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I think people understand the odds are small. However, perhaps they perceive their chances of meaningfully turn around their life in other ways have even smalle

by lunaru 9mo ago

I think people understand the odds are small. However, perhaps they perceive their chances of meaningfully turn around their life in other ways have even smaller odds. i.e. improbable vs actually impossible. At least the lottery doesn't care about your current circumstance and everyone has an equal (equally small) chance. 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.

01HNNWZ0MV43FF 9mo ago
30 seconds? I can daydream in bed for an hour for nothing.
dangus 9mo ago
Another aspect is that in many states, a large portion of the lottery goes directly into public good programs like education: https://www.powerball.net/distribution-of-revenue https://www.powerball.net/distribution-of-revenue All the players know that the odds are horrible, but in the end someone does win.
- Retric 9mo ago
  Money is fungible, every penny going from the lottery to X is a penny not taken from the general fund. Thus specific funds for X is only meaningful as a minimum funding amount.
  - Waterluvian 9mo ago
    And they would also have to believe that their education system in its current form would have been even worse without the lottery.
  - dangus 9mo ago
    This is technically true, but the end result is that if you abolish the lottery (unpopular) you have to raise taxes (even more unpopular) to replace lost revenue. Sin taxes work so well at plugging funding gaps specifically because they are optional.
    - deleted 9mo ago
      [deleted]
    - Retric 9mo ago
      That and they are taxing the poor and under educated who are least likely to complain. 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.
      - koolba 9mo ago
        > 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.
        selcuka 9mo ago
        > it’d force Amazon to show the country of manufacture I don't think many people would care.
        dangus 9mo ago
        I’m reminded of that company that added a Made in USA option of their product that you could select next to the normal price and nobody would buy it at any price premium. Like, literally nobody. I wish I could remember where that blog post was, I think it came up on HN.
        selcuka 9mo ago
        Probably this: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43787647 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43787647
        Retric 9mo ago
        That experiment had an 85% price premium said the item was identical and some people still added it to their cart. Saying people wouldn’t pay any premium is very different than saying they won’t pay an 85% premium.
andrerpena 9mo ago
I think: 1) Like you said, people are buying hope. 2) People cannot fathom this degree of improbability. So, the fact that it's at least possible overrides the near-impossibility of it. 3) There is some aspect of entertainment and social-interaction to it. It's a bit like watching sports. Who you're cheering for is irrelevant, and whoever wins doesn't change your life in any way, but still, we watch it.
- strken 9mo ago
  The social aspect is real. The only time I've seen anyone in my family buy a lottery ticket was when one of the jackpots got big enough to become headline news. Mum bought a ticket just to be able to talk about it (and had a chat to us about probability and gambling).
anonzzzies 9mo ago
I know people in the neighbourhood/street I was born, who still live there (well over 50 years in the same house) who bought the postcode lottery tickets since forever, 12x a year, never won anything; this year it fell in the adjacent area code... It must hurt.
- dostick 9mo ago
  What does it mean - adjacent area code? They can’t play anymore?
  - Z0rp 9mo ago
    It means they nearly won but sadly didn't. So close yet soo far away.
  - Scarblac 9mo ago
    In the Dutch postcode lottery, they draw a random postcode (roughly a street) and everyone that lives there and has a ticket wins. The wider area code (village level) win smaller prizes. 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.
    - lostlogin 9mo ago
      Seems a clever marketing tactic to rope in more people. How do you confirm address? ‘I moved home to my parents last week’ etc.
      - lazyasciiart 9mo ago
        You have to buy a ticket - presumably you have to commit to an address somehow at that point, so people can only buy for one postcode even if they're lying. Unless there's a skewed outcome that shouldn't really matter. (And if there is a skewed outcome...the people who'd bought the winning postcode and didn't have a house on that street would be under heavy scrutiny!)
p1dda 9mo ago
The odds are really small but so are the cost of playing
- ozim 9mo ago
  Problem is there are people who buy tickets for each and every draw for years. 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.
UqWBcuFx6NV4r 9mo ago
I’m at the point where I take it as a red flag when someone doesn’t understand this, and instead bangs on about “low odds” and “the idiots that think that they’ll win”. A combination of superficial booksmarts, a misplaced sense of elitism, and a very real lack of emotional intelligence, that I know that I don’t enjoy being around. There’s definitely a low end on this bell curve, but I think that your average Joe Blow off the street has about as good an undemanding of the chances of winning the lottery as you or I. Which is to say that we’re all definitely flawed in our ability to intuitively comprehend very large numbers, but not uniquely so. It’s just nice to feel like something good might possibly be coming your way. It’s about hope, exactly as you say. I’m barely even an occasional gambler, including the lottery. The one or two times where I’ve bought a ticket, it was worth the $10 or whatever I paid, which I truly do not miss an iota and never have. It’s a game. Anyone who doesn’t get that is deranged.
- Loeffelmann 9mo ago
  It's mainly about showing how low the odds actually are. I think everyone understands they are low but it's ridiculous how low exactly.
- LatencyKills 9mo ago
  My brother left school after ninth grade and struggles financially — he can’t afford basic health insurance, yet he’ll spend $100 on lottery tickets whenever possible. 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.
  - jstanley 9mo ago
    The difference in expected value between purchasing one ticket and fifty is 50x! Buying 50 tickets is 50x as bad as buying 1 ticket.
- bryanrasmussen 9mo ago
3RTB297 9mo ago
I've always assumed this was correct in a way. 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.
latexr 9mo ago
> At least the lottery doesn't care about your current circumstance and everyone has an equal (equally small) chance. 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-times-using-unbelievably-basic-math-80026 https://www.iflscience.com/how-a-man-won-the-lottery-14-time...
- thaumasiotes 9mo ago
  > If you have more money you can buy more tickets which leads to higher—or even certain—odds. 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.
  - latexr 9mo ago
    > I don't think there are any lotteries with that feature. It’s in the link I posted.
    - thaumasiotes 9mo ago
      Did you try reading the only other sentence in my comment?
      - latexr 9mo ago
        No need to get upset. I replied earnestly, I thought you might’ve skipped it. 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.
        thaumasiotes 9mo ago
        > I replied earnestly, I thought you might’ve skipped it. 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.
deleted 9mo ago
[deleted]
stavros 9mo ago
Sure, I'll grant you that. But then explain this: Why is it that, whenever I tell people who are about to play the lottery, to pick the numbers 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, they say "that's crazy, the numbers will never come out in a row like that"? 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".
- staindk 9mo ago
  If 1 through 6 are drawn you'd probably have to share your winnings with many more people than most other combinations.
  - stavros 9mo ago
    Given how much people are avoiding 1 through 6, I think you'd probably be better off picking that.
    - retsibsi 9mo ago
      This is interesting but IMO it's very likely to be chosen more often than average. 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.
      - stavros 9mo ago
        I do see your point, but I doubt this probability analysis was done by the people who say "what? The numbers will never be drawn in a sequence like that". It's not that they want to avoid common numbers.
chairmansteve 9mo ago
Very well said. 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.
yieldcrv 9mo ago
My thoughts are that I’m not poor enough for buying lottery tickets to be a tax on me 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
wildzzz 9mo ago
I rarely play Powerball Mega millions but when I do, it's fun thinking about how you'd spend (and protect) your winnings. "First I'll pay off that old debt, then I'll buy a new car, then I'll buy that cute house I've been driving past everyday. Then I'll call my boss and tell him to suck a fat one".
Breza 9mo ago
I spend about $10/year on scratchers since I like the causes they support. But most of the volume that I see being bought at the corner store down the street comes from folks who really don't appear to understand the odds.

