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
Imagine a worldwide pandemic that has a 1 in a million chance of killing you. In the US, 330 would die from it. Globally, 8,000 people would die. If the odds were 2 in a million, the death rates would be 660 and 16,000, respectively.
If a pandemic had a 0 in a million chance of killing you, no one would die, either in the US or globally.
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