In practice, you don't win the lottery.
I am beginning to suspect that novice rationalists should actually go buy a scratch ticket — do the math, then try it anyway, actually notice that you don't win, that it was a dumb idea (or at least, a money-losing idea) to play, and that this is what a one-in-a-million chance feels like: it feels like losing a buck, 999999 times out of a million.
With one ticket, there is usually something like a one out of fifty chance of winning a few dollars.
Today's post, Two Cult Koans was originally published on 21 December 2007. A summary (taken from the LW wiki):
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This post is part of the Rerunning the Sequences series, where we'll be going through Eliezer Yudkowsky's old posts in order so that people who are interested can (re-)read and discuss them. The previous post was Politics and Awful Art, and you can use the sequence_reruns tag or rss feed to follow the rest of the series.
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