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
Zero isn’t the same as not zero.
The idea is that in some situations it’s worth giving yourself a chance that isn’t zero, even if it’s small. If you’re playing a sport, a low percentage shot is better than not shooting at all, because eventually one will go in.
The lottery is a negative expected return, which means that in the long term you will lose money on average. So that’s not a rational shot to take. However, if you buy a single ticket every week, then you get to spend the whole week dreaming about what you’ll do with the money, because your chance of winning is no longer zero. And that’s probably the best return you’ll ever get from spending a dollar or two on entertainment.
So that’s the benefit of making your chances not zero.
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