I admit that I'm relatively new to these concepts so I apologize in advance if my post is a bit scatterbrained or in the wrong post, but it's just a thought.
It's good that you are trying to learn and that you posted. There are misconceptions, which I will proceed to pick apart in extreme detail :), but, if I do this well, you will learn something and come to a deeper understanding of the concepts.
While the lottery would accomplish that preference, it is not the best way to do so. By being a game of chance, lotteries may only be run by the government, so some of the money that would go to the one person goes to the government instead. While people might also prefer that the government has money, they could donate to the government (or to a charity) separately. Also, bundling the two things into one action fixes the ratio between the amount of money given to each. This is neutral if fixed at the desired ratio and of negative utility if fixed at a suboptimal ratio. It would only be considered good to most people if the people who want a lower rate of lottery tax are few enough that they cannot start their own lottery-like system, so they are forced to pay the higher taxes desired by the rest of the ticket buyers in order to play.
Also, the person that benefits is randomly selected. Would it not be preferable to chose someone with above-average need for the money? Even if the ticket buyers would not think so, surely they could think of some criteria that is better than random . In general, the lottery shows no signs of being optimized for this preference. Since you're new here, you may not have read http://lesswrong.com/lw/hu/the_third_alternative/ . I highly recommend it.
Since people would think that buying a lottery ticket that they knew would not be able to win would be ridiculous, we can tell that none of these considerations are what matters. People buy lottery tickets because of the benefit to themselves and, since this is irrational in all but the few cases where utility is concave up in money (and people's participation in the lottery does not depend on how well it conforms to a certain concave up utility function), it is unlikely that the concern for other possible winners, which is minimal on its own, makes it rational for them.
Ahh, right. Thanks for that point. I forgot you can't have hidden motivations if they're not conscious.
Also, I've read the third alternative article but I'm not really seeing what you were trying to say by posting it.
My original thought was that when you have a choice between torturing a person for fifty years or letting 3^^^^3 people experience a dust speck in the eye, I'd pick the 3^^^^3 people getting the dust speck.
However, from an outsider's standpoint, would you rather give 3^^^^3 people a penny or one person a billion dollars (you're not included in...
The classic criticism of the lottery is that the people who play are the ones who can least afford to lose; that the lottery is a sink of money, draining wealth from those who most need it. Some lottery advocates, and even some commentors on Overcoming Bias, have tried to defend lottery-ticket buying as a rational purchase of fantasy—paying a dollar for a day’s worth of pleasant anticipation, imagining yourself as a millionaire.
But consider exactly what this implies. It would mean that you’re occupying your valuable brain with a fantasy whose real probability is nearly zero—a tiny line of likelihood which you, yourself, can do nothing to realize. The lottery balls will decide your future. The fantasy is of wealth that arrives without effort—without conscientiousness, learning, charisma, or even patience.1
Which makes the lottery another kind of sink: a sink of emotional energy. It encourages people to invest their dreams, their hopes for a better future, into an infinitesimal probability. If not for the lottery, maybe they would fantasize about going to technical school, or opening their own business, or getting a promotion at work—things they might be able to actually do, hopes that would make them want to become stronger. Their dreaming brains might, in the 20th visualization of the pleasant fantasy, notice a way to really do it. Isn’t that what dreams and brains are for? But how can such reality-limited fare compete with the artificially sweetened prospect of instant wealth—not after herding a dot-com startup through to IPO, but on Tuesday?
Seriously, why can’t we just say that buying lottery tickets is stupid? Human beings are stupid, from time to time—it shouldn’t be so surprising a hypothesis.
Unsurprisingly, the human brain doesn’t do 64-bit floating-point arithmetic, and it can’t devalue the emotional force of a pleasant anticipation by a factor of 0.00000001 without dropping the line of reasoning entirely. Unsurprisingly, many people don’t realize that a numerical calculation of expected utility ought to override or replace their imprecise financial instincts, and instead treat the calculation as merely one argument to be balanced against their pleasant anticipations—an emotionally weak argument, since it’s made up of mere squiggles on paper, instead of visions of fabulous wealth.
This seems sufficient to explain the popularity of lotteries. Why do so many arguers feel impelled to defend this classic form of self-destruction?2
The process of overcoming bias requires (1) first noticing the bias, (2) analyzing the bias in detail, (3) deciding that the bias is bad, (4) figuring out a workaround, and then (5) implementing it. It’s unfortunate how many people get through steps 1 and 2 and then bog down in step 3, which by rights should be the easiest of the five. Biases are lemons, not lemonade, and we shouldn’t try to make lemonade out of them—just burn those lemons down.
1See Po Bronson, “How Not to Talk to Your Kids,” New York, 2007, http://nymag.com/news/features/27840.
2See “Debiasing as Non-Self-Destruction.” http://lesswrong.com/lw/hf/debiasing_as_nonselfdestruction.