While in the actual purchase of a literal lottery ticket, you guarantee a loss to enable a huge gain, the criterion to be a “lottery ticket” case in the Alicorn-loves-cutesy-titles sense is just that the motivation is to make the huge gain possible. Sometimes, you can do this without guaranteeing a loss of any size—all it requires is that you move to open up the possibility of a large gain. Raising the stakes does exactly that: before you raise the stakes, the large gain isn’t possible. After you do so, the large gain is possible, although not guaranteed. Presumably, you’d never raise stakes if that never made it possible to win big—you wouldn’t raise the stakes on a bet you were certain to lose!
I’ll wait for your next post then, and see how your classification fits in with that.
While I was thinking about your post initially, I envisioned a 2d graph, with “probability” on one axis and “(dis)utility” in another. I was toying with formalizations of your concepts as linked blobs of area at various locations on that graph, and my visualizations (of all-in vs lottery) were quite different. So, if I raise that particular point again, it probably will be in terms of that picture.
While in the actual purchase of a literal lottery ticket, you guarantee a loss to enable a huge gain, the criterion to be a “lottery ticket” case in the Alicorn-loves-cutesy-titles sense is just that the motivation is to make the huge gain possible. Sometimes, you can do this without guaranteeing a loss of any size—all it requires is that you move to open up the possibility of a large gain. Raising the stakes does exactly that: before you raise the stakes, the large gain isn’t possible. After you do so, the large gain is possible, although not guaranteed. Presumably, you’d never raise stakes if that never made it possible to win big—you wouldn’t raise the stakes on a bet you were certain to lose!
I get it now, thanks.
I’ll wait for your next post then, and see how your classification fits in with that.
While I was thinking about your post initially, I envisioned a 2d graph, with “probability” on one axis and “(dis)utility” in another. I was toying with formalizations of your concepts as linked blobs of area at various locations on that graph, and my visualizations (of all-in vs lottery) were quite different. So, if I raise that particular point again, it probably will be in terms of that picture.
Putting a lot of work into a career like acting where there’s a low chance of a very high reward strikes me as an “all in” strategy.