Eli5: What’s the difference between something with 1 in a million odds and 0 in a million odds?

Question

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

Answer 1

Depends on how many times the experiment is run. On a single cycle, they’re basically the same but whenever you go from 0-1 out of a million, when running it many times the odds increase dramatically