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OrphanWilde comments on What's wrong with this picture? - Less Wrong Discussion

15 Post author: CronoDAS 28 January 2016 01:30PM

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Comment author: Matthew_Opitz 29 January 2016 08:24:45PM 0 points [-]

An analogous question that I encountered recently when buying a powerball lottery ticket just for the heck of it (also because its jackpot was $1.5 billion and the expected value of buying a ticket was actually approaching a positive net reward) :

I was in a rush to get somewhere when I was buying the ticket, so I thought, "instead of trying to pick meaningful numbers, why not just pick something like 1-1-1-1-1-1? Why would that drawing be strictly more improbable than any other random permutations of 6 numbers from 1 to 60, such as 5-23-23-16-37-2? But then the store clerk told me that I could just let the computer pick the numbers on my ticket, so I said "OK."

Picking 1-1-1-1-1-1 SEEMS like you are screwing yourself over and requiring an even more improbable outcome to take place in order to win...but are you REALLY? I don't see how....

I'm sure if 1-1-1-1-1-1 were actually drawn, there would be investigations about whether that drawing was rigged. And if I won with ANY ticket (such as 5-23-23-16-37-2), I would start to wonder whether I was living in a simulation centered around my life experience. But aren't these intuitions going astray? Aren't the probabilities all the same?

Comment author: OrphanWilde 29 January 2016 09:18:41PM 0 points [-]

I treated the ticket as an experiment into the question of whether or not I'm living in a simulation, treating it as weak evidence against an already weak hypothesis.