>>8796681Well, it's not necessarily about math or greed.
The tl;dr version that fits in the /vt/ character limit is this: humans used to be a hunter-gatherer species and we developed behaviours to help us to survive better in starvation conditions; something as simple as the brain sending a hunger impulse in response to seeing the colours red/orange/yellow (because it indicates something is rich in calories) is a relatively benign adaptation, but you'll find that fast food companies use these colours a lot in their visual designs to subtly make people feel hungry and more likely to buy something or overeat.
Tens of thousands of years back an early man may have noticed buffalo used to congregate by the waterhole, and by waiting near the waterhole he could easily encounter buffalo to hunt (compared to wandering around and hoping to find food). This is pattern-recongition, and because it provided an immense survival advantage it was a behavioural trait very tightly conserved by evolution. However our pattern-recognition is kinda dumb and the instinct is very easily fooled, and this is what gambling preys on: we can understand intellectually that a 0.5% rate for an SSR in a gatcha is very, very low but when you've spent $200 on rolls and have failed to get that character, the monkey-man inside you is jumping up and down and screaming that if you just keep spending the buffalo -will- definitely come. And that monkey-man can be very persuasive. Better education would help, but some people sadly can't fight the instinct.
This represents a loophole in human reasoning. You can't talk or reason someone out of a behaviour they didn't reason themselves into. It's like an exploit in a video game: If it's something too deeply rooted in the game code to fix, you have to dummy it out by limiting or removing access to the compromised function and by punishing the bad actors seeking to take advantage. This means legislating to ban gambling and levying massive fines on the enablers who have ruthlessly market-researched how to find and target whales (like Maririn). And although it'd be easy to ban HFCS, unlike the earlier example of hunger/food gambling is completely useless to society; all it does is enrich the establishment who, lets face it, are rich enough already.
>>8797259Well at least she shook the habit and is doing much better now.
