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An antiprediction is a statement of confidence in an event not happening rather than happening, or a very uncertain hypothesis of near-maximum entropy that nevertheless seems startling because cognitive biases make us pay attention to certain outcomes way out of proportion to their actual probability. The confident proclamation that you will not will the lottery may seem to the very naïve like a bold prediction that concentrates probability mass, but in fact this antiprediction is derived simply from the observation that each of the millions of possible lottery combinations are equally likely, and any one person's ticket is very likely to come up. The flaw in the example of the lottery may be particularly easy to spot, but the same fallacy may emerge in different, harder-to-detect guises, whenever the availability heuristic makes some a priori unlikely outcomes unusually salient.

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