Although it was not via the lottery, my wife's sister won one million dollars on a TV show in the 1980s called "The one million dollar chance of a lifetime". It turns out that she and her husband would get $40,000 a year for 25 years, but they got divorced a few years later, so she received $20,000 a year until recently. It was quite a contrast between the show's promise to "make you a millionaire" and the actual very modest improvement in lifestyle from an extra $20,000 a year.
Anyway, none of you know her so this doesn't disprove the principle for you, but maybe it makes it a little more likely that I am in a simulation. The real problem with this conclusion is that it seems to require believing that most people (i.e. all of you readers among others) are zombies, which seems untenable. Otherwise my sister in law's presence on the holodeck puts me there, and you as well.
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.