Is the Lottery for fools?

Seems to me theres a conflict of interest in the same government being responsible for most children's education and running the lottery.

If it was a private company responsible for both, I bet there would be an uproar and it would be illegal.
 
Elind said:
Would you be terribly unhappy if you won 20 million instead of the 40? Who cares?
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Yes, I would be terribly unhappy. I would be terribly unhappy if I won 3 million just the week after they dealt out a 40 million jackpot, too.

I would probably get over it; just as I always get over having no numbers correct, or just two instead of the three needed for a minimum price.

It's just not fair, right? I mean, if I (personally, due to my accumulated good karma and my vast smnartness applied in picking the correct numbers and what not) beat the odds, then it's just mean off the ods to in turn beat me on such minor detail, right?

Rasmus.
 
tsg said:
He has .0001% chance of winning, I have 0% chance of winning. .0001 - 0 = .0001
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I think this is clever but still wrong. Mathematical semantics here. The difference in your chance of winning, being zero, and any other positive real number is meaningless, or as large as you want it to be. The two comparables don't belong in the same sets, so to speak.
 
A friend of mine pointed out the fundamental difference between lottery and insurance:

Lottery MIGHT give a benefit.
Insurance WILL prevent a major loss, IF there is one.

It's better to be protected against a potential major loss than potentially get a big benefit. Especially since the odds of what you generally insure against are much higher than winning the lottery.
 
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Elind said:
I think this is clever but still wrong. Mathematical semantics here. The difference in your chance of winning, being zero, and any other positive real number is meaningless, or as large as you want it to be. The two comparables don't belong in the same sets, so to speak.
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Correct, it IS wrong. It fails to take into account that the winning lottery ticket could get caught in the wind and blow to his doorstep, where he will be able to take it and collect the winnings (being a bearer instrument). I'll use the scientific method of a WAG and calculate those odds at 0.0000000000000001%.

Therefore, the differential is actually .0001% - .0000000000000001% = .0000999999999999% improvement for buying one ticket.

If purchasing one ticket for only a .000999999999999% improvement is a good investment, then purchasing a second ticket for a .0001% further improvement is also a good investment. By induction, it would then be logical to spend every dollar you have on additional lottery tickets.
 
petre said:
Correct, it IS wrong. It fails to take into account that the winning lottery ticket could get caught in the wind and blow to his doorstep, where he will be able to take it and collect the winnings (being a bearer instrument). I'll use the scientific method of a WAG and calculate those odds at 0.0000000000000001%.

Therefore, the differential is actually .0001% - .0000000000000001% = .0000999999999999% improvement for buying one ticket.

If purchasing one ticket for only a .000999999999999% improvement is a good investment, then purchasing a second ticket for a .0001% further improvement is also a good investment. By induction, it would then be logical to spend every dollar you have on additional lottery tickets.
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:yikes:
 
Rolfe- Whether PBs are worth it depends to some extent on your tax status.
As a serious long term investment they are poor performers on average, though there is always a chance of a big win. Reinvest the prizes in more bonds. that way you can measure results. Otherwise you tend to spend any winnings on the spot.

I bought a substantial holding about ten years ago. I would have earned more in a decent savings account, but tax would have levelled the gain.
That said , I bought mine at the same time as a group of friends. If they are to be believed, mine have performed worst by a long way. All the others are home counties residents. I'm starting to get mildly paranoid about that.
 
failed to disprove a woo

I have a sad story...

The mother of one of my long time friends is the most wooish person I have ever known. She's a J.W. and believes in every woo I've ever heard of, and she's an alternitive health practisioner of every sort.

Well, some 15 years ago or so (whilest I was in elementary school as a wee one) she somehow came to believe that the lottery is not random (perhaps it was divine revolation?)

Anyway, I'm a computer programmer and she had a little Commador computer. And so she suggested that we take two years of lottery results and shove them into the computer, find out which numbers come up most frequently, she'll buy a ticket and we'll split the winnings. I took her on simply to show her that it's insane and the lottery is random.

So we went to the lottery office and got copies of all of the winning numbers over the preceeding two years.

We laboriously data entered all the results. There was some difference in ball frequency. The number that hit most often hit more than twice as often as the least frequent. But my explination was simply that with only 5 balls choosen twice a week for two years is a relatively small samle size with fifty-some-odd balls.

Anyway, so I asked the computer for the most drawn 5 balls and it gave them to me. 4 of them hit that week. That ticket was worth some teens of thousands of dollars. But... at the last minute she wanted two tickets instead of one, so I asked for 10 numbers and we wound up splitting the four winning numbers between the two tickets and won nothing.

