool with good grades than uncool with bad grades). However, in Japan, in-class excellence is even more stigmatized. Any Hermione Grangers quickly get shamed into shutting up, even more so than in the US.
Duolingo does show you your points both compared to strangers in a leaderboard and friends. As do fitness apps such as Strava. And that is definitely an extra incentive to keep up every day (for me at least). And I was also motivated by the personal levelups and badges.
Pokemon Go is absolutely addictive in a way that Fitbit isn't. I'm not sure if Niantic is just better at this, or just more committed. I've planned activities throughout an entire week to bump up my walking to the magic 50 km. It's somewhat self limiting in that there's only so much walking you can do in a day, and there's really not much to do that doesn't involve walking. But yeah, humanity can make addictive virtuous experiences, we just don't.
For a couple of short years, the Basis Peak fitness tracker was a thing. It had _by far_ the best gamification/virtuous addiction/whatever you want to call of it of any fitness tracker out there. Badges for different activities. Badges for doing multiple things a day. Badges for doing things multiple days in a row. I can't really describe it well, but I managed to lose about 15 pounds over the course of several months (and while I was a little overweight, I've never been obese to the point that losing 15 pounds was easy) and due in part to the incentives of the app, I was biking into work 2-3 times a week (16 miles each way), in addition to many other activities. The device got discontinued and due to it's cloud integration, it stopped working. While I have managed to lose weight and keep it off since then (mostly just through better diet), it was by far the most physically active I've ever been in my life since I stopped regularly playing sports in undergrad. I've tried the fitbit twice for sustained periods of time and didn't get _nearly_ the same feedback.
My point is that good design is _so important_ in making these things work (which the review mentions). Why no other device has picked up the Basis peaks design, I have no idea. But if I could get it again, I would pay many hundreds of dollars (it was about 150 new at the time.
It didn't have any hardware abilities that fitbits and other trackers don't (It was just a heart-rate monitor with accelerometers for activity detection), so there is no reason current trackers couldn't be as good (probably better with the improvements of the past 5 years). It's really frustrating to me since I had found something that worked well for me, over a relatively sustained period of time, and no one out there is bothering to replicate it.
Maybe you and other people can remember enough of how it worked that it could be recreated.
Great review. Thanks for writing it!
One thought I had is that both you and the author are drawing to strong a division between “unhealthy, addictive behavior” that incorporates activities that are basically empty calories (gambling, social media addiction, etc.) and healthy, behavior where you do lots of good things (???).
I’m not on social media. I’ve watched you all from the sidelines. You’re all insanely addicted. I’m 47, so I clearly remember when all of you USED to do other things, but now you stare at your phones and little else. You even talk about Facebook posts while we’re out to dinner even though you know I’ve no fucking idea what you’re talking about. It’s real, and it’s a serious bummer.
And I don’t participate. Unfortunately, what I do instead is stare at my phone reading Substack articles, all day long (and before Substack, blogs). I’ve subscribed to a ridiculous number of Substacks at a cost that I’ve hidden from my wife, and there are probably eight longform articles for me to read a day. God forbid I miss the third 6,000 word article of the day written about cancel culture.
Maybe the problem is the PHONES. Maybe the problem IS the pills, regardless of what the rats tell us. Maybe there are objects that cause addictions. Facebook existed before smartphones, and you all incorporated into your lives just fine. But when it was put on your phones, wow.
I’m not convinced that me reading eight Substack articles a day is materially more beneficial to me, my family, or society, than you staring at your phone all day owning the Xs on Twitter. It’s all just too much time, too much busyness. Anything that distracts us from our duties (to our families, our community, our jobs) to this extent is bad. So put me down for blaming the phones and the pills.
I wrote this way too quickly - I've got run. When you read it, please pretend it's more polished.
Tell us what people used to do in the before-times. Didn't they just watch TV and read magazines and formulaic books?
I'm wondering whether having a taste for dark flow is connected to something. Maybe depression?
