Secondly, they make a decent illustration of the horrible LHC inconsistency problem that arises when the probability that “one’s model of the probabilities is mistaken” dwarfs the calculated chance of a particularly important outcome. Lottery examples illustrated this well enough to suggest an approach to a solution, in fact.
There are other uses, too, like pointing out that the expected utility of a single ticket can be negative even if the expected value is positive, due to the logarithmic dependence of utility on wealth.
None of these deny that there can exist cases where a particular lottery strategy like yours will win. Your post may be correct, but it is trivial and utterly irrelevant to the conversations we’ve been having; therefore I don’t think it belongs as a top-level post.
It seems to me you’re misunderstanding how and why we’re using lottery examples.
Lotteries are brought up on Less Wrong, first of all, to demonstrate the standard bias of failing to fully internalize how small a probability can be.
Secondly, they make a decent illustration of the horrible LHC inconsistency problem that arises when the probability that “one’s model of the probabilities is mistaken” dwarfs the calculated chance of a particularly important outcome. Lottery examples illustrated this well enough to suggest an approach to a solution, in fact.
There are other uses, too, like pointing out that the expected utility of a single ticket can be negative even if the expected value is positive, due to the logarithmic dependence of utility on wealth.
None of these deny that there can exist cases where a particular lottery strategy like yours will win. Your post may be correct, but it is trivial and utterly irrelevant to the conversations we’ve been having; therefore I don’t think it belongs as a top-level post.