Originally published at: https://boingboing.net/2019/03/12/woman-buys-30-lottery-tickets.html
…
3 Likes
I really wish stories like these were accompanied by thousands of equally weighted stories that read, “Man/woman buys 30 lottery tickets and is out $30.”
46 Likes
lot·ter·y / ˈlädərē/ (n.): A tax on people who are bad at math.
26 Likes
beat me to it oh wise fermata. we should all record this as a model example of observer bias; and/or let’s report the rare the successful the non-boring
7 Likes
“Your number’s come up!” means death but “Your numbers came up!” means a pile of money.
Punctuation is important!
17 Likes
Quantity, too. One number is a loser. Multiple is a win.
6 Likes
A 150,000 times this^
Reporting just the winners feeds the selective recall bias that makes gambling seem like a good thing. Although I know it will never happen, I think that lotteries should be required to post the names of every looser in the exact same way they publish the names of winners to give people a proper perspective of just how rare winning actually is. And just as weight loss companies are no longer allowed to use testimonials to tout non-representative results, Lotteries and other gambling industries should not be able to show people winning without showing the proper number of people loosing since it is non-representative of the overall experience.
9 Likes
At least she’s using the money to renovate her house. She could just fritter it away which is what I gather happens with a lot of lottery winners.
5 Likes
you know what would be a better story? The story about the few thousand people who did the same thing but didn’t win any money. The ones who kept seeing the same numbers everywhere and then lost the lottery. Maybe not as much fun but definitely more useful.
8 Likes
Are you saying that people who let’s say for example buy 30 lottery tickets if they get a feeling about certain numbers may be prone to poor financial decision making?
7 Likes
Yes, unless you’re also backed by Deutsche Bank, in which case you’re a financial genius.
6 Likes
24 Likes
You don’t really want that. There’s nothing interesting about not winning.
Would you also want a story every day there are no volcanic eruptions in the US or hurricanes battering the east coast? Everytime there’s a school shooting, do you want 100,000 other stories about schools with no gun violence?
Something tells me that a person, who habitually/compulsively spends at least $30+/day on lottery tickets, who then wins $150,000, is probably still not breaking even. (Not to mention the fact that that money will already be spent before she cashes the check.)
8 Likes
no, come is a good thing. So your number’s come up is a good thing if you had only one number in the lottery, but your number’s up is a bad thing because no come and you’re gonna die. sometimes spelled cum if you need to tattoo it on somebody’s hand in Springville.
7 Likes
13 Likes
Wait a second. Don’t lotteries work where you choose a series of numbers, then if they come in, anyone who chooses these numbers splits the pot? So in reality, she only had to buy 1 ticket to win the prize. She essentially split the pot with herself 30 times.
OCD is a strange thing…
5 Likes
Next on Fox News: we’ll list the names of the seven billion people who, like that one guy who was two minutes late to the gate, didn’t get on the plane that crashed.
3 Likes
But if there were multiple other winners with the same number, she would have had a proportionally larger share of the pot. But I don’t know the specifics of the lottery she played, so I don’t know if that happened or was likely.
1 Like
