Dopamine is a signal substance that is present in several places in the brain, and animals, doing different things in different places. It is not as simple as an exploitable chemical that is enabling this or even involved in the behavioral studies targeted and implemented by gambling companies.
Many things in life is exploitative. The plastic in almost all your utility is designed to break so you have to buy new products. The insurers are purposefully hiding clauses to steal from actual people in distress, at the moment where they lost everything. Oil companies astroturf and lobby to keep the transportation and air quality at this unsustainable level just to make even more money when they already have most of the money in the world, enough to buy whole continents, just lying around in Panama.
Music, film, and other forms of art are the few places where the consumer is more actively engaged and sensitive to being exploited, yet it is also the space where that just doesn’t fly. The gambling area is the most interesting place to view these moral questions in. Why is it okay that their entire business model is to work around regulation as much as possible to reach those most vulnerable in society to take their money?
Games with exploitative practices are going hard out of fashion. The people that engage with those systems unhealthily is the same people that are gambling addicts.
To me it’s just very easy and obviously best to use policy involving support networks and social safety nets to protect people rather than using prohibitive regulation and hope that soulless corporations will ever grow artificial moral spines. These psychopathic global machines will never be human or act human ever
I have obviously simplified the role of dopamine in the brain to make it more digestible, but you are dead wrong about dopamine’s role in intermittent reward and the link to gambling addiction. It has a very strong influence on behavior. Like many aspects of human behavior, the effect is not an on-off switch to enable gambling addiction. We have lots of things going on in our head that are, at times, working against each other as far as behavior is concerned. It is more like an analog adjustment that “pushes” toward a specific behavior much harder than it otherwise would. And this effect is just as powerful as addictive chemicals in potency.
Dopamine levels can measure that effect, it is neither the cause or effect. It is like saying the salt in sea water is the active ingredient making fish live. Only certain fish, only one of the things required, and so on. “it” does not have influence on behaviour, “it” is a chemical used in many different parts of our brain, for instance used to keep us breathing among many other things also in animals and even plants, not affecting their behavior in any way.
Dopamine is a signal substance that is present in several places in the brain, and animals, doing different things in different places. It is not as simple as an exploitable chemical that is enabling this or even involved in the behavioral studies targeted and implemented by gambling companies.
Many things in life is exploitative. The plastic in almost all your utility is designed to break so you have to buy new products. The insurers are purposefully hiding clauses to steal from actual people in distress, at the moment where they lost everything. Oil companies astroturf and lobby to keep the transportation and air quality at this unsustainable level just to make even more money when they already have most of the money in the world, enough to buy whole continents, just lying around in Panama.
Music, film, and other forms of art are the few places where the consumer is more actively engaged and sensitive to being exploited, yet it is also the space where that just doesn’t fly. The gambling area is the most interesting place to view these moral questions in. Why is it okay that their entire business model is to work around regulation as much as possible to reach those most vulnerable in society to take their money?
Games with exploitative practices are going hard out of fashion. The people that engage with those systems unhealthily is the same people that are gambling addicts.
To me it’s just very easy and obviously best to use policy involving support networks and social safety nets to protect people rather than using prohibitive regulation and hope that soulless corporations will ever grow artificial moral spines. These psychopathic global machines will never be human or act human ever
I have obviously simplified the role of dopamine in the brain to make it more digestible, but you are dead wrong about dopamine’s role in intermittent reward and the link to gambling addiction. It has a very strong influence on behavior. Like many aspects of human behavior, the effect is not an on-off switch to enable gambling addiction. We have lots of things going on in our head that are, at times, working against each other as far as behavior is concerned. It is more like an analog adjustment that “pushes” toward a specific behavior much harder than it otherwise would. And this effect is just as powerful as addictive chemicals in potency.
Dopamine levels can measure that effect, it is neither the cause or effect. It is like saying the salt in sea water is the active ingredient making fish live. Only certain fish, only one of the things required, and so on. “it” does not have influence on behaviour, “it” is a chemical used in many different parts of our brain, for instance used to keep us breathing among many other things also in animals and even plants, not affecting their behavior in any way.