Comment by lunaru
4 days 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.
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.
There's a difference between buying hope, and decreasing the quality of what you do have significantly for false hope.
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.
> There's a difference between buying hope, and decreasing the quality of what you do have significantly
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.
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Or they might just be sneering because they are emotionally incompetent book-smart jerks, like my brother. He has absolutely no personal experience of financial hardship and doesn't believe there is any explanation except stupidity for someone spending $10 on lottery tickets before they've fully funded their 401k for the year.
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On cue, you demonstrate exactly what the previous poster was talking about. Every single HN user understands how the lottery works. I wish I knew an alternative word to "mansplaining".
My brother left school after ninth grade and struggles financially — he can’t afford basic health insurance, yet he’ll spend $100 on lottery tickets whenever possible.
I understand the utility he’s purchasing: a temporary sense of hope. What concerns me is the implicit misunderstanding of probability. The difference in expected value between purchasing one ticket and fifty is statistically negligible. This isn’t about elitism — it’s simply about recognizing orders of magnitude and the arithmetic reality of vanishingly small odds.
The difference in expected value between purchasing one ticket and fifty is 50x! Buying 50 tickets is 50x as bad as buying 1 ticket.
My uncle was for the longest of time a gambling addict, and would buy lottery tickets. It was disheartening seeing him ruin his life over this "hope".
I certainly don't doubt that my uncle also felt a strong sense of "hope" when he bought his lottery tickets, but for what differed a lot. My uncle would buy lottery tickets in the hope of regaining the amount of money that he had lost to gambling, while you probably buy them in the hope of having a significantly higher quality of life if you win. One is financially a very bad decision, the other is not (as bad).
Personally, I would never buy lottery tickets. Not because the chance of you winning is small, but because you're supporting a predatory system that attacks those that are the most vulnerable to gambling: those who've already lost large amounts of money. I hate the gambling industry and the damage it causes to regular people.
Luckily my uncle has stopped gambling, but the effects of when he was a gambler are still, sadly, visible.
In all that rant you forget that there's a difference between paying 3$ to buy "hope" and excitement until next week's draw, and compulsively buying scratch cards with abysmal odds several times a day. The latter is a real problem and many jurisdictions around the world allow these predatory games to be sold and advertised everywhere.
I think there's something to be said for separating disdain for the person and disdain for the institution; unfortunately the latter is used as an excuse for the former.
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.
There is a place for everyone. We need the elitist, number crunching nerds to remind us that it's bad odds and the gambler to show us that you can find enjoyment in the simple things.
All gambling is buying hope. The lottery has the worst gambling odds I've ever heard of, so I don't understand why we're defending it.
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.
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.
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).
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.
What does it mean - adjacent area code? They can’t play anymore?
It means they nearly won but sadly didn't. So close yet soo far away.
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.
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> 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-time...
> 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.
> I don't think there are any lotteries with that feature.
It’s in the link I posted.
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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
All the players know that the odds are horrible, but in the end someone does win.
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.
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.
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And they would also have to believe that their education system in its current form would have been even worse without the lottery.
30 seconds? I can daydream in bed for an hour for nothing.
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.
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".
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".
If 1 through 6 are drawn you'd probably have to share your winnings with many more people than most other combinations.
Given how much people are avoiding 1 through 6, I think you'd probably be better off picking that.
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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.
The odds are really small but so are the cost of playing
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.
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