Comment by kelseyfrog

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.

It's a misunderstanding because addiction is a habit where the transition cost of adopting the habit is low and the transition cost to exit the habit is high.

This means you can say people voluntarily got into their addiction, but you cannot say they voluntarily stay in their addiction.

Cigarettes are a good example. It is easier to wean off from cigarettes and switch to vaping and then quit vaping, than to quit smoking directly.

This is because the transition cost from smoking to vaping is much lower.

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.

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."

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.