Secondly, because everyone realizes the chances are small, the real product being sold is Hope. Even the advertisements for the lotteries address this. The thing you're buying is 30 seconds of daydreaming so you can comfortably tackle the rest of the day.
The hope of winning the lottery is essentially false hope, but false hope is better than nothing, that's true.
But look at LatencyKills post https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46474645 if someone is buying 100s of dollars worth of lottery tickets that's a real problem, I'm sure you understand that with your mention of the $10 you spent, but you should consider the people who sneer and get upset about people buying lottery tickets might not be people who care much about 10 dollars but rather people who grew up with caregivers that spent all the money coming into the house on false hope.
You are making the same category error that the parent is talking about. It’s not a rational risk/reward calculation.
It’s more like a compulsion / addiction to the soothing / hopeful feeling that people feel for a few minutes when they think about the problems in their life that would be alleviated by winning.
Remember that the lottery is effectively the same game that used to be called “running numbers” when mob families ran it in the 20th century. The government though encouraging gambling addiction at the time was not worth the social costs. Now those costs are apparently the fault of the addict / family and not the government/ lottery contractor.
>Remember that the lottery is effectively the same game
I believe running the numbers was guaranteed never to pay out significantly because it was rigged, the lottery is just statistically against you.
The lottery is not legal in all 50 states. IIRC Alabama still considers the lottery to be morally problematic, which is the same reason it was not legal during the “running numbers” days.
I'm not sure what percentage of people that talk about the lottery being a tax on stupidity do so because they have been personally traumatized by its effect on their family, or seen its effects on others, but I do believe it is the ones like your brother who seem to get most of the press.
I understand the utility he’s purchasing: a temporary sense of hope. What concerns me is the implicit misunderstanding of probability. The difference in expected value between purchasing one ticket and fifty is statistically negligible. This isn’t about elitism — it’s simply about recognizing orders of magnitude and the arithmetic reality of vanishingly small odds.
I certainly don't doubt that my uncle also felt a strong sense of "hope" when he bought his lottery tickets, but for what differed a lot. My uncle would buy lottery tickets in the hope of regaining the amount of money that he had lost to gambling, while you probably buy them in the hope of having a significantly higher quality of life if you win. One is financially a very bad decision, the other is not (as bad).
Personally, I would never buy lottery tickets. Not because the chance of you winning is small, but because you're supporting a predatory system that attacks those that are the most vulnerable to gambling: those who've already lost large amounts of money. I hate the gambling industry and the damage it causes to regular people.
Luckily my uncle has stopped gambling, but the effects of when he was a gambler are still, sadly, visible.
But actually... there really are, IMO, better ways to "buy hope", or for that matter positive feelings, many of which actually have positive EV (even if not financially), and it is in my opinion a systemic flaw that we use well-known exploits in human psychology to take money from, statistically, the people who have the least.
People get FOMO - what if my neighbors become millionaires but I didn't have a ticket?
And in this case, some code very close to theirs won. It makes it seem you missed out by a tiny margin.
How do you confirm address? ‘I moved home to my parents last week’ etc.
Not really true. If you have more money you can buy more tickets which leads to higher—or even certain—odds.
https://www.iflscience.com/how-a-man-won-the-lottery-14-time...
I don't think there are any lotteries with that feature. You can guarantee that you win, but you still won't have certain odds because the payout isn't guaranteed.
It’s in the link I posted.
The point I was making is that with more money you increase your chances to win. The fact that you may have to split the winnings isn’t relevant, you still won. I was explicitly responding to the “the lottery doesn't care about your current circumstance and everyone has an equal (equally small) chance” remark.
So... you didn't read the second sentence of my two-sentence comment? Or do you have some theory where "you can guarantee that you win" means it isn't possible to guarantee that you win?
> The point I was making is that with more money you increase your chances to win. The fact that you may have to split the winnings isn’t relevant, you still won.
And here, you're still wrong. You can guarantee that you "win" the lottery instead of "losing" it. But if you're going to be buying seven million lottery tickets, it matters quite a lot whether you end up buying seven million tickets at a dollar each and making $1.05 per, or buying seven million tickets at a dollar each and making $0.52 per or $0.35 per. Collecting a jackpot by losing five million dollars is not a "win" in any sense that's not internal to a lottery department, including the sense of people who like daydreaming about winning the lottery.
