5 ms·

Voltaire's Luck: The French Philosopher Outsmarts the Lottery

114 points by ArtWomb 8y ago

seren 8y ago
There is an interesting part in Casanova's autobiography where he is in Paris, and he is trying to sell a Lottery implementation to the governement. If I remember correctly he even meets a minister of Louis XV, but the project never really starts. Casanova was essentially a conman always looking for new scheme to make money : he started his careers pretending having the knife of St. Peter used to cut Christ's ears, and used it as a divination tool to find buried treasure. And he later used numerology. That gives you some ideas of who was interested in Lotteries in the XVIIIth century.
- probably_wrong 8y ago
  > he started his careers pretending having the knife of St. Peter which used to cut Christ's ears Are you sure you are not confusing "the knife used to cut Christ's ears" with "the sword used to cut the ear of one of the men who came to arrest Jesus"? Because I never heard the former, and I'm under the impression that I whould have.
  - seren 8y ago
    You are correct my memory is a bit fuzzy, and your interpretation is probably correct. Edit : after further checking, he was pretending having the knife of st. Peter, used to cut off the high priest servant's ear in the garden of Gethsemane to prevent the arrest of Jesus. (Which makes more sense..) 10 Then Simon Peter having a sword drew it, and smote the high priest's servant, and cut off his right ear. The servant's name was Malchus. 11 Then said Jesus unto Peter, Put up thy sword into the sheath: the cup which my Father hath given me, shall I not drink it? John 18:10–11
    - mci 8y ago
      Except that the sword has been in Poznań, Poland for over a thousand years: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sword_of_Saint_Peter https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sword_of_Saint_Peter
      - swish_bob 8y ago
        Historically, actually having a relic of a saint is very poorly correlated with claiming to have a relic of a saint, even when people aren't explicitly trying to con people.
        justtopost 8y ago
        We really have almost zero proof that most of the 'real' relics are legitimate. Many value the meaning more than the actual item, especially when considering the perspective of the church.
- totololo 8y ago
  Where is our ICO philosopher?
lordnacho 8y ago
A lot of the probability you learn in high school came about because people wanted to understand certain games of chance. The thing described here is a good example. It sounds like there were some underpriced bonds that were also lottery coupons, and Voltaire scooped them up. The history of people trying to beat games of chance with math is incredibly interesting. Take Ed Thorp. He actually built a machine to measure how fast the ball was going round a roulette table, out of the very first transistors on the market. Yes, back when computers were stored in a house. If you look at the odds though, the house advantage is only slight in most casino games. A small tilt can favour the player. Ed and a load of MIT people also went on to break Blackjack through a hole in the implementation. Turns out if you don't reshuffle often, the odds change and you can devise a system for winning. Yet another group of MIT kids did the lottery thing again.
- caf 8y ago
  Ed Thorp literally wrote the book on Blackjack - it's called Beat The Dealer and is definitely worth a read.
- segfaultbuserr 8y ago
  The collaborator of that project was Claude Shannon. And it has been branded as the world's first wearable computer. http://www1.cs.columbia.edu/graphics/courses/mobwear/resources/thorp-iswc98.pdf http://www1.cs.columbia.edu/graphics/courses/mobwear/resourc...
  - claudiawerner 8y ago
    My third year of EE course on communication systems has given me an appreciation for Claude Shannon :)
benj111 8y ago
Its says this: "The lottery craze began in 1694 (the year of Voltaire’s birth) when the English Parliament established a lottery" But then goes on to mention at least 2 earlier lotteries. The wikipedia page doesn't single this lottery out either. So what makes this lottery special?
- g-erson 8y ago
  I read it as meaning the English Parliament were an influencer of their European counterparts.
- simonh 8y ago
  I suppose it means that the earlier lotteries didn't start the craze, and that one did?
mcv 8y ago
It always surprises me when Voltaire is called a philosopher. I was also surprised when Epic Rap Battles of History picked him for their lineup of 3 western philosophers. What philosophy has he written? My impression is that Voltaire is mostly known for him political pamphlets, propaganda, poetry, and of course his financial investments, including gaming the lottery.
- segfaultbuserr 8y ago
