Why I oppose gambling - A humanist perspective

I don't like gambling.  Many people don't like gambling, some for religious reasons.  But I'm a humanist, so I have no religious reasons.  So why do I oppose it?

We all live under the illusion that what we see is real, and what we think is true.  These illusions are so compelling that many people refuse to believe that our awareness is an illusion, but neuroscience and the study of the paranormal prove that the images in our minds are not accurate pictures of the real world.

Some of the differences between human perception and reality are classified under the title 'cognitive biases'.  These include the perception that 'I' am more important to the world around me than is justified.  Another key human bias is that we have a tendency to overestimate the chance of good things happening to us, and underestimate the chance of bad things happening, even in the face of compelling evidence to the contrary.

Because we are alive, we are descended from ancestors who won through tough times and out-competed their peers in the struggle for survival and reproduction.  And we inherited the traits which helped make that difference, for example the tendency to persevere in the face of adversity, and not the abilities accurately to assess probabilities of success versus failure.  Indeed, we are spectacularly maladapted for mathematics, which is why so many of us find it hard.  We have to defeat our in-built biases and become disciplined in following rules of logic which are as unnatural as they are successful.

Just how bad we are at intuitive math, particularly when it comes to assessing risk and probability, is shown by the following BBC video.  When I first saw this kind of demonstration I was utterly convinced that the probability of winning remained 50:50, (you'll see what I mean when you watch it).  Even Professor of Mathematics Marcus du Sautoy was convinced.  He worked it out mathematically, I modelled the game in Excel, (independently of course, I don't move in such noble circles), and the correct answer really is 1 in 3 if you keep to your original guess.

BBC News Magazine - Monty Hall problem: The probability puzzle that makes your head melt

So what has this to do with gambling?  Well we're programmed to assess risk and probability incorrectly.  We inherently overestimate our chance of winning compared to losing.  If Alan had been tempted to bet on the game, Marcus could've cleaned him out.  Alan is inherently no worse at this than you, me or anyone else.  And when we use intuition and common sense about gambling, we make decisiona as rational as a child playing on a railway track.

The only gambling I entertain is the English Grand National, (an annual horse race over jumps, on which many people make a token bet).  But I take the role of family bookmaker and stakes each person can afford to lose.  I've come away on top every year except one.  Even when my wife got third place this year, I paid out less in winnings than I made in stakes on her other bets.  And that's how gambling works - it's always rigged against the punter, it's just that we're all programmed to ignore that fact.

This makes gambling as much a vice as addiction to narcotics.  And the bookmaker is the pusher.  Both vices involve bypassing reasoned choice.  Both involve someone making money by exploiting other people whose decision making is compromised.  Both ruin lives.  And in my opinion, both should be outlawed.

Are humans immune from extinction?

Steve Zara made interesting post about a discussion PZ Meyers is having on Twitter.  Steve argues that humans have developed technology which is close to bringing human evolution to a halt, that we will soon leave Earth and colonise the solar system and thereby become immune from global catastrophies.

I would like to explore a counter argument: I maintain that humans are still subject to natural selection.

The greatest selection pressure of all is death of an embryo or foetus from developmental defects - such as a missing circulatory system - which make development impossible.  The majority of fertilised ova do not survive to birth, and many of these don't even make it to implantation.

We have made great strides in combating disease, yet we remain in a microbiological arms race.  Modern medicine provides an enormous selection pressure on human pathogens which are evolving to get around it.  MRSA and C-Diff are examples.

Our abilities to survive modern diets also provides selection pressure.  We have evolved the ability to digest lactose into adulthood within the last 10,000 years, since we domesticated dairy animals.  No other mammal species can do this.

We haven't colonised space yet, and in my opinion it will be some considerable time before off-world colonies become completely independent of humans on Earth, if ever.

We need only a pandemic which wipes out enough people that space travel is abandoned as an expensive luxury.  Then we are all eggs back in the same basket, and vulnerable to global catastrophe.

Finally, the very technologies which allow us to manipulate ourselves and our environments, makes us vulnerable to the failure of those technologies.  A catastrophe which disables modern communication, high-tech industry and global commerce, would leave people with complex prostheses or reliance on drugs for survival, facing imminent doom.

I know how long it takes me to be debilitated when my internet connection goes down, but if it never came back up, or I could never buy car fuel, pay with a credit card or shop for food, I'd be back in the pre-industrial age in days.

I have great confidence in human adaptability, ingenuity and ability to survive extreme conditions.  But I don't think we're any more immune from extinction than the dinosaurs were.

Why versus How

I've just been looking through The Really Simple Guide to Humanism, (which is an excellent introduction btw), and in particular a video on the question Without a God, or religion, why should we care about anything?  About 2/3 of the way through, Colin Blakemore brings up an old point that science should address questions of how and leave questions of why to religion.  Of course, in the context of humanism, this means the why questions are suspicious back doors into religious thinking.  But I fundamentally disagree.  And here's why.

Why addresses issues of greater complexity than how typically does, but that does not mean the question presupposes that the answer makes reference to an intelligent agent.  And the biological answer to why am I here is substantially different from that to how did I come to be here.

How did I come to be here prompts an answer which addresses the biological mechanisms around reproduction.  It may include sexual dimorphism, meiosis, fertilisation, mitosis and embryology.  It is a perfectly valid discussion to have, but has a narrower scope than discussions which why questions prompt.

Why am I here prompts a biological explanation which is far more profound, and addresses fundamental questions of existence, which are not the exclusive domain of religion.  For example, I may answer that you are here because your parents succeeded in making you, that their parents succeeded in making them, and that every one of your ancestors, unlike most of their competitors, succeeded in leaving offspring who also succeeded against the competition to leave offspring.  I could go on to point out that some of the reasons your ancestors succeeded was because they happened to have combinations of genes which made them well adapted to successfully reproduce in the environment they lived in.  Finally, we could consider that your ancestors were also successful, in part, because they passed on the genes which gave them their success, and that you are likely to possess many of those successful genes yourself.

So why am I here can prompt a discussion of the fundamentals of evolution which are often beyond the scope of how questions.  Why would any thinking person want to dismiss that?

Shermer's Hierarchy of Needs

In his blog article The 'Point' is beside the point, Michael Shermer presents a truly updated, neo-darwinian version of Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs which provides a foundation for discussing a humanist (non-theist) basis for ethical individual and social conduct. Click the image below to read the article.