> I was explicitly responding to the “the lottery doesn't care about your current circumstance and everyone has an equal (equally small) chance” remark.
Note that everyone also has the same chance of buying out the lottery at a profit - it's not necessary to buy those tickets out of pocket, because you can do it with investor backing. The story in your link is the story of someone who bought out a lottery with investor backing. He's not alone; other people also buy out lotteries using money they didn't provide. This is one of the easiest investor pitches you can give.
But you’ve already locked yourself into an incorrect preconceived notion of the original point (which is simply: “not everyone has an equal chance on the lottery, though on the surface that may look like the case”) and are for some reason getting angrier with each response, so I don’t think we’ll get anywhere here.
All the players know that the odds are horrible, but in the end someone does win.
Thus specific funds for X is only meaningful as a minimum funding amount.
Sin taxes work so well at plugging funding gaps specifically because they are optional.
Making things explicit such as stamping a “45% Tax” on lottery tickets really changes people’s perception. The Trump administration almost flipped out when Amazon considered explicitly adding tariffs to people’s checkout.
I wish they called their bluff and did it as it’d force Amazon to show the country of manufacture.
I don't think many people would care.
Like, literally nobody.
I wish I could remember where that blog post was, I think it came up on HN.
Saying people wouldn’t pay any premium is very different than saying they won’t pay an 85% premium.
Humans do a poor job estimating extreme odds. 0% chance or 100% of a high risk/reward event. How many people in rural areas are prepping for a Carrington Event-sized solar flare or nuclear war, but a car accident or cancer diagnosis and resulting medical bills would sooner and statistically more likely to ruin their lives? Many. They see the small chance of survival as being high reward, with low risk.
Likewise, the lure of a 100% chance of life-changing material wealth that takes the low risk of $2 fits the same mold.
Until someone says "you know what, what the hell, that's as good a pick as any", I'm going to go with "they don't know how small the odds are".
If you choose a random number, then for each other player your chance of picking the same numbers as them is the same as your chance of winning: in the case of Powerball, 1 in 292,201,338 = 0.0000000034. If you instead non-randomly choose 123456, then for each player that actively avoids 123456 your chance of picking the same numbers as them only decreases by 0.0000000034 (from 0.0000000034 to 0). But for each player that actively chooses 123456, your chance of picking the same numbers as them increases by 0.9999999966 (from 0.0000000034 to 1).
We could model this more precisely by looking at the other players' choices as semi-random with some combinations weighted higher and some lower, but you see my point: even if lots of people are repelled by 'obvious' sequences like 123456, this can be outweighed by a very small number being attracted to them.
The lottery used to be a guage of my level of hopelessness. If I was feeling hopeless I would buy a ticket.
Luckily I haven't bought a ticket for years.
I used to buy one every week.
That amounts for not so trivial amount of money - would be much better for them if they put it in savings account or basically anything else.
People chase the jackpots but there are multiple $1,000,000 winners every drawing, 2-3 times a week
At the end of the day, gotta be in the game to win it
It would be really interesting to watch the expected value play out over repeated plays!! I am imagining a running balance where you keep track of total spend versus total returns. Most of the time the balance steadily goes more negative, with occasional jumps back up when you hit a partial match, and very rare big spikes from a larger win.
Very cool project!
Might hide all this behind the current automatic view with a “play it yourself” toggle.
The prizes were shared amongst everyone
If the prize pot was say £10m, 4 winners would get £2.5m each.
I suspect that the hunebr of people choosing 123456 would be far higher than choosing 6 random numbers. Thus in the event your numbers did come up, you would get far less winning than someone who had the same odds but chose say 13 22 32 35 40 42
The point of lottery games is to offer the lowest possible probability of winning that has a perception of being winnable.
So guessing few random small numbers feels easier than picking one random large number.
The whole point of the website is to show those games in a context where people without a math degree will get how low the winning chances are.
So the games with the same winning likelihood Are Not the same game.
And that dream lasts right up until you check the numbers.
That’s the part rational investors tend to miss … the power of dreaming.
And I’ll admit it - I play the lottery too, even though I already live a pretty comfortable life.
Dreaming does cost nothing.
It's fun to look at the kinda house you could buy if you had €5 million in the bank. Even though I'd never have that much, and even if I did I wouldn't spend it on such a thing.