Adverse Childhood Events greatly increase risk of adult addiction (and depression, etc). So wouldn't be surprising.
This was a great piece to read!
Perfect for temporarily escaping the stress of reality.
Thanks! ;)
There have happened a few things since 2012, perhaps especially in Europe. The state possessing the regulatory power creates an interesting back-and-forth. The state wants gambling (this provides income, either directly through having a state lottery, or indirectly through concessions and taxes), but it doesn't want addiction - addiction has significant social and PR costs. The lotteries would kinda want properly addicted players, but realize that because the state has the regulatory power, and can be influenced by the public's perception, there are limits to how far they can push things, and ideally they would like to pre-empt actual regulations by their own systems. Therefore, both sides like a pretty high amount of spending from each person, while trying to reduce social costs (an interest of the state) or the risk of harsher regulation due to social costs and public relations (the game providers).
For instance, the Norwegian state lottery runs gambling machines with a number of restrictions on them (some of these come from above, from the political parts of the system, and others are created by the state lottery itself in order to seem responsible to its superiors). These include a player card linked to your identity (this being Scandinavia, it's easily achieved and hard to bypass), enforced loss limits on a daily/weekly/monthly level (well under $1000 monthly), making it illegal to put the gaming machines in establishments that serve alcohol, capping individual wins to just a few hundred dollars, and forbidding some of the methods discussed in the review, like near-misses or features that encourage a "one more round" mindset. The whole system also runs on a centralized network, making it even easier to control and analyze play. These kinds of "responsible gaming" systems are increasingly common throughout Europe.
Another thing that has happened since 2012 is the increase of web/app-based gambling (obviously accelerated by the Corona pandemic). But what's strange here isn't that it has happened, but rather that it hasn't happened _more_. For what else that you could do online would you even consider going to a specialized machine outside your home to do the same thing on _its_ screen? With a casino, there's an obvious explanation - the surroundings make for a different experience, and it's easy to see how it would encourage flow. But a lot of gaming machine play happens on fairly simple machines placed in numbers of one to three in coffee shops and 7-Eleven type stores that certainly don't bring that kind of ambience.
Oh, and the review misses one very different reason for machine gambling - money laundering. If the tracking in the system and the operating processes is weak, you can play with unlaundered cash, having an excuse for your wins (the wins come out laundered) while the system doesn't care about your losses. AML/CTF laws post-9/11 try to crack down on this, and it's easy to see how the more centrally controlled a system is, the better the transparency becomes. Under the Norwegian solution, for instance, you can only use bank funds in the first place, making the system essentially proof against money laundering.
It's worth noting that in the US, the ability to launder income via casinos has been gone for decades. Casinos fall under all the provisions of the Bank Secrecy Act, which means reporting suspicious cash activity, suspected structuring or attempts to structure, refusal to show ID or fill out reporting paperwork, etc, to FinCEN the same way a bank does.
I have a pretty hardcore internet pornography addiction I've been working to get over, it was created over the decades and I don't know it was a problem until I tried to quit. But I've also been working on getting rid of it and studying math and computer science to hopefully switch careers.
So here's my take on the different flows. I like math and computer science, out of all things in my life its what I enjoy the most. However I usually drag my feet to start studying for the day and it usually feels like I am fighting myself to do so even while I know I will enjoy it and feel good when I am done. When I am working on a programming problem getting into a state of flow is easy. There is a big difference between doing and studying, studying requires 100% conscious effort to get things right and correct my errors, programming takes half my mental effort as I have some best practices ingrained so I can usually iteratively try things to see what works. I enjoy both those activities, but they are draining for me mentally.
Porn is a hit of a wonderdrug, whatever bad feelings are usually wiped away and I am wired in a state of dark flow for hours. It's like a lightswitch in my head with an on/off, if I screw around on the web or go anywhere I am not supposed to and whatever neurons get activated I know my day is shot. I can feel the change instantly, I feel my head constricting and I feel more locked in to my mind rather than controlling it. impulses get amplified 100x. A true rogue agent seems to take over.
