Gregory's Server
@mcc I mean the whole "give me money and there's an extremely small chance I'll make you rich tomorrow" is the whole premise of the lottery. It's not exactly a farfetched thought experiment.
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2 comments
@mcc @mausmalone also, even for a payoff with zero effective probability (I.e. an imaginary payoff), paying five bucks for a lottery ticket is easier to justify than, say, handing over your wallet or killing a baby |
@mausmalone So the thing is the reason you can form a meaningful expected value calculation when dealing with the lottery is because you actually do a priori know the government is capable of raising the amounts of money involved in the lottery. It's not a thought experiment in a vacuum, you actually do have to rely on reasoning that isn't part of the logical/mathematical construction