Needless to say this didn't exactly make my case for me with this woman. It was a lucky (unlucky?) day.

Well, there's my sad story.

Aaron
 
Soapy Sam said:
Rolfe- Whether PBs are worth it depends to some extent on your tax status.
As a serious long term investment they are poor performers on average, though there is always a chance of a big win. Reinvest the prizes in more bonds. that way you can measure results. Otherwise you tend to spend any winnings on the spot.

I bought a substantial holding about ten years ago. I would have earned more in a decent savings account, but tax would have levelled the gain.
That said , I bought mine at the same time as a group of friends. If they are to be believed, mine have performed worst by a long way. All the others are home counties residents. I'm starting to get mildly paranoid about that.
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The tax status does have quite a big bearing on it, and makes it a better prospect for me. You can't reinvest if you already have the maximum (or as close to it as you can legally go), so I'll just have to be disciplined with the winnings.

The PB web site is very explicit about the randomness of ERNIE, and says that more bonds held in the Home Counties win because more people live there and hold bonds. The statement seems sincere and I can't see why they'd be lying about it. I suspect your experience is about par for the course and your friends are talking up their luck somewhat.

I just listened to a friend who has about £10,000 in bonds tell me that she gets something every month and sometimes more than one prize. I simply don't believe her, at that holding level. I think the months she wins, which are probably more than half the time, are red-letter and so memorable.

Rolfe.
 
Complexity said:
If you don't believe in luck (woo concept), I hope you'll agree that the expected return from playing the lottery is less than the investment. Someone buying lottery tickets as an investment is either a woo or a fool.
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True. It's a totally crap investment.

If you buy lottery tickets for entertainment, there's a small part of you that believes in luck (woo concept), that you've got a real chance of winning, and that gets excited over this. Someone buying lottery tickets for entertainment is either a woo or a fool.
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I disagree.

1. "Luck" is not a woo concept. Believing in "luckiness" as a repeatable phenomenon is woo. Luck is just chance, which happens all the time. Somebody will win the lottery. That person will have had good luck. Somebody lost $10 the other day - bad luck. I found it - good luck. It's just part of life, the universe and everything.

2. 1 chance in 10,000,000 is a real chance - just a very small one. So what? Pretending it's more would be dumb. Pretending it's zero doesn't make it so, either.

3. The simple mathematics of expectation values does not reflect the reality of the situation. So what if your expected return is technically .001c or whatever for the dollar you put in? I can lose a dollar without noticing, so it's more realistic to put my investment in as zero. And then an expected return of anything > 0 is an improvement...

So, while your investmennt is (psychologically) zero to you, it's not stupid as entertainment. Blowing significant amounts of cash - yes, sure, fool or woo.
 
I think that most people understand 'luck' as differing from expected behavior.

Having 'good luck' is to perform better than expected without any naturral explanation.

Having 'bad luck' is to perform worse than expected without any natural explanation.

Most people understand 'luck' to be something given or withheld by something supernatural.

Luck is a woo concept.
 
Let's try to come to an agreement.

Luck, as a descriptive measure, is merely an observation. "Wow, 10,000,000 played the lotto and Bob won. He was lucky." Not necassarily woo.

Luck as a predictive measure is completely woo. "Next week, Bob will win again!"

Agreed?
 
Sorry, ImaginalDisc, but I don't agree.

You're only asking for confusion by using the same word in these two contexts.

Most people understand 'luck' to be some supernatural seasoning that can be sprinkled on their lives from above, if they have placated the gods, or withheld, if they haven't given proper tendance.

Most people believe in luck and observe at least one ritual to invite good luck or ward off bad luck.

Describing someone as lucky or unlucky is woo.
 
Complexity said:
Luck is a woo concept.
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Not really. If I find a twenty someone has dropped on the street, I have been lucky. If I am walking down the street and am killed or injured in an unforseeable freak accident, I have been unlucky. Now if I beleive that something I do can pre-dispose either of those events to occur, THAT'S woo.
 
I understand what you're saying, I simply don't agree with it.

Underlying each of the allegedly non-woo uses of 'luck' that have been offered is a superstitious belief in luck. Each and every one.

Luck is woo.
 
Complexity said:
Underlying each of the allegedly non-woo uses of 'luck' that have been offered is a superstitious belief in luck. Each and every one.
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So you're saying I don't know what I mean when I say I was lucky about something?

Rasmus.
 
tsg said:
He has .0001% chance of winning, I have 0% chance of winning. .0001 - 0 = .0001
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Except that you don't count percents that way.

What you have is a 100% less chance of winning than he.

That 100% amounts to 0.0001 percentage points.
 
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