I think there’s a flaw in this reasoning. You’re assuming that the harm from lotteries increases monotonically with the time spend dreaming about winning. The form of your argument is: “a huge amount of dreaming is harmful (because it stops you improving your life in more effective ways), therefore a small amount is harmful (i.e. worse than none)”.
Non sequitur. A tablespoon of salt in your soup makes it taste terrible, therefore a pinch of salt makes it taste worse than no salt?
It may well be that spending $1 per week to buy 10 minutes of false but pleasant hope is the best use of that 10 minutes and $1, or at least, no worse than any other use you’re likely to make of it. E.g. if you’re taking that time and money out of your leisure budget, then you may well use it instead on smoking, or beer, or fries.
And if you instead allocate it to thinking about how to get a promotion, sure you could do that, but why not do both? (I.e. spend a different 10 minutes on your promotion.) So this is a false dilemma. People who play the lottery may exaggerate the probability of winning, but I doubt they make plans—and it’s not clear they displace other attempts at self-improvement—on the assumption they’ll win.
I think there’s a flaw in this reasoning. You’re assuming that the harm from lotteries increases monotonically with the time spend dreaming about winning. The form of your argument is: “a huge amount of dreaming is harmful (because it stops you improving your life in more effective ways), therefore a small amount is harmful (i.e. worse than none)”.
Non sequitur. A tablespoon of salt in your soup makes it taste terrible, therefore a pinch of salt makes it taste worse than no salt?
It may well be that spending $1 per week to buy 10 minutes of false but pleasant hope is the best use of that 10 minutes and $1, or at least, no worse than any other use you’re likely to make of it. E.g. if you’re taking that time and money out of your leisure budget, then you may well use it instead on smoking, or beer, or fries.
And if you instead allocate it to thinking about how to get a promotion, sure you could do that, but why not do both? (I.e. spend a different 10 minutes on your promotion.) So this is a false dilemma. People who play the lottery may exaggerate the probability of winning, but I doubt they make plans—and it’s not clear they displace other attempts at self-improvement—on the assumption they’ll win.