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
As a practical matter, there’s no real difference TO YOU if you purchase a lottery ticket with 1 in a million versus 0 in a million odds. You are for all practical purposes equally unlikely to win either of those lotteries. It does make a big difference to the lottery holder though, since in one instance there’s a good chance they’ll pay out if lots of tickets are sold where while in the other, they’ll never pay out.
Pretty much the same thing from your perspective for all your other examples. And there’s no practical difference from the lottery holder’s perspective for your other examples – an additional 1 in a million (whether it’s 1 v 2, or 492,368 v 492,369) doesn’t change their payout odds significantly.
For all intents and purposes, you have about the same chance of finding a winning Powerball ticket on the street as you do purchasing one.
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