> Unless you have an addiction to it there's no inherent difference between spending a $50 on a night out with your friends of losing the same amount at the casino.

I dunno, people who do the former seem a lot happier the next day.

if you're unhappy after gambling and losing, you're not having fun. Winning gambling is not the fun, it's just happiness from money.

If you enjoy blackjack, or poker, or craps, regardless of winning or losing, then it's fine to gamble. If you're only having fun from the exhileration from the large winnings, then it's not "fun", but thrill seeking, just like skydivers or extreme sports. Except for those thrill seeking sports, there's often safety measures in place.

That matches my personal experience, for sure. I have been to a casino exactly once (aside from playing nickel slots at LAS a couple times just to kill some time). As I recall, it was indeed $50 that I lost. Very quickly, too. I felt terrible. Stupid for even playing a game I knew was stacked against me.

Never been back. The only gambling I do now is buying a $2 powerball ticket every time the jackpot goes above $1B. The momentary fantasy is worth the two bucks.

But if you win..?

It's not just risk: it's taking actions that have negative expected value. 20-something men also tend to ride motorcycles and volunteer to go into battle, so it's kind of a thing.

Exactly. My friends and I have poker nights occasionally, and we always make sure dues are paid to those who are owed them, and nobody is upset in the end. It's about playing the game and having something to do with friends. You'd pay that much going out to watch a movie or going to dinner anyways.

Why involve money?

The game truly doesn't function without stakes. With no bets, the only stakes are losing your entire stack and not being able to play, so it pushes the game very early on into all-in territory.

With small sums ($5), it's too easy to slip into the same mindset after your buddy offers you a beer (since it's basically paid for)

In high school we combatted this with a $20 buy in. Now we do a $50 buy in. Sure, it kinda sucks to lose. But the money is just going back to your friends, and a dinner + drinks out on the town is likely to cost the same. Even when you lose you still had a fun night. And when you win it's even better!

Of course, we are only playing once every few months.. so it's really not a big issue financially.

Because without betting something you at least notionally care about, poker is a tedium simulator rather than a game. The betting is where the game is, and if you don't care about winning or losing the bet, you're skipping the game portion.

Of course, that just shifts the question to why not play a game that's actually fun.

It is very fun with small amounts of money.

Dopamine

I don’t find gambling entertaining at all. I know it’s negative EV so it just feels bad to me. I’ve only gambled one time when I turned 21 and went to Vegas (a bit of a tradition perhaps) and I didn’t enjoy it.

> Is it still ok to say that men take more risks than women in general?

As long as you don't try to define your terms.

> Is it still ok to say that men take more risks than women in general?

Unless you're so woke that you think testosterone is a social construct, yes it's still very ok

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3653580/#:~:tex....

https://www.pnas.org/doi/full/10.1073/pnas.0907352106

This is legit. A lot of people want to treat men and women as having no biological differences. But the distribution of men’s risk tolerance is shifted well to the right of women’s. And it means that more men end up as entrepreneurs than women, but also in jail, addicted to drugs and gambling, dead in an accident, etc.

the second link you pasted is a study made by economists, not real scientists, strike that.

The first one you really didn't read, did you? "In contrast to received wisdom regarding testosterone and risk, the present data provide the first robust evidence for a nonlinear association between economic preferences and levels of endogenous testosterone."

"Despite the common view that high testosterone levels lead to risky decisions across numerous domains, we found that testosterone has a quadratic relationship with economic risk preferences: Individuals with low and high levels of testosterone (within their gender) were risk and ambiguity neutral, whereas individuals with intermediate levels of testosterone were risk and ambiguity averse."

> the second link you pasted is a study made by economists, not real scientists, strike that.

I find it funny how you're willing to offhandedly dismiss a paper because "economists, not real scientists", but seemingly have no problems with the field psychology which had the replication crisis and "experiment on a bunch of freshmen psychology students and extrapolate to the whole population" studies.

the other paper is penned by neuroscientists lmao, does noboy open the links anymore?

Economy and psychology aren't too dissimilar when it comes to being "real" science. People can think whatever they want about genders, dismissing hormones is a bit harder, especially when people fight to get said hormones to affirm their gender, if it was all "the same" and interchangeable it wouldn't be the case

I've been surgically modified such that my body doesn't produce sex hormones in any significant quantity on its own. As a substitute, I use separate transdermal gels containing testosterone and estrogen, which have relatively short metabolic half life in my body.

I normally target an estrogen level similar to an average woman and a testosterone level between the female and male reference ranges. I'm able to adjust the mix on the order of days when it suits me, and there absolutely is a difference. People who know me well can usually tell what mix I'm running.

the other paper is penned by neuroscientists lmao, does noboy open the links anymore?