It would be nice if I got to have the controls and just avoid content I don't want to see usually. But its not that simple, Something I call adjacency cascade usually always leads me back to porn. As an example lets say I watch YouTube, I look up meme videos, I scroll through those until I see I see one that's slightly sexualized, I tell myself I shouldn't but If I am already feeling bad my ego is already depleted. It keeps hopping down those lines until I find a rare uncensored porn video on youtube.
My rouge addiction agent uses all latent intelligence I have to optimize it's one goal, and Its really really good at breaking down all barriers I create if it gets power. I am smarter than myself. (as a fun corollary my addiction helped me understand the orthogonality thesis and deceptive agent AI research easily and intuitively.) My solution was the same but more hardcore that the OP. I blocked all the internet except for sites I use to study. No searches on google, if I don't know something I have to find it another way. and congrats you made the cut.
Addiction doesn't feel like 'you' from the inside, maybe that's what's so enticing, but once you get back in the drivers seat and see all the time the rouge agent has wasted just to hurt you, you wish you never gave up the seat in the first place... Until it whispers those sweet nothings of escape in your ear again.
Thank you for writing this vivid description.
One thing that I feel i underrated in overcoming internet addictions is the positive power of social factor. Often people do not have resources to go to a therapist, but just having a living person who you know you'll talk to for 10 minutes in the evening to tell them that another day was a waste and they'll tell you the same and then you'll say what you're going to try tomorrow and so on, can make a lot of difference.
So yes! And COVID restrictions have so reduced the daily small interactions we have with others .....
Question: how much of casino's profits comes from people with gambling addictions? I'd have thought lower in Vegas than for local casinos, but are there stats on this?
Depends on the casino. Here in Australia I suspect our casinos' profits come mostly from Chinese money laundering, with gambling addictions a distant second.
Oh, that would be the same as in British Columbia! Governments get addicted to gambling too, or at least gambling revenues.
I just wrote a post on LessWrong referencing Addiction by Design… if only I had waited, I could have linked to this excellent review.
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/xErhEhPpPjJvDFNaT/sympathy-for-the-ferryman-of-hades-or-why-we-should-keep
Can't you edit your post on LW? You can add a comment too.
Are gym rats and workaholics addicts? There is certainly a flow aspect to their behavior.
In terms of the rat park experiment, I recently went to a fancy spa resort that had a strict no cell phone policy. I was worried I’d have withdrawal. But with so many activities it was an absolute delight.
I've known gym rats who work out to the detriment of their personal relationships, who keep increasing the difficulty of workouts when their bodies are telling them clearly it's too much, who work out when ill or injured .... So yes, definitely can be addictive.
Apparently there are two flavours of workaholics. The ones who work so much because they are avoiding something (avoid negative emotions by getting into the flow, avoid spouse by not coming home from work until they are asleep, avoid fear of failure by always working harder than the other person ....) experience a lot more negative effects from their high work hours (on physical and mental health etc) than do those who work a lot because they love their work and find it super satisfying.
"Good flow" = when studying or solving a problem or working on a project or exercising; you are in the zone and you do something useful.
"Neutral flow" = when playing video games; you are exercising some skills, but ultimately nothing useful, and probably procrastinate from something useful.
"Evil flow" = when gambling; the zone is about destroying your wealth and possibly your life.
The question how much are addicts responsible for their addiction seems obvious from the perspective of multiple agents in the mind. There is a part of the mind that wants playing on the machine and losing the money. There are other parts of the mind that would prefer to keep the money for something more useful. The machine is designed to provide advantage to the gambling part of the mind in the internal fight. Yes, the addict had a dark side, but it was not obvious that the dark side was going to win against the rest of the brain, perhaps the rest of the brain would win. The machine did whatever it could to support the dark side, and then the owners said "well, it was a dark side of *your* mind, why do you blame us?"