  During the Enlightenment, the term Les philosophes (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philosophes https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philosophes) basically refers to all public intellectuals who were proponents of rationalism, classical liberalism, and who engaged in political criticism, even many were not scholars on metaphysics themselves. To this day, because of their great historical influences to political philosophy in general, they are often simply called "philosophers". The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy has a good summary, > At the center of his work was a new conception of philosophy and the philosopher that in several crucial respects influenced the modern concept of each. Yet in other ways Voltaire was not a philosopher at all in the modern sense of the term. https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/voltaire https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/voltaire
- 77pt77 8y ago
  And Candide.
plouffy 8y ago
The rules of the lottery are a bit sparse, but it sounds like a guaranteed pool. The lottery worked like this: (1) If you have Hotel de Ville bonds you can participate (if not for the lottery, these were almost free since no one thought they would actually get paid). (2) The pot of the lottery is 500,000 (money from government) + money from selling tickets. (3) An individual can only buy 1 ticket. (4) Each ticket is not worth the same. An individual can buy one ticket at a cost of 1/1000 of the debt you wish to be repaid on. So if you have 1,000£ of debt, you can buy 1 ticket for 1£. (5) You get paid 0.85 * 1000 * cost of your ticket. (6) All tickets sold are put in a wheel of "fortune" [1]. A ticket is picked, the value of the winning is subtracted from the pool. And this process continues until the pool is "in debt" (however, the last ticket is redeemed in full, so in essence it's very likely that the government would have to pay in more than 500,000). This debt does not carry forward into the next pool So looks like Voltaire, and his mates (with help of the notaries that were asked to sell the tickets) were able to buy all the tickets available (and were even able to buy the tickets discounted!) ensuring that they would collect on >500,000 government guarantee. [1] http://www.wikigallery.org/wiki/painting_227105/Claude-Louis-Desrais/Drawing-the-lottery-at-the-Hotel-de-Ville http://www.wikigallery.org/wiki/painting_227105/Claude-Louis...
- OscarCunningham 8y ago
  This is still very confusing to me. The total amount that the bettors could gain was 500,000 (or just over). This must have been much less than the total value of the bonds, since otherwise the bonds would not have been worthless. So it's not possible for Voltaire and his friends to have made more money than they originally lost by being owners of bonds that became worthless. How did this make Voltaire rich? (Also, the discount that the syndicate got on the tickets should be irrelevant. That money is going into the pool so they're getting it back either way.) EDIT: Aha! Maybe the way it worked it that there was actually another rule. (7) There are only a limited number of tickets available. Many fewer than 1000 times the number of bondholders. Then Voltaire and his friends can profit by buying up all the tickets, since they don't hold all the bonds. Even though 500,000 was a negligible fraction of the total value of the bonds, it was a huge multiple of the value of the bonds held by Voltaire and his friends.
amelius 8y ago
Was posted before: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18839755 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18839755
acoye 8y ago
[…] France had nearly gone bankrupt. The bankers were to blame, having devised financial instruments that magicked debt away, only for it to return multiplied once it was discovered that the collateral wasn’t there. […] History does rhyme …
vivekd 8y ago
There's a similar modern story of a Romanian man who gamed the modern lottery by buying all possible combinations. I wonder is he was inspired by Voltaire. https://thehustle.co/the-man-who-won-the-lottery-14-times https://thehustle.co/the-man-who-won-the-lottery-14-times
blancheneige 8y ago
for anyone curious about the 1719 financial crisis mentioned in the first paragraph, I recommend this short video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=diEVmQZ1QfM https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=diEVmQZ1QfM or read about John Law's system: http://www.mshistorynow.mdah.ms.gov/articles/70/john-law-and-the-mississippi-bubble-1718-1720 http://www.mshistorynow.mdah.ms.gov/articles/70/john-law-and... bonus point if you can draw frightening parallels with today's federal reserve system.
yboris 8y ago
In the book How Not to Be Wrong: The Power of Mathematical Thinking Paperback, Jordan Ellenberg discusses this as an example of a poorly-designed lottery where people with enough mathematical sophistication and enough financial resources could game the system: https://www.amazon.com/How-Not-Be-Wrong-Mathematical/dp/0143127535 https://www.amazon.com/How-Not-Be-Wrong-Mathematical/dp/0143...
mariopepper 8y ago
Very often the question of the game of the lottery becomes dominant in the minds of people. We all doubt such decisions as we are not sure of the result. But luck can be favorable to any person. A few days ago I won a new ipod playing the game. All drakemall reviews i found at https://drakemall.info/drakemall-reviews-and-opinions/ https://drakemall.info/drakemall-reviews-and-opinions/ And now I am infinitely happy with my luck

