Fuzzy Addictions & Blended Intelligence: Hit Me

It never ceases to amaze me how willing people are to fully graft onto a single roll of life's di without ever grasping the contradiction that comes with retrospection. Game, set and match: gambling, addiction, and the intersection known as an 'addictive personality'. Today many people have come to accept the preponderance of ponderance which suggests that merely partaking in an activity like gambling is akin to opening an email attachment from a website called Eve's apple. Moreover, some people have fully outsourced their but-for-the-grace and simply yielded tomorrow’s right of way to today’s roll of hindsight. In the case of gambling, today it is generally accepted that there is a certain percentage of people for whom merely crossing a line of chance cut on a mirror will cause a cascade of Tonys from the postal block to descend neigh ward from the cerebral hood.

It’s important to appreciate that in terms of behavior, rational and irrational are not ‘opposites’ in an either / or , off-setting – one cancels the other out sense. Make no mistake, naturally they joust, but it’s useful to footnote, that was once irrational – like the earth is round, may one day become the more rational shoe to wear. In any respect, the so-called power of logic does not rest in its inherent truth content, that's a mis-enumerator. Rather the applied value of logic comes from its ability to extend and link ideas beyond their isolated surface. Logic is a tool, a tool that everyone seems to think they have the definitive combination for. It follows that the strength of any - it follows –fatally cruxes upon the truth-for-the-time-being proffered up in the very first assumption, the very first choice as to which direction to turn the lock’s tumbler.

Oh, but you say, turn to the right, that’s simply self-evident; well it’s also self-evident that in Great Britain and Japan that all cars drive on the left side of the road.

In any respect, once again, the key to keeping this within earshot of the issue starts with choosing to diagnose or ascribe (either way) compulsive gambling as a specific behavior or a more general ‘addictive personality’ behavior. I don’t pretend to have the definitive answer (and if you think that any one person does, then you are entirely missing the underlying point in this diatribe). What I do suggest, however, is that the difference between which one you choose, general or specific, will make all the difference in the world between being ‘right’ or actually attempting address the problem. Because irrational behavior, like compulsive gambling, cannot be generalized, and yet generalizations are the necessary trait that allows for an appeal to the reverse engineering properties of deductive logic. Inductive logic, the type used in the experiments, always concludes - with doubt. Inductive logic creates great journalist sound bites, but those discrete indiscretions are, nevertheless, entirely ill-numerate.

From a public policy point of view the problem with continuing to generalize irrational behavior, that is continuing to make ‘exceptions’ to generalized behavior, is that pretty soon the sum of the exceptions encompasses every behavior. If you cannot see the disconnect with that latter rationale, then you should become a computer programmer who believes that macro or micro economics don’t matter and that 'everything' can be reduced to a model. If we objectively, rationally, if not compassionately, continue to stroll down that yellow brick road, popping A is A pills without any sober second thought, pretty soon public and personal policy are one and the same. Many people think that latter comment makes sense; for which I'm reminded of a TV character who once said," I'm for all the right things".

My point is not to make light of addictions, anything but. Rather my point is to emphasize that it is utterly erroneous to compare different addictions, let alone generalize them as one. Gambling is not drug use any more than all drugs are one drug. Gambling is gambling, heroin is heroin, caffeine is caffeine, etc. is etc., and unless we start to see the full spectrum on these kinds of issues AND address each behavior on its own frequency of individual merit, then we're destined to stand staring helplessly, but righteously, at the no-fault headlights of on coming traffic. That di you can bet on.