I hate this kind of research. Or well, I hate that it has any influence at all, that it matters.

This kind of research being that which shows an obvious harm that we all know about. It should have zero influence because it is blindingly obvious. Namely because if the title wasn't true, betting companies wouldn't be spending lots of money on it in the first place. But they are, as everyone who lives in the UK can tell. So we know. So this study shouldn't influence policy in the slightest. But it does.

I hate it because there's by definition a gap of years between A. all of us knowing that a phenomenon is harmful B. the study coming out. And then another gap of many years between the study and actual policy changes.

Here's my request to people in academia who do studies like these - which is admittedly a tiny percentage of academia. Just fudge the numbers and publish it a year earlier. Use LLMs to generate the text. It would be a huge boon to society. We all know it's true, so you're not doing anything wrong. Your quest for honesty is hurting everyone. The actual data is pointless.

It's like gathering real data on whether pigeons will indeed eat sunflower seeds if thrown on the ground in front of them, versus just making it up. Maybe such a study hasn't been done yet, but it literally doesn't matter because we know the outcome. There's zero gain from actually doing the study versus saying that yes, pigeons will generally do so.