Re: 2011 Dec 4
Posted: Mon Dec 05, 2011 7:13 pm
Ah, OK, that makes more sense. In skimming the thread the argument seemed to come out of nowhere.
Why not cut out the middleman and have someone threaten to kill you if you don't purchase a ticket?msg wrote:While the expected value may be negative it doesn't mean that purchasing a lottery ticket is not rational.
As an extreme example suppose you need $1,000,000 to pay off the mob otherwise they come and kill you. If you don't buy the ticket you're going to die where as if you do buy the ticket you might not. More generally it's naive to suggest that the value of money to an individual is a linear function.
There is a threshold, probably before you hit the million, where you can leverage the money to evade the mob. Whatever money you could spend on lottery tickets would give a much better return spent trying to either hide or move out of reach. Granted a few dollars wouldn't do much, but anything is more useful weighed against the absurdly low chance of winning the lottery. Point is, the scenario needs to be absolute for the purchase to be practical and reality is never such.