As a mathetmatician how can you ever justify participating in a lottery where there is a possibility of no-winners or shared winners. It just destroys any hope of any positive EV.
I gain happiness also from the miniscule hope of the life-altering outcome of winning the lottery.
That gain in happiness is occasionally worth the price of a lottery ticket.
I'm not an expert, but seems to me this feeling is also the main driver leading to gambling addiction, which ultimately leads to addicts saying things like "It's not about the money, but the game itself", after having lost a ton of money.
Wonder if Yotta can lead to the same addiction, and if so if it is then solely applied for positive objectives (i.e. saving money), or lowers the barrier to entry for other gambling schemes that are less beneficial.
But the odds are on a completely different level of impossibility in lottery that I just cant really get your end of the argument :/
If I were poorer, I suspect the happiness I gained from the lottery ticket purchases would be even greater.
If I already owned a home, on the other hand, I would value the lottery ticket hopes much lower.
Buying a lottery ticket from time to te, when the prize was big, made us live in a fantasy world between the time we bought it and when te results were announced. I think this thing - imagining a life without financial worries, lavish vacations and expensive toys, motivated me to learn more, try to launch a few startups and sacrifice my free time in order to try and achieve greatness.
Were those money well spent? Definitely yes (even though I haven't actually won the lottery)
Tbh lottery tickets can be a pretty cheap form of hope relative to other forms of gambling. Take a look at some of RobinHood's customers who are ”investing”. The odds seemed so favorable until they realized 95% of traders lose their money.
I own my home. It's an objectively bad investment (my tech stocks sure appreciated more than a home I bought in 2008 before the crash :) But I like the feeling that comes with owning a home.
I go out for dinner. (Well, used to). It's objectively a waste of time and money, but I still like the feeling that comes with it.
I play guitar. There's no EV attached to it (in fact, people might pay me to stop ;) but there's still an emotional payoff.
The same goes for the lottery. For some people, there's entertainment value in it, despite understanding the mathematics of it. If you've ever played poker for money - unless you're exceptionally good, you paid money to sit around a table in a smoky room. EV is negative, emotional experience is a lot of fun. (Yeah, poker isn't entirely chance, but I promise that unless you're pretty good at it and spent a lot of time learning, it's pretty much equivalent)
A lottery that doesn't have a winner sounds rotten and I don't think you'd eat rotten food from a restaurant, no matter how much you accept that inherent EV of the transaction is negative. There are many, many more words that can and have been written about the psychology of lotteries, but suffice to say, for many lottery players, it's not as simple as "I know that the EV < 1, I'm just playing for the entertainment value".
https://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2016/02/how-mit...