theAkash comments on Outside the Laboratory - Less Wrong

63 Post author: Eliezer_Yudkowsky 21 January 2007 03:46AM

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Comment author: theAkash 15 December 2013 11:54:06PM *  1 point [-]

I partially AWYC, but unless there's some aspect to the experience that I don't get, I don't see why actually buying the lottery ticket is necessary.

Going to a movie helps one escape into fantasy. A lottery ticket seems like a much less helpful prop for this. I can - and have, particularly as a child - fantasize about what I would do with wealth and status (although the means of achieving such, in my fantasies, has generally been the slightly lesser improbability of becoming a famous author or something similar) completely unaided.

In fact, it might be better to do as I did and imagine achieving your incredible wealth by some means other than lottery winnings, precisely because winning the lottery is so improbable. Thanks to a horrifying history of akrasia on that front and some amount of realization that I really want to do science instead, I haven't actually made any effective moves towards becoming an author, but nevertheless it is, I think, an accepted fact that people will be more motivated to do what they fantasize about.

Why not let them be motivated to do something actually useful?