As an analogy, imagine a country, where a certain small fraction of population (let's say 1%) are some kind of Nazis. A foreign government contacts them, sends them tons of money, weapons, provides training, helps them hack government computers, and so on (the only thing the foreign government does *not* do is send their own people). There is a revolution, and the country becomes a Nazi dictatorship. And the foreign government says: "hey, why does anyone accuse us of interfering? it was *their* citizens that did the revolution, how could that be our fault?"
On Khan Academy games and Duolingo: they are absolutely addictive. For around a year I logged on to Duolingo every day and dutifully logged my 30 points so that I could keep my streak. I don't know whether that's because I've grown up online so I'm just predisposed to any form of internet addiction but in any case, yes. Obviously those aren't the same as other types of addictions (it's five minutes of a language exercise, in my opinion it doesn't have the same capacity) but they do create a compulsion to go through with that language exercise to the point where your autonomy can disappear.
The reason why I'd also say that Duolingo and Khan Academy-esque academic games aren't as addictive as Instagram or TikTok is that they don't have any element of humanity to them. After a certain point the experience of logging your points just becomes stale and unnecessary--at least in the face of the "one more video" or "ten more minutes" impulse that you'd otherwise find in social media.
In terms of what a "virtuous addiction" would look like, I submit that I am addicted to air, water, and food. I consume these compulsively and suffer from serious withdrawal symptoms if I attempt to give them up. Luckily, they're good for me (with the exception of some of the food) so it's just a virtuous addiction.
Or if that's a bit too biologically primal to count, how about this? I am addicted to showering every morning, brushing my teeth once or twice a day, and going to work five days a week. Much like any other addiction I know I physically _could_ stop if I wanted to but it would make me feel bad; nonetheless I'm pretty sure that if I could get out of these habits then I'd eventually stop feeling the urge. Anyway, these are all virtuous (or at least beneficial) things that I feel strongly compelled to do, they just don't seem like "addictions" because they're so commonplace and beneficial that nobody uses that particular frame to analyse them.
This is my favourite piece so far by far. Love the author's writing style.
Very nice review, winner for me so far. I noticed myself circling down the TikTok drain the last 2 weeks and convinced myself I was getting something useful out of it. Just deleted it, thank you.
My virtuous app is my radiology reading worklist. I switched jobs from an academic to more private practice environment and have been able to get into a flow much more easily due to the larger volume but lower complexity of cases. I think many of my peers would call the academic to private move as a downgrade, but it has definitely improved my work enjoyment.
This is my favourite review so far - by a long shot. In fact I'd wager that it is the review Scott predicted with 60% certainty would win the book review contest. [And I also notice Scott joining in the comments with something positive vibey]
Having said that, the first things that come to mind as I comment, are criticisms. That fact was surprising enough to me that I stopped to wonder why it might be. A couple of answers presented themselves. Firstly I recently re-read Scott's "I can tolerate everything except the outgroup" and there was enough overlap between this reviewers worldview and my own for the differences to cause a certain amount of grievance in me.
Secondly, I'm a recovering compulsive gambler and therefore take it as read that non-gamblers can't possibly have an understanding of the lives, motivations and experiences of people that do (or did) gamble compulsively.
However, having noticed the arousing of my completely gratuitous prejudices, I'm left with very few criticisms at all. I was annoyed at the ending, but of course the problem was entirely mine. I was enjoying the flow of the review in the way I would a good Tom Hanks movie - I was in good hands, utterly trusting, and then suddenly I was thrown back into my everyday life with its uncomfortable unpredictability.
And the teaser at the end - that the book had numerous personal stories from gambling addicts, but the reviewer didn't have time or space for them, annoyed me for a few seconds. Then I realised it was an extremely good decision to omit them - but to let the reader know that they were in the book should the reader be interested. They would both take up a huge amount of space for very little addition to the review, and also wouldn't be a particularly good fit for typical SSC/ACX readers. Too much anecdote, too little persuasive argument.
The writing was deceptively good - another Tom Hanks anology would probably be appropriate. There weren't any literary pyrotecnics, just polished, unfussy clarity. What I liked most was the intellectual and general humility of the review, especially because it is something I lack.
