If you were friends with an alcoholic it would be pretty shitty to give them a bottle of vodka for their birthday.

People are not machines, it’s not as simple as deciding whether to do something or not. You have stronger and weaker days. Temptation makes it harder to do what is in your best interests, even if you’ve decided on another day that you’d rather not partake.

Getting concrete about gambling: lots of people decide not to gamble and just don’t. Lots of people decide they don’t care whether they gamble and they do. But there are also many people in the middle, who would rather not gamble, but find that they sometimes act against their own best interests, and their own past resolutions to not gamble. Bombarding these people with offers of free bets increases the likelihood that they will gamble on their weaker days.

When I hear takes like yours, I feel very jealous. I would love to always act in my own best interests and according to some policy I predetermined. But that’s just not my experience of how life works.

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kelseyfrog 5 hours ago | parent [-]

It seems like a gambling addiction is the same as not having the capacity to choose not to. Is that a misunderstanding?

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rsync 2 hours ago | parent | next [-]

I wish that mark pilgrim had not taken his blog off-line… He had a very insightful and moving peace about alcoholism and described it in a very striking and understandable way.

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sd9 5 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

I think… sort of.

I feel like you’re trying to force some sort of binary here, but I’m trying to say that you may choose not to gamble in general, on day X, but find that you do gamble later.

In fact I would say that many gambling addicts have _chosen_ _not_ to gamble in some sense, but in another moment they do find that they choose to. There’s a temporal aspect to this.

Advertising gambling to those people makes it less likely that they will follow through on their choices.

Do you always do literally everything you choose with a clear head? Never procrastinate, get angry, feel sad, whatever? It’s really hard for me to see your perspective on this.

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Terr_ 4 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

I think it becomes philosophically clearer if we view it as a fight between multiple minds--or contextual operating modes--in the same person. The practical and ethical question for outsiders is which one we want to favor in the fight with the other(s).

"I want to eat this bucket of ice cream... But I also really want to not want to."

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fn-mote 5 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

People in Gambler’s Anonymous (GA) would definitely disagree with this characterization.

The same way sober alcoholics would disagree with a similar statement about alcohol addiction.

	▲	kelseyfrog 5 hours ago \| parent [-]
		Please correct me! Gaps in my understanding are opportunities to learn something new. I'd like to know the difference between the characterization of being "powerless over alcohol" for example and not having the capacity of choice. 1. https://www.aa.org/the-twelve-steps