Today's post, New Improved Lottery was originally publeslished on April 13, 2007. A summary (from the LW wiki):
If the opportunity to fantasize about winning was a rational justification for the lottery, we could design a "New Improved Lottery", where a single payment buys an epsilon chance of becoming a millionaire over the next five years. All your time could be spent thinking how you could become a millionaire at any moment.
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Eliezer's point is that if you think you should play the lottery then you are wrong about your own values, you don't just have weird values. (And he's helpfully correcting you.)
If you want fuzzies more than to save beings, your current values are "fuzzies (important)", "saving beings (not important)", and (likely unknown to you) "change the weight of 'saving beings to 'super duper important' (super duper important)". (Either that or you're a serious jerk.)
I'm just not getting it. Do you really think people are never just stupid?
I thought I already explained what was wrong with that here:
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