If one lottery ticket is worth while, why not two? Are you assigning a nonlinear value to the probability of winning the lottery? That causes a number of problems.
At the risk of looking even more like an idiot: Buying one $1 lottery ticket earns you a tiny chance - 1 in 175,000,000 for the Powerball - of becoming absurdly wealthy. The Powerball gets as high as $590,500,000 pretax. NOT buying that one ticket gives you a chance of zero. So buying one ticket is "infinitely" better than buying no tickets. Buying more than one ticket, comparably, doesn't make a difference.
I like to play with the following scenario. A LessWrong reader buys a lottery ticket. They almost certainly don't win. They have one ...
As per a recent comment this thread is meant to voice contrarian opinions, that is anything this community tends not to agree with. Thus I ask you to post your contrarian views and upvote anything you do not agree with based on personal beliefs. Spam and trolling still needs to be downvoted.