Neither you nor Oredigger77 seem to understand that “expected value” is a statistical concept, and as such any reasonable probability of the statistical outcome actually occurring requires a sufficiently large sample size. He makes the ridiculous statement that at the current expected value, buying a ticket makes you “5.45% on your investment”. No, buying a ticket with odds of winning at less than 1 in 292 million loses 100% of your “investment” with about as close to certainty as anything can be.
People have a hard time intuitively grasping these sorts of odds. In the hours leading up to last Saturday’s draw, Powerball in California alone was expecting ticket sales of between $5 million and $10 million per hour. They had sold 10 million tickets just the previous day, in California alone. Even those numbers didn’t budge the astronomical odds.
Sounds like an either-or fallacy. Being “smug” – or as I like to say, “realistic” – about lotteries has no effect on anything else. It’s not like understanding the statistical nature of lottery scams takes up so much mental energy that there’s nothing left for financial prudence anywhere else!
Gee really, you mean the 7-11 isn’t going to hand me $2.11 for every $2 ticket I buy? Wow I never realized this statistics stuff was so hard! :rolleyes:
This is excellent advice which I have decided to heed. I have just spent next month’s lottery ticket money on a medical degree from the University of Doctoring, Pyongyang, DPRK, and a set of X-ACTO knives. Anyone need some urgent surgery?
As I understand “statistics,” the lottery has nothing to do with statistics (at least not odds of winning or ROI). You aren’t working with large data sets, just large numbers. You aren’t sampling ping-pong balls and measuring how “number” they are. The odds of winning the lottery is a simple math problem and doesn’t require statistical modeling. Not sure how stats would even apply.
But I think “statistics” is used rather loosely to mean “involves long division”.
I instead prefer to view buying a lottery ticket as exceptionally cheap occupational therapy, since the vast majority of the lottery tickets I have purchased in my lifetime (which amounts, in total, to less than $500) were purchased specifically as work-related things. Either I bought into the office pool (as a gesture towards workplace socialization and being a good sport and all that) or I bought a ticket because my boss was being a shit and purchasing a lottery ticket gave me a theoretical possibility of winning the thing and therefore gave me an assist with the whole “not stabbing my boss with a letter opener” thing.
Not sure if you’re being pedantic or just being jerkish, or if there’s really a difference, since I fail to see the point. Yes, to be technically accurate, I should have said “expected value is a concept in probability theory”. So sue me. Although even the Wikipedia article on expected value states that “This article is about the term used in probability theory and statistics.” In common parlance expressions like “statistically unlikely” are commonly used to mean “improbable according to the mathematics of probability theory” without too much backchat from pedantic academics with their shorts in a knot.
Statistics do, in fact, have a significant role in lotteries. You’d use statistics to analyze how ticket sales varied with jackpot amounts, for instance, or the relative probabilities of particular numbers or ranges being self-selected by purchasers, both of which could have major impacts on “expected value”. In any case, my point was that “expected value” is meaningless for a small number of instances because the outcome isn’t a continuous function but a discrete one in which the probability of returning any value at all is effectively zero.
Yep. People think statistics just means “this involves long division.” But I think it takes something less than a “pedantic academic” to know that statistics is not synonymous with “hard math.” E.g., it could be somebody with a dictionary.
Hence my clarification that statistics don’t apply to odds of winning.
I don’t play the lottery expecting to win. I play the lottery (on occasion) to buy the right to dream about it for a few days. And for a dollar or five it’s actually pretty cheap entertainment.
2 bucks is a tax??? I probably lose that forgetting to empty my pockets before I put my pants in the dirty wash basket. I mean, that’s a cup of coffee that you’ll just end up pissing away anyway.
Honestly though. If a person won a billion dollars, the curse of the lottery would bite them in the ass so hard they would probably end up with a ruined life.