I don’t know why the last comment is relevant. I agree that 1 in a million odds happen 1 in a million times. I also agree that people win the lottery. My interpretation is that it means “sometimes people say impossible when they really mean extremely unlikely”, which I agree is true.
The point was not that people win the lottery. It’s that when they do, they are able to update against the over 100 million-to-one odds that this has happened. “No, no,” say the clever people who think the human mind is incapable of such a shift in log-odds, “far more likely that you’ve made a mistake, or the lottery doesn’t even exist, or you’ve had a hallucination.” The clever people are wrong.
Anecdata: people who win large lotteries often express verbal disbelief, and ask others to confirm that they are not hallucinating. In fact, some even express disbelief while sitting in the mansion they bought with their winnings!
Right, but they don’t update to that from a single data point (looking at the winning numbers and their ticket once), they seek out additional data until they have enough subjective evidence to update to the very, very, unlikely event (and they are able to do this because the event actually happened). Probably hundreds of people think they won any given lottery at first, but when they double-check, they discover that they did not.
The point was not that people win the lottery. It’s that when they do, they are able to update against the over 100 million-to-one odds that this has happened. “No, no,” say the clever people who think the human mind is incapable of such a shift in log-odds, “far more likely that you’ve made a mistake, or the lottery doesn’t even exist, or you’ve had a hallucination.” The clever people are wrong.
Anecdata: people who win large lotteries often express verbal disbelief, and ask others to confirm that they are not hallucinating. In fact, some even express disbelief while sitting in the mansion they bought with their winnings!
And yet, despite saying “Inconceivable!” they did collect their winnings and buy the mansion.
Right, but they don’t update to that from a single data point (looking at the winning numbers and their ticket once), they seek out additional data until they have enough subjective evidence to update to the very, very, unlikely event (and they are able to do this because the event actually happened). Probably hundreds of people think they won any given lottery at first, but when they double-check, they discover that they did not.