Showerthoughts @lemmy.world Devgard @lemmy.world 9mo ago

People who are lucky (never get sick etc.) shouldn't be the ones to buy lottery tickets

If you're lucky in one area, what's the chance that you'll be lucky in another?Instead, it should be those who are really unlucky, the lottery might balance out their luck 💀

edit: I forgot about ~~mutually exclusive~~ independent events probability ty everyone

4 comments

Probability theory to the rescue:

Assume you have two binary variables X and Y. X is equal to 1 if you're sick, 0 otherwise. Y is equal to 1 if you win the lottery, 0 otherwise.

Your question implicitly asks what the probability of winning would be given that you're not sick. By definition that would be:

p = P("X=0" and "Y=1") / P("X=0")

And you're stuck with the "X=0" and "Y=1" event as you need some knowledge about how X and Y are related to each other.

In other words, does your health have any effect on how the lottery machine works? Or vice versa, does the lottery machine impact your health? As the answer to both is obviously no (as there's no physically possible way that could be true, unless you believe in the paranormal and there being some god who plays around with the probabilities), it's reasonable to assume that X and Y are independent, in which case P("X=0" and "Y=1") = P("X=0") * P("Y=1"), but then this simply means that p = P("Y=1"), ie your health doesn't matter: whether you're healthy or sick, that doesn't change the probability of you winning the lottery.
- 1 or 0. Odds are 50/50. Got it.
People who believe in luck are the ones to buy lottery tickets or think they have a system for winning at a casino.

People who understand statistics know that the lottery is a tax on people who believe in luck.

When playing poker, there are always more optimists at the table than statisticians. Be the statistician...
I guess this goes into how you imagine luck.

Is it one stat that gets balanced all around? How do you know you didn't spend all your luck surviving something you didn't even know about. Does it take into account how the world affects you or just your actions? Maybe it's a general stat that affects everything by the same amount, which is the framework that goes with the "wow I nearly died, I should buy a lottery ticket".

Easiest is to determine it after the fact, as a relative value for all the stuff that happens to us outside our direct control.