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brazil84 comments on Outside the Laboratory - Less Wrong
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I don't know, I've never bought lottery tickets, I may only gamble token amounts of money at events where it is socially expected to do so.
Maybe I'm wired differently than most people, but what do you find rewarding about it?
We are not talking of something like tasty food or sex, which your ancestors brains were evolutionary adapted to seek since the time they were lizards, gambling opportunities did not exist in the environment of evolutionary adaptedness, you need some high-level cognitive processes to tell a lottery ticket from any random piece of paper.
It's true that people have difficulties reasoning informally about low-probablity high-payoff (or high-cost) events, which explains why gambling is so popular, but gambling is also one of the few high-uncertainty scenarios where we can apply formal methods to obtain precise expected (monetary) value estimations. Once you do the math, you know it's not worth the cost.
But obviously you knew that already, so my question is, how can you still daydream about winning the lottery without experiencing cognitive dissonance?
As mentioned above, the pleasant daydream of hitting the big jackpot.
I disagree; for example one can easily envision a hypothetical caveman deciding whether to hunt for a big animal which may or may not be in the next valley.
I don't know. But I can tell you that it's a pleasant feeling. Let me ask you this: Do you ever daydream or fantasize about things which (1) you wish would happen; and (2) are extremely unlikely to happen?
Sure. But would this hypothetical caveman still decide to hunt if he was pretty much certain that the animal was not there?
Uh, sexual fantasies aside (which I can blame my "reptile brain" for), I don't think so.
I'm not sure, it would probably depend on his assessment of the costs, benefits, and risks involved. In any event, I don't see the point of your question. You asserted that gambling opportunities did not exist in the ancestral environment; that's not so.
I think you are pretty unusual; my impression is that most people daydream as far as I know.
But let me ask you this: Do you agree that there a decent number of people like me who are not gambling addicts but still occasionally buy lottery tickets? If you agree, then what do you think is the motivation?
That's just decision making under uncertainty. I was talking about proper gambling, such as buying lottery tickets. My point is that you need some high-level ("System 2") processing to associate the action of buying a ticket to the scenario of winning vast riches, since these are not the sort of things that existed in the ancestral environment.
But if you understand probability, then your System 2 should not make that association.
Given army1987's comment I suppose it is possible to get that association from social conditioning before you understand probability.
On further reflection I think I overstated my claim. I do speculate/daydream about fictional scenarios, and I find it rewarding (I used to that more often as a child, but I still do it).
Therefore I suppose it is possible to counterfactually pretend to having won the lottery using suspension of disbelief in the same way as when enjoing or creatiing a work of fiction. But in this case, you don't actually need to buy a ticket, you can just pretend to have bought one!
Yes.
Habit created by social conditioning looks like a plausible answer.
You either are using "System 2" with a narrower meaning than standard or are making a factually incorrect assumption. (There were no cars in the ancestral environment, and some people have driven cars while sleepwalking.)
Once you learn how to drive a car, you can do it using only System 1, but you need System 2 to learn it.
I still have no idea what your point was. "proper junk food" didn't exist in the ancestral environment; "proper pornography" did not exist in the ancestral environment either. So what?
Do you need System 2 processing to associate an erotic story with sexual release? To associate the words "Coca Cola" with a nice sweet taste?
Well when you were a child, did you play with toys, for example toy trucks ? And was the play more enjoyable if it were a somewhat realistic toy truck as opposed to, say, a block of wood?
It's not very plausible to me. For example, if it were credibly announced that all of the winning tickets for a particular drawing had already been sold, I doubt that occasional lottery players would buy tickets for that drawing.