The original post asks:
Seriously, why can't we just say that buying lottery tickets is stupid?
The answer is: because that would be a silly over-generalisation. Gambling is sometimes a rational course of action. It is good for people to be aware of that - in case they find themselves needing to gamble - a common circumstance - especially for males.
Roulette is often better than buying lottery tickets for large sums - due to taxation issues. However, in some countries, there's a government-run lottery and many other forms of gambling are illegal.
Note that the economist Robin Hanson made exactly the same point as me here.
Can you confidently assert (p > 0.8) that, since the advent of modern lotteries, at least a thousand people have arrived independently in circumstances under which buying lottery tickets was a non-stupid action?
What kind of circumstances were they?
Today's post, New Improved Lottery was originally publeslished on April 13, 2007. A summary (from the LW wiki):
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.
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