Prelude to Post of Dr. William G. McCown Q&A

[Frank Kneeland]

Prelude to
Post of Dr. William G. McCown Q&A
or
Why Should
I Care?

If
you are unfamiliar with Dr. William G. McCown, he is one of the
foremost authorities on problem gambling in America, and author of
several books on the subject. His book Best Possible Odds,
published in 2002, was a call to
arms for the entire psychological community to give problem gambling
more attention. The call was heard. In the decade since, more
research and advance in the field has occurred than in the century
before.

But
why should you care?


If you are a frequent follower of Video Poker related
forums, the odds are you don't currently have a gambling problem. But
could you ever, and do you perhaps know someone that might? The
intention of the interview, which I will be posting soon, was not to
help people who already have gambling problems. Its primary intent is
to outline and highlight risk factors for developing problems and to
detail some basic good practices to avoid issues. What this means to
you:


If you are new to gambling and want it to always remain
fun and guilt free, the information in this article may be able to
help improve your gambling experience and your enjoyment...and...


As it turns out, many of the things that have the
potential to make us better gamblers help us in all aspects of life;
quantifying risk, making good decisions, not judging decisions by
their outcomes, being free from biases, etc... The current and
amazingly successful new treatment strategy for problem gambling
involves something called cognitive behavioral therapy, which has
grown out of psychology's new understanding of heuristics. If you
haven't heard of heuristics before, here's something to whet your
appetite.

Heuristics:
How it got started.

The Nobel Laureate Daniel Kahneman had just finished
doing a great deal of research into positive and negative
reinforcement and had concluded that in all cases he had looked at,
rewarding good behavior worked better than punishing negative
behavior. He took his research on the road and found himself on an
Israeli Air Force base explaining to flight instructors about his
findings to help them improve military training. The reception he got
was not as expected. Just short of calling him a complete idiot, the
consensus between all the instructors was as follows:


You may have done all this research in your lab, but
that's not how it works in the real world. (Sound familiar?)

If someone does great and you compliment them they
always get worse.

If someone screws up and you scream and chastise them
they always get better.



Proving his strength as a scientist, he did not ignore
this real world information in lieu of his laboratory results. He
asked the Air Force if he could conduct a study into what the
instructors were telling him and they consented. Three and a half
years later, here's what he found.


The instructors were absolutely right about what they
had noticed. People did get worse after being complimented and they
did indeed get better after being screamed at.

The instructors were completely wrong as to the source
and causation of the facts.

The reason people tended to get worse after being
complimented was because the instructors were only complimenting
them after exceptionally good performances. Did you catch the word,
“exceptionally” in that last sentence? By definition,
exceptional things are rare and uncommon. Simple regression to mean
indicates that it was highly unlikely that the student pilots would
do as well after having done exceptionally well.

The exact same dynamic was true for the people being
screamed at. Though a strong talking to might be in order after
flying a plane into the base commissary, it's just not that likely
that the same pilot would do it two days in a row.



He proved unequivocally that positive reinforcement was
indeed better for training military pilots, though not by much. The
study concluded that nothing the instructors did had much effect on
the pilots at all. Their innate ability had more to do with their
performance than anything else. That ability was simply being
obfuscated by random factors, like the weather or equipment failure,
over which neither the instructor nor the pilots had any control.


Dr. Kahneman's final conclusions were that people can
grossly misinterpret information and come to not only wrong
conclusions, but in some cases answers that are diametrically opposed
to reality—all thanks to the normal common ways our brains process
information. Did you catch the words “normal” and “common”
there? This was a case of sane normal healthy people being 100%
totally wrong, due to nothing other than normal thought. He found
this very interesting. The first hundred years of psychology had been almost exclusively devoted to the study of abnormal psychology. No one cared about the every-man.


He teamed up with Doctor Amos Tversky and now, after
nearly half a century of research, the human race finally possesses
the knowledge of why intelligent healthy people don't always make the
best decisions, and why people come to different conclusions with
identical information.


That information, combined with other research, has
given us cognitive behavioral therapy, and it's useful information to
ALL...not just problem gamblers...not just would-be gamblers...not
just gamblers...


