Boobies and the lottery
So, in the past I have “donated” boobie pictures to boobiethon, a online fundraising event for breast cancer research. This year I entered into a drawing for a free custom WordPress theme. And I won it!
You might think that I’m lucky, but actually when I enter lotteries I’m very calculating. Once when I was 10, there was a Beanie Baby lottery at the local library. You could see the jars with the tickets in them for each Beanie Baby. There was one Beanie Baby that had very few tickets in the jar, so I bought exactly one ticket for it. And I won the Beanie Baby.
I saw that for this contest, there were 5 WordPress prizes to be awarded total. For other contests there were only one. And I correctly surmised that others would try to win the more desirable prizes. I also submitted 5 pictures of my boobies, and you got one ticket per boobie picture with a maximum of 5 pictures. That’s 5 entries. Donating $10 only got you one ticket. And it cost me nothing :).
It’s human nature to go for the lottery item of the thing you actually want. I don’t do that. I enter the lotteries for things I think no one else wants and that have multiple awards and that have a low-to-no cost. You’re never going to win the monetary prize, because the odds are against you. You CAN win things if the odds are in your favor.
This relates to an interesting idea that I had recently—namely that if you change your tastes and preferences to like things that other people don’t like, especially when it comes to food, you can save a hell of a lot of money.
But only to a point. If you want unpopular specialty foods, they can cost a lot.
If you’re willing to play years-old video games, you can get them for very little money.
Or better yet, open-source games only. If you play UrT and Wesnoth instead of Call of Duty and Civ, you just saved at least a hundred dollars.
Inciting title notwithstanding, I admit I wasn’t overly impressed by this idea. The main point of this post seemed to be this:
What you are really doing here is calculating the expected utility of winning the various prizes offered and concluding that the expected utility of a minor prize is greater than that of a larger prize. I don’t think anyone on LW would disagree, because this is probably the most straightforward case of what it means to practice instrumental rationality.
I think it’s good to have this written out somewhere. This is a white belt technique in the rationality dojo context, but that doesn’t mean it’s not worthwhile to actually state and teach it.
Actually, what I found striking was this:
The expected utility for me of acquiring something I do not want or need is, at most, nothing.
Are you folding in “capable of selling for net gain” to your definition of “want”?
Only when the likely gain exceeds the trouble of entering, winning, collecting, and selling.
Hence “net”.
Then, yes, apparently.
I found that phrase to be a bit contradictory—if you don’t want something, why go for it? I suspect the answer is that the original poster assigns utility to winning a lottery regardless of the utility of the prize.
That’s certainly the implication—and the point relies on the reader sharing that utility, which I don’t believe I do.
...which is why I wasn’t too impressed. What would make it more interesting is if the original poster made the normative claim that we should do so. That would generate a more intriguing debate.
I found the childish vocabulary a little offputting, honestly … but I’m also not still excited by the fact that breasts exist. :P
I was being a bit facetious, but not too much, because I admit that I my curiosity was triggered by the odd (for LessWrong) title.