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If playing the lottery becomes worthwhile, arbitrageurs will immediately step in until it isn't. Got a lottery ticket with a 10% chance of being worth $100? I'

• iudqnolq 4y ago
  I disagree on minimal evidence. My intuition is it's more likely you're wrong about what people value than that many people are wrong about that kind of math. Arbitrage is a real issue, but it's not magic and there's a lot of friction in the real world. For ex, you don't get spam callers trying to buy your chance of a large settlement payout.
• forgotloginonp4 4y ago
  The claims of “bad at math” ring hollow as Selbee did appear to use statistical analysis and there is a movie being made celebrating those wins. https://highline.huffingtonpost.com/articles/en/lotto-winners/ https://highline.huffingtonpost.com/articles/en/lotto-winner... But it’s also possible that math whizzes like Jerry Selbee are finding and exploiting flaws that lottery officials haven’t noticed yet. In 2011, Harper’s wrote about “The Luckiest Woman on Earth,” Joan Ginther, who has won multimillion-dollar jackpots in the Texas lottery four times. Her professional background as a PhD statistician raised suspicions that Ginther had discovered an anomaly in Texas’ system. In a similar vein, a Stanford- and MIT-trained statistician named Mohan Srivastava proved in 2003 that he could predict patterns in certain kinds of scratch-off tickets in Canada, guessing the correct numbers around 90 percent of the time. Srivastava alerted authorities as soon as he found the flaw. If he could have exploited it, he later explained to a reporter at Wired, he would have, but he had calculated that it wasn’t worth his time. It would take too many hours to buy the tickets in bulk, count the winners, redeem them for prizes, file the tax forms. He already had a full-time job.
• Tozen 4y ago
  You seem to be also missing the point of these lottery retailers being disproportionately clustered in the poor Black neighborhoods. The "math problem" also involves pushing the distribution of the "vice" off on them (where such people are more desperate to escape their circumstances), then negating any overall or possible benefit to those poor Blacks that don't have such a vice (like kids) and need greater educational funding and opportunities.
  • landemva 4y ago
    > those poor Blacks This is patronizing and wrong. Math skills are also lacking in many white communities. Maybe it is more about cultural acceptance than math skills.
    • diordiderot 4y ago
      This sounds like a dog whistle. Denying effects of systemic racism and blaming 'culture'
    • bobkazamakis 4y ago
      misquoting someone is an interesting way to dog whistle
  • Aunche 4y ago
    Gambling is a vice and pretending that it's not doesn't help people. You do receive utility from buying a single lottery ticket, because it allows you to dream, but that's not something that scales with increased spending. Beyond that, it is never a rational decision to buy lottery tickets. You're almost always going to be happier if you put that money aside in an emergency fund. In the past, you'd be able to use the excuse of poor people being underbanked, but these days there are plenty of fee-free online banks.
    • Tozen 4y ago
      You are misunderstanding the point that I made. I'm not saying that gambling isn't a vice nor am I condoning such behavior, put rather the state allowing or pushing such a vice disproportionally into poor Black neighborhoods is a demonstration of being corrupt and exploitative. Selling nearly unachievable "dreams" to poor desperate people is depravity, even more so when the state is sanctioning the marketing and advertising campaigns being directed at them. The view of such a situation is further demonstrated by the state minimizing any possible benefits from the profits of the lotteries to the same Black poor neighborhoods they are taking advantage of. They are primarily funneling money out of those neighborhoods, from the people that can least afford it, to any and everywhere else.