(no subject)

[sigmaleph]

Playing the lottery gives you the ability to pleasantly fantasize about what you would do with the winnings, whereas not playing the lottery removes all plausibility from these fantasies.

I keep hearing this argument and finding it extremely puzzling. Presumably people can entertain the hypothetical of having won the lottery regardless of having purchased a ticket, so is this in some fundamental way a different thing than fantasising about it, or is it that attempting the fantasy without the plausibility of the ticket doesn't make it pleasant, or what?

(how much money does a vivid imagination need to save you on lottery tickets before it becomes adaptive daydreaming?)

Comments

[wingedcatgirl]

I mean given the odds, buying a ticket doesn't necessarily make the fantasy plausible.

[sigmaleph]

That is also part of the thing that bugs me, "plausiblity" seems to be working by very weird mechanisms here.

In addition to that, you'd think that "I have bought a lottery ticket, so I *could* win the lottery" and "I have money in my wallet and the ability to go to places where they sell lottery tickets, so I *could* buy one and subsequently win" are approximately equally plausible scenarios, with almost all the improbability concentrated in the "win" step. Yet apparently people feel the need to complete the "buying" step before they can talk about the plausibility giving them license to fantasise. So obviously there's something going on that isn't really about how objectively likely winning is.

[contrarianarchon]

I mean, what are the odds of you spontaneously buying a lottery ticket? I assume it adds at least another couple orders of magnitude to the improbability. Probably more if you consider the number of days on which you haven't bought lottery tickets on impulse previously.

(Yes, this is a silly argument and ultimately people who didn't care much about 10^8 won't care much about 10^11 but it's funny)

[brin_bellway]

It feels intuitive to me. Maybe not Objectively Reasonable, but intuitive.

It's more fun if it might actually happen because then there's an aspect of *hope*. The difference between "might win" and "might buy a ticket and *then* win" is that the latter involves a decision on your part, while the former is purely external to you: you'll *never* get the world you want if you don't arrange for that world to be possible.

(this assumes free will, but then intuitions generally do)

---

In practice, I'm too risk-averse to enjoy gambling where there is a possibility of loss (stuff where you always gain but the *amount* is random can be fun). I can force myself to do it anyway if I'm confident enough that the expected value is positive, but lotteries don't even have that going for them. I can see why someone with the same hope but less fear to counterbalance it would enjoy gambling; hell, empirically, past selves from back when I wasn't anxious were known to occasionally buy scratchcards.