In the first example, you couldn’t play unless you had at least 100M dollars of assets. Why would someone with that much money risk 100M to win a measly 100K, when the expected payoff is so bad?
Yeah, uhm, I figured I’d misunderstood that, because my second hypothesis was that someone was trolling us. Looking at the poster’s previous comments I’m more inclined to think that he just missed the whole ‘Bayes is god’ meme.
Sorry that talking about money lead to confusion. I guess the point I was making was the following. See my respond to mattnewport, i.e.:
Suppose you have a gamble Z with negative expectation with probability of a positive outcome 1-x, for a very small x. I claim that for small enough x, every one should take Z—despite the negative expectation.
In the first example, you couldn’t play unless you had at least 100M dollars of assets. Why would someone with that much money risk 100M to win a measly 100K, when the expected payoff is so bad?
Yeah, uhm, I figured I’d misunderstood that, because my second hypothesis was that someone was trolling us. Looking at the poster’s previous comments I’m more inclined to think that he just missed the whole ‘Bayes is god’ meme.
Sorry that talking about money lead to confusion. I guess the point I was making was the following. See my respond to mattnewport, i.e.:
Suppose you have a gamble Z with negative expectation with probability of a positive outcome 1-x, for a very small x. I claim that for small enough x, every one should take Z—despite the negative expectation.