114 points by ArtWomb 8y ago

There is an interesting part in Casanova's autobiography where he is in Paris, and he is trying to sell a Lottery implementation to the governement. If I remember correctly he even meets a minister of Louis XV, but the project never really starts. Casanova was essentially a conman always looking for new scheme to make money : he started his careers pretending having the knife of St. Peter used to cut Christ's ears, and used it as a divination tool to find buried treasure. And he later used numerology. That gives you some ideas of who was interested in Lotteries in the XVIIIth century.

probably_wrong 8y ago
> he started his careers pretending having the knife of St. Peter which used to cut Christ's ears Are you sure you are not confusing "the knife used to cut Christ's ears" with "the sword used to cut the ear of one of the men who came to arrest Jesus"? Because I never heard the former, and I'm under the impression that I whould have.
- seren 8y ago
  You are correct my memory is a bit fuzzy, and your interpretation is probably correct. Edit : after further checking, he was pretending having the knife of st. Peter, used to cut off the high priest servant's ear in the garden of Gethsemane to prevent the arrest of Jesus. (Which makes more sense..) 10 Then Simon Peter having a sword drew it, and smote the high priest's servant, and cut off his right ear. The servant's name was Malchus. 11 Then said Jesus unto Peter, Put up thy sword into the sheath: the cup which my Father hath given me, shall I not drink it? John 18:10–11
  - mci 8y ago
    Except that the sword has been in Poznań, Poland for over a thousand years: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sword_of_Saint_Peter https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sword_of_Saint_Peter
    - swish_bob 8y ago
      Historically, actually having a relic of a saint is very poorly correlated with claiming to have a relic of a saint, even when people aren't explicitly trying to con people.
      - justtopost 8y ago
        We really have almost zero proof that most of the 'real' relics are legitimate. Many value the meaning more than the actual item, especially when considering the perspective of the church.
totololo 8y ago
Where is our ICO philosopher?

lordnacho 8y ago

A lot of the probability you learn in high school came about because people wanted to understand certain games of chance. The thing described here is a good example. It sounds like there were some underpriced bonds that were also lottery coupons, and Voltaire scooped them up. The history of people trying to beat games of chance with math is incredibly interesting. Take Ed Thorp. He actually built a machine to measure how fast the ball was going round a roulette table, out of the very first transistors on the market. Yes, back when computers were stored in a house. If you look at the odds though, the house advantage is only slight in most casino games. A small tilt can favour the player. Ed and a load of MIT people also went on to break Blackjack through a hole in the implementation. Turns out if you don't reshuffle often, the odds change and you can devise a system for winning. Yet another group of MIT kids did the lottery thing again.

caf 8y ago
Ed Thorp literally wrote the book on Blackjack - it's called Beat The Dealer and is definitely worth a read.
segfaultbuserr 8y ago
The collaborator of that project was Claude Shannon. And it has been branded as the world's first wearable computer. http://www1.cs.columbia.edu/graphics/courses/mobwear/resources/thorp-iswc98.pdf http://www1.cs.columbia.edu/graphics/courses/mobwear/resourc...
- claudiawerner 8y ago
  My third year of EE course on communication systems has given me an appreciation for Claude Shannon :)

benj111 8y ago

Its says this: "The lottery craze began in 1694 (the year of Voltaire’s birth) when the English Parliament established a lottery" But then goes on to mention at least 2 earlier lotteries. The wikipedia page doesn't single this lottery out either. So what makes this lottery special?

g-erson 8y ago
I read it as meaning the English Parliament were an influencer of their European counterparts.
simonh 8y ago
I suppose it means that the earlier lotteries didn't start the craze, and that one did?

mcv 8y ago

It always surprises me when Voltaire is called a philosopher. I was also surprised when Epic Rap Battles of History picked him for their lineup of 3 western philosophers. What philosophy has he written? My impression is that Voltaire is mostly known for him political pamphlets, propaganda, poetry, and of course his financial investments, including gaming the lottery.

segfaultbuserr 8y ago
During the Enlightenment, the term Les philosophes (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philosophes https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philosophes) basically refers to all public intellectuals who were proponents of rationalism, classical liberalism, and who engaged in political criticism, even many were not scholars on metaphysics themselves. To this day, because of their great historical influences to political philosophy in general, they are often simply called "philosophers". The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy has a good summary, > At the center of his work was a new conception of philosophy and the philosopher that in several crucial respects influenced the modern concept of each. Yet in other ways Voltaire was not a philosopher at all in the modern sense of the term. https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/voltaire https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/voltaire
77pt77 8y ago
And Candide.

