No doubt the lottery is always a bad idea*, and thought-experimentally reducing the number of tickets sold to 100 per week ought to convince people of that. But no doubt it wouldn't convince them of it, any more than pointing out that 1-2-3-4-5-6 has as good a chance as any other number of winning ever does. I guess with 1-2-3-4-5-6 the thing is that a lot of people just won't believe it anyway, and some of them won't believe it because they don't believe that the lottery, or anything, is truly random (e.g., either God will have you win the lottery or he won't, and c'mon, God is not gonna have you win the lottery if you play a stupid number like 1-2-3-4-5-6. In other words, "the most magical of thinkers" is maybe a lot of people.)
*more precisely it's a bad investment, given that the average return is guaranteed to be negative, but if all you really want out of life is to have fifty million dollars and whatever that gets you, and the lottery is the only way you could possibly get it, then playing the lottery is a good idea (the funny thing about this is I first realized this long ago when I was motivated to think about it by someone I didn't like mocking the stupidity of people playing lotteries).
Anyway, as to the contrast between the examples... yeah, the canning example gets distracting in that once mass canning technology exists it's not really worth it from a dispassionately rational point of view for anyone to do any home canning of anything... anyone's motives for doing or consuming it will have something to do with personal / family / local connections, or ideology, or something like that (or else some kind of probably irrational belief that home-canned products are better for you and/or actually less likely to poison you). As I like to say about growing my own vegetables, after a pretty good sample of years of trying: growing your own may be a lot more expensive and time-consuming than buying them from the grocery store, but at least they're not as good! (This is not true of everything... but it's true of a lot.)
But anyway, controlling the mass-production technological alternatives out of the canning example, it occurs to me that you can actually resolve it into an actual lottery paradox: families A, B, C, D, E, ... Z all can their own tomatoes; the members of each family are justified in believing that no one in their own family will ever get botulism from their canned tomatoes; but anyone would be justified in believing that someone in at least one of those families will get botulism.
And anyway what I'm getting at is that while the members of the families will all be justified in believing that no one in their families will get botulism, someone like me, who doesn't come from a canning family, has no set of people to identify with for whom they can believe with justification that no one of them will ever get botulism from their home-canned tomatoes. That old lady believes with justification that "none of us (including me) will ever get botulism"; I believe with justification that "one of us (maybe me) will get botulism"--because my "us" is much bigger than hers.
> how does the perceived value or risk changing line up with the availability > heuristic: do you see something more to it, or not?
I always have to look up things like "availability heuristic"... but I guess the thing here is, like I was just saying to kest, it's one thing to hear examples of things happening, it's another thing to hear examples of things happening and identify with them in such a way that you take them as evidence that those things might happen to you. The thing I keep thinking of in connection to this (although it's such a messy example that I keep not bringing it up) is a grocery store cashier I overheard sometime around 2005 in Kitchener, Ontario--at that time a city in the 100K population range, in a metropolitan area of maybe 250K--saying she didn't want to go to Toronto because she was afraid of terrorist attacks. So, she hears about 9/11 happening, and (for at least that many years after) she identifies Toronto but not Kitchener as a place where similar things might happen.
> This was not true for NOLA
Yeah, the fact that crime rates do actually differ a lot by city, not to mention neighbourhood, also messes up my crude examples.
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timeasmymeasure
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Date: 2023-01-11 12:50 am (UTC)No doubt the lottery is always a bad idea*, and thought-experimentally reducing the number of tickets sold to 100 per week ought to convince people of that. But no doubt it wouldn't convince them of it, any more than pointing out that 1-2-3-4-5-6 has as good a chance as any other number of winning ever does. I guess with 1-2-3-4-5-6 the thing is that a lot of people just won't believe it anyway, and some of them won't believe it because they don't believe that the lottery, or anything, is truly random (e.g., either God will have you win the lottery or he won't, and c'mon, God is not gonna have you win the lottery if you play a stupid number like 1-2-3-4-5-6. In other words, "the most magical of thinkers" is maybe a lot of people.)
*more precisely it's a bad investment, given that the average return is guaranteed to be negative, but if all you really want out of life is to have fifty million dollars and whatever that gets you, and the lottery is the only way you could possibly get it, then playing the lottery is a good idea (the funny thing about this is I first realized this long ago when I was motivated to think about it by someone I didn't like mocking the stupidity of people playing lotteries).
Anyway, as to the contrast between the examples... yeah, the canning example gets distracting in that once mass canning technology exists it's not really worth it from a dispassionately rational point of view for anyone to do any home canning of anything... anyone's motives for doing or consuming it will have something to do with personal / family / local connections, or ideology, or something like that (or else some kind of probably irrational belief that home-canned products are better for you and/or actually less likely to poison you). As I like to say about growing my own vegetables, after a pretty good sample of years of trying: growing your own may be a lot more expensive and time-consuming than buying them from the grocery store, but at least they're not as good! (This is not true of everything... but it's true of a lot.)
But anyway, controlling the mass-production technological alternatives out of the canning example, it occurs to me that you can actually resolve it into an actual lottery paradox: families A, B, C, D, E, ... Z all can their own tomatoes; the members of each family are justified in believing that no one in their own family will ever get botulism from their canned tomatoes; but anyone would be justified in believing that someone in at least one of those families will get botulism.
And anyway what I'm getting at is that while the members of the families will all be justified in believing that no one in their families will get botulism, someone like me, who doesn't come from a canning family, has no set of people to identify with for whom they can believe with justification that no one of them will ever get botulism from their home-canned tomatoes. That old lady believes with justification that "none of us (including me) will ever get botulism"; I believe with justification that "one of us (maybe me) will get botulism"--because my "us" is much bigger than hers.
> how does the perceived value or risk changing line up with the availability
> heuristic: do you see something more to it, or not?
I always have to look up things like "availability heuristic"... but I guess the thing here is, like I was just saying to kest, it's one thing to hear examples of things happening, it's another thing to hear examples of things happening and identify with them in such a way that you take them as evidence that those things might happen to you. The thing I keep thinking of in connection to this (although it's such a messy example that I keep not bringing it up) is a grocery store cashier I overheard sometime around 2005 in Kitchener, Ontario--at that time a city in the 100K population range, in a metropolitan area of maybe 250K--saying she didn't want to go to Toronto because she was afraid of terrorist attacks. So, she hears about 9/11 happening, and (for at least that many years after) she identifies Toronto but not Kitchener as a place where similar things might happen.
> This was not true for NOLA
Yeah, the fact that crime rates do actually differ a lot by city, not to mention neighbourhood, also messes up my crude examples.