A good example of some of the qualities I admired is how the reviewer dealt with the authors contention that capitalism is somehow responsible for the prevalence of gambling addictions. I don't know if that seems more ridiculous to me than it does to the reviewer, but I would have been launching tirades of sarcasm and ridicule. What I read was a calm but convincing rebutal. Most impressive.
I especially liked that the reviewer managed to convey something central about gamblers - or at least the vast majority of those I met in rehabs and in the meetings of gamblers anonymous. Which is (contrary to the reviewers and most peoples initial understanding) that gamblers are not primarily motivated by trying to win more money. Yes, superficially it looks (and can feel) like that. But it is, as was said, much more frequently, and more deeply, about escaping to a safer, more comforting place. Which is indeed why winning can be such a depressing experience.
The book reviewed was specifically about slot machines and it is quoted as saying that "Machine gambling is not like other kinds of gambling" Of course, a book devoted to one kind of gambling is prone to making such distinctions, but although Iim maybe out of touch with the addictive power of modern gambling machines, I find that hard to believe. I'd bet that the majority of money gambled on the high streets of Britain is still spent in betting shops and not on gambling machines of any kind. Vegas, of course, is a different world entirely..
probably was discussed before in the comments, but still:
I think the reason apps like duolingo aren't as addictive is because duolingo has to teach you a language, at least with mild efficacy (and a fitbit has to get you fit and so on).
Under these restriction, it isn't necessarily the case that gambling machine engineers could have made a machine addictive. Learning a language is by default hard, or should I say broccoli, otherwise everybody would do it all the time just for fun and there wouldn't be a need for apps to gamify learning. Gambling machines have no such limitations and can focus on purely chocolate aspects of gaming. This doesn't map perfectly with vice and virtue but the correlation is pretty obvious.
So some activities have inherent broccolian qualities to begin with.
Came here to say this as well. Gambling machine designers have many more degrees of freedom. They just need to make money and stay legal. As you say, Duolingo needs to do that _and also teach you a language_.
The slot machines have another advantage too: when they want to reward the user they can give them cash money.
>Designers replaced mechanical levers with buttons and physical reels with video screens. This made the games three to four times faster. The quicker each game, the more money gamblers can spend during their gambling session. Quicker games are also more addictive. Bally, a casino company, targets 3.5 seconds per game
This is an important thing to understand. Casinos don't particularly optimize towards taking all your money. They optimize towards making you play as many games as possible.
You know card-counting? People often wonder "why don't casinos take easy steps to stop you doing that? Such reshuffling the deck after each hand, or dealing from four mixed decks, etc?"
They don't because it would waste time and slow the pace of games. Fewer games means they make less money. It's not worth it just to catch the occasional decent card counter (as opposed to random idiots who rush to casinos after seeing it in a movie). They more than cover their losses by speeding up game-time for the remaining 99%.
Maybe my information is out of date, but I thought card counting would get you kicked out of casinos, your name and face added to a list of known card counters and shared with other casinos, etc.?
You have to do it well enough and reliably enough to consistently make enough money that you are enough of an annoyance to the casino to deal with you.
If you count cards out loud, they'll also probably kick you out for being a tool.
Seems casinos can't stop you from counting cards, at least in Atlantic City:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ken_Uston
Makes sense - card counting is not cheating, simply playing at a higher level of skill than a casino may like.
I think that's true in Vegas (Nevada) too – it's not _illegal_ (or otherwise prohibited) to count cards.
But a casino manager, in a YouTube video, claims that casinos can 'ban' patrons for any reason, e.g. including card counting. The video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NNWEWFWtJ1Q
There's one thing that's common in addictive activities that I think can't be easily replicated by self-improvement ones: the conjunction of feelings of "just one more time" (which hacks or hedonic treadmill) and ex post regret. When it comes to self-improvement, you'll either give up or achieve a milestone and stop to give yourself a rest.