by lunaru 9mo ago

01HNNWZ0MV43FF 9mo ago

30 seconds? I can daydream in bed for an hour for nothing.

dangus 9mo ago

Another aspect is that in many states, a large portion of the lottery goes directly into public good programs like education: https://www.powerball.net/distribution-of-revenue https://www.powerball.net/distribution-of-revenue All the players know that the odds are horrible, but in the end someone does win.

Retric 9mo ago
Money is fungible, every penny going from the lottery to X is a penny not taken from the general fund. Thus specific funds for X is only meaningful as a minimum funding amount.
- Waterluvian 9mo ago
  And they would also have to believe that their education system in its current form would have been even worse without the lottery.
- dangus 9mo ago
  This is technically true, but the end result is that if you abolish the lottery (unpopular) you have to raise taxes (even more unpopular) to replace lost revenue. Sin taxes work so well at plugging funding gaps specifically because they are optional.
  - deleted 9mo ago
    [deleted]
  - Retric 9mo ago
    That and they are taxing the poor and under educated who are least likely to complain. 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.
    - koolba 9mo ago
      > 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.
      - selcuka 9mo ago
        > it’d force Amazon to show the country of manufacture I don't think many people would care.
        dangus 9mo ago
        I’m reminded of that company that added a Made in USA option of their product that you could select next to the normal price and nobody would buy it at any price premium. Like, literally nobody. I wish I could remember where that blog post was, I think it came up on HN.
        selcuka 9mo ago
        Probably this: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43787647 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43787647
        Retric 9mo ago
        That experiment had an 85% price premium said the item was identical and some people still added it to their cart. Saying people wouldn’t pay any premium is very different than saying they won’t pay an 85% premium.

andrerpena 9mo ago

I think: 1) Like you said, people are buying hope. 2) People cannot fathom this degree of improbability. So, the fact that it's at least possible overrides the near-impossibility of it. 3) There is some aspect of entertainment and social-interaction to it. It's a bit like watching sports. Who you're cheering for is irrelevant, and whoever wins doesn't change your life in any way, but still, we watch it.

strken 9mo ago
The social aspect is real. The only time I've seen anyone in my family buy a lottery ticket was when one of the jackpots got big enough to become headline news. Mum bought a ticket just to be able to talk about it (and had a chat to us about probability and gambling).

