As mattnewport and LucasSloan point out, it doesn’t change the actual numbers—a bad bet multiplied a thousandfold is still a bad bet—but it does change the wrong numbers: buying a thousand tickets for a 0.01% chance of a million dollars is a losing bet again.* More evidence that the ignorance argument fails.
* How I calculate this (changes in italics):
According to your calculations, “none of these thousand tickets will win the lottery” is true with probability 99.9975000312185%. But can you really be sure that you can calculate anything to that good odds? Surely you couldn’t expect to make forty thousand predictions of which you were that confident and only be wrong once. Rationally, you ought to ascribe a lower confidence to the statement: 99.99%, for example. But this means a 0.01% chance of winning the lottery, corresponding to an expected value of a hundred dollars. Therefore, … these thousand tickets still lose, because you spend a thousand to win a hundred.
As mattnewport and LucasSloan point out, it doesn’t change the actual numbers—a bad bet multiplied a thousandfold is still a bad bet—but it does change the wrong numbers: buying a thousand tickets for a 0.01% chance of a million dollars is a losing bet again.* More evidence that the ignorance argument fails.
* How I calculate this (changes in italics):