Gambling helps us in the identification of cognitive
biases. They are very hard to detect in everyday life, but they
become obvious if not omnipresent inside casinos. Find a person
making a bad decision in a casino, and the smart money says you have
found someone employing an error prone heuristic, with at least mild
cognitive distortion. Identification, of course, is only the first
step because the very self-same heuristics that gave rise to the bad
decision often make it hard or impossible for people to understand
what they've done wrong, even if it is explained to them...as was the
case with the flight instructors in the story above. As always, the
first step to solving any problem is knowing you have one. And if you
do manage to beat the odds and identify a thought process that is
less than optimal in a casino, the odds are very good that the
information will help you for the rest of your life and the lives of
your children as well.


Heuristics is a new science and its application in
cognitive behavioral therapy has the potential to be one of the
greatest turning points in the history of mankind. As it turns out
the very same things that are being used so successfully to treat
gambling problems also work to prevent them, and could help us all
think better.


If
there is any aspect of life that wouldn't be improved by thinking
better, I can't think of it.


I'll post the interview in one week. ~FK

[Frank Kneeland]

Here's what I was hoping to see in this thread. Above is a really good real world example of where real people, in this case flight instructors, came to exactly the wrong conclusions even though they're observations were correct.Since this is videopoker.com  I thought people might want to chime in with VP related cognitive errors like thinking that end machines are luckier, because they hit more.State a casino misconception and then talk about what causes it. You're on your own for a few days, but I'll check in on Saturday.

[Eduardo]

End machines are luckier because of seldom-discussed forces in the RNG. The RNG has a gravitational pull to it, which is greater on the outside of a bank of machines. Low cards are more effected by RNG gravity, and so they come up more often on inner machines. This leaves more royals and aces for the outside machines. The only way to counter these effects and offset the RNG's gravitational pull is by wearing tinfoil underwear. With that, you can win just about anywhere!

[shadowman]

Eduardo, you need to mention the bacterial effect. That tinfoil really can cause some awful growths.

[royal flush]

funny

[faygo]

Here's what I was hoping to see in this thread. Above is a really good real world example of where real people, in this case flight instructors, came to exactly the wrong conclusions even though they're observations were correct.Since this is videopoker.com  I thought people might want to chime in with VP related cognitive errors like thinking that end machines are luckier, because they hit more.State a casino misconception and then talk about what causes it. You're on your own for a few days, but I'll check in on Saturday.

 Everybody knows the end machines are the hottest. Just ask the slot supervisors, they will tell you. Gotta take that inside info to the bank.(plus you can trip anyone going by that you don't particularly like their looks...better then punching them in the face)

[backsider]

Frank, let me apologize for these people for making fun of your effort.

[faygo]

Frank, let me apologize for these people for making fun of your effort.
 Thank you for bring so thoughtful to apologize for us. You may have been better served to do a mea culpa instead and apoligize for all the non sensical stuff you have posted.

[shadowman]

"Dr. Kahneman's final conclusions were that people can grossly misinterpret information "
 


Does this mean that Dr. Kahneman may have fallen into the same trap and his conclusions were wrong? 

[New2vp]

Thank you for bring so thoughtful to apologize for us. You may have been better served to do a mea culpa instead and apoligize for all the non sensical stuff you have posted.Well, there might be another problem since no apology was necessary.  The myth of end machines being better is a bona fide answer to what Frank was asking because it is a belief by many players and casino employees.  (Frank even used this example in one of his posts on another forum where he was starting a similar thread to this one.)But don't be so hard on our friend.  It is much more difficult for him to come up with a legitimate response to this thread because so much of what he advances as "beliefs" are myths, though he will not acknowledge them as such.  (That is, if you consider any of his posts to be legitimate at all.)  You have to recall that his apparent purpose in posting, beyond trying to make a general pest of himself, is trying to draw attention to himself and promote myths rather than try to educate himself and others.  (It is fairly unreasonable to conclude that any genuine person could ignore the fallacies to such a great extent after Frank has been so ultra-patient in trying to help him understand.)