But then... NUCA ZARIA: Effective Addiction
We build an addictive industry and transfer all earnings to effective charities. Then we send a message to our victims, I mean, customers, saying "Thanks for saving 20 kids from malaria. Please keep going," so they'll feel proud and be cured.
That's how many lotteries work; as fund-raisers for specific 'causes'. Even in places like Quebec where lotteries/scratch cards etc are mostly a gov't monopoly and profit goes into general revenue (aka 'the tax on stupidity'), the gov't makes a point of showing the many marvelous ways the money is used; schools! hospitals! highways!
People aren't the only ones addicted to gambling, governments are too.
What is "NUCA ZARIA"?
it's Effective altruism lingo for "new cause area"
A question to pose to casinos: If addiction is purely a moral failing, why did people get less addicted to older slot machines?
That doesn't prove that it's 0% a moral failing, but I think it disproves the idea that it's 100% a moral failing.
About the part where virtuous apps don't addict as easily as vices, couldn't this just be because vices like slot machines don't take much effort while the Duolingo's and the Fitbit's do take effort? Like, pushing a button for the dopamine hit is going to be more addictive then spending mental effort to learn more of a language or spending physical effort to workout.
Hmmmm, we know there are certain factors that make substances more/less prone to trigger addiction/compulsive use.
The ones I remember are;
- must have a pleasurable effect (this is why we don't get addicted to Tylenol)
- the faster the pleasurable effect hits, the more addictive (this is why crack is more addictive than snorting cocaine which is more addictive than taking it in tablets)
- the shorter the pleasurable effect, the more addictive
- if there is a down after the pleasurable effect wears off (ie, you actually feel worse than you did before taking the drug), more addictive (all stimulants do this, some more than others)
Then we add in factors like how often the person is using the drug (cigarettes; hundreds of tiny hits a day! Each drag counts!) etc
It seems to me that similar factors might explain why game-ifying around good/desired habits hasn't worked that great. Slot machines are pleasurable, fast, wear off fast, and we can take hundreds of 'hits' in a short time. FitBits can't 'reward' us for every. damned. step. Although even without that, I've known of a couple of people who get VERY compulsive about their step total.
The 'dark zone' certainly fits with the stress factor; people who are addicted to substances or who have compulsive behaviours such as gambling, video-gaming, shopping etc are much more likely to indulge or over-indulge or relapse when their stress is up or they are unhappy but avoiding.
Then of course the consequences of the addiction/compulsive beh create more stress and unhappiness .....
We know that people are much more likely to get addicted to something that goes well the first couple of times they try it, whether it's a substance (felt great and laughed a lot using cannabis the first time, or had a panic attack) or activity (won the first few times you gambled, or lost?).
So now I'm wondering whether gaming machines/online gambling takes advantage of that. When a gambler can be identified (by the card they use to play?) as trying a specific game or site for a first time, make them win. Or a few smallish wins within the first few times they play. Then set the winning ratio back to normal .....
This would work particularly well on those sites where you can play poker for free. Free games? Win ratios much higher than usual. Once they're playing for $, back down to normal.
I used to manage an arcade, and there was a game called "Stacker" that used some of these tricks. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stacker_(arcade_game)#/media/File:StackerMachine.jpg
In this game, players had to time a button press to stack 1-3 blocks on top of previous rows. If they got to the penultimate row, they could cash out for a small prize. If they kept going, the top row had the potential for expensive prizes (e.g., a 3DS).
The top row was a lot faster, and the player could absolutely mess up the timing. However, the operator menu in the game also let the arcade owner set the rate that big prizes were allowed to be won. If it wasn't time for a win, even a perfectly timed player would get a "near-miss" when the game cheated and moved the block one space over. If you watched carefully, you could see this happening.
Conversely, if it WAS time for a win, the top row would move a bit slower. If you payed attention and noticed this happening, you could watch someone lose because of bad timing, walk over there, and win the big prize yourself. A few of the regulars at the arcade used to do this and then go sell the 3DS's to Gamestop, which I had no problem with. They'd spend that money on the DDR machine.
