And the second "Certified Crazy" award goes to ... casino players!

I've made my way to the local casino with a friend for something that we tongue-in-cheekily call our "sociological" study. It's really nothing of the sort, but people watching makes for good fun. But are casino players crazy?

Case for casino-players insanity: The odds are against you. If you keep playing, you will loose money, period. I've never understood the idea behind cheering for luck - by definition, luck is a purely random process unaffected by wishes or actions. I do understand the thrill of a win, but unlike the lottery, casinos usually requires investing a fair sum for a relatively small potential gain. The lottery is the opposite (small sum invested for potentially huge rewards) and makes somewhat more sense. What strikes me about the casino is that the odds and the cost/benefit ration do not seem to be adjusted to reward the customer very well. The reward is more primal (when it happens), and it seems to me that the phenomenon of gambling has some of the components of addiction in that there is little pleasure in gambling on a sustained basis, but one must engage in the habit nonetheless to avoid withdrawal.

Case against casino-players insanity: Some people get a kick out of making a wager, and some of those people spend a reasonable amount ($50?) there are perfectly willing to pay/loose in the form or entertainment money. So be it. I'd still like to understand the thrill behind the idea. In many ways, it reminds me of religion – the previous Certified Crazy award winner (religion) owes its success in part on the trick that it is well-nigh impossible to disprove the existence God. Same thing goes for the next gamble: the winning game might just be around the corner, and you can't disprove that it's not. In both cases, however, failure to disprove something does not make it true, with the predictable consequence that the insanity endures.

Verdict: Gambling is unproductive at its best and an illness at its worse. People come to gambling from a variety of background for a variety of reasons, but overall it remains a destructive mechanism by which casino owners enrich themselves at the expense of people whose brain reward mechanisms are vulnerable and too easily hijacked.

And so, casino players, you know who you are, you've been Certified Crazy!