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Eliezer_Yudkowsky comments on Rationality is Systematized Winning - Less Wrong
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There's a big difference between "someone else wins the lottery" and "everyone else on your street wins the lottery". One is likely, the other absurdly unlikely.
Given your current knowledge of how the lottery works, the expected value is negative, ergo not playing the lottery is rational. Someone else winning the lottery (a result predicted by your current understanding) is itself not evidence that this decision is irrational.
However, if an extremely improbable event occurs, such as everyone on your street winning the lotto, this is strong evidence that your knowledge of the lottery is mistaken, and given the large potential payoff it then becomes rational to examine the matter further, and alter your current understanding if necessary. Your earlier actions may look irrational in hindsight, but that doesn't change that they were rational based on your knowledge at the time.
...presuming that your knowledge at the time was itself rationally obtained based on the evidence; and in the long run, we should not expect too many times to find ourselves believing with high confidence that the lottery has a tiny payout and then seeing everyone on the street winning the lottery. If this mistake recurs, it is a sign of epistemic irrationality.
I make this point because a lot of success in life consists in holding yourself to high standards; and a lot of that is hunting down the excuses and killing them.
Yes. I was generally assuming in my comment that the rhetorical "you" is an imperfect epistemic rationalist with a reasonably sensible set of priors.
The point I was trying to make is to not handwave away the difference between making the most optimal known choices at a moment in time vs. updating one's model of the world. It's possible (if silly) to be very irrational on one and largely rational on the other.