I'm pretty sure newer versions of the game have removed this exploit, but not the cheating "near misses". There's plenty of other redemption games with similar behavior.
This is also why "crane games" and machines like these are often regulated as gambling devices; they look like games of skill but they're rigged to make you lose some of the time even if you play "perfectly".
Speaking of dopamine drips, interesting that this particular substack doesn't have a "like" function.
The users revolted and got Substack to change the UI to hide it.
> I think this is the biggest gap in Schüll’s theory. If designers optimized gambling machines for addictiveness, why can’t they do the same for these apps? If bad machines can be made addictive, then why can’t good machines?
It seems to me that you answer this question in your review:
> When it comes to machine gamblers, my theory is completely incorrect. People who spend hours and hundreds on machine games are not after big wins, but escape. They go to machines to escape from unpredictable life into the “zone.”
I suspect that given the nature of virtuous tasks, you can't design a system that lets someone escape into "the zone" the pursue them. If you're trying to get better at picking up the dishes, or exercising, eventually you have to stand up and actually do the work, which will shove you right back into "unpredictable life".
Thinking about this some more, I'm realizing that there's lots of instances in my life where I start to plan how I am going to make big changes, which in itself serves as means of escape from reality. But as soon as I am asked to return to unpredictable life and implement those changes it all falls apart.
Another problem is that a lot of "virtuous tasks", e.g. picking up the dishes, are finite/limited. Once you've 'picked up the dishes' for the day/period, you're done – and _finishing_ is end to being in the 'zone' (being in 'flow').
I think this was one of the best reviews so far, reading it was rather... addictive. I think the mention of 'dark flow' was one of the most interesting parts - the idea of creative/productive flow and the brain-deadness of procrastination having something in common has been in my head for a while now, but this helped my clarify what the difference could be.
Someone in the comments mentioned randomness, which I agree would make a big difference (e.g. Duolongo points are hardly random, you only get them when you remember vocabulary or something). But TikTok and other social media aren't that random either - perhaps the key is the lack of 'challenge-skill balance'? If there is very little challenge but otherwise still a lot of engagement, maybe that leads to a dark flow.
Good review! The gacha mechanism which was developed in Japan has found its place in tons of mobile games during the last 5 years especially, and kids are used to the idea of gambling as a normal risk to take, from a very young age. If you walk past a pachinko parlor in Japan in the evenings, you can observe thousands of people who spend 2-3 hours sitting there immediately after work, completely immersed in the "dark flow" outlined in the review. The appeal of games like Candy Crush and Clash of Clans among older demographics is a well-known phenomenon as well. Games have addiction circuitry to begin with, and if you add a gambling component, I don't really see how it could possibly be overcome by most individuals. After dumping about $100 into a gacha game a few years ago and then quitting it a few months later due to feeling like it was a chore, I play multiple ones with a no-spending rule purely for art/game mechanics. My outlook is that this issue is going to become a full-blown catastrophe among swaths of young adults in the next decade and it will become a societal concern just like cigarettes and hopefully, meet its end in a similar way too.
Definitely the best review so far. I simply deny (refute and repudiate) the idea that addiction isn't 90% or more circumstances over genetics. (I'm not quite willing to say it's 100%, but I'm close.) That doesn't mean it's just "willpower" or "just" a personal failing. Let me put it this way: people who feel a calling and whose lives are in order simply don't waste their lives gambling or getting high or drunk enough they destroy their lives. Said another way, the addiction doesn't destroy men's lives; men's lives are destroyed and so they become addicted.
I admit this would be a hard thing to argue with me about, for if you pointed to a guy and said 'his life was good until he got addicted', my response would be to deny the premise: 'it obviously wasn't.'
Great review. Small nit for the author: While I agree that the connection between late stage capitalism and gambling isn't strong, Macau *is* actually a hotbed of capitalism, one of the "one china, two systems" areas that stayed westernized and capitalist during the latter 20th century, just like Hong Kong.