That's a habit I picked up when I lived in the UK and I played their national lottery once every month or so.
(/r/SpottedonRightmove/ is also a fun sub if you like this kinda thing; "right move" is a UK estate agents chain.)
I’ve personally had thoughts about what I would do if I were millionaire, and given the amount of stories of people coming into a large sums of money and their life getting significantly worse, I’d prefer to actually not win it.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Betteridge%27s_law_of_headline...
Presumably its easier to dream when there is an unpredictable outcome, rather than knowing you have to wake up tomorrow to spend the day driving around and pissing in bottles. An outside force that could change circumstances is a better feeling than knowing that really isn't any way of changing your career when you can't go to school because you can't afford it.
> Presumably its easier to dream when there is an unpredictable outcome
Anecdotally, I know almost no one who plays the lottery, but almost everyone at some point has shared an “if I won the lottery” dream. Playing isn’t a prerequisite. It’s not too different from dreaming of becoming a rockstar when you can’t even play an instrument. Most of us have some version of that, no money necessary.
You don’t even have to sell them hope. Just sell them the sensation of hope.
That gets messy in a hurry. Most of the time time a lottery is introduced to help fund school districts, funding from other sources for those districts dries up. Money is fungible, and the effect is as if the lottery money directly went somewhere other than its earmarked purpose.
People still win the jackpot, frequently. Some of those people probably understood the odds too, and it just happened to them, that feeling must be pretty wild.
Could also change the cadence for tallying purposes (so 1 second = 1 week/fortnight/month) to keep track of how many weeks, months or years one has been doing this for. But that might get depressing!
(and no, you wouldn't be able to farm them - the store only carried X amount of tickets, and they usually sold out quickly)
"Lottery-like" mechanisms for selling homes exist in the UK as "prize competitions" or "house raffles", which operate under specific legal rules to avoid being classified as illegal lotteries. This method gained significant news coverage, particularly a high-profile case in 2017, and has become a growing trend.
This is true but a bit misleading: 99% of people actually playing poker in the US today are playing Texas Hold'em or other variants where "your first hand" contains more than 5 cards and is vastly more likely to have a royal flush. I've had several royal flushes but would not want to think I'm only an order of magnitude or two away from having the luck of a Powerball winner.
A useful statistic to include is the probability of becoming a successful business owner, or better yet, the probability of getting a job that pays an annual salary of 200k, 1mil. etc. Maybe that will inspire people to dream more practically.
Another insightful feature would be to emulate playing at the rate of real life (approx. tickets per second in real life).
(excluding the smaller pool draws of 5/6, 4/6, etc)
One ticket as the width of a human hair (60-80 µm).
The winning numbers are a hole the width of a human hair.
The odds of winning 1:14m is hitting another hair head on in a line 14,000,000×0.00007 m=980 meters wide. (~840 meters to ~1,120 meters)
The odds of winning 1:33.3m is hitting another hair head on in a line 33,294,800×0.00007 m=2,330.636 meters wide. (1,998 meters to ~2,664 meters)
(calculations by ChatGPT)
If I buy a ticket, it's so I can daydream for myself.
See also: Simulation Clicker.
I know how my brain works these days.
Maybe try shouldIplaythelottery.com
https://archive.org/download/HeliganSecretsOfTheLostGardens/...
This seems pretty reasonable, actually! Somehow it makes the 320M seem manageable.
For me, it makes me realize how incredibly large human populations are.
Not to mention that once your winnings goes over a certain threshold the chance that you end up dead from bad choices or straight up murdered seems to skyrocket.
...but anyway, are you really arguing that rich people live way more dangerous?
Nevertheless, here's an article from an untrustworthy looking site!
In Europe, or at least in Germany, they don't name drop. If the jackpot was very high, like >100M you can sometime hear in the news something like "the win goes to nord Bavaria." But that's it. The winners even get schooled on how to stay low. Only talk about the win in the family. Open an new bank account in a big city and not at your village bank. Don't immediately quit your job. Don't invest in shady shit etc.
If you self select to be public about it, that is on you. And there are people who do. Most talk about it after they have lost a lot of money and are in debt now. They thought they are set for life. So they raise their living standard drastically. Give out big gifts etc. And "suddenly" 10M isn't that much money anymore. :-)
But yea, I agree that lottery is stupid. Put the money on savings.
Lottery is a tax for people who don’t understand statistics.