I was thinking about lottery odds, and how so much of the pitch is, essentially, you miss 100 percent of the shots you don’t take, with the thought that you should at least enter because your odds go up so much with just one ticket. The odds were non existent before, and now they exist even if they’re vanishingly small.
Is the difference between 1 in a million and 0 in a million actually somehow more than the difference between 1 in a million and 2 in a million, or between 492,368 in a million vs 492,369 in a million? Or are all three of these functionally the same?
In: 0
The way I, a five year old, figure it, they are functionally the same.
If you buy zero lottery tickets, you have no chance of winning. If you buy 1 lottery ticket, you have a chance of winning, but it’s vanishginly small.
If you buy three of them, technically you have more of a chance to win the million, but practically your chances are still vanishingly small. Now if you were to buy one hundred lottery tickets, then you’d for sure win money.
But most likely not a million. Not even your money back. you spend 100 000 on lottery tickets, you’ll be lucky if you get 50 000 back. What a racket the lottery is.
Latest Answers