anonzzzies 9mo ago

I know people in the neighbourhood/street I was born, who still live there (well over 50 years in the same house) who bought the postcode lottery tickets since forever, 12x a year, never won anything; this year it fell in the adjacent area code... It must hurt.

dostick 9mo ago
What does it mean - adjacent area code? They can’t play anymore?
- Z0rp 9mo ago
  It means they nearly won but sadly didn't. So close yet soo far away.
- Scarblac 9mo ago
  In the Dutch postcode lottery, they draw a random postcode (roughly a street) and everyone that lives there and has a ticket wins. The wider area code (village level) win smaller prizes. 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.
  - lostlogin 9mo ago
    Seems a clever marketing tactic to rope in more people. How do you confirm address? ‘I moved home to my parents last week’ etc.
    - lazyasciiart 9mo ago
      You have to buy a ticket - presumably you have to commit to an address somehow at that point, so people can only buy for one postcode even if they're lying. Unless there's a skewed outcome that shouldn't really matter. (And if there is a skewed outcome...the people who'd bought the winning postcode and didn't have a house on that street would be under heavy scrutiny!)

p1dda 9mo ago

The odds are really small but so are the cost of playing

ozim 9mo ago
Problem is there are people who buy tickets for each and every draw for years. 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.

UqWBcuFx6NV4r 9mo ago

I’m at the point where I take it as a red flag when someone doesn’t understand this, and instead bangs on about “low odds” and “the idiots that think that they’ll win”. A combination of superficial booksmarts, a misplaced sense of elitism, and a very real lack of emotional intelligence, that I know that I don’t enjoy being around. There’s definitely a low end on this bell curve, but I think that your average Joe Blow off the street has about as good an undemanding of the chances of winning the lottery as you or I. Which is to say that we’re all definitely flawed in our ability to intuitively comprehend very large numbers, but not uniquely so. It’s just nice to feel like something good might possibly be coming your way. It’s about hope, exactly as you say. I’m barely even an occasional gambler, including the lottery. The one or two times where I’ve bought a ticket, it was worth the $10 or whatever I paid, which I truly do not miss an iota and never have. It’s a game. Anyone who doesn’t get that is deranged.

Loeffelmann 9mo ago
It's mainly about showing how low the odds actually are. I think everyone understands they are low but it's ridiculous how low exactly.
LatencyKills 9mo ago
My brother left school after ninth grade and struggles financially — he can’t afford basic health insurance, yet he’ll spend $100 on lottery tickets whenever possible. 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.
- jstanley 9mo ago
  The difference in expected value between purchasing one ticket and fifty is 50x! Buying 50 tickets is 50x as bad as buying 1 ticket.
bryanrasmussen 9mo ago

3RTB297 9mo ago

I've always assumed this was correct in a way. 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.

latexr 9mo ago

> At least the lottery doesn't care about your current circumstance and everyone has an equal (equally small) chance. 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-times-using-unbelievably-basic-math-80026 https://www.iflscience.com/how-a-man-won-the-lottery-14-time...

thaumasiotes 9mo ago
> If you have more money you can buy more tickets which leads to higher—or even certain—odds. 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.
- latexr 9mo ago
  > I don't think there are any lotteries with that feature. It’s in the link I posted.
  - thaumasiotes 9mo ago
    Did you try reading the only other sentence in my comment?
    - latexr 9mo ago
      No need to get upset. I replied earnestly, I thought you might’ve skipped it. 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.
      - thaumasiotes 9mo ago
        > I replied earnestly, I thought you might’ve skipped it. 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.

deleted 9mo ago

[deleted]

stavros 9mo ago

Sure, I'll grant you that. But then explain this: Why is it that, whenever I tell people who are about to play the lottery, to pick the numbers 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, they say "that's crazy, the numbers will never come out in a row like that"? 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".

staindk 9mo ago
If 1 through 6 are drawn you'd probably have to share your winnings with many more people than most other combinations.
- stavros 9mo ago
  Given how much people are avoiding 1 through 6, I think you'd probably be better off picking that.
  - retsibsi 9mo ago
    This is interesting but IMO it's very likely to be chosen more often than average. 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.
    - stavros 9mo ago
      I do see your point, but I doubt this probability analysis was done by the people who say "what? The numbers will never be drawn in a sequence like that". It's not that they want to avoid common numbers.

chairmansteve 9mo ago

Very well said. 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.

yieldcrv 9mo ago

My thoughts are that I’m not poor enough for buying lottery tickets to be a tax on me 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

wildzzz 9mo ago

I rarely play Powerball Mega millions but when I do, it's fun thinking about how you'd spend (and protect) your winnings. "First I'll pay off that old debt, then I'll buy a new car, then I'll buy that cute house I've been driving past everyday. Then I'll call my boss and tell him to suck a fat one".

Breza 9mo ago

I spend about $10/year on scratchers since I like the causes they support. But most of the volume that I see being bought at the corner store down the street comes from folks who really don't appear to understand the odds.