I don’t think this works because you’re submitting to the same probabilistic calculation but muddying the waters, so somewhere you should be missing something which pushes expected value in line and makes it a bad decision. There’s also the issue that no lottery has proper payoffs where expected value is par.
A better argument is to note that we lose money with little utility gained all the time because we don’t intuit our accounts very well unless we’re close to the edge of them by some factor. In that case, buying lottery tickets is a good bet up to edge * factor because they have a higher expected value than simply losing the money altogether.
Fine, but where and what? I’ve already gone through the math a couple of times looking for errors; the purpose of posting here was to get fresh eyes on the problem.
I see that Wei_Dai has come up with the answer. I was unwilling to dedicate the time to it, as your example was needlessly overgrown. I should have simply said nothing save that. My apologies.
I don’t think this works because you’re submitting to the same probabilistic calculation but muddying the waters, so somewhere you should be missing something which pushes expected value in line and makes it a bad decision. There’s also the issue that no lottery has proper payoffs where expected value is par.
A better argument is to note that we lose money with little utility gained all the time because we don’t intuit our accounts very well unless we’re close to the edge of them by some factor. In that case, buying lottery tickets is a good bet up to edge * factor because they have a higher expected value than simply losing the money altogether.
Fine, but where and what? I’ve already gone through the math a couple of times looking for errors; the purpose of posting here was to get fresh eyes on the problem.
I see that Wei_Dai has come up with the answer. I was unwilling to dedicate the time to it, as your example was needlessly overgrown. I should have simply said nothing save that. My apologies.