Is the Lottery for fools?

LW said:
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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See above, he only has a 99.9999999999% less chance of winning ;P
 
Complexity said:
You're only asking for confusion by using the same word in these two contexts.
Describing someone as lucky or unlucky is woo.
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Excuse me? We're trying to make words in English mean only one thing, regardless of context now?

You mean I won't have to drive in a parkway, and park in a driveway? I can dance to funk, and not have figure out whether I'm going to "get up" or "get down"? English isn't a programing language, context counts for a lot.
 
LW said:
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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IT WAS A JOKE!
 
Rasmus - I'm saying that you apparently don't understand what you mean when you say that you were lucky about something. Most people aren't very aware of what they say or how the meaning of what they say is constructed and conveyed.

ImaginalDisc - I want to correct what I was trying to say in the earlier post, now that I've had more time to think it through.

Consider these two sentences:

1. "I was lucky today - I won twenty bucks in the lottery."
2. "I'm feeling lucky today - I think I'm going to win the lottery today."

The word 'lucky' is being used in exactly the same way and has the same meaning in both sentences. ImaginalDisc's descriptive/predictive distinction isn't helpful here. He's trying to create a distinction in the meaning of the word 'lucky' that does not exist.

I maintain that the word 'lucky' in sentence 1 is inextricably related to the superstitious concept of 'luck', including the belief in the supernatural.

If you use the words 'luck' and 'lucky' (or any related words, e.g. 'fortunate') carelessly, not desiring their superstitious connotations, choose better words to convey your meaning.

If you can't find more accurate words, honestly examine your beliefs.

A lot of people who are otherwise pretty skeptical show a bit of woo when it comes to luck.
 
Complexity said:
If you can't find more accurate words, honestly examine your beliefs.
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luck - The chance happening of fortunate or adverse events

This is not superstition, nor does it have anything to do with the supernatural. A poker player who has made his 22:1 draw on the last card has gotten lucky. Whether he attributes that luck to random chance or some supernatural force determines whether or not it is woo. If he believes he can affect that luck by carrying some object, that is woo. "Feeling" lucky is woo. Luck in itself is not woo.
 
Complexity said:
If you use the words 'luck' and 'lucky' (or any related words, e.g. 'fortunate') carelessly, not desiring their superstitious connotations, choose better words to convey your meaning.

If you can't find more accurate words, honestly examine your beliefs.
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To satisfy this request, perhaps one could say:

"By the occurance of a beneficial event that, lacking full foreknowlege of the state of the universe and the rules governing its behavior, one would have deemed unlikely a priori, I won twenty bucks in the lottery!"

Would you agree, Complexity, that this is a wooless statement?

If so, then would you still claim that "I was lucky today - I won twenty bucks in the lottery." cannot convey the identical meaning as my statement in any context? Or would you revise your claim to assert that you, specifically, would never equate these two expressions and feel it is wrong to do so, though others might?

Should you fail to agree with that, would you claim that someone uttering, "The sun will rise tomorrow morning" is in err, and should in fact state, "Tomorrow morning, the earth will rotate in position relative to the sun such that the former no longer intersects the path of the latter's luminant radiation"? ;)
 
HeavyAaron said:
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
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Your sample size is large enough - 5 * 2 * 104 = 1040. What you are failing to consider is that, presuming they use the same balls for entire period, that the balls will have some individual differences - i.e. some will be lighter and some heavier. Thus, some are more likely to be chosen and some less likely. The actual incidence is not going to be great, but could give the patient and thorough analyst an edge in placing bets.

I tried to work a similar scheme some years ago when the lottery was new in my state. I would up being able to reduce me odds by a factor of 10. Unfortunately, moving from approximately a 1 in 20 million chance to a 1 in 2 million chance was not sufficient for me to invest actual money in the scheme.
 
Beth said:
What you are failing to consider is that, presuming they use the same balls for entire period, that the balls will have some individual differences - i.e. some will be lighter and some heavier.
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But why would we presume this? For example, from the CA lottery:
For each SuperLOTTO Plus draw, a pool of two draw machines is used. Using numbered capsules, the independent representative randomly selects the machines to be used at each draw. The first machine selected is designated as the SuperLOTTO Plus draw machine, with the remaining machine designated as the Mega draw machine. Six solid rubber ball sets are available for use for each SuperLOTTO Plus draw, three sets for the SuperLOTTO Plus balls(white), and three sets for the Mega balls(purple). Each ball set is stored in a locked box with a numbered, metal seal attached. Also using numbered capsules, the independent representative randomly selects one SuperLOTTO Plus ball set and one Mega ball set prior to each draw. In the event a ball set failed during pre-testing, an alternate ball set would be selected and used for the draw.
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It goes on to describe how stataticians keep track of results to ensure randomness, balls are weighed to 1/1000 of a gram, equipment is kept in sealed rooms and monitored with video equipment 24/7, etc. Googling reveals similar regulations in other states.

http://www.calottery.com/games/gamespecifics/gamefaq.html#q6

Perhaps your state did not have rigorous protocols in place when you did your analysis; I don't know. But to think that a computer program as described in the HeavyAaron's post would work today is pretty naive.
 
