(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

[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)