Is there an “official” name for this statistical fallacy:
Since each person is highly unlikely to win the lotto, no one will ever win.
thanks,
-Short
My WAG, but I think it might fall in the catagory of Argument By Generalization.
Common Sense? Someone does in fact win the Lotto or other lotteries.
A variant of this is ‘probaility of [event] so low as to be completely impossible’
(no prizes for guessing where we’ve seen that one applied).
I’d go for Hasty Generalisation, but there’s a touch of others there too.
How about Misunderstanding the Nature of Statistics? That one seems kind of catch-all stupid, but they put it in there, not me. 
Thanks. You’d tink it was common sense, but I came accross a similar argument in a scientific (peer reviewed and everything) paper. The argument was that a phenomenea occured rapidly in any given location, so it was not detectable anywhere. Probematic, yes, but published.
thanks again
-Short
The odds of beign dealt a common bridge hand are l1 in 25,000,000 (or something like that).
But, after being dealt a bridge hand, it’d be foolish to look at it and say that it must not have happened because the odds were so staggering.
I think this is a problem with probability, since the probability of a single event occuring out of an infinite number of possibilities is 0 which doesn’t mean that event won’t occur. So the fallacy is just applying the principle to circumstances that it doesn’t apply to
In the social sciences, in college a few decades ago, that would have been called the fallacy of generalizing to the individual.
This is the falacy of composition. This is when one assumes that properties of a single entity are shared by a group of such entities. If this were true, nobody would ever get into a lottery pool to increase their odds of winning.
It might be lumped under the same one as “The likely hood of surviving two plane crashes in mind boggolingly low. Therefore, if you have already survived one plane crash, you will be safe for the rest of your life.”
You mean a perfect bridge hand, which is all the cards of one suit.
This is what I thought of when I first saw this thread, but it’s not quite right. The classic fallacy of composition (as told to a theatre of students) is that since any one of them could escape if they alone heard the fire alarm, all could escape. At least as stated in the OP, that’s not quite the story.
IANAS (I am a bridge player, though), but it seems to me that the odds against being dealt every possible bridge hand are alike (and equally astronomical).
Er, for “every,” read “any.” What I’m trying to say is that any hand is just as (un)likely as any other, and the odds against being dealt thirteen spades are no greater than those against being dealt any other hand.
“Is there an “official” name for this statistical fallacy:
Since each person is highly unlikely to win the lotto, no one will ever win.”
In creationist circles it is known as intelligent design. They don’t recognize the fallacy.
(js - Mangetout made that same point in the fourth post, BTW…I gusee you don’t win the non-existant prize then ;))
“irreducibly complex systems”
Could a lottery be considered an irreducibly complex system when what is required for on outcome is considered among the 80,000,000 possibilites (depending on the lottery).