Complexity said:
If you use the words 'luck' and 'lucky' (or any related words, e.g. 'fortunate') carelessly, not desiring their superstitious connotations, choose better words to convey your meaning.
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Unfortunately, I don' think there is a commonly known word in the english langauge that conveys the meaning "Something that occurs which is beneficial but improbable" without carrying an associated supernatural connotation such as luck does.


I suppose I could drag out an unweildy phrase like "Something that occurs which is beneficial but improbable", but as John Stewart would say "I'VE GOT **** TO DO!"
 
Complexity said:
Rasmus - I'm saying that you apparently don't understand what you mean when you say that you were lucky about something.
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I am not even granting you that I don't understand what I am saying, but please trust that I know what I want to say.

I assure you that the word "lucky" as I use it has nothing woo about it. If enough others use the word the same way I do, who are you to say that it cannot mean what we use it to mean?

The dictionnaries I consulted appear to agree that it is entirely possile to use thew word the way I do.
 
roger said:
But why would we presume this? For example, from the CA lottery:
Perhaps your state did not have rigorous protocols in place when you did your analysis; I don't know. But to think that a computer program as described in the HeavyAaron's post would work today is pretty naive.
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That's correct. Back then, they used a machine with something akin to ping pong balls with numbers written on them. They were blown around the inside of the machine and one would pop out the top. I don't know how often they replaced the balls. At any rate, my analysis didn't show sufficient differences to make betting that way worthwhile, thus however often they were replacing them back then was sufficient to foil that particular scheme.

I agree, I don't think it would work today. The protocols have become more rigorous. But given that HeavyAaron created his program 15 years ago, it might explain the results he got.
 
I don't think there's anything unusual about the top number hitting more than twice the lowest number. I ran a quick simulation: (perl code follows, for anyone interested)

my ($NBALLS, $DRAWS, $TRIALS, @counts) = (50, 5, 208);

sub choose_balls {
my @drawn = ();
while (@drawn < $DRAWS) {
my $draw = int (rand($NBALLS));
next if (grep {$_ eq $draw} @drawn);
push @drawn, $draw;
$counts[$draw] ++;
}
}

sub run_trial {
@counts = (0)x$NBALLS;
for (my $i = 0; $i < $TRIALS; $i ++) {
choose_balls();
}
my ($best_count, $worst_count) = ($counts[0], $counts[0]);
for (my $n = 1; $n < $NBALLS; $n ++) {
if ($counts[$n] > $best_count) { $best_count = $counts[$n]; }
if ($counts[$n] < $worst_count) { $worst_count = $counts[$n]; }
}
print "Ratio is ", ($best_count / $worst_count), "\n";
}

for (my $n = 0; $n < 20; $n ++) {
run_trial();
}

Of the 20 rations, the LOWEST ratio it printed was 2.1; it hit 3 twice and 3.1 once; a second run produced 3.2 and 3.5, without a ratio below 2.
 
Beth said:
Your sample size is large enough - 5 * 2 * 104 = 1040. What you are failing to consider is that, presuming they use the same balls for entire period, that the balls will have some individual differences - i.e. some will be lighter and some heavier. Thus, some are more likely to be chosen and some less likely. The actual incidence is not going to be great, but could give the patient and thorough analyst an edge in placing bets.
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That's the first thing that jumped to my mind as well. If certain numbers are coming up with a significantly higher than random frequency; then chances are good that there is some non-uniformity in the balls that causes the mechanism to be more prone to selecting them. Wouldn't be the first time something like that has happened.
 
A fool yesterday...
_38425633_smile_wide_pa_300.jpg

:p
 
tsg said:
A lucky fool today....
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More so than you might expect.

I've more than once come across discussions describing at some length how many (I'm not sure of the percentage, but it's not trivial) big lotterly winners become financially destroyed within a few years of the big win. There are even seminars and guides to help those winners from going that route. Now, is that just a big scam for some to get a percentage of that winfall? Me thinks not entirely. Since the majority of those playing are usually not of the financial savy, it would not surprise me to find their money matters wisdom still lacking substancially afterwords. Not to mention the increased visits from formerly unkown relatives and friends that will seem to perpetually keep coming out of the woodwork and plumbing.
 
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Just thinking said:
More so than you might expect.

I've more than once come across discussions describing at some length how many (I'm not sure of the percentage, but it's not trivial) big lotterly winners become financially destroyed within a few years of the big win. There are even seminars and guides to help those winners from going that route. Now, is that just a big scam for some to get a percentage of that winfall? Me thinks not entirely. Since the majority of those playing are usually not of the financial savy, it would not surprise me to find their money matters wisdom still lacking substancially afterwords. Not to mention the increased visits from formerly unkown relatives and friends that will seem to perpetually keep coming out of the woodwork and plumbing.
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I recall hearing an account of someone who had received a large financial windfall--he was inundaded with requests by vague acquaintences, and distant family members... not to be given money, but to participate in some business venture using his capital. His stock response was to politely offer to have them submit a written proposal to his lawyer.
 
gnome said:
... not to be given money, but to participate in some business venture using his capital.
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I love that.

"I'm not here to ask for a handout ... but there's this yo-yo I'm developing that's going to overwhelm the marketplace and make a killing! All I need is a few hundred thousand to get started ..."
 
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