[SEQ RERUN] New Improved Lottery

badger

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.

Discuss the post here (rather than in the comments of the original post).

This post is part of a series rerunning Eliezer Yudkowsky's old posts so those interested can (re-)read and discuss them. The previous post was Lotteries: A Waste of Hope, and you can use the sequence_reruns tag or rss feed to follow the rest of the series.

Sequence reruns are a community-driven effort. You can participate by re-reading the sequence post, discussing it, posting the next day's sequence reruns post, summarizing forthcoming articles on the wiki, or creating exercises. Go here for more details, or to discuss the Sequence Reruns.

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.

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.

I thought I already explained what was wrong with that here:

Re: Seriously, why can't we just say that buying lottery tickets is stupid?

Buying a lottery ticket is not stupid - under some conditions.

Say you have two cents, and can't afford your train fare home (which is one stop away). If you can gamble those two cents in a game of chance, you may be able to convert them into a whole train fare.

The conditions of being stuffed - unless you have a lot of money - may not be that uncommon: so many people may be inclined to gamble this way.

I just... I don't... Why do people feel the need to do this on Eliezer's posts so much? Why can he not make a single statement without somebody finding some obscure, improbable, irrelevent exception, and loudly trumpeting it? Going through the sequence reruns, it's appalling how many people in the comments from the OB days just seem to be wilfully missing the point for the sake of generating a defensible disagreement.

Is it a desire to demonstrate how clever they are by being contrary, even if the disagreement is over some wholly irrelevent nitpick? Do they... (read more)

2MixedNuts15y

This is not in fact the situation of most lottery players. When you're lower-middle class (and not in need of expensive treatment or fighting x-risk), you want low variance, because you're slightly above some bad thresholds like homelessness. It makes sense to gamble if you're dirt poor, though. Source is just talking to people who buy lottery tickets, so N is small. Do you have more data?

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