plouffy 8y ago

The rules of the lottery are a bit sparse, but it sounds like a guaranteed pool. The lottery worked like this: (1) If you have Hotel de Ville bonds you can participate (if not for the lottery, these were almost free since no one thought they would actually get paid). (2) The pot of the lottery is 500,000 (money from government) + money from selling tickets. (3) An individual can only buy 1 ticket. (4) Each ticket is not worth the same. An individual can buy one ticket at a cost of 1/1000 of the debt you wish to be repaid on. So if you have 1,000£ of debt, you can buy 1 ticket for 1£. (5) You get paid 0.85 * 1000 * cost of your ticket. (6) All tickets sold are put in a wheel of "fortune" [1]. A ticket is picked, the value of the winning is subtracted from the pool. And this process continues until the pool is "in debt" (however, the last ticket is redeemed in full, so in essence it's very likely that the government would have to pay in more than 500,000). This debt does not carry forward into the next pool So looks like Voltaire, and his mates (with help of the notaries that were asked to sell the tickets) were able to buy all the tickets available (and were even able to buy the tickets discounted!) ensuring that they would collect on >500,000 government guarantee. [1] http://www.wikigallery.org/wiki/painting_227105/Claude-Louis-Desrais/Drawing-the-lottery-at-the-Hotel-de-Ville http://www.wikigallery.org/wiki/painting_227105/Claude-Louis...

OscarCunningham 8y ago
This is still very confusing to me. The total amount that the bettors could gain was 500,000 (or just over). This must have been much less than the total value of the bonds, since otherwise the bonds would not have been worthless. So it's not possible for Voltaire and his friends to have made more money than they originally lost by being owners of bonds that became worthless. How did this make Voltaire rich? (Also, the discount that the syndicate got on the tickets should be irrelevant. That money is going into the pool so they're getting it back either way.) EDIT: Aha! Maybe the way it worked it that there was actually another rule. (7) There are only a limited number of tickets available. Many fewer than 1000 times the number of bondholders. Then Voltaire and his friends can profit by buying up all the tickets, since they don't hold all the bonds. Even though 500,000 was a negligible fraction of the total value of the bonds, it was a huge multiple of the value of the bonds held by Voltaire and his friends.

amelius 8y ago

Was posted before: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18839755 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18839755

acoye 8y ago

[…] France had nearly gone bankrupt. The bankers were to blame, having devised financial instruments that magicked debt away, only for it to return multiplied once it was discovered that the collateral wasn’t there. […] History does rhyme …

vivekd 8y ago

There's a similar modern story of a Romanian man who gamed the modern lottery by buying all possible combinations. I wonder is he was inspired by Voltaire. https://thehustle.co/the-man-who-won-the-lottery-14-times https://thehustle.co/the-man-who-won-the-lottery-14-times

blancheneige 8y ago

for anyone curious about the 1719 financial crisis mentioned in the first paragraph, I recommend this short video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=diEVmQZ1QfM https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=diEVmQZ1QfM or read about John Law's system: http://www.mshistorynow.mdah.ms.gov/articles/70/john-law-and-the-mississippi-bubble-1718-1720 http://www.mshistorynow.mdah.ms.gov/articles/70/john-law-and... bonus point if you can draw frightening parallels with today's federal reserve system.

yboris 8y ago

In the book How Not to Be Wrong: The Power of Mathematical Thinking Paperback, Jordan Ellenberg discusses this as an example of a poorly-designed lottery where people with enough mathematical sophistication and enough financial resources could game the system: https://www.amazon.com/How-Not-Be-Wrong-Mathematical/dp/0143127535 https://www.amazon.com/How-Not-Be-Wrong-Mathematical/dp/0143...

mariopepper 8y ago

Very often the question of the game of the lottery becomes dominant in the minds of people. We all doubt such decisions as we are not sure of the result. But luck can be favorable to any person. A few days ago I won a new ipod playing the game. All drakemall reviews i found at https://drakemall.info/drakemall-reviews-and-opinions/ https://drakemall.info/drakemall-reviews-and-opinions/ And now I am infinitely happy with my luck