Categories: uncategorized
Date: 03 October 2006 15:00:08
I stopped working.
Well, technically I should say that I stopped the paid employment that I had. I carried on working but the financial set-up was rather different as, indeed, was the work. I had been working in an amusement arcade, spending most of the summer fixing one-armed bandits. As a human being it gave an interesting insight into the psychology of some of my fellow humans, and as someone who understands a little about probability it gave an interesting insight into how the abstract theory of probability interacts with the day-to-day throwing of a dice. Except that, of course, throwing a dice is random whereas one-armed bandits ... well, are they or aren't they? Can something that is legally obliged to pay out 73% of what it takes in be genuinely random? But then again, has that law ever been applied? How can you establish whether it has been broken or not - how many games do you have to play to see 73% of your money back? And how much does winning on one machine make it more likely that you will lose the next game? In theoretical probability there is no impact - rolling a six on a dice makes it absolutely no less or more likely that you will roll a six the next time. But that's not what instinct says, is it? Well, if that's what your instinct says, then it also says that losing on a one-armed bandit one minute makes it more likely that you'll win the next. Combine that with the sense of a score needing to be settled that comes from losing money in gambling, and you have a very strong instinct to keep playing. And, of course, if you win, then, well, you're obviously onto a winning streak aren't you... I can see why people got very upset about gambling a hundred years or so ago, and I can see the same problems coming back now as society has forgotten the problems that we faced back then and as on-line gambling makes it easier to hide the action if not the losses.
There have been two occasions when I've been particularly scared by my fellow humans. One was in Germany - my office overlooked one of the main squares in the city and often there were protests where huge crowds would gather. Somehow I felt in my bones that what was a peaceful protest one minute could so easily turn into a riot. It didn't while I was there, but I sensed the possibility strongly and have had almost a phobia of large crowds ever since. In a crowd there is some spirit which takes over the human beings that make up the crowd - there's a form of possession (in the sense of demon possession although I don't think it's demonic) which makes people cease to seem human and is quite disturbing.
The other time was in that amusement arcade and also involved people ceasing to be human. It would often happen that one person played a lot on one machine, putting a lot of money in, waiting and waiting for the pay-off that they were certain would come soon enough. Often they would get a small win and I would end up involved if the coin dispenser malfunctioned in some way and the gambler didn't get their money. As you would expect I would fix the machine and test it to ensure that it now functioned correctly. How do you test whether the machine pays out correctly? You keep playing until you have a win, so I would keep pumping coins into the machine and pressing buttons at random until it paid out. Coins would come tumbling out of the machine verifying that it was functioning fine. But then came the problem. The gambler would always, always turn to me and say ``Give me that money that just came out of the machine - it's mine''. At first I was bewildered by this - how could they think it was theirs? But then one of them explained - they'd been playing the machine all afternoon - putting money in and waiting for the machine to return the 73% that it was legally obliged to do. So the next money the machine paid out was clearly due to them, because if it had been functioning correctly they'd have kept on playing until it paid out to them. As I write it now I'm not even clear myself of the logic of this argument, or of my defence. But of course a logical argument is irrelevant in these circumstances - I was stealing their money and that's all there was to it. And that naked greed for that money was not a pleasant thing to see. Not human, and not nice.