Comment by UqWBcuFx6NV4r
4 days 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.
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.
And I feel you're making the same category error that I was responding to, that is to say it may not be a rational/risk reward calculation, but people who indulge in a small bit of irrationality are having fun and people who indulge in large bits of irrationality significantly damaging their already damaged finances have a problem.
>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.
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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.
I believe that category was already handled by the comment I was responding to, which effectively said anyone who sneered at the lottery was like your brother without taking into account the subset of people I pointed to.
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.
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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.