You may not have noticed that I was accusing you of being insightful.
I'm trying to be sensitive to your issues about this. So how would you have suggested that I phrase my comment? I said, "This is what Eliezer seems to be saying", and asked if that was what you were saying. I don't know what you want. You seem to be saying (and I have to say things like this, because in order to have a conversation with someone you have to try to figure out what they mean) "Shut up, Phil."
In this case, when I said you seemed to be saying that rational decision-making about playing the lottery does not mean maximizing expected utility, I was just being polite. You said it. I quote:
Those who buy tickets will not win the lottery. If you think the chance is worth talking about, you've fallen prey to the fallacy yourself.
This says that the chance of winning the lottery is so low that you don't need to do an expected utility calculation. I will not back down and pretend that I might be misinterpreting you in this instance. Maybe you meant to say something different, but this is what you said.
You're tired of me trying to interpret what you say? Well, I'm tired of you trying to disclaim or ignore the logical consequences of what you say.
Eli tends to say stylistically: "You will not " for what others, when they're thinking formally, express as "You very probably will not __" This is only a language confusion between speakers. There are other related ones here, I'll link to them later. Telling someone to "win" versus "try to win" is a very similar issue.
In passing, I said:
And lo, CronoDAS said:
To which I replied:
There's a certain resemblance here - though not an actual analogy - to the strange position your friend ends up in, after you test the Quantum Theory of Immortality.
For those unfamiliar with QTI, it's a simple simultaneous test of many-worlds plus a particular interpretation of anthropic observer-selection effects: You put a gun to your head and wire up the trigger to a quantum coinflipper. After flipping a million coins, if the gun still hasn't gone off, you can be pretty sure of the simultaneous truth of MWI+QTI.
But what is your watching friend supposed to think? Though his predicament is perfectly predictable to you - that is, you expected before starting the experiment to see his confusion - from his perspective it is just a pure 100% unexplained miracle. What you have reason to believe and what he has reason to believe would now seem separated by an uncrossable gap, which no amount of explanation can bridge. This is the main plausible exception I know to Aumann's Agreement Theorem.
Pity those poor folk who actually win the lottery! If the hypothesis "this world is a holodeck" is normatively assigned a calibrated confidence well above 10-8, the lottery winner now has incommunicable good reason to believe they are in a holodeck. (I.e. to believe that the universe is such that most conscious observers observe ridiculously improbable positive events.)
It's a sad situation to be in - but don't worry: it will always happen to someone else, not you.