I've derived the my sole income from professional gambling for the last five years (things kinda got awkward at my old programming job at a startup after I came out in support of brexit and trump, which was a factor in my deciding to quit and move to vegas)
Professional APs tend to hate the casinos because they knowingly exploit addicts and delusional system-players while barring anyone who has a real edge as soon as they're detected. I'd guesstimate that addicts are only 25% of casino patrons in Vegas but the majority of casino revenue (they're outnumbered by casual tourists who only lose a little). Genuine professional APs are fewer than 1 in 1000 casino patrons (not counting poker players who sit around waiting to pounce on drunk tourists, or small time slot hustlers scavenging the obviously scavengable slots like Ocean Magic. I mean people who beat the house for a living).
It's interesting to see doctors and lawyers punt money away on gaming decisions that are mathematically silly. They may be rational in their domains of expertise, but it doesn't transfer. They throw money away on the basis of superstitions.
To the ideal advantage player, it feels good to be playing with a positive expectation, and feels bad to be playing with a negative expectation, regardless of the actual outcome. Kind of like how the ideal utilitarian might be able to suppress his feelings of ickiness or warm fuzzies, to just shut up and calculate his expected utility. At this point I'm so jaded that I can win or lose $50k in a few minutes and feel nothing, so that helps.
A minor correction to the OP: money on the card did not directly replace coins. TITO (ticket-in-ticket-out) replaced coins, and it is still the dominant system.
I was already addicted to video games like world of warcraft long before I tried gambling, so I never found it particularly compelling as entertainment. All the gambling games are really lame compared to the latest video games. For me it was just all about the money. I calculated that I could make more per hour from AP than I could make from other things, so I did that.
I theorize that a good treatment for gambling addiction might be to get someone addicted to the most exciting video games instead, so that they start to find all the slot machines to be super lame by comparison. And then you can gradually taper down to less dopaminergic video games such as turn-based RPGs from the mid-90s, and then quit entirely. Perhaps the sequence could go TF2 deathmatch, TF2, Portal, Escape Velocity, Civ4, Realmz, nada.
Brief review-of-the-review:
I liked this one a lot. Clear, cogent, readable, and interesting. It presents the book's core argument clearly and charitably but not uncritically. The questions the reviewer raises don't seem all that mysterious to me. Most patterns of behavior, especially simple ones, are unhealthy when pursued compulsively. And I sometimes gets compulsive over the video games or TV shows I use to unwind, so I can easily understand that there's a spectrum from "I'm doing this because I enjoy it" to "I'm doing this because it's designed to hyperstimulate certain processes in my brain". Besides wishing it went into a little more depth, I can't find anything to fault here.
This probably sounds silly, but... if gambling addicts plan and budget around their need to gamble, and they deliberately seek to gamble, and gambling away money is the thing they prefer to do with their time... then the "seatbelts you can refuse to wear" won't work, but then, why do we have the obligation to stop them from doing the thing they want to do with their resources? For all the description of how insidious the machines are to trick people into thinking they are close to winning, it goes on to say that the gamblers don't really care that much about winning and do not behave like people who have been tricked. They have a weird-ass hobby, one that they can take to a self-destructive level, but there's a lot of hobbies like that. Why do we have the obligation or the right to stop them?
How many people do you know who are by the "behavioral addiction" standard "addicted" to football or basketball or hockey? Okay, less than the national average given the audience here, but it's still a thing you know about. When do we have the obligation to step in and make their hobby stop?
> Why do we have the obligation or the right to stop them?
I don't think we have either an obligation or a 'right' to stop them, but I'm sympathetic to (and also share) _wanting_ to 'help' them, as gambling sure _seems_ like a symptom of something bad (to at least some degree).
It's worth noting that physical machines are vulnerable to manipulation as well. For example, modern claw machines can be programmed to raise or lower the claw's gripping strength in order to manipulate the win probability, limit